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
This is the second of two parts: Part I.
There is a history of artists creatively engaging with archives to expose and highlight petit recits. Archival art, as Nigerian curator and art critic Okwui Enwezor argues, demonstrates art’s role in creating critical discourse around the archive and memorialisation, public information, erasure, trauma, identity and time (2008:13).
Archie Moore’s Venice Biennale-winning Kith and Kin (2024), undermines and critiques Western archival records in an immersive depiction of Kamilaroi time (Kith and Kin website, 2024). (Both flexible and cyclical, Kamilaroi time is underpinned by the simultaneity of past, present and future: Moore 2024.) Hovering above a black pool of reflection sit piles of bright white coroners’ reports, representing hundreds of Indigenous deaths in custody and family members lost to weaponised bureaucracy and institutions (Art Monthly 2024, including photos by Andrea Rosetti). Surrounding the paper installation are black walls covered with chalk, where Moore illustrates First Nations kinship ties that span more than 2,400 generations and 65,000 years (Moore 2024). The erased circles allude to gaps in his family recorded history, genocide inflicted through the violence of colonisation (Kith and Kin website 2024).
Academic Kathy Carbone notes that artists making archival art interrogate ‘dominant power structures, challenge or reframe history, or bear witness to those silenced, oppressed, or marginalised’ (2020:261). This describes the impact of Moore’s Kith and Kin. Art historian Hal Foster notes that artists working with archives pursue a ‘counter memory’ when they explore the documentation of neglected or marginalised knowledge (2014:4).
In Unlearning Imperialism (2019), scholar Ariella Aisha Azoulay explains how archives work as violent imperial technology which we need to unlearn to disengage from unquestioned political concepts such as ‘citizen’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘human rights’ (Azoulay 2019:23). In this tradition, my artwork is a physical exploration of what philosopher Paul-Michel Foucault describes as history ‘which transforms documents into monuments’ (1972:7).
My counter monument Deathmin is literally a monument of documents. After my veteran husband died, at the end of my Honours study I was left with one mountain of paper. This was the bureaucratic paperwork I had amassed since my late husband’s death, made up of endless requirements of evidence-building that took thousands of pages to claim compensation from the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. The pile also included Defence documentation that had been so comprehensively redacted that there was no meaning left.
As my study progressed, the pile grew as I contended with outstanding matters of military administration. My new paperwork joined my late husband’s, and when stacked together, it became Deathmin. The isolating, confusing and humiliating nature of a private bureaucratic nightmare is embedded in the work. ‘Personified’ at my height and my late husband’s weight, the stacked archive represents the Kafkaesque cruelty and performative nature of institutions, with their apathy, corruption and unaccountability. It subverts how documents have worked to categorise and control my family, and transforms them into counter monument form, showing the abusive power of the institutions which produced them.
Yet now, so, too, does Deathmin: forcefully inserted into the archive, a fearless petit recit to the grand narratives, its counter monumental weight pushing against those memorial walls.
The Napier Waller Art Prize is an acquisitional national art competition where the Australian War Memorial works to remedy historic veteran silencing by elevating the artistic expression of veterans. This time last year, Deathmin won, and at the exhibition opening in the Australian Parliament House, with an audience of politicians, military hierarchy, and the public, I called for action. The stories and art of those with lived experience belong in our archives, so that truth is taught and understood.
I am proud of my connection to the Australian War Memorial and its work in this space. Deathmin and Alex Seton’s For Every Drop Shed in Anguish (see Part I of this article) are examples of the Memorial getting on with the important work of reflecting the true cost of war. But the Memorial knows my stance when it comes to properly reflecting the Australian Wars: the Memorial simply must do better on that part of our history.
Rachel Perkins, Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman and Director of The Australian Wars documentary has argued, ‘These were the wars that were fought in Australia, and they were the wars that really made the modern Australian state’ (Perkins 2022). This important fact of history can no longer be suppressed at the Australian War Memorial.
The No result for the Voice referendum gives our national institutions a greater responsibility to tell the truth, not a mandate to silence it. If the Australian War Memorial keeps wilfully omitting the one war Australians fought on our own Country, it is at risk of looking like a propaganda relic, completely out of step with contemporary memorials and museums.
When the Memorial’s $550 million renovations have been completed in 2028, there will be 17,702m2 of gallery space available (Defending Country 2023). Never before will there have been so much space for the Memorial to do its job: honestly and commemoratively reflecting our nation’s experiences of war. As I have argued before (Rae 2025) the Memorial must include on its new and freshly painted walls the genuine heroics and sacrifice of Anzac history, as well as the complicated and difficult truths about all our wars and their far-reaching costs.
Last year, historian Clare Wright wrote, ‘It’s good to be reminded that Lest We Forget can be a unifying catch cry for the inclusive histories that our national cultural and commemorative institutions are empowered to tell’ (Wright 2024). The Australian War Memorial has never had greater opportunity, or responsibility, to course-correct on its previous silencing.
* 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 Chancellors List for academic excellence (top 2%) and won the RMIT Social Change Award.
Picture credit: 'Paper trail spill' detail, 2023 (the author).
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