The Great War is a story Australia and Canada share. In 1914, the two young dominions rallied to the Empire’s cause. Both rushed to send contingents of soldiers, nurses and airmen to Europe; both placed their infant navies at the service of Great Britain; both raised hundreds of thousands of pounds to help the war effort. In the course of the conflict Canada mobilised 620 000 of its eight million, Australia 420 000 out of five million. The losses the two countries bore are remarkably similar. Some 60 000 Australian dead are scattered across the battlefields of Gallipoli and Palestine, France and Belgium. Canada fought mostly on the Western Front, where 67 000 died.

Nor do the parallels end there. For both Australia and Canada, the Great War helped define a new sense of national identity. It was not just that this was the first major military conflict in which either country had fought, or the scale of loss, or that both countries produced their own exemplary leaders with strategies quite distinct from British command – General Sir John Monash on one hand, General Sir Arthur Currie on the other. Serving overseas, Australians and Canadians saw what distinguished them as a people; they longed for the landscapes and the accents left far behind them. ‘Home’ ceased to be Great Britain and many became critical of the class-bound inequalities and oppressive traditions of Empire.

Of course, there were differences as well: Canada introduced conscription, Australia did not; Vimy Ridge marked a great Canadian triumph, Gallipoli a terrible defeat; the Western Front looms large in Canadian remembrance; few remember a small contingent from Newfoundland slaughtered beside the Anzacs on the plains of Suvla. Even so, the stories that bind us seem stronger – back when the war was fought and first commemorated, and arguably still today. And nowhere are those stories more compelling than in the great memorials raised at Villers-Bretonneux and Vimy.

Australia’s National Memorial looks out over the fields of the Somme; Canada’s commands the flat ground of Flanders. Both were completed just a few months before the Second World War began and both were built on ground heavy with Australian or Canadian sacrifice. Canada’s memorial takes the form of two shafts stretching high into the sky; Australia’s a soaring white tower flanked by semi-cloistered walls. In each case, the stone carries the names of the missing – boys from Vancouver and Quebec, Hobart and Darwin swallowed up by the battlefields around them.

In 2001, the Canadian writer Jane Urquhart brought the story of her country’s memorial to life. The Stone Carvers is a tale of love, loss and redemption set in the 1930s. Its central character is a young woman, Klara, whose lover, Eamon, is killed in France. Nothing is left of Eamon’s body, there is only that name set in stone to remember him by. In Urquhart’s story, Klara somehow makes her way to Vimy and, disguised as a stonemason, undertakes work only thought fit for men and helps to build the memorial. It’s her calloused hands that carve the features of the monument’s central sculpture, fashioning Eamon’s likeness into stone, carving out her grief for eternity.

On the other side of the world, at around the same time as Klara’s imaginary journey was set, the Australian artist Daphne Mayo set to work on Queensland’s state memorial. Unlike the strong vertical lines of Vimy and Villers-Bretonneux, the monument took the shape of a circular colonnade, a ring of Doric columns modelled on an ancient temple in Greece. Mayo’s memorial was set beneath it – a tribute by the women of Queensland to their men who marched to war. In Mayo’s memorial they are marching still. The bas-relief shows a procession of warriors, their heads bent slightly down in stoic resolution, a horse-drawn gun carriage central to their train. The image is sombre, almost funereal; they are ‘marching as to war but also to a burial’.1 And, ironically perhaps for the women’s memorial, it is overwhelmingly masculine. Daphne Mayo had suggested a design highlighting women’s war efforts at home and overseas. The committee opted instead for a tribute to branches of the armed services, and the single figure of a nurse can barely be seen.

Overwhelmingly masculine: The men of Queensland march to war. Despite being a women’s memorial, the figure of a nurse is obscured at the end of the procession; perhaps that was deliberate. A voluntary worker herself during the conflict, Daphne Mayo was acutely conscious of women’s marginalisation in war. Courtesy Tina Donaghy.

Carving the memorial was a physical and emotional labour for Daphne. Physically she was never very strong. Her fiancé, Lloyd Rees, described her as ‘a short elfin like creature, with a mass of golden locks and voluminous blue eyes, and often with a sickly pallor due to her chronic asthma’.2 Frail and exhausted, Daphne would rise early in the morning hoping to escape the heat of Brisbane’s sun.

An elfin like creature: Known as ‘Queensland’s girl sculptress’, Daphne Mayo’s work won a number of prizes and scholarships but (being a woman) it was difficult to compete in what was considered a largely male sphere. Mayo was one of the few women to be admitted to the Royal Academy Sculpture School in London, its director stating that she would bring credit to the Academy ‘even if she was but a woman’. Here she holds Winged Victory, a sculpture completed in 1912 and eerily anticipating the outbreak of war. Courtesy State Library of Queensland.

I used to get up at the first crack of dawn, toast a crust of bread and a slice of bacon, and get into my little car and off to the job. Sometimes it was still so dark when I got there that I had to wait until it was light enough to see – this would probably be about 5 o’clock. At 9 am it was so hot working against the stone wall that I nearly fried. Then I packed up and went home and was back again at four in the afternoon, working until dark.3

But it was not just the heat that was taxing. Daphne carved her figures with devotion, mindful that in the faces of those soldiers, sailors and airmen, mothers, wives and sweethearts would see the men they’d lost. And leading the procession is her own brother Richard, a lad who went to war at 22, served in Egypt and died of war-related causes seven years after the fighting had ended. Like Klara in Urquhart’s story, Daphne had cut her own grief into stone.

Cutting grief into stone: Daphne Mayo completing the finishing touches to the Women’s Memorial in Anzac Square, Brisbane. Shaping this memorial was a physical ordeal, it was difficult, dirty and dangerous work. The Australasian 6 May 1922 courtesy National Library of Australia.

A lad who went to war at 22: Captain Richard Mayo leads a procession of fallen warriors. Mayo served in the Australian and New Zealand Mounted Divisional Train. That fact, and the inspiration of a similar memorial in Edinburgh, almost certainly influenced Daphne’s design. Courtesy Tina Donaghy.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This account is based on a study of both Canada and Australia’s National Memorials. For the Australian memorial see Laura James, ‘A Little Piece of Australia in France: Memory, Loyalty, Nationalism in Historicising the Relationship between Victoria and Villers-Bretonneux’ (BA honours thesis, University of Melbourne, 2010) and Linda Wade, ‘The Reconstruction of Villers-Bretonneux 1918–1922’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010). Daphne Mayo’s life and work is captured by Judith McKay and Michael Hawker, Daphne Mayo: Let There be Sculpture (Brisbane: Queensland Art Gallery, 2011); for consideration of her work in the civic sphere see Judith McKay, ‘Daphne Mayo and a Decade of Public Monuments for Brisbane’, Art in Australia, Autumn 1982, p. 360. For a study of Vimy, and memorials in general, see Bruce Scates and Rebecca Wheatley, ‘War Memorials’ in Jay Winter (ed), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) pp. 528–558. The authors would like to thank Geoff Bird and Raynald Lemelin for their advice on the Vimy memorial. We have drawn further biographical information from Mayo’s private papers held by the University of Queensland and a typescript of her interview with Hazel de Berg held by the National Library of Australia. Mayo’s own reflections on the role of sculpture are surveyed in Art in Australia, no. 72, August 1938, p. 12. The authors thank Tina Donaghy for her valuable assistance.

1 Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian landscape (Carlton: Melbourne University Press 2008), p. 292.

2 Lloyd Rees cited in ‘Cheerful, strong-willed and resolute’, A Significant Women of Her Time, the Daphne Mayo collection, Fryer Library online exhibition, University of Queensland.

3 Daphne Mayo, transcript of undated radio talk, Daphne Mayo Papers, UQFL119, Fryer Library, University of Queensland.