Bronze and scarlet: the material culture of commemoration

In 2023, a statue of Vivian Bullwinkel (1915–2000) was unveiled at the Australian War Memorial (AWM). This was significant as the first statue of a ‘real’, (non-allegorical) woman in the grounds of the AWM. This provides an appropriate occasion to reflect on the workings of gender in the contemporary commemoration of war. In the first part of this article I look at the site itself and the material culture deployed in the commemoration of Bullwinkel in the AWM. I read these material cultural objects with a particular focus on the importance of dress in constructing the gendered identities of nurses in wartime and beyond. I then re-read a selected archive of nurses’ internment memoirs to reflect on how dress is portrayed. I argue that re-reading these representations through the prism of dress reveals the gendered complexities of the relationship between the largely feminised profession of nursing and the largely masculine institution of the military.