It is beautifully fitting that a missing piece in history’s jigsaw will be added to the monuments of Ballarat when The Garden of the Grieving Mother is unveiled by the Governor General on Sturt Street today. An Arch of “Victory” that stands in irony to the grim length of Remembrance Drive where almost every tree along its 22kms bears testament to a sacrifice of four slaughterhouse years. If the naive folly of ten thousand country youths heading off to a “great” war were not harrowing enough, consider the vast hole this loss tore in the countryside. A whole generation of western Victoria either dead, missing or irreparably physically and psychologically damaged. So the choice of subject of a memorial is both worthy and evocative. Every man lost or scarred had a family. Like the ripples of all tragedy, they too became the collateral damage.
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Great monuments make us pause to remember but also urge us to wonder. And this one makes us ask another question of war. If the arch marks the illusory and pyrrhic nature of a victory celebration then perhaps this understated statue marks the unutterable legacy of more than 15 million deaths in that war and the lessons a century have failed to teach us.
If November 11 1918 was the watershed moment of enormous relief for half of humanity it must also have seemed like the hideous awakening from four years of collective madness. The shattered equilibrium of empires in ruins and lives needlessly extinguished cast a long and horrible shadow. A devastated generation after WWI sought to cling to the hope that a “great” war might end all wars. Thousands of mothers across Ballarat must have sworn never to give another son to the insatiable and unfeeling maw of war. But this philanthropic hope that wisdom would grow from carnage was short lived, new fears and old hatreds meant within decades Europe was mired in more incalculable losses. Another generation of mothers had cause to weep and grieve. And in every decade since there has been another failure of memory as nations again “trek from progress”.
In 1918 these confronting questions may have been too unbearable to ask. A century on we owe it to all mothers not to forget. In an age when the middle east is being torn apart by fanaticism , when a North Korean tyrant gleefully launches the latest missile and a belligerent egotist postures from the White House, these answers are more important than ever.
