Canberra - Australian War Memorial

The massive Byzantine-style monument commemorating Australia's war dead was designed in 1925 as something more than the ordinary war memorial, with a museum, archives, an art gallery and a library. It was inaugurated in 1941, in the middle of the second world war. The dome and the courtyard at the entrance to the memorial commemorate the fallen, whose names are inscribed on the walls of the colonnades. The Hall of Memories has stained glass windows, a mosaic made of millions of parts and three statues of Australian soldiers. Relics and documents from the Memorial's large collections (1 million photographs, 40,000 relics and mementos, 20,000 maps) are displayed in galleries devoted to different theatres of war. At the entrance to the ground floor, on the right, are portraits of the initiators of the Memorial, the historian CEW Bean and General Sir William Birdwood. Of particular interest are the collection of old aircraft and a Japanese mini-submarine from Sydney Harbour, reconstructed from its remains. Critics _of the Memorial complain that it glorifies war rather than warning against it.