Michael Piggott*
Evidence
On 7 January 2025, an article appeared in the Canberra Times headed ‘Damning report slams Australian War Memorial over “diversity”, “colonial terminology”’. There we learned the Memorial had received a consultant’s report titled ‘Cultural safety and diversity audit report’.
Journalist Steve Evans admitted he had a copy of the confidential report – which was obvious anyway from the extensive quoting. Commissioned from lawyers Terri Janke and Company, the report drew on a staff survey, other testimony, information about the membership of the Memorial Council, labels on objects in the Memorial's galleries, and Memorial policies.
The report had a strong emphasis on the views and feelings of Memorial staff, not least Indigenous and ‘other ethnic minority’ staff, that is, those from a ‘culturally, ethnically and/or linguistically diverse background’. There were also references to the physical, emotional and cultural safety of staff generally, and to the racism experienced by both staff and volunteers.
The mention of ‘trauma’ was especially interesting. Steve Evans reported that the consultants:
said that staff at the War Memorial could suffer “vicarious trauma” because of the traumatic material, stemming from war, which staff sometimes have to deal with. “Unlike other cultural institutions, the Memorial holds a larger quantity of objects and materials that can be traumatising and distressing to staff.”
The consultant’s report had also drawn attention to the ‘lack of processes when staff engage with traumatising materials’.
A week after the Canberra Times article I heard second-hand that a long retired senior War Memorial colleague had exploded in disbelief at the idea of upset staff, wondering in words to the effect, ‘What did they think they were going to encounter applying to work at a place called the Australian WAR Memorial?!?!’.
Some of the nearly 70 reader comments posted to the online Canberra Times agreed. For example:
Everyone is sick of this utter garbage. Grow up and toughen up.
Perhaps staff who might be so impacted might consider that working at a war memorial was not the best choice for them!
They have a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Have a Memorial to All those Vicariously Affected by War.
Everyone in the real world is getting tired of this repetitive public service malarkey. The whole WOKE concept is so last year ... just deal with it like we have for centuries.
And who'd of thought that there would be weapons, grim stories and confrontational material in a War Memorial?
“Safetyism deprives young people of the experiences that their antifragile minds need, thereby making them more fragile, anxious, and prone to seeing themselves as victims" (excerpt from The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt).
It [the Memorial] is not meant to be a therapeutic space but a historical one, preserving the unvarnished truths of conflict.
It sounds that an extreme left viewpoint was commissioned from the report. We really are a society of hurt feelings now. Hint: War was and still is brutal. People’s feelings were and are still not a consideration.
Other comments were more in line with the report. For example:
Sadly the old twentieth century problem of scorning weakness and need is emerging in these comments.
How does one, working in a space such as a war memorial, listen to these voices and represent them, today? The culture of twentieth century Australia was very “British and white”. How people coped was often shaped by values deriding any show of so called weakness. Now, in 2025, any attempt to try and understand all this, and to open the discussion in a more inclusive and multidimensional way, seems, sadly, to be derided as “woke”.
As to how the Memorial should respond, several comments implied staff with military service backgrounds would handle things better:
There was a time when the Memorial actively employed many ex-service personnel who had first hand experience of war. This practice had significant advantages, as these individuals brought a deep, personal understanding of the realities of military service and conflict. Their experiences lent authenticity and gravity to the way stories were told, ensuring that the sacrifices and struggles of those who served were portrayed with genuine insight and respect …
While times have changed, and the Memorial’s staffing priorities may have shifted, there is still great value in ensuring that those with direct military experience play a role in shaping how this history is preserved and presented.
Commentary
1
My long-retired Memorial colleague had a point (up to a point). Regardless of any expectation of or obligation on the Memorial to add warnings to recruitment advertisements, surely some minimum awareness by prospective staff can be assumed? Surely no one would apply for a position requiring contact with collection items not knowing that, for instance, bayonets or photos of dead bodies or descriptions of POWs’ torture might trigger distress? Would they?
Or is this an older person’s naivety about later generations? More likely, we need to accept what Jordan Prosser called ‘the dark unknowability of other people’. Someone asked on Reddit a couple of years ago why plastic bags in retail packaging had excessive warnings such as, ‘This bag is not a toy, it can cause suffocation’, in as many languages as possible? The responses ranged from ‘Because people are fucking stupid’ and ‘It’s a safety thing. Small children can suffocate with a plastic bag on their heads as they can’t always get it off their faces’ to ‘ “Cause someone got sued and lost big money’.
2
Wearyingly, there’s a culture wars element to the issue of warnings, and it’s been evident now for decades. It started from concern that works of art and literature needed warnings that their content may cause distress or offence or perpetrate stereotypes.
Film classification, of course, has been with us much longer. Such concern can – no, has been – overegged, and, in the process, excited conservatives and free speech advocates have labelled it yet another kind of ‘wokeness’. Thus, a recent number of The Spectator Australia included a Mark Wood cartoon in which a high school history teacher tells a colleague, with two boys in the background, ‘It was affecting their mental health, so I’ve had to rewrite history’.
And not to forget the late Bill Leak, for years The Australian’s favourite cartoonist, a collection of whose drawings was titled Trigger Warning (2017). Gentler reservations underpin the hilarious pastiches of Bruno Vincent, his titles including You Can’t Say that Any More and Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Trigger Warning.
Excited anti-wokers aside, trigger warnings can be counterproductive. Just as banning books can increase interest in them, scholars have identified a ‘Pandora effect’ to explain the minimal value of warnings. As Victoria Bridgland, lead author of ‘A meta-analysis of the efficacy of trigger warnings, content warnings, and content notes’, put it in 2023, ‘Trigger warnings … appear ineffective in preventing vulnerable populations, such as people with mental health concerns, from engaging with distressing stimuli’.
*Michael Piggott is a retired archivist based in Canberra. His post-retirement appointments have included President, Friends of the Noel Butlin Archives Centre, ANU (2013-17) and Chair, Territory Records Advisory Council (2018-20). He was made an AM in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2017. He is one of the distinguished Supporters of the Defending Country campaign. For other work by him, use the Honest History Search engine, and see this article on the Defending Country site.
Picture credit: Judith beheading Holofernes (Caravaggio, 1599)
Continued: Part II of this article.
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