War Memorial battle dioramas get revamp

The Australian War Memorial is renovating its prized dioramas ahead of a $27 million redevelopment. Source: AAP

WHEN the Australian War Memorial first displayed its battle dioramas in the 1920s, their realism was overwhelming for one veteran of the fighting at Gallipoli.

Curator Nick Fletcher said the man found the Lone Pine diorama just too much.

"He said 'I have to get out, it's all coming back to me, my mate was killed behind me in the middle of that scene. I can't stay'."

The memorial's dioramas are carefully constructed tableaux of particular battles and they remain extraordinarily popular despite modern interactive computer technology.

Now the dioramas featuring the battles of the Western Front of World War I but not Gallipoli, are being cleaned and conserved as part of a $27 million redevelopment of the memorial's First World War galleries ahead of the Anzac centenary.

War Memorial acting director Nola Anderson says the restored galleries will reopen in 2014.

"Not much has happened to these galleries since 1971, which is when this wing was opened. They will be the last of our galleries redeveloped to modern museum standards," she said on Wednesday.

"We will have more collections, we will have new technology but we will have some of the things that (the) Australian public know and love and that includes the dioramas."

Mr Fletcher, lead curator for the redevelopment, said memorial founder Charles Bean understood the average Australian would never be able to visit the battlefields or the graves of loved ones.

"Therefore, the dioramas provided a way in which people could put themselves in that scene and try and understand what their family had gone through," he said.

Work on the first dioramas started in the 1920s with sculptors visiting the actual battlefields and working from paintings and photographs.

Each is crafted of plaster, newspaper, horsehair and chicken wire over a timber frame and feature soldier figures cast from pewter and lead. Each figure is unique to a particular diorama.

The dioramas and original backgrounds were painted by prominent artists such as Louis McCubbin.

Conservator Alana Treasure says much of the work involves removing 40 years of accumulated dust and grime using a brush and vacuum cleaner, while lying on scaffolding over the diorama surface.

"We are not going to overpaint anything, unless there's a loss and you are looking at just plaster."

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