Rachel Griffiths’ ABC series ‘When the War is Over’ explores war art
Rachel Griffiths’ new television show explores how artists shape the image of war - from Cold Chisel’s banned song Khe Sanh, to David Williamson’s harrowing script for Gallipoli.
Around a decade ago Gallipoli screenwriter David Williamson travelled to Turkey with his wife Kristin to visit the site of one of Australia’s most disastrous military campaigns, the subject of his and director Peter Weir’s multi-award winning 1981 film Gallipoli. Showing them around the area was a local history professor with impressive knowledge of the 1915 battle and the haunting locations where the countless senseless deaths took place. Suddenly the professor stopped and, pointing down the hill said, “See that house down there? That’s my house, thanks to you and Peter Weir.” The paid guide went on to explain that before the film few people visited Gallipoli but since its release Australian politicians and tourists from Australia and other parts of the world regularly made the pilgrimage to pay their respects to the fallen.
It was not the first surprising response the veteran writer and playwright had received following Gallipoli’s debut. Although Williamson and Weir, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker behind The Truman Show, Dead Poet’s Society and Master and Commander, had intended the film to carry a stark anti-war message, it instead left some viewers seeing a celebration of young Aussie heroism.
“When I went into it I thought it was predominantly a film about the horror, futility and waste of war and I still think it is. So many people have told me that final scene still moves them to tears and feelings of horror,” Williamson tells Culture. “So it was a bit of a shock to see that what I’d thought was the strongest anti-war statement we could make was also seen as a glorification of heroism, and that running out into certain death was seen as heroic as well as tragic. The reception is much more ambivalent than I anticipated, but perhaps that’s what good art does: it posits all sides of the question.”
It is this very sentiment – that art can provoke myriad responses while educating, inspiring, even healing – that led actor and filmmaker Rachel Griffiths to begin looking deeper into the art of war. Gallipoli was just one of a host of powerful and enduring war-focused Australian works of art that led her to ask, “what can art tell us about war that the history books don’t?”
The result is When the War is Over, a five-part series on the ABC from November 18 that sees Griffiths not only travel to battlefields in Turkey, Thailand, Vietnam and here at home, but interview the artists behind some of our most iconic and enduring works of art created in response to Australia’s role in those wars and exploring their ongoing effect.
Griffiths sits down with Williamson; speaks to Wesley Enoch, director of the play Black Diggers; quizzes Jimmy Barnes and Don Walker about Cold Chisel’s debut single Khe Sanh, banned when it was first released in 1978, an anti-war anthem followed closely by Redgum’s heartbreaking I Was Only 19 five years later; she pores over Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North about the Thai-Burma Railway; and relives some of the agonies of post-war life through official war artist Ben Quilty, veteran and artist Kat Rae, and artist and curator Brook Andrew, whose artworks all convey their own interpretations of and thought-provoking messages about war. Finally she travels with country music singer and Gumbaynggirr and Bundjalung man Troy Cassar-Daley as he personally performs his song Windradyne, composed and named in honour of the Australian Wars warrior and peacemaker, to the late Wiradjuri man’s grave.
“I’m a bit of a war nerd, I’ve read a lot of war history (but) I realised my own feelings and understanding about war, mostly on a personal level, had come from art,” says Griffiths. She recalls as a child seeing a portrait of Vivian Bullwinkel, the eminent nurse who served during World War II, the sole survivor of the Bangka Island Massacre in 1942 who was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal among other awards, and whose portrait appeared three times in the Archibald Prize. “I remember seeing the portrait and not knowing that women were heroes and had been prisoners of war and had survived ... one little portrait on a wall carries a whole story and fires the imagination and keeps her bravery and all the nurses’ stories alive,” Griffiths says. “It’s been interesting seeing artists as the conscience of war, which they always have been, from Guernica to more recently, but I think we’ve undervalued the role of artists being the moral compass after war, bringing our attention to the residue of war after we’ve all moved on.”
Just how effectively artists can convey the horrific and ongoing impact of war is evidenced time and again as Griffiths travels between battlefields, eras and genres.
She firmly believes Australia is still not adequately having that conversation, pointing out it’s not enough to attend a dawn service on Anzac Day or wave a flag at an annual footy match when veterans are continuing to suicide and live irrevocably altered lives. “We must demand our government ensures that people this country has sent to war are looked after, with whatever they need for as long as they need when they return.”
Quilty, Australia’s 2011 official war artist in Afghanistan, captures expertly but confrontingly the horror so many veterans brought home with them in his 2012 exhibition After Afghanistan in which he painted the veterans broken and nude, works veterans later told Griffiths were hugely impactful for them given what they conveyed, as the rate of suicides continued mounting. “Ben is committed to his subjects, he didn’t just paint and forget,” Griffiths says. “I thought it was a powerful assertion of the role of the artist.”
In 2024 the final report into the Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide was handed down, containing 122 recommendations to government for real, meaningful and long-lasting reform.
Both insightful and moving, When the War is Over is also uplifting in its depiction of the joy that can be found through art even in dark times, from the dying soldier on the notorious Thai-Burma Railway who insists on painting butterflies in a defiant means of bringing beauty and love to his fellow soldiers; or the descendant of an Australian nurse who talks to Griffiths about the nurses’ choir that gathered covertly during their internment by the Japanese in Sumatra in World War II.
Finally Griffiths explores the art of resistance, and healing, myriad examples of which she uncovers in her investigations into the Australian Wars between colonists and First Nations people. Under-discussed and under-acknowledged, they stretched from 1788 to about 1930 and resulted in an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal deaths – a similar number to the Australian War Memorial’s official toll of 103,000 Australians killed in foreign wars.
While the Australian Wars are slowly being more broadly discussed – editor Rachel Perkins’ eponymous new book was featured in Culture last month – less is known or acknowledged about the resistance of the Indigenous people who fought back.
Like other Australians of his time, Cassar-Daley went through school with no education about the wars and resistance from first contact, only learning from his grandparents about the massacres that had taken place locally. He is gratified to hear that’s now changing, and believes art has a role to play in educating and healing.
“I think there’s an overhang of shame as to what happened and people not wanting to be associated with those wars, but in reality we all are one way or another, genetically we’re all intertwined with this old truth we tend to run from,” Cassar-Daley says. “The truth telling is important and the shame is important to address as well, because the people who are feeling the shame shouldn’t be. It’s just part of our history and history is always going to be full of good and bad stuff. But it gives me the motivation to write about it and learn myself, and then hopefully we can educate each other.”
He has done just that with Windradyne, his moving ode to the 19th century resistance warrior who fought hard against his colonisers but was also a peacemaker, who brought together various local mobs who walked across the mountains from Bathurst to Parramatta to meet with the government to discuss living together in harmony. Incorporating his late Aunty Mary’s book into his research, Cassar-Daley composed the song on a gango (a kind of banjo) to create a sound he hopes evokes the feeling “of running with him with his spears across the plains”. In the song he details the remarkable friendship between Windradyne and local white farmer George Suttor, who recognised the man’s rights and not only gave him shelter but learnt his language so they could converse. When the ABC production crew unearthed descendants of both Windradyne and Suttor, Cassar-Daley requested permission to perform the song at the grave of Windradyne, in the company of both men’s descendants. The moment is captured on camera. “It was a personal moment between myself and Windradyne, just saying thank you for everything he would have done for a lot of people who did believe in fighting but did believe in living in harmony too. I think we can all take a bit of that in our life,” Cassar-Daley says.
The song was released in 2024 but artists have been using art to depict resistance since the Australian Wars began. The series reveals a sketchbook depicting the violence of the Native Mounted Police, drawn by an 18-year-old Aboriginal boy taken from his country in far north Queensland in the 1800s; and explores more contemporary expressions of art including Brook Andrew and Trent Walter’s memorial Standing By Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheenner on the site of the first public hangings in Melbourne of two Indigenous men convicted for the murders of two whale-hunters; and writer-actor Meyne Wyatt’s searing 2020 performance on Q&A, a monologue from his 2019 play City of Gold, that went viral.
“You realise these ANZAC values of fighting for king and country, courage, all those values applied to Aboriginal resistance. Why don’t we also acknowledge and celebrate that? Not just the dispossession and massacres which of course happened, but the way resistance happened has been forgotten. You’ve got to know the heroes too, right?” Griffiths asks. “Artists are important to the national conversation and national discourse and can really change the narrative.”
David Williamson is more circumspect about the reality of art changing hearts and minds. While he concedes books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin and All Quiet on the Western Front challenged notions of racism and attitudes to war respectively, he fears art preaches only to the converted. “The truth is a lot of the time the passion for art plays to its own converted audience,” he says. “I hope When the War is Over reminds viewers what Gallipoli was saying at its best: that war is horrific and futile.”
Nonetheless Cassar-Daley points out the profound and ongoing effect art – in his case music – continues to have.
“Art opens our mind, opens the door to accessibility to these stories. Music and stories and paintings are a buffer, they soften the blow a little bit while you’re learning, music takes you to the place that makes you feel what you’ve got to feel,” he says.
When the War is Over premieres on the ABC on November 18 at 8pm with all episodes available to stream on ABC iview.
Lifeline 131114. Open Arms, a counselling service for veterans and their families, is available 24/7, 365 days a year, on 1800 011 046.
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