A Question of Eligibility asks why deaths in the Australian Frontier Wars are ineligible for honour at Australian War memorials.
The work was presented as a large-scale photo-projection, paste-up and audio recording in 2016.
A reading of the Australian War Memorial’s criteria for conflict death eligibility on the national Roll of Honour accompanies the work. This audio is digitally augmented to create the same sense of space as a large stone war memorial.
Four text-panels are mounted on the wall in the dark spaces between the columns of the Shrine of Remembrance’s façade. On these panels contemporary research by Raymond Evans and Robert Ørsted–Jensen (2014) on fatalities in the Australian Frontier Wars is presented, as is the total number of memorials to them compared to memorials for overseas theatres of war. This text is inscribed in similar font and spacing as inscriptions in granite at the Shrine of Remembrance. The semi-obscured wall text is intended to embody how frontier histories have been hidden, but not well hidden.
A series of 35mm black and white film photographs shot at The Shrine of Remembrance in Narrm (Melbourne) accompany the work.
A 3x2 metre portable paste-up iteration of the work was installed temporarily onto a Swanston St hoarding board in 2016.
