Members of the AHA will be well aware of events of war commemoration that do not adequately or appropriately reflect what happened in the conflict they commemorate. The most commonly cited and indeed egregious example is the national fixation with Gallipoli, at the expense of the more significant Australian sacrifices and achievements on the Western Front in WWI.

Can bricks-and-mortar war memorials also be an unbalanced, inappropriate reflection of the conflicts they commemorate?

This paper explores the question using, as a case study, the new National Boer War Memorial inaugurated in Canberra in May 2017.

The issue is important because the representation of the conflict embodied in the memorial is permanent and reaches an often uninformed audience.