Money isn’t the best way to show respect

We must honour our war dead, but is the millions we’re throwing at two enormous projects a way of showing respect, or are we just creating military theme parks, asks Terry Sweetman.

One afternoon last week I was one of just nine people in a suburban cinema watching Peter (Lord of the Rings) Jackson’s wonderful They Shall Not Grow Old.

His restoration and colourisation of original Imperial War Museum film from more than a century ago was everything critics had promised. It was a poignant, moving and harrowing 90 minutes of the Great War experience in the raw.

It wasn’t history — that can be found in thousands of books — but it was the experience of millions of ordinary men told in their own voices.

Oddly, two things stood out in my mind: The miserable allocation of clothing to men who were expected to wallow in mud and choke on their own blood and the appalling dental state of the ordinary soldiers. These were inconsequential observations but they were as telling as the acres of bodies, the squealing masses of rats and of men reduced to the primitive and brutal of conditions.

The film focused largely on British soldiers but occasional glimpses of knockabout slouch hats and awe-struck references to the fierce gambling habits of the Diggers was a reminder that it was also about Australians.

It might have been a slow day out in the ‘burbs but the film has done a roaring box office trade in Britain and there is an insatiable demand for it in schools.

Keep your eyes open for the DVD.

LEIGH PAATSCH REVIEWS THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD

Peter Jackson took Imperial War Memorial photos and film....

... and restored and colourised them for a new generation.

I have no idea of the cost of the film but at a quoted $6000 a minute for the computer magic that transformed the flickering Charlie Chaplinesque footage into modern imagery it can’t have been exactly cheap. However, published artistic expenditures by the IWM and 14-18NOW, which commissioned the film, suggests a comparatively modest budget.

Comparative to what? Well perhaps the $100 million we spent on the John Monash Interpretive Centre in northern France which gives every promise of being the white elephant of the century.

Tony Abbott announced it in 2015 amid claims that it would attract more than 110,000 visitors a year.

Figures unearthed by Fairfax have found it is falling short of its target by tens of thousands and, with an average of 5800 a month, might reach just 70,000 for the year.

On its slowest day, it had just 61 visitors, averaging a lousy eight an hour. On top of the initial investment, this trickle of visitors is budgeted to cost us $2.6 million a year.

Remember this was on top of the estimated $560 million or so we spent on the centenary of the Great War. And, of course, it is entered in a different ledger to the almost $500 million to

be spent extending the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The memorial is precious to me and has been for all my life but this seems a wickedly extravagant investment in the past at a time when we are so careless of the needs of today’s casualties of war.

The Sir John Monash Centre in Villers-Bretonneux is not meeting its visitor number targets. Picture: Ella Pellegrini

The justification seems to be that the memorial can display only 4 per cent of its holdings at any one time but, seriously, maybe that’s something we have to live with.

I detect no such enthusiasm about splashing around the dough so the National Gallery can put all its artworks on show at once.

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And, if displaying the collection is the prime objective, perhaps we should return to the museology theories of the past rather than the present which often seems to be about displaying fewer things in larger spaces.

The memorial attracts about 1.2 million visitors a year so there is no denying the public interest. However, its infatuation with bigger, brighter, bigger goes some way towards

justifying one unkind claim that was becoming director Brendan Nelson’s military theme park.

In inflation-adjusted terms the memorial cost just $20 million when it was opened in 1941 and has been regularly extended and renovated over the years, including Anzac Hall (home to the aircraft and submarine) in 2001. That same hall that will be extended under the new plan (demolished, according to critics).

But, at least most Australians can see the war memorial, which is more than can said for Abbott’s Folly in France.

The memorial boasts it has more than 3.5 million feet of original film and 1000

hours of video. Next time we have a fit of grandiosity maybe we should sling Jackson and his

computer wizards a few bucks and tell him to help himself to the film and audio library.

And we should stop pretending that money is an appropriate measure of respect and remembrance.

Terry Sweetman is a Courier-Mail columnist.

@Terrytoo69