Australians at War Film Archive

Contemporary war is no longer about big armies facing each other off; peacekeepers are rarely in a position where they’re actually facing another army. They’re usually there at a time when the civilian population’s being mashed. And in situations like Somalia or where you know you had a starving

population and bandits were coming in and shooting and killing them and we were trying to defend them. We weren’t facing off the bandits, we were trying to protect the civilians. So the real subject of the work is the civilians, and what interests me is their stories, we’re up against a sort of, a culture of compassion fatigue where everyone’s seen the little frozen Somali kid. So I come up with the story in Somalia, my main Somalia story is of Marowhen Alihi [phonetic] a brave old grandmother who saved her three

granddaughters by carrying them for two weeks to a feeding station. That’s a story of great courage, I’d much, much rather do that than a picture glorifying soldiers of war. To me it’s an obscenity to glorify war, my image of Kibeho called Shit [italic?\], where you’ve got a father holding his daughter’s head and he’s sitting down trying to shit and keep the flies off the head. That’s showing that there’s no dignity in war, that all human dignity is stripped away.

And the job usually of war artists is to try and dignify these acts of gross violence, these inhuman acts. So really I’m an anti-war artist, rather than a war artist.

The soldiers, when they walk into an exhibition of mine there’s always photographs there which quite often even document them and their experiences. They walk straight past the photographs, they go to the paintings and drawings and they say, “Shit, that’s what it feels like to be there, you’ve got it.” And what an artist has to do these days, we don’t have to be like a classical musician, the kind of art that I do is like rock and roll and it speaks to these eighteen year older soldiers that are listening on

Walkmans to modern, you know, they’re listening to modern groups music. It’s a kind of protest art, it’s gutsy and it’s about people. And what you can do with a pencil that you can’t do with a camera is show, is take these images in and feel them, I mean most of these soldiers are badly damaged by what they see. No soldier came out of the Kibeho massacre in one piece, myself included. In fact I like to meet up with those soldiers again, just to talk because we’re the only people who saw

it, and we’re the only people who can understand each other. And the art shows that, it shows what they went through, and the horror of peacekeeping is that usually soldiers have to be there, when it’s not peacemaking. Watch the worst abominable things happen to civilian populations and the soldiers want to use their guns to protect the people and they have to watch their heads being hacked off with machetes. They come back damaged by that and they like to know that there was an

artist there who felt and saw it with them and can let the world know what they saw. You know like army PR [Public Relations] is never going to let the people back home know what these guys went through, or no one would want to go peacekeeping. In many ways the peacekeeper has a much more difficult experience than the solider of the first and Second World War where they knew they were up against absolute evil and they could fight man to man. These soldiers have often got to stand by and watched women and children being killed and they’re radioing

into the UN [United Nations] saying, “Can we do something?” And the UN’s saying, “No stay there, you’ve got to be impartial.” That’s hard to live with and that’s why there’s a need for art that expresses what it’s like to go through that trauma. And I’m torn the same way, you know I want to get in between the bastards that are hacking the kid’s heads off, and the kids and save them too. So I know, I know what it’s like to be there.

Yeah. I mean really the situation Australia had in Timor where we were peacemaking and similarly in Somalia where the soldiers could go in with weapons and, and work at it. I believe Australians are the best peacekeepers in the world because the first thing Australians do is work the people out, become close to the people, they’re not aloof, they’re not a separate force,

they become one with the peace, it’s Australian altruism. And then they find ways if there’s roofs off houses, after work they put roofs back on, they find orphanages where they can distribute clothes. We get involved. Whenever I’ve been on peacekeeping with any other nations, if I’ve been in the other nations’ vehicles, people have, in the streets are sick of the UN, they hate the UN, they’re throwing rocks at them. But you go through in an Australian convoy and everyone’s saying, “Hey Aussie, how are you, we love you, you know when are you coming back?” Sort of thing, because we work

with the people. This is something the soldiers don’t have orders to do, they do it naturally. No Australian soldier can ever stand somewhere guarding something without in a few minutes starting sharing their rations packs with the little local kids that are starving. I mean it’s the Australian thing, what Australian will ever sit next to a bloke in a bar who can’t afford a beer and not buy him one? Well the same thing happens with peacekeeping, no Australian can sit down and eat ration packs in front of kids that are starving, and that’s why we’re loved

everywhere we’ve been, where we’ve done peacekeeping.

I’ve always found the [Australian] War Memorial a boring mausoleum, which is what it is, it’s like visiting a graveyard, and I don’t like the glorification of war. I’m from the generation that protested against Vietnam. But

I became aware as a photographer and filmmaker that photography and filmmaking can’t go the whole distance. The crucial time for me was in Nicaragua, shooting documentary footage about the Nicaraguan conflict, but discovering that certain things I could only express with a pencil. And for me what you can create as an artist is that thing that no camera can create, it’s the emotional experience, and it’s putting symbols and images together. Sometimes it will take me three years

before the brain is finally got what it wants to say, it’s sort of some process has occurred and you come out with an image that says, you know everything about that conflict. And so I spent my life really defining the difference between what I can achieve as a photo journalist, a filmmaker, story teller, a painter and drawer, and I don’t really distinguish between the mediums. I see them, we’re living in an era now of multi media art, so

the painting, the drawing, the film, it’s all part of it. And even the process of getting in there, getting access, to be able to be always at the front line. I’ve learnt to get to the point where the conflict is happening, where the bullets are flying as quickly as it, you know a stream going down a mountain path. I find the quickest way to, to that, that flash point. And that’s part of the art too, that’s part of creativity. We’re looking at an art scene where it is art to hang yourself

on meat hooks, or to have your face rearranged in plastic surgery and show the surgery as art. The world of the flat canvas has stopped, a lot of people view the most interesting thing that I do is the activity of how I get access to things, like the Australian Army or the PLO [Palestine Liberation Organization] or the IRA [Irish Republican Army], or more recently the Taliban in Afghanistan. All that process is now part of art; we’re living in a post sort of flat wall furniture

era of painting.

I do images like Night Vision which is one of my startling, most startling images of Australian soldiers, and I was aware when I did that drawing, I actually was curled up under an APC [armoured personnel carrier] with a torch in my mouth and I scribbled this picture out of soldiers with night vision goggles on, looking like a science fiction character out of Terminator [Hollywood film]. And I was actually frightened to let the soldiers

on the patrol see it because I thought that they would have thought that I was making them look like inhuman monsters. And there’s nothing private in the army, so within minutes they were all looking at it and they said, “That’s it, that’s what it felt like.” And the thing was these guys had night vision goggles, they were walking through ancient Somalia looking at it through two miniature TV screens. And it was like a virtual reality video game. And this captured that, and I actually drew

the figures in the style of the kind of, they were playing little video games to fill in the time, this was their world. It’s an electronic sort of computerised world. The generals back in Australia might want thing to look like Healy and Ivor Heal [war artists], sorry the generals back in Australia might want things to look like Ivor Heal or Lambert or Streeton or something in that conventional turn of the 19th to 20th century period. But the soldiers want

rock and roll, they want stuff that reflects the way it was for them. So you know I was pleased with that, even now when I’m travelling with soldiers they all know my work and they know how wild it is and they say, “Where can we buy a book?” And I’ve actually got one very good illustration where I did a very realistic version of a patrol in Baidoa where you can see every nut and bolt on the guy’s night vision goggles. I had it in the same exhibition as a big painting which is the wild

sort of rock and roll video game type image, and everyone just walked past the other one, they go straight to the contemporary image. Unfortunately a lot of conservative people believe that good painting looks like a photograph, but photography has made that irrelevant, an artist has to look inside themselves and they have to find new ways of expressing things. So for me it was to take this experience of a modern army that now prefers to fight at night because we own the technology for night vision fighting.

And grapple that together with the kind of imagery, the kind of experience of working with these disoriented goggles, and come up with something that actually expressed what it felt like to be one of those soldiers in an ancient African city walking through it like Arnold Schwarzenegger [Hollywood actor] with Terminator goggles on.

Just one more thing, just, just one thing I’d like to say about that is that one thing that upset me a little bit about contemporary war artist pictures, was that I felt that I’d stretched the army and a lot of people into accepting images like the night vision painting. And these pictures did remind me that they had almost gone back to the era, I could image taking photographs of soldiers on patrols and then turning them into pastels, without giving it that expressionist leap.

And I felt that it was a backward step, I, I felt that the last fifteen years I’ve stretched perception, so they’ve actually got generals and colonels and people who are in a very conservative organisation still happy to let me work, work within the theatre of Australian war, knowing that I’m producing extremely contemporary images. And it was disappointing to see the more contemporary war art actually going back, more or less to turn of the century, turn of the 19th, 20th century kind of art.

Yeah something that could have been done in 1905, yeah.

I mean I don’t want you to use that because it’s not, bad to have that on a sort of an archival file.

Yeah that’s good.

Yeah.

When I was in Somalia I was aware that one of the unique characteristics of that conflict from the Australian perspective was that women were now carrying guns within the army, and particularly women within the MPs [Military Police] who are actually at the cutting edge, out in the streets of Mogadishu, sort of facing potential ambushes and things. And there was another interesting aspect which was that in that culture, the Somali culture, the Muslim culture, women had almost

no rights and you know they had no education, it was similar to the Taliban situation in Afghanistan. And so here were these modern women with guns and helmets and so on, the situation arose where it was thought that the Somali men were hiding weapons on their women because they knew that the UN being politically correct wouldn’t let male soldiers touch Muslim women. So the answer was to get Julie Rikowski

an MP, an Australian MP woman soldier to go and frisk these women. She had a helmet on and to her she felt, to herself she felt completely feminine. I went out on that patrol and she immediately went and started frisking a woman and people started picking up rocks and wanting to, they thought you know this was a man touching a Muslim woman. So sensing the situation I said, “Julie pull your helmet off.” She didn’t realise how quickly and how dangerous, how dangerous it was becoming.

And she took her helmet off and her long blonde hair fell down and immediately she became like the seventh wonder of the world. People couldn’t believe that there could be a woman ordering men around with stripes and a gun, in pants. And I think this is one of the great things that Australian peacekeeping has taken to places like Somalia, the sense that there is a potential for women to have some kind of equality.

But it’s amazing the informal, people find it, they want to hear me give some formal explanation of my role with defence force and army and so on, but there is none. It’s just that I’ve got this trust from the soldiers and the army and…

My relationship with the army’s based on a person to person thing, so I’ve worked out the Australian Army actually works on corporals who are section leaders and they’re the only people who actually, who go out and have interface and do patrols and really do, do things. The rest of the people administrating and back

in offices and so on. So when I arrive somewhere I stay in the transit camp, I sleep in the dirt with the soldiers, I eat with them, and I quickly network with them and I find out what’s really going on, and it’s building up this network of friendships. And even though I might often be very critical of the army and of the soldiers in my work they know that I’ve been truthful, that I’ve never actually distorted or changed a truth. And I think it’s a respect for the fact that I’ve told it the way it is. There’s often been

tremendous resistance, there was a lot of pressure on me not to tell the real story of Kibeho, for fear that families back in Australia would be worried about the risk that their soldiers were taking in Rwanda. But the soldiers themselves wanted that story told. I now feel that I’m a kind of unofficial poet laureate to the army and one army medic may have known the work I’ve done with another, and also, oh you’re here George, that’s wonderful,

all this unrecognised work’s going on, look at the people, look at what we’re doing, can you come with us?. Because they know they can trust me to put that accurately and truthfully into history.

The Kibeho massacre was something which just

a small medical unit of Australian soldiers, an infantry section that was guarding a Doctor Carol Vaughan-Evans and her medical assistants. And the Australian Army felt that there was going to be a massacre of this kind but the UN to my knowledge wouldn’t allow us to send, we only had medical people, anything other than medical people. And it appeared that no real army factor, UN Army factor was sent there to prevent this massacre. It was, on the first anniversary of the

big genocide. And I feel what’s happened in Rwanda is that there’s a retaliation and retribution where possibly as many people are being killed, Tutsis killing Hutus [Rwandan tribal names], as happened originally but the world sanctioned it. And so this was us being in a situation where we were seeing innocent women and children, the people at Kibeho had come to this church complex because there’d been a vision of the Virgin Mary, they were within Rwanda, they were

far less likely to be Interahamwe [militia] than anyone else, the Interahamwe had gone to other countries like Tanzania and Zaire. And the RPA [Rwandan Patriotic Army] the Rwandan Tutsi Army came and surrounded these people, forced them together, prevented them from having water or food, and then ploughed into them and a lot of them were killed. I saw tremendous acts of courage by the Australian soldiers that were there, theoretically

they were only there to treat UN wounded, but no Australian can do that, it was a true Simpson and his donkey [Gallipoli hero] situation, where the Australian soldiers were going out over and over again, including the medical people and bringing in wounded. It was also an absurd situation because our small group of just seventeen were armed, all wanted to take their weapons and try to stop the people who are doing the killing with their weapons, but being a UN situation they couldn’t.

And so we wanted to save the people before they were hurt but it, sort of a deal was done that we could actually save them after they’d been wounded. And it was ridiculous, there were moments where, I for example would go in and get a woman and her child and be leading her out and be told that she is guilty and she had to die by the RPA gauntlet that I’d have to go past. And I’ll never forget leaving that woman and child behind.

Then I might be helping out a couple of teenage boys which looked potentially guilty, and I’d be able to get them out. There was no reason to it. And I saw moments of incredible human courage from the Australian peacekeepers. There was one moment where the Australian section was out, they’d gathered wounded and they came under fire from people within the refugee compound. And it’s terribly hard for any human being, when bullets are fired at them, not to try and take cover and protect themselves. Well the tremendous

courage and pride, I believe that courage is a thing of beauty like beautiful opera singing or ballet, it’s, it’s something great in the human spirit. And these soldiers proudly carried their wounded and didn’t dodge and duck and drop the wounded to save their own lives. There was also a moment where Carol Vaughan-Evans was told that we couldn’t go back to get the people who’d been bandaged because the RPA were going to finish them off,

and a lot of heavy fire had started. And we all looked to her and she made the decision to go back, which took tremendous courage. It was one of the most courageous acts I’ve ever seen. Because she wasn’t just risking her life, she was risking the lives of the people that were working under her. But you could tell that there wasn’t even a fraction of a moment where she would have considered not going back for those wounded.

Oh the, the painting of Carol, the painting I’ve done of Carol isn’t a particularly good painting. What happens when you come back from a thing like Kibeho you have a lot of very raw material. It’s impossible to actually draw someone.

To be frank the painting of Carol in Kibeho doesn’t do her justice. My painting of The Preacher that won the Blake Prize is a painting that I did when I came back, and expressed all my horror and I got everything into that painting. The problem for me as an artist is I can’t ever stop trying to help people in the situation, to stop and draw, so I get these very crude drawings done, like the one

that Carol’s picture’s based on. And then there’s a period where I’m a mess myself, I’m a jumble and I get back and I feel that, well I’ve got to tell the story so I do some pictures really quickly and sometimes I’m lucky with the one like The Preacher and it hits the mark. But usually it takes a time for me to process the work and then I come out with my picture of Kibeho which puts it all together, it’s got the image of the Man Joseph and Shit with the

kid’s head, it’s got The Preacher and it brings it altogether. So there’s this sort of, in a lot of ways the, the drawings that I do are it and there’s no need to do the paintings, the paintings are gilding the lily. But the big final painting that I did of Rwanda, the Kibeho picture, really was my way of closing the door on the place I was haunted for years by, and it took me three years to finish that painting. And I finally had to put it

to bed with that picture, you know.

The art that I do

is not therapy. I come back to my beautiful home at Bundeena where I’m surrounded by water, I’ve got a wonderful wife and children, my family help restore me and living in the national park does as well. Then when I have to work on paintings about Rwanda to meet the obligation I have to the experience and to the people that I’ve witnessed, I have to, like an actor getting into a part; I have to bring it back. And quite often bringing it back does more damage than,

almost then being there. I sometimes wonder, I’ve learnt that the soldiers who are at Kibeho who’ve left the army find it much harder to cope, psychologically, than the ones who are still say out, I met two of the veterans of Kibeho in Timor and they were still active peacekeepers. So someway I never stop, I mean I keep going back to war, and I sometimes wonder how I would cope if I did stop. Sometimes it’s the momentum,

it’s being back in that theatre, because when you’re back into that climate of danger and you’re in the position where you can save lives, and that, that’s the important thing, actually it’s probably more important than all the other bullshit that I’ve just said. The fact is that when you’re there you’re able to save lives, and so if I hadn’t been at Kibeho, if none of those soldiers had been at Kibeho, we all know that a lot more, you know a significant number of people would have died that needed our help. And so when

you actually leave a place like that it sort of runs through your mind, the horror, but it also, you tick over how you used every moment that you had to save lives. And I think that’s why I keep going back, because how many people, apart from surgeons and so on in our society have the chance to actually save other human lives.

Couldn’t agree with you more.

No I’m sure you, I’m sure you’re right. The one great truth that I’ve gained from being involved in all these conflicts, and particularly with peacekeeping, is that you learn that the majority of humanity is good, and that there is no reason for despair. And that keeps your sanity and it keeps you working with this. And that there are people like Milosevic and Karovich and Pol Pot who are abhorrent,

Adolph Hitler, who makes this happen. And they attract similarly psychotic evil people to them, but you hardly ever come in contact with them, you just keep, you just come in contact with the people who are mashed and damaged and wounded by them. An interesting thing from the point of view as an artist, there’s an aspect of contemporary art where a lot of contemporary art works because you have something like a Duchamp toilet urinal in the context of an art gallery and

it works because it’s incongruous. And an interesting thing about peacekeeping for me is seeing soldiers with tanks and all their weapons of war, and their bulletproof vests and helmets, and they’re standing on a beach in Timor, or in a field in Rwanda or Somalia, where people are just getting on with their life. Where there are people who are bare foot and they’re out there without any armour or weapons. And this, this surreal contrast which you constantly see of peacekeeping where

the peacekeepers are rigged out and they’ve got their agenda and they’re officers have tell them the patrols that they’ve got to do that day. And it seems absurd when the people around them are just trying to plant a new crop of food or catch some fish.

The Legless Bike.

Oh yeah the big one, I actually did that in a Khmer Rouge hut, yeah.

Yeah I’ve done a lot of work on landmine victims; I can give you the new book on landmine victims, yeah.

In Cambodia I found it terribly important to try to get to know the Khmer Rouge and the people as well as the army and the peacekeepers. So I broke my period there between time spent with peacekeepers, often their helicopters with their modern equipment, modern equipment and their signal, signalling devices and so on. Then I actually went and lived in a Khmer Rouge village, which was full of people that were legless and there’s my picture of Ta Brang [phonetic], with the legless

bike. And I started to find a new image of Cambodia emerging. And my image of the optimism of that place came from a person who had no reason for optimism at all. Who’s a man who’d fought against Pol Pot, he’d lost both of his legs to the hip and he created this incredible contraption, which I’ve called the legless bike. And it was a bike that you could both steer and pedal with your hands. And at that time he had a wife and two kids and they were living under

a tree and the bike became an ad for his business, which was repairing bikes. I went back to visit him again last year and he’s now prosperous, he had built a house and he had a new, two week old baby boy in his arms. And what brought him through was the smile and I think that the thing about Cambodia was this sort of, the Khmer love, the special Khmer kind of love of Buddhism

and the spiritual, and this sense of being able to come, overcome almost anything, made him in a way my smiling Buddha. And he became a symbol of the possibilities of all those people rising up out of the dark days of the killing fields and actually making something of themselves. So the legless bike almost became a mechanism that symbolised for me the possible resurrection of Cambodia

and the fact that the peacekeeping that we were doing there might actually have some long term benefit. If you were there and you just saw beggars around restaurants with broken limbs and the images of all the people who’d been damaged by landmines you could build this place as never going to get anywhere. But it was the resilience of many of these mine victims, you know there was a, a man who had lost both legs and his hearing and he was going back into the rice fields, where once again he could stand on a land mine, his wife

was deaf and they were having kids and it was this sort of, it’s almost like being in Europe, in Bosnia and seeing the tulips come up in spring. But in Cambodia spring means nothing, but the tulips coming up is just this resilience of the people, after a period of darkness to just come out and burst into something positive, full of a smile and ready to get on with life and rebuild their country. That’s the great thing about peacekeeping, you’re actually there at the moment when the country’s about to be

pulled out of chaos and beginning to rebuild.

My experiences is that Australian peacekeepers are

the best peacekeepers in the world because they have this altruism where they may have put in a ten hour day working with the army and then they’ll go off in their own time, instead of having a hot meal, and help put a roof on an orphanage. They get to know the people, they learn the language. There’s something about Australia the lucky country, where when we’re faced with complete misfortune in these other countries we want to share what it is to be Australian and give them some of our luck.

And we’re also good soldiers, we’re tough, hard, and in these countries an army which is soft is not respected. So we’ve got this wonderful sweet and sour, the sense that anyone who looks at an Australian soldier and sees them operate knows that they’re coming up against something hard if they try to do something against the population. But the population itself grows to love them because of their softness and their altruism. So yes I’d,

as an Australian taxpayer, I believe that we have the best peacekeeping force in the world and now it’s a very experienced force. Recently in Timor I met veterans of Somalia and Cambodia and Rwanda, and I believe the reason for the success of our operation in Timor was that we had a lot of experienced peacekeepers on the ground, who had this successful experience working, whether it was Baidoa or Siem Reap, which they could bring to Dili and Timor.

I’ve got a very strong view about that.

In 1993 when I went to work with the Australian forces in Somalia and Cambodia and then onto the Middle East, everyone in the academic intellectual community, anyone associated with me from my own generation, this is a generation that fought against Vietnam and thought I was crazy, they thought I was some sort of warmonger. But as soon as I arrived on the ground in Mogadishu, I realised it was a new era, and I feel very privileged to have actually

documented this era and seen the change in the Australian attitude to the army. Soldiers are well read, they don’t, they read, they don’t get a chance to watch TV, they’re very, they’re not macho, often the reason why they’ve joined the army is because they want to contribute in some way. And they’re a younger generation that didn’t really know about Vietnam, and now we’ve got this new history. We’ve got to accept that we’re in another era

and we’re in an era where we’ve actually produced the best peacekeeping army in the world. And I think all of Australians are proud of that now. I mean look at the people who decried spending anything on defence, but yet couldn’t get our army into Timor quickly enough and were wondering why we were delaying. We are living in an isolated place, we have a very civilised peace loving society, and we have an opportunity to help maintain peace in our region.

And we’ve got a very successful army at doing that.

I think the modern army is

seen, on my way to Dili the soldiers were watching G.I. Jane [90’s fictional US film about integration of a female into the Navy SEALS commando force ] and modern television productions like that, there’s a different culture and background. But what’s intrinsic of being Australian, this sort of love affair play and hatred of bureaucracy and the fact that Australian soldiers couldn’t be made to massacre people, they won’t go against their own conscience, they’ll stand up to any officer. All of those things are still there,

whether they know about the history of the Anzacs and they’ve read people like Bean, they probably wouldn’t know who Bean is, they might know who some Hollywood, you know Russell Crowe [Hollywood actor] is, but The Gladiator[Hollywood film], but they don’t necessarily know that history. They’re aware of, that they belong to a tradition but I think it’s good that the values that have always made Australian soldiers successful, which is this sense of fair play and sense of not being lead by the nose into things

that they’re against is still there and that’s part of the Anzac tradition. No young lieutenant in the Australian Army could make a corporal or a sergeant do an indecent exercise without them standing up to them and questioning them. The Australian Army has a individualistic personal morality which we all, as Australians share, whereas most other armies in the world spend the whole time of training, training that

out of the, training the inhuman, this is what happens in the American Army, with the Marines and in the British Army, to a large extent, people are taught, as soldiers to become killing machines and to obey orders. Thank God that’s never happened to our people and that’s what makes us good peacekeepers.

No, no you’re the boss.