Ten kilos of first world war grief at the Melbourne Museum
A new exhibition at Melbourne Museum explores the experiences of Victorians in the Great War, and the war’s effects on them.
27 Aug 2014 12:00
Peter Stanley
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Visual Arts
Image via Wikimedia
Museums have a hard job conveying often fleeting human interactions and experiences using their stock-in-trade – the artefact. How can you convey friendship or hatred through objects? What can you use to show fear, hatred, comradeship or idealism? How can a museum convey in an artefact what grief felt like?
Peter Stanley is one of Australia's most active military-social historians. He has published 28 books, mainly in the field of Australian military history, as well as a novel for children,Simpson's Donkey and the adult novel The Cunning Man.
He worked at the Australian War Memorial from 1980 to 2007, where he was its senior historian from 1987, and there curated or contributed to many exhibitions. In 2007 he became the inaugural head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia.
He has been part of many television histories, including consulting, appearing in or presenting programs such as Australians at War, Revealing Gallipoli, and In Their Footsteps. His book, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Murder, Mutiny and the Australian Imperial Force, jointly won the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian history in 2011.
In February 2013 Peter joined UNSW, Canberra, as a Research Professor in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society. He has completed the social history chapters of one of the multi-volume Oxford Centenary History of Australia in the Great War and the first book on Indians and Gallipoli, to be published in 2015. He is working on books on the National Library's Great War collections, on Australia and the Armenian massacres and on the Australian memory of the Great War.
