Sacrifice
7 April 2022
By: Centre For The Australian Way Of Life
How did we select the works to go in our Australian Canon? Artistic and literary merit is of course a prime consideration, but not the only one. The great literary critic Harold Bloom said artists decide what should be in a Canon. Perhaps that is the case if all we want is literature for its own sake, but a national Canon must have more than that. And so we have also looked for works which speak to our national character, and may have helped form it. We have, for instance, included the remarkable Sacrifice, housed in the Hall of Silence at the Anzac Memorial, Hyde Park, Sydney.
At one level this brings to mind how the mothers of Ancient Greece reputedly bid farewell to their sons marching off to war: “Come back with your shield—or on it.” Truly did the Anzacs honour their mothers and country with their valour in a pitiless struggle. But the sculpture by George Rayner Hoff is also, as the accompanying text describes:
A physical expression of the spirit and legend of the Anzac—Honouring service, and the Courage, Endurance, and Sacrifice by all servicemen, servicewomen and their families.
While echoing the description of the Greeks by a Roman writer, Plutarch, the image of the fallen soldier is also unmistakably Christian. This is not accidental. As the Australian historian John Moses explained in the Autumn 2021 edition of the IPA Review, the original conception of Anzac Day in the immediate post-war period was inherently Christian (read Our Most Sacred Day, here).
Reconfiguring the crucifixion as sacrifice is the core symbolic transformation of the New Testament, and this sculpture is in the lineage of more than a millennia of Christian art. One does not have be Christian to appreciate our fallen soldiers, but one should have some understanding of the cultural heritage and the symbolic language that informs how we commemorate them.
Further information on Sacrifice can be found at the website of the Anzac Memorial, here. Cover image courtesy of Anzac War Memorial.
For commentaries on other works in the IPA’s Canon, go to the Index at The Genius of Australia.
