Hall of Memories, Waitaki Boys' High School, Oamaru

Hall of Memories, 2015, continues on from Laurence Aberhart’s Remembering ANZAC (1980-2013) series, a project that Aberhart worked on for more than thirty years, photographing war memorials across Australia and New Zealand. The photograph captures the Hall of Memories at Waitaki Boys High School in Oamaru. In the early 1920s it was widely felt need by the Waitaki Boys High School Old Boys Association to commemorate those who served and died in World War I, for all soldiers but especially for the 700 old boys from Waitaki Boys High School who served in the war and the 120 who died. Governor-General Jellicoe laid the foundation stone in 1923 and in 1927 the Duke of York, later King George VI, officiated the opening ceremony on 16 March 1927. The war memorial is adorned with collected memorabilia: autographed portraits of admirals and generals, flags, pennants and captured enemy insignia. The interior’s stained glass windows, flags, plaques, trophies and crests honour the school’s royal, vice-regal, military and other illustrious connections. Aberhart’s work documents the changing relationship between communities and their memorials: it depicts memory as a fluid thing constantly in a process of being reinterpreted rather than as something fixed in time. The collected array of memorabilia that adorns the memorial juxtaposes the solitary and isolated memorials shown in Remembering ANZAC.