REFLECTIONS

FROM THE DIRECTOR, MATT ANDERSON PSM

Commission’s newest First World War cemetery, the first to be commissioned in over 50 years.

Visitors to the Memorial will have been met with much activity. The three major works packages (Southern Entrance and Parade Ground, Bean Building and Research Centre, and Anzac Hall and the Glazed Link/ Atrium) are starting to come up out of the ground. Work is also well underway for the design of the galleries that will do justice to the magnificent new spaces we are creating.

Supervising Editor Karl James

Editor Andrew McDonald

Manager Michael Kelly

Memorial Editorial Staff Lachlan Grant, Craig Tibbitts, Duncan Beard, Meghan Adams, Rachel Caines

Editorial Contributions

The Editor, Wartime

Australian War Memorial GPO Box 345, Canberra ACT 2601

E: wartime@awm.gov.au

Image sales (02) 6243 4542

General enquiries (02) 6243 4211

I received the news of the discovery of the final resting place of the Montevideo Maru with mixed emotions. To see the ghostly images of the largely intact vessel on the seabed, over 4,000 metres below the surface of the South China Sea, was a lonely and confronting reminder of the tragedy of war and the loss of more than 1,000 Australian service personnel and civilians. But I take great heart that there were families, friends, historians, philanthropists and Defence experts committed to search until the ship was found.

It is yet another reminder of what’s good about us. I need only think of Lambis Englezos, a retired teacher from Melbourne whose ‘magnificent obsession’ enabled us to find, recover and honour Australia’s missing diggers from the 1916 battle of Fromelles. Of the 250 bodies discovered in a mass burial site near Pheasant Wood, 173 have now been identified. So far, all have been Australian, and they now lie in the Commonwealth War Graves