Anzac Memorial

Step out of the trees of Hyde Park and the first thing you notice is the quiet. The traffic of central Sydney is still there, just beyond the lawns, but it seems to fall away. In front of you rises a block of pale pink granite, square and solid, with tall vertical lines that pull your eye up toward the sky. Below it, a long rectangle of still water holds the reflection of the whole building. This is the Anzac Memorial.

The word Anzac comes from the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, the force that landed at Gallipoli, in Turkey, during the First World War. For Australians, that campaign became a founding story, a moment when a young nation counted the cost of war in the lives of its own people. This memorial was built to honour the men and women of New South Wales who served in that war. Over time, it has come to remember those who served in every conflict since.

The building opened in 1934, and you can see that decade in every line. This is Art Deco, the style of the years between the two world wars. Art Deco favours strong geometry, stepped forms, and clean vertical rhythms rather than heavy ornament. The architect was Charles Bruce Dellit, a young Sydney designer who won the competition for the project. He gave the memorial a calm, almost severe shape, more like a monument from an ancient civilisation than a traditional Victorian war memorial with columns and angels.

Look closely at the outside walls. Around the upper edges sit large seated figures in stone, their heads bowed, their faces still. They were carved under the direction of Rayner Hoff, an English-born sculptor who taught in Sydney. Hoff and Dellit worked closely together, and the sculpture is not decoration added afterward. It is part of the structure itself. The figures represent the different services of the war, and they seem to keep watch over the park in every season.

Before you go inside, turn around and look north, back across the long Pool of Reflection. The water is lined with trees, and on a still day the memorial appears twice — once in stone, once upside down in the pool. This view was planned. The memorial was designed as the end point of a long axis through the park, so that people would approach slowly, with time to think, before they reached the doors.

Now step inside, into the Hall of Memory. The light changes at once. Tall windows filled with amber glass turn ordinary daylight into a soft, warm gold. The sound changes too. Footsteps become careful, voices drop, and even children tend to lower their voices without being asked. Many visitors stand still here for a moment before they understand why the room feels so different from the street outside.

Now raise your eyes to the dome above you. It is covered with small golden stars — 120,000 of them. Each star stands for one person from New South Wales who volunteered to serve in the First World War. From the floor they look like a night sky, and it is easy to admire them as pattern alone. Then the number settles in. Every point of light was a person, with a home, a family, and a street somewhere in this state.

In the centre of the floor is a circular opening, edged with a low balustrade. Walk up to it and look down. Below, in the Hall of Silence, lies Rayner Hoff's bronze sculpture called Sacrifice. A dead young soldier lies stretched across a shield. The shield is held up by a woman, his mother, together with his sister and his wife, who carries a small child. Most visitors miss how the design works. You must bow your head to see the figure at all.

Here is a story that many visitors never hear. Hoff also designed large bronze relief panels for the outside of the building. One of them showed a nude female figure on a cross, as a symbol of civilisation being destroyed by war. Senior church leaders in Sydney objected strongly, and the panels were never installed in the form Hoff imagined. The argument reached the newspapers of the day. So the memorial you see is calm and dignified, but it was shaped partly by public controversy.

Go down to the lower level and you reach the newer part of the memorial. Dellit's original plans included elements that were never built in the 1930s. A major centenary project, completed in 2018, finally added some of them. The new spaces lie beneath the ground, so the original building above was left largely unchanged. Exhibition rooms here tell the stories of individual service men and women through photographs, letters, uniforms, and personal objects.

One of the newer spaces is the Hall of Service, and it holds a second surprise. Along the walls are small glass vessels filled with soil. The soil was collected from many hundreds of towns, suburbs, and places across New South Wales, places that sent people to war. Look at the colours — red earth, grey earth, pale sand, dark loam. Together they form a map of the state, made not from lines on paper but from the ground itself.

As you move through the building, notice how the design guides you upward and downward, from light into shadow and back again. Dellit used height, silence, and gold light to slow people down. It is worth taking your time here. The memorial is still used for ceremonies, especially on Anzac Day each April, and on Remembrance Day in November. On those days the steps and the pool fill with people, wreaths, and the sound of a lone bugle.

When you are ready, walk back out through the doors and into the open air. Let your eyes adjust to the brighter light. Behind you is the pink granite, the bowed stone figures, and somewhere inside the warm gold room and the soldier lying on his shield. In front of you is the long pool, the trees of Hyde Park, and the city going about its day. As you walk away, look back once more and watch the memorial settle into the water.