DEATHMIN FORMS PART OF MY larger project Un-archives and Antiprints, which tells a multi-level story through artistic interventions upon the personal archive I inherited when my abusive veteran husband (hereafter referred to as ‘A’) suicided in 2017. My frustration began at A’s funeral, where I saw how inadequate the romanticised Anzac myths were at expressing the real cost of war, and how they had grown to become part of the seemingly immovable  cultural mountains that are the legacies of  . Later, I saw how this bedrock of traditional Australian war commemoration, while increasingly challenged, grievously reinforces the destructive effects of the military-industrial complex. I also became cognisant of the way the military ‘Anzac-washes’ its actions through supporting military art and war commemoration.

Turning the mechanisms of military institutions, museums and bureaucracy back on themselves, I borrowed their strategies to make artistic interventions that redacted, reconfigured and reinterpreted my monumental inheritance to create an ‘un-archive’. I did this in the spirit of practitioners devoted to creating artworks that are shrines to truth, whose works both encompass and exceed the personal.

Art curator and critic Justin Paton writes of artists who have been excluded from the ‘men’s business of being artists of war’^[1]. Ironically, despite my status as a war widow and twenty-year veteran of the Australian Army, I was one such artist. In making Deathmin I catalogue and attack A’s personal archive and reinsert my autobiographical understanding into public spaces and dialogues. In doing so I activate my role as an unofficial war artist and create a counter-archive: a subversion of romanticised and heroic Anzac legends showing the unvarnished harm that war causes.

 

Death has a paper trail, particularly death as a direct result of war. Documenting family domestic violence is more complicated. It is an unacknowledged war. On average in Australia, one woman a week is killed by her intimate partner^[2] and police are called out to family violence incidents on average every two minutes^[3]. An estimated 85 per cent of all domestic violence incidents remains unreported^[4] and the situation is worse for defence families: a recent report from the Department of Veteran Affairs (DVA) identified families of servicemen as highly vulnerable to the impacts of intimate-partner violence^[5]. The Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide confirmed that 45.5 per cent of intimate partners of transitioned Defence personnel reported emotional, physical or sexual violence. Further, there is a strong association with suicide and PTSD for these. Daughter of a Vietnam war veteran, Ruth Clare writes that 23 per cent of the offspring of Vietnam veteran families experienced abusive, harsh parenting, compared with 5-10 per cent of the general population^[6]. When they are not helped, ‘wounded warriors tend to wound’^[7] but these truths are rarely acknowledged in the face of Anzac. Historian Henry Reynolds writes, ‘Anzac rhetoric dwells on ‘suffering endured’ yet is silent about ‘suffering inflicted’^[8].

Deathmin memorialises A’s death and its aftermath. It has been seven years since our daughter and I fled A’s violence at home. The bureaucratic paperwork I had amassed since his death was made up of endless requirements of evidence-building that took thousands of pages to claim compensation. It contains page after page in which A requests support for his broken body. Eventually, DVA paid $7 fortnightly, later reduced to $5. Three months before A died, payments ceased. The pile also included defence documentation that had been so comprehensively redacted that there was no meaning left. As time progressed the pile grew as I contended with outstanding military administration. The Inspector-General, Australian Defence Force, is supposed to investigate and report on each veteran suicide within a year, with recommendations to prevent further deaths. A’s report was six years overdue, redacted, ignored pertinent facts, and lacked any recommendations to save lives. A’s report was signed off in March 2023 but came to me in October of that year. I had just three days to share my experiences with the Royal Commission into Veteran Suicide before submissions closed. My new paperwork joined A’s, and when stacked together, it became Deathmin. The isolating, confusing and humiliating nature of a private bureaucratic nightmare is embedded in the work. ‘Personified’ at my height and A’s weight, the stacked archive represents the cruelty and performative nature of institutions, with their apathy, corruption and unaccountability. It subverts how documents have worked to categorise and control my family, exposing the abusive power of the institutions which produced them.

Deathmin is a counter-monument to the strong, upright imagery often conveyed in the Australian War Memorial. It embodies the burden placed on veterans and their families. It asks bureaucratic institutions to care for the people they say they will. In the army, you are taught that no matter how tired you are, you cannot lean against walls. Heavy with fatigue and leaning precariously like the fate of so many, Deathmin is weary and wants to rest.

Yet now, so does Deathmin: forcefully inserted into the archive, a fearless protest to the grand narratives, its counter monumental weight pushing against the memorial’s walls.

The Napier Waller Art Prize is an acquisitional national art competition where the Australian War Memorial works to remedy historic veteran silencing by elevating the artistic expression of veterans. In May 2024 Deathmin won this prize and at the exhibition opening in Australian Parliament House, with an audience of politicians, military hierarchy, and the public, I called for action. Deathmin will now be travelling to Government House for display, at the request of the Governor General. The piece is a testament to the power of extended print practice in archive and protest art. The stories and art of those with direct experience belong in our archives, so that truth is taught and understood.

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[1]  Paton, Justin (ed.) (2024) Louise Bourgeois – Has the Day Invaded the Night or Has the Night Invaded the Day? (Art Gallery of New South Wales Publisher, Sydney), 23

[2]  ANROW (Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety), website accessed 14 May 2024. https://www.anrows.org.au/.

[3]  Safe Steps Safe Steps Response Centre website), website

accessed 13 November 2024. https://safesteps.org.au/understanding-family-violence/who-experiences-family-violence/.

[4] Hill, Jess (26 April 2024), ‘We won’t stop violence against women with conversations about respect. This is not working. We need to get real’, Guardian.

[5] Department of Veterans Affairs report (2023) Intimate Partner Violence among current and ex-serving Australian Defence Force personnel and families, Phoenix Australia, Melbourne, 85.

[6] Clare, Ruth ‘Enemy – A daughter’s story of how her father brought the Vietnam war home’ (Sydney, Penguin Random House Australia, 2016), 197-98.

[7]  van der Kolk, Bessel ‘The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma’ (New York, Viking, 2014).

[8] Lake, Marilyn and Reynolds, Henry ‘What’s Wrong with Anzac?: The Militarisation of Australian History’, (Sydney, University of NSW Press, 2010), 28.

Two years after A’s death, and after 20 years of service, Kat Rae left the army to become a full-time artist. As a veteran she is familiar with the defence force’s obsession with printed paperwork. Now, as a print-informed artist, Kat turns the harmful methods of the military industrial complex onto its own materiality. Kat has just completed her Honours in Fine Art at RMIT.

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