Defending Country is pleased that Kat Rae took up our invitation to write something for us. For more, see our earlier post, a War Memorial article, and the announcement of her win in the Memorial’s Napier Waller Art Prize in 2024. DC
Kat Rae*
I retired from the Australian Army in 2019 – as a Lieutenant Colonel after a 20-year career – to study my lifelong passion in Fine Art. My honours project in 2023-24 told a multi-level story through the gesture of destructive artistic interventions enacted upon the personal archive. It began when my personal experience as an Army officer, war widow, and survivor of veteran domestic violence made me realise how inadequate the romanticised Anzac myths were at expressing the real cost of war.
Topics of survivorship, resistance, Truth-telling, commemoration and protest raised by brave Aboriginal activists, academics and artists went to the heart of my project. The Voice to Parliament referendum occurred during the year I was studying. In breaks from the studio, I would join Yes campaign actions on campus and throughout the city. The predicted but still devastating No result was something else to grieve, reinforcing my urgency to tell the truth. As Cairns et al have said (2024; references are listed at the end of Part II of this post), Australian history must be decolonised and, with it, Anzac mythology, a pillar of the patriarchal, white settler nation-building narrative (White 1981).
There are war memorials in most Australian country towns celebrating the sacrifice of Australian soldiers (Inglis 2008), yet the brutal Australian Wars which continued until the 1960s across the country, are mostly unmarked. To counter powerful and organised resistance by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, the colonialists of Australia used massacres to seize control (Langton 2022:20), creating sites of loss and trauma across the continent (Massacre Map Project 2022).
The far-reaching and intergenerational cost of war (both local and international) has always been suppressed in Australia, as revealed by the Yoorrook Justice Commission in Victoria (Yoorrook website 2025) and the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide (et al., 2024).
Yoorrook, meaning ‘truth’ in Wemba Wemba/Wamba Wamba language (Yoorrook website 2025), reinforces the importance of Truth-telling in the face of dominant narratives that work to suppress lived experiences. Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard (1984) wrote that postmodernism began with the questioning of grand narratives. Grand narratives are based upon the appeal to values that give a totalising account of historical events, experiences, and social, cultural phenomena.
According to Lyotard, these reductive grand narratives have become untenable in postmodern times because of the progress in communication, mass media and computer science. This has given rise to localised truths or points of view, which Lyotard calls ‘petit recits’ (1984:60). Petit recits offer alternative stories contradicting traditionally held beliefs that have served to underpin society.
Kerby et al (2021) write how counter monuments, which are artistic (and often protest) forms of public art, reinforce Lyotard’s petit recits. By disrupting grand narratives such as ‘history is glorious’, ‘memory is fixed’ and ‘these people are infallible heroes’ counter monuments, like petit recits, illuminate alternative perspectives, including those of marginalised groups. Contending with how other experiences or people are absent, counter monuments intentionally challenge the subject, form and meaning of traditional public monuments to deny imposing authoritative ideologies. For this reason, they are usually public works that address the more obscure and distressing parts of history.
Arising from debate about how to remember the Jewish people murdered during World War II, and recently experiencing a resurgence through the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, counter monuments subvert the 19th century memorial trope of triumphant Western nationalism and colonisation (Atkinson-Phillips 2018:382) with its lofty bronze statues on stone plinths. Embodying a scepticism toward traditional forms of commemoration, counter monuments instead, according to historian James Young (1997), encourage thoughtful remembrance.
Artist Alex Seton’s artwork in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial, For Every Drop Shed in Anguish (2024), is made up of 18 unique ‘droplets’ of marble, some weighing up to 3000kgs (Australian War Memorial, 2023). It represents the ‘blood, sweat and tears’ shed by those in service and their families and, for me, is a poignant example of a contemporary counter monument to the true cost of war. Karen Bird, a historian and mother of veteran Jesse Bird, who died by suicide after his service, contends that the sculpture represents ‘those Australians whose names have been redacted from our military history; the silenced, the forgotten, the unspoken. The men and women who have fallen outside the palatable retelling of our war and military history. Who, until this time, have had no place at Australia’s dedicated war memorial’ (Bird 2021). (The Alex Seton monument below was dedicated in 2023 and Karen Bird spoke at the ceremony.)
The counter monuments that have arisen from the BLM movement subvert traditional memorialisation tropes and spotlight what is omitted when history is commemorated. Two of these counter monuments appeared near my home, on Wurundjeri land in Edinburgh Gardens, Naarm/Melbourne. They exemplify what Australian landscape architect Sue Ann Ware (2008) terms ‘anti-memorials’, relying on ephemeral approaches that reject the myth of permanence and closure.
In 1862, Queen Victoria granted land to establish colonial-style gardens (Allom Lovell & Associates 2004).The Wurundjeri people of the East Kulin nation had already been decimated by land-grabbing, disease, and active conflict with Europeans (Wurundjeri Walk History 2024). The Edinburgh Gardens centrepiece is a pedestal designed to hold a statue of Queen Victoria. The statue only stood for three years before mysteriously disappearing (Allom Lovell & Associates 2004). Perhaps this was the first BLM counter monument action! The original statue was never replaced.
The bare Edinburgh Gardens pedestal is part of Yarra Council’s Plinth Program, for temporary exhibitions. Taungurung sculptor Steven Rhall’s counter monument, Tanderrum, was recently displayed here. The work, comprising a small plinth embellished in ochre, black, yellow and red Indigenous design, is upended on the original pedestal. The inversion and shrinking subverts the contextual colonised landscape and associated power structures inherent in monuments and memorials (City of Yarra 2024).
By reflecting the plinth on itself, Rhall undermines the authoritarian function of the pedestal. He directs the viewer’s focus onto the Wurundjeri land at the plinth’s base and privileges First Nations’ connection to Country (City of Yarra 2024). Rhall highlights that more than just the original statue has been stolen.
The other counter monument in Edinburgh Gardens was not commissioned and the artist remains unknown. It organically captures the energy of BLM activism. On 26 January 2024, the anniversary of the British invasion, the stone monument to Captain Cook at the entrance to the gardens was anonymously toppled and spray-painted with the words, ‘Cook the Colony’.
This intervention (some would argue it should be called vandalism) counterpoints Rhall’s sculpture by questioning how far protest art and counter monuments are compatible with institutionalisation and government. Yarra Council commissioned Rhall’s work. The anonymous protest action disrupted colonial powers and forced debate about whether the local settler Council would replace the plaque. Yarra Council determined that the Cook memorial would not be returned to Edinburgh Gardens (City of Yarra 2024). Like the Queen Victoria statue that went missing around 160 years ago, this is an example of how art activism can change power systems and the way history is told.
*Kat Rae served in the Australian Army before becoming a full-time artist. She has had numerous solo and group exhibitions, and her artwork has been recognised in many competitions. Her 2024 Honours project made the RMIT Vice Chancellor's List for academic excellence (top 2%) and won the RMIT Social Change Award.
References are listed at the end of Part II of this post.
Part II of this post.
Picture credit: Alex Seton, 'For Every Drop Shed in Anguish' (2024)
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