Michael Piggott*
Commentary (continued from Part I of this article)
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There is something deeply ironic about a War Memorial being urged by a consultant to accept that contact with its collections has the potential to cause staff vicarious trauma. It’s been observed that anti-war sentiment would increase in proportion to knowledge of its effects. We know the War Memorial doesn’t glorify war, because it keeps telling us it doesn’t; and anyway, as its former Director, Brendan Nelson, has alleged, critics who think along those lines are ‘not people that you bump into in the galleries’. In fact they are ‘largely intellectuals, academics and retired public servants and fellow travellers’.
But still, the Memorial’s collections do include material far, far more realistic, visceral and upsetting than the items usually made available and exhibited in its galleries. Its curators and historians know this, and could prove it without any help from a retired archivist, let alone a latter day ‘Bloody Sam’ Peckinpah.
If the exhibitions did go off-script, I’d like to imagine a shift in sentiment about those who authorise war (and its inevitable violence, direct and collateral) and who benefit and profit from it. Still, Terri Janke would probably caution, how traumatising that would be for the staff.
Something like this was the point, as I read it, of ‘A trigger warning on art? A daft idea – but a back-handed compliment’, by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian in 2016. His prompts were comments by Stephen Fry about victim culture, beheading videos and a BBC warning about some of Caravaggio’s art.
At the end of the article, Jones hinted at the ‘compliment’ by reference to ‘Judith beheading Holofernes’ (see Part I of this article), a painting based on an event described in the Book of Judith, included in some versions of the Old Testament Bible:
Look at the pain in Judith’s eyes as she contemplates her own violent work. Look deeper into the anguish of Holofernes as he died. Caravaggio – and Shakespeare – are the very opposite of pornographers of violence. Great art does not get off on violence. It portrays it in order to understand the extremes of human suffering. If Shakespeare did not show Macbeth’s crimes, he could not take us into the guilty mind of a murderer, nor get us to the desperate understanding of Macbeth’s last speeches. Caravaggio’s beheadings reveal the cruelty of the violent world we still live in.
The missing piece in the logic behind warnings is the unknown viewer, the unknown Memorial staff member. Beheadings, whether painted or filmed, sadly don’t reveal to literally every viewer the cruelty of the violent world we live in.
It’s even been argued, famously, again by Brendan Nelson, in justifying the expansion of the galleries, that the display of war-related objects can help ameliorate trauma, a dubious and counter-productive idea. But as Mia Martin Hobbs noted:
Military hardware displays may carry emotional significance for veterans who worked with them, but they also dwarf everything around them: giving primacy to combat in our collective war memory. They send a message that combat is the most valuable kind of soldier experience, and that it is more valuable than what they do – or who they are – as veterans. For those recently transitioning veterans who are most vulnerable to life-long PTSD, such memorialisation tells them that the most important part of their story is already behind them.
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The potential for staff experiencing vicarious trauma issues is hardly unique to the Memorial, though the Janke report, according to the Canberra Times, claimed, ‘Unlike other cultural institutions, the Memorial holds a larger quantity of objects and materials that can be traumatising and distressing to staff’. To be polite, that’s a stretch. Museums, libraries, archives and galleries around Australia document the experience of Indigenous Australians via material potentially traumatising and distressing to their Indigenous staff, and certainly, working or volunteering at Australia’s various Holocaust museums and centres would test anyone’s sanity.
To reiterate, the Canberra Times reported, ‘The consultants also 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’. One wonders how often and how seriously this trauma occurs. Cultural institutions aside, working in the justice, law enforcement, security, detention, health, accident investigation, aged care and construction sectors, among others, offers the possibility of direct and vicarious trauma. As WorkSafe Victoria notes,
Exposure can occur directly from violent and aggressive behaviours or indirectly during the course of one's work, such as through counselling an assault victim or reading details relating to an assault. For example, as part of their work, some employees, such as child protection workers, lawyers, police officers, forensic scientists, journalists and customs officers, may need to repeatedly listen to or view material containing detailed descriptions or images of distressing and traumatic events experienced by others.
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Though this appears not to have been within the scope of Janke’s project, can consulting war-related material for research also be traumatising, directly and vicariously? In Australia, this awareness emerged when members of the Stolen Generation sought to read the files which recorded their or a family member’s care and control, and those files still existed.
The effort needed to, first, locate files if they still existed, secondly, to overcome official reluctances to allow access, and then the experience of reading their contents was harrowing, distressing and re-traumatising. Chapter 16 of the Bringing Them Home Royal Commission report (1997) included testimony to this effect, as did other published memoirs. As Bernadette Kennedy put it in 2005, ‘For Rene, the file search has been physically and emotionally draining. Few Australians would be aware of this ongoing trauma.’ After reading many such files, historian Peter Read recalled being ‘overwhelmed by the nonchalant wickedness vibrating in the dusty silences of the State Archives’.
In response, from the early 1990s, library, archives and Indigenous representatives have developed policies, protocols and procedures to sensitively manage access and many other aspects of ‘decolonising’ the record, culminating in the 2019 Tandanya Declaration. In the same decade, archivists working with records documenting the experience of child migrants, orphans and others who were once ‘in care’ built on these earlier policies.
All involved acknowledged, however, that there are innumerable archival sources which could cause vicarious trauma, including photographs of traffic accidents and of physical mental and sexual abuse, war records, police case files, inquest files, medical files, records of scientific experiments: innumerable sources, and people from all sorts of backgrounds, seeking access for any number of reasons. Clearly, there were many more categories of ‘users’ than Indigenous researchers accessing government records of control and surveillance, and many more categories of traumatising records than public archives. Soon enough, a generic training package, A Trauma-Informed Approach to Managing Archives, was developed.
One understands the War Memorial’s Research Centre staff are across the basics of trauma-informed practice. More generally, the Memorial website includes a Disclaimer, easily missed unless you scroll to the very bottom of the page. It includes all the usual suspect warnings now cited by cultural institutions (Indigenous images, offensive language in historical documents etc.), but also this: ‘Some of the images in the Memorial’s collection depict the consequences of warfare ,including human suffering or death, which some people may find disturbing’.
In similar vein, the Memorial’s guide to making oral history recordings urges interviewers to be alert to the potential for ghosts to be conjured: 'the interviewees may experience degrees of stress, distress, grief, anxiety, or fatigue. You and your interviewee should be assured that this is completely normal.'
Presumably, for Memorial staff conducting such interviews, here, too, vicarious trauma is a possibility. Increasingly so, we might wonder, or less so? What proportion of staff have ex-service backgrounds, and who would be confident to generalise about that fraction who sought employment at the Memorial? What role does gender play, given that the proportion of females working at the Memorial has been increasing for decades and now stands at 59 per cent, and who would be confident to generalise?
According to Terri Janke, staff identifying as part of a minority is what matters. Regardless, it’s said that in the midst of death there is life, and that death is part of life. And it seems it is ‘completely normal’ to feel distress talking about war. That war itself is completely normal is probably too depressing to confront.
*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: Bodies of civilians and security forces at a hospital in Ghazni province, west of Kabul, Afghanistan, 12 August 2018 (VOA)
This article also appears on our sister site, Honest History.
