The Sir John Monash Centre in France will open for Anzac Day and tell all about Australia’s WWI soldiers
THE $100 million Sir John Monash Centre in France is set to be opened by Malcolm Turnbull just before Anzac Day and it tells amazing stories about Australia’s WWI soldiers.
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FINAL construction work is underway at the new, $100 million museum in France which will pay homage to the extraordinary sacrifice of Australia’s World War 1 soldiers.
The Sir John Monash Centre, set into a hillside overlooking the village of Villers-Bretonneux, will tell the story of Australia’s role in the battles along the Western Front, using the experiences of some of the 416,000 soldiers who served between 1914-1918.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull will declare the centre open on April 24, on the eve of Anzac Day, which is also the centenary of the Second Battle of Villers-Bretonneux, where 1200 Australians died in the successful campaign to liberate the village from German occupation.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott first announced the centre, named for the famous Victorian war commander John Monash, and committed the funding for it in 2014.
The museum has been carefully dug into the hillside behind the Australian National Memorial outside Villers-Bretonneux, a cemetery, memorial tower and wall engraved with the names of more than 10,000 Australian soldiers whose final resting places were never found.
The cemetery includes the graves of more than 2100 Commonwealth soldiers including hundreds of Australians. More than 600 of the graves honour unknown soldiers who have never been identified.
The museum is designed to be interactive, where visitors will view films and hear audio describing the war in the soldier’s own words.
Taken from journals and letters, the words paint a horrifying picture of the war that raged across the Western Front and claimed 46,000 young Australian lives.
Visitors will also be able to download an app which will work as an audio-guide, and take them through the cemetery, the memorial, and through the museum.
The centre will be part of the Australian Remembrance Trail, which runs along the key WW1 battlefield sites in Belgium and France and encourages visitors to reflect on the soldiers’ sacrifice.
The centre’s director, Caroline Bartlett, told News Corp Australia the first sod was turned on January 18, 2016, and construction work on the site — atop a century-old battlefield — had unearthed a number of important artefacts from the war.
“We went through and did a pyrotechnics study of the ground and found a few things,’’ she said.
“So we went ahead and got them all out of the ground and had some interesting finds including 234 kilograms of unexploded ordnance, and about 200 objects of significance,’’ she said.
“We had a helmet, we’ve got a Lee-Enfield rifle, we’ve got quite a few shells, exploded ordnance shells. We have inkpots which tell a very personal story I think.’’
A number of those items are now displayed in the museum.
As well as static displays, the museum relies heavily on immersive multimedia, with lights, realistic battle sounds, and confronting images of soldiers in battle.
Visitors to the museum will walk through long ramps which are designed to feel like the trenches the soldiers fought in.
The brickwork features words which were in popular use at the time — including diggers, two-up, cobber, mate and dinkum.
The French and Australian flags fly over the memorial site.
Entry to the site is free.
For more details, go to https://sjmc.gov.au/
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