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Use the resources and activities in Expressing national goals – between the wars to examine the inquiry questions in Stage 5 History Australia between the wars and Stage 5 Geography Changing Australian Environments.
Investigate six heritage places – drawn from the New South Wales State Heritage Inventory (SHI) – for evidence of major influences on Australian life in the period between the wars. Discuss contemporary ideas of heritage – for example, values underlying regional perspectives on preserving the past – and the connections between places that these ideas generate.
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Explore the ways that visual histories can contribute to an understanding of the past. Activities in this unit incorporate ideas for using visual images to examine the goals, attitudes and values of Australians. Connections are drawn between the built and natural environment inherited by Australians and the goals and values that communities have expressed through approaches to life and work. Roy Lumby – Chairman of the Twentieth Century Heritage Society of NSW – demonstrates how the past can be read in a theatre, a department and an incinerator, all built between the wars.
Prominent in many towns and suburbs throughout Australia are war memorials. These provide a visual reminder of the impact world conflicts have wielded on communities throughout the nation. Meredith Walker writes that cemeteries and war memorials are places of continuing interest and attachment in Australian communities. She presents a scene that is familiar throughout rural and urban Australia:
Lists of people involved in World War I, and often of those involved in subsequent wars, are inscribed on war memorials, which become the sites of ceremonies on Anzac Day or Armistice Day. War memorials were often the centrepiece of a small park suitable for annual services, using plants symbolic of sacrifice and loss. Memorial avenues, with each tree dedicated to a fallen soldier, are another way in which communities have commemorated this part of their history.
Following World War II, plaques were added to memorials and substantial funds were contributed by government and communities to commemorating the war effort by providing new local facilities, such as halls, swimming pools and parks in many towns and suburbs.
(Meredith Walker, A Sense of Place, p 39)
While war memorials are substantive fixtures in the Australian landscape – and provide unerring imagery of what it means to be Australian – many of the industrial and architectural achievements of the 1920s and 1930s have not survived. Look at the ways change in the built environment reflected national goals of the period; and how changes in subsequent decades give an insight into changing goals over the century.
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Starting points for Expressing national goals – between the wars include: |
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Heritage places as a springboard for investigating the influences on life in Australia between the wars
Examine heritage places for evidence of influences on life between World War I and World War II
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Choosing a syllabus inquiry question or content area and using heritage places as a source of information and evidence
Choose a topic for investigation and access heritage places to gathering information and evidence
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Taking a retrospective view of the 20th century through an investigation stemming from heritage places
Use the information and evidence provided by heritage places to investigate key influences, events and developments in one of the following focus issues of Australian history:
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Australia and the rest of the world
Australia's political history
Australia's social and cultural history
Aboriginal and non-aboriginal relations
Willandra Lakes, Parramatta Park
Australian Hall
Tranby, Mutawintji National Park
Rights and freedoms of various groups
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