Sidney Nolan: The Gallipoli Series

Since its refurbishment in the late 1990s, the Australian War Memorial is regarded as the most popular tourist attraction in Canberra, pulling in around 1 billion visitors a year from those locally, nationally and internationally. It is well and truly a hothouse of the war stories, names of war heroes and memorabilia for the young and the old to cherish and for us to experience the impact war has on our society.

The newest Memorial exhibition, Sidney Nolan: the Gallipoli series is currently on show until 18 November. It features a collection of the one of Australia’s most acclaimed and internationally recognised artists’ journey in encapsulating his ideas on war, loss and death over a 20-year period of his artist career. Nolan (1917–1992) worked on the Gallipoli series from the mid-1950s until the late 1970s, and in 1978 Nolan presented 252 of his works of the Gallipoli series to the Australian War Memorial in loving memory of his brother Raymond.

Nolan’s brother Raymond was a soldier who died in a tragic accident just before the end of the Second World War. His drawings and paintings are indicative of both his personal and social reflections on the Australian experience of the Gallipoli war. Nolan, who is well-recognised for articulating visual expressions on themes drawn from Australian history, myths and legends, attempting to capture the identity of an Australian national character in his Gallipoli series.
Nolan’s drawings and paintings features haunting images of solders, their struggles in battles, and the landscape of this historic event capturing Nolan’s vivid colours and unique vision to provide timeless and iconic images of the ANZAC experience. As Nolan continues to return to this theme, his work evolved and of new dimensions to meaning of war as well as sorrow and loss.

As Michael Veitch, the host of ABC Sunday Arts TV program, pointed out at the launch of the exhibition, “I like to think that Gallipoli continues to resonate on some level because, given that war is itself, mankind’s ultimate failure, failure of reason, failure of spirit and sense, celebrating wars victories seems somehow churlish.” How true is he.

And while you are there, stick around for the screening of Over the Front, the interactive digital art storytelling of the lives of some of the pilots who fought in the Great War in the air at the ANZAC Hall.

Sidney Nolan: The Gallipoli Series

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