Maybe we should just look at the portrait for a moment. It shows Ben Roberts-Smith, awarded the Medal for Gallantry in 2006 and the Victoria Cross in 2011, standing crouched, arms thrust out, thumbs cocked, as though to fire a gun at an invisible enemy.
It’s threatening, over-bearing, macho, hypermasculine, celebratory, and enormous, like the man himself—some 220 centimetres wide and 160 centimetres high.
And here is a photograph of it being unveiled at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra in September 2014, with the then-Director of the AWM Brendan Nelson, the artist Michael Zavros, and Roberts-Smith.
The war in Afghanistan was always complex and morally ambiguous. The United States decided to invade and occupy the country in response to Al-Qaeda’s strike upon the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. The US then got its allies, Britain and Australia, to go in with it to make its actions seem less arbitrary and contentious.
Rex Butler teaches Art History in the Faculty of Art Design and Architecture at Monash University. Paris Lettau is a contributing editor at Memo Review and was the 2015 Spiros Zournazis Memorial Fellow at the Australian War Memorial.
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