Downstairs in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra is a ‘Discovery Room’ aimed at children from kindergarten age to years 6 and 7. The room has a mock-up trench, the bridge of a World War II Corvette, an Australian kitchen/dining room, circa 1939-45, and a bivouac/command post from the Vietnam era. It is also given a ‘one-family’ theme via photographs of three generations of men from an Australian family who served in the two world wars and Vietnam. Children visiting the Discovery Room are encouraged to dress up, the boys as combat soldiers or seamen and the girls as nurses.
The last time I looked in the Discovery Room was during school holidays. Lots of kids were running around in their borrowed uniforms and I overheard one of the museum’s volunteers, an older woman, talking to some parents. They were looking at the photos of a family. One shot depicts a helicopter, picking up soldiers in the jungle in Vietnam. The volunteer was telling a story about the day a Vietnam veteran was looking at the photographs in front of some kids. The vet said how brave the chopper pilots were and how he had been rescued by one when he was wounded. ‘The kids had eyes like saucers.’ The veteran described how difficult it had been for the airmen to get him aboard the helicopter because he was ‘slippery with blood. There was blood everywhere.’ The volunteer turned to the parents. ‘Of course we would never tell the kids things like that.’
As I walked through the rest of the museum, it struck me that many of the galleries had something childish about them. The Vietnam exhibit, for instance, with its Bell helicopter and life-sized soldiers on patrol that reminded me of Action Man toys I had played with as a kid. Upstairs, you can look at the WWI dioramas. Though the purpose of these is avowedly again to show ‘what it was really like’, they remind me of nothing so much as playing with toy soldiers when I was a kid. In the WWII galleries, you can stand in a simulator, which gives you the noise sensation and vibration of a Lancaster Bomber taking off. Very exciting.
The point I’m making may seem obvious: if you take the terror, killing and maiming out of war, what you have is something like a kid’s game, a parade with drums and bugles, or