How to Make a Miniature of the Demolition of the Eighteen Arch Ashlar Bridge at Asluj, First World War, 1917.

Cat Auburn, How to Make a Miniature of the Demolition of the Eighteen Arch Ashlar Bridge at Asluj, First World War, 1917, 2019-2024 , Sculpture: bronze, the artist’s hair; video on screen

How to Make a Miniature of the Demolition of the Eighteen Arch Ashlar Bridge at Asluj, First World War, 1917 is a durational autotheoretical suite of artworks undertaken by Cat over a period of five years: a sculpture cast in bronze and made with bobbin lace woven from the artist’s own hair, and a time-lapse video essay that follows the creation of the sculpture. Autotheory describes the practice of joining critical theory with autobiographical experience. This subverts the power dynamics of traditional modes of theorising by incorporating the wisdom of those from outside of the established academic canon, such as friends or oneself.

Cat has engaged in over a decade of artistic research regarding the Anzac legend, and this suite of artworks interrogates the sense of dissonance she feels when experiencing representations of the Anzac legend and it’s reinscription back into contemporary culture. “I struggle to see myself reflected in these historic tales of conflict that have shaped our collective memory and national identity.” This sense of dissonance has compelled Cat to find a different approach to the forms of nostalgic reenactment and material languages of commemoration typical of Anzac memorial.

How to Make a Miniature of the Demolition of the Eighteen Arch Ashlar Bridge at Asluj, First World War, 1917 uses as its starting point, a photograph from the Rhodes Collection of the Palestinian Exploration Fund (UK) of a bridge demolished by Anzac troops in South Palestine during WWI. Cat first encountered this image in 2013 during her research for The Horses Stayed Behind, her award-winning WWI centenary project, exhibited throughout Aotearoa.

The bridge had been demolished by an Anzac demolition party at Asluj, Palestine in 1917 during the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of WWI, and the image of the monumental ruins became an important thinking-companion for Cat. This image captures one of many Anzac tales of daring and adventure which exemplify Anzac character traits bequeathed to contemporary Aotearoa New Zealand: masculine stoicism and understated resourcefulness. 

This defining narrative is complicated by Cat’s experience of presenting The Horses Stayed Behind at a conference in Jordan in 2018:

“I had become used to travelling on an Aotearoa New Zealand passport and being welcomed wherever I went internationally. But this time, for the first time, I was told that Aotearoa New Zealanders are not popular in Jordan because ‘we’ were the foot soldiers who helped implement the British Mandate in the region, resulting in decades of unrest in the Middle East. This ran counter to the narrative I had grown up with: that Aotearoa New Zealanders have only had a positive influence on international events.”

By regularly filming herself sculpting the scene at Asluj, including her own voice and stories within the film, using her hair as material, and casting the traditional commemorative material bronze at a domestic rather than monumental scale, Cat uses her artistic materials and processes to theorise what it would be like to experience herself within an Anzac narrative. In this way she autotheoretically questions how her own national identity operates from an international position, both as an antagonist when positioned within Jordan, and as Pākehā whilst living in Scotland and unable to visit ‘home’ during the COVID-19 pandemic.

With Thanks to:

Christine Borland, Katherine Baxter, Kyle Lewis, Soni Rogowski, Estella Castle, Jemma Corbin, Kelly Howe, Lesley Guy, Fiona Crisp, Stephanie de Roemer, Sarah McClintock, Greg Donson, Britta Letz, Agnes Borland Sinclair, Ross Sinclair, Marilyn Freeman, Maria Gil Ulldemolins, and the family of Lance Corporal James Foster Rudd.

This research is supported by an AHRC funded Northern Bridge Consortium studentship. With thanks to Creative New Zealand for additional financial support.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT

(Bernard Regan) Between 1914 and 1918, Britain – the most powerful nation in the world, with the largest empire – was in the midst of a war involving the established and emerging great powers of the day. The German alliance… 

(When I was a small child, my father told me that my great-grandfather ate his horse in the First World War.)

… if not completely destabilising British links to its empire in Asia and access to the increasingly significant commodity of oil. This war engulfed the whole of Europe and shaped the politics of the twentieth century. As theatres of conflict developed in the Near East, parts of Africa…

(“He was a natural horseman, your great-grandfather. The horror of killing that horse was a burden he carried until his dying day.”)

… in the conflict. Across its empire, military personnel were mobilised from the British dominions and colonies with nearly a million recruited from Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. A further 1 million soldiers and non-combatants were recruited from India. No previous war…

(I loved horses when I was little. That fact hasn’t changed much, now that I am grown.)

… this scale. The fighting ultimately led to a redivision of political and economic spheres of influence, with global and historical repercussions.

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When I was a small child, my father told me that my great-grandfather ate his horse in the First World War. ‘He was a natural horseman, your great-grandfather. The horror of killing that horse was a burden he carried until his dying day.’”

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(Wikipedia) The demolition of the Eighteen Arch Ashlar Bridge at Asluj was part of the greater raid on the Beersheba to Hafir el Auja railway. The raid took place on 23 May 1917 after the Second Battle of Gaza and before the Battle of Beersheba during the stalemate in Southern Palestine in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of World War I. Although the railway bridge at Irgeig north-west of Beersheba was bombed by aircraft on 22 December 1916, when the bombs hit their target, the solid, strongly built bridge was found to be virtually indestructible from the air. At daylight on the 23 of May the New Zealand Mounted Rifle Brigade was north of the planned demolition site and in touch with the Imperial Mounted Division, which was to demonstrate against the Beersheba line and prevent any Ottoman troops attempting to stop the destruction of the railway. Only a few snipers tried to interrupt the work. General Chaytor's northern column reached Asluj at 07:00 on 23 May and by 10:00 had set and exploded charges cutting in half alternate rails on both sides of the railway line for 7 miles. The 18-arch Ashlar bridge at Asluj was also destroyed. Here every second arch was blown up. The raid was completely successful. Both columns returned to their base without being attacked. 

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So, it’s 2018 and I’m in Jordan. I’ve just finished presenting my artistic project about the 10,000 horses New Zealand sent to the Middle East during World War One. This is at a conference called Creative Practice and Cultural Memory: Exploring First World War Heritage in the Middle East. I’m so used to travelling on a New Zealand passport and being welcomed wherever I go with delighted comments about the All Blacks or The Lord of the Rings. But this time, for the first time, I was told that New Zealanders aren’t popular, not in Jordan.  Because New Zealander’s were the foot soldiers who helped carry out the British Mandate in the region, resulting in decades of unrest in the Middle East.

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(Benedict Anderson) According to Benedict Anderson, nationality is an identity that we unconsciously assume, having adopted a nation’s tenets because we are born and socialised into it. He suggests that the nation is a constructed system of power that upholds itself for the benefit of itself. The nation is imaginary in as much as the borders that crisscross the earth are political constructs and that I have never met the majority of other folk from Aotearoa - my sense of kinship with them is an act of imaginative relationality. However, our acceptance of this identity, Anderson suggests, is based on a series of paradoxes, one of which is that the ‘nation’ is a recent development, yet anachronistic and conservative. This requires the fabrication of an ancient source of origin to maintain validity. 

Since nationalism was refused an ancient origin rooted in the actual soil of Australia and Aotearoa by their respective colonial pasts, the Anzac legend became a substitute white origin story for nationalism to rally around.

(Benedict Anderson) Anderson suggests that it is imagined comradeship that is crucial in explaining why individuals are willing to die for their nation. The nation fosters this love – a love strong enough to convince people to die for it – by presenting as natural and agenda-less. This seeming naturalism allows the nation to appear neutral and objective and therefore it’s easier to associate with.

(Sara Ahmed) Additionally, Sara Ahmed suggests that individual and collective emotions operate as resources within socio-political systems of power. Ahmed critiques nationalism, particularly how love for the nation generates and validates hatred of perceived others. Ahmed explains how collective hating binds “the imagined white subject and nation together”. This emotional economy, where love and hate circulate to reinforce national identity, underscores the power dynamics at play in the formation of nationalistic fervour. 

The idea that we imagine ourselves into having a national identity doesn’t offend me or unsettle my sense of identity. Things that unsettle me have more to do with assimilating uncomfortable narratives into my sense of self that have historically been omissions, particularly within my own family story.

At some point, and I’m not quite sure when it happened, but it’s definitely started to happen, I find myself more aligned with notions of national indifference. 

(Tara Zahra) National indifference describes the state of those who feel ambiguously towards, or do not identify with, a fixed national identity. My sense of self, personality traits, likes and dislikes, have become unmoored from the notion that they originate with my place of birth and its associated grand narratives.

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(Chorus of four female voices with New Zealand accents) When I was a small child, my father told me that my great-grandfather ate his horse in the First World War. “He was a natural horseman, your great-grandfather. The horror of killing that horse was a burden he carried until his dying day.”

I loved horses when I was little. That fact hasn’t changed much, now that I am grown. But what has changed is my understanding of this tale; the large and small slippery truths and unspoken words that swirl around this ancestral consumption of horse flesh.  My child-mind couldn’t conceive of a scenario in which I would kill and eat my hypothetical horse that wasn’t necessarily forced, desperate, gory and grief-stricken.

My father told me this visceral story to impress upon me a sense of lineage, that my love of horses is not entirely of my own making: it exists in my blood. This oft-repeated family history, never told in any detail, has stayed with me. It instilled within me a sense of belonging to a larger whole - to my family – and the inheritance of a character trait which I absorbed into my identity. But scratch past the surface and the outer layers of the story begin to fracture under scrutiny. What will we find at its heart, tucked away beneath its crumbling crust?

An origin story; a petite mythology.

In the mud and the sands of the various theatres of the First World War, soldiers had very little agency over the fate – let alone the killing and consumption – of a horse. These animals were a valuable military resource, so to lose one ‘was worse than losing a man, because after all men were replaceable whereas horses weren’t’. I’ve failed to find any records confirming that my great-grandfather was assigned to either the New Zealand horse-drawn artillery on the Western Front or the New Zealand Mounted Riflemen of the Sinai-Palestine campaign. The family story I’ve been told and retold is likely just that: a story. I was just a child who liked horses.

But still, we often become the stories we inherit.

The story of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand in The First World War is called the Anzac legend. New Zealanders and Australians are told and retold the visceral legend of the deeds of the Anzac troops during the Battle of Gallipoli. These tales reinforce a sense of national identity and shared character traits that were born from the ashes of tragedy.  These tales that we were told and retold and continue to retell impress upon us a sense of lineage: that our Australian-ness, our New Zealand-ness, exists in our blood. But the problem with the simple telling of the Anzac legend is that it is far more complicated than the ‘baptism of fire’ myth would have us believe.

It is an origin story; a grande mythology.

Let us see what lies beneath this legend’s crust.

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(Svetlana Boym) So I’ve been thinking about Svetlana Boym’s theory of restorative nostalgia, which is the kind of nostalgia that simplifies stories down to this basic homogenous unit where you can say the battle of Gallipoli and you get a feeling from it or a fleeting impression of it without ever looking at any of the detail. Boym separates nostalgia into two classifications that speak to the ways in which individuals, and indeed entire nations, reflect on the past in order to understand the present: restorative nostalgia focuses on the longing for a home (for nostos); reflective nostalgia focuses on the longing itself (the algia of nostalgia). Boym considers reflective nostalgia to be a more nuanced and critical engagement with the past. It allows for critical reflection on cultural heritage and an appreciation of the complexities of the past. Boym positions reflective nostalgia as a foil or antidote to restorative nostalgia, which she sees in a more negative light through its association with controlling political regimes.

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(McKenna and Ward) Whilst undeniably an important historical moment, I would argue that the Anzac legend is a complicated settler narrative that is often co-opted to support far-right nationalist agendas. 

(Lake and Reynolds; Simran Pawar) This problematically places military history and white masculine identity at the centre of national identity. 

(Charlotte Macdonald) The Anzac legend is equally maintained by practices of forgetting as remembering. 

(Shanti Sumartojo) Anzac narratives often exclude women, and sometimes obscure, erase or co-opt indigenous experience. 

(Franchesca Walker) Franchesca Walker describes a series of complex, interlocking co-options of Māori into the Anzac narrative, including a split between different iwi in their desire to participate in World War One due to ongoing territorial disputes with the Crown, and the popular, yet false belief at the time that Māori were a dying race. 

The centrality of the Anzac legend as a national origin story implies that these nations were born in 1915, thus ignoring the indigenous cultures already established and relegating these communities to a pre-colonial past. 

(MacDonald; Belich) Whilst Aotearoa New Zealand’s First World War memory remains active in the present, the way memory operates in relation to The New Zealand Wars (1845–1872) acts to relegate New Zealand’s colonial history to the distant past. 

(Charlotte MacDonald) Until recently, the account of the New Zealand Wars, in which Māori fought against dispossession and invasion, was largely excluded from the collective recollection shaped at a national scale.

The Anzac legend has become one framework through which national identity is understood in both Australia and Aotearoa that is seemingly unquestionable. Other national origin narratives are currently being contested in both nations, including the narrative of the discovery of both lands by Captain James Cook of Great Britain. Aotearoa has a third founding event: the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi (1840). 

(Josh Butler) An equivalent document was not afforded to the indigenous populations of Australia, who continue to be legally excluded in the Australian constitution after a national referendum on this matter failed on 14 October, 2023.

(Donoghue and Tranter) “One of the reasons the Anzacs continue to be influential is precisely because they are a collective entity – they are not recognized as individuals whose reputation would be more open to scrutiny.” 

(Lake and Reynolds) By daring to question the Anzac legend, those that do run a spectrum of risks ranging from being labelled unpatriotic and committing “treason”, through to the loss of employment or the threat of having their citizenship removed. 

(Paul Johnson) Australian indigenous musician, Ziggy Ramo faced public criticism and censorship for his song April 25th, which critiques the Australian treatment of indigenous people by (Cunningham) “interrogating why the nation chooses to enshrine some parts of our history and conveniently brush aside others.” 

(Osman Faruqi; The Guilty Feminist) Similarly, Australian Yassmin Abdel-Magied felt it necessary to leave the country permanently due to the backlash she faced after suggesting on social media that current wars should be remembered alongside Anzac war veterans on Anzac Day. As a result of this backlash, she lost her job and faced threats from politicians to revoke her Australian citizenship.

(McConville et al) Severe consequences such as these are directly due to the enmeshed nation-building associations of the Anzac Legend. National identity and values, especially in Australia, have been encoded with the rules of memorialisation: that is, unwavering respect and deference. Individuals that offer scrutiny, debate or dissent are positioned as ‘despicably deviant’ and policed accordingly.

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When I was a small child, my father told me that my great-grandfather ate his horse in the First World War. “He was a natural horseman, your great-grandfather. The horror of killing that horse was a burden he carried until his dying day…

(In a whisper: I inherited a wooden chest - a great big wooden travel chest. Its really heavy, with some kind of leather-looking laminate peeling away from its exterior. It belonged to my great-grandfather and he used it to cart his gear around during World War One. It has his details written on it in white paint - clear and round. I tried to get rid of it a few years ago - to donate it to a war museum but they never got back to me. Funny how getting rid of it means a museum collection, and not a rubbish dump.)

… never told in any detail, has stayed with me. It instilled within me a sense of belonging to a larger whole - to my family…

(in a whisper: I used to think that World War One poisoned my family - and maybe it did indirectly, so I can’t shake this grim feeling the wooden chest gives me. It’s one of the few items I didn’t bring with me to the UK. I guess I subconsciously wanted to keep it as far away from me as possible. I don’t know, I guess I’ve never really thought about it until now. I have some of his war medals - two, actually. But they don’t seem infected in the same way as that wooden chest. Maybe it’s to do with its metaphorical nature - you can lock things away in a heavy wooden chest. Look, I know its just an inert object - but it still feels really sour to me.)

…or the New Zealand Mounted Riflemen of the Sinai-Palestine campaign. The family story I’ve been told and retold is likely just that: a story. I was just a child who liked horses. But still…

(In a whisper: You see, I spent my childhood catching whispers and still feeling all that was unspoken by the adults - sensing in some way that I needed to protect myself from something I couldn’t name, from monsters that the family kept hidden. You see, I thought for the longest time that WWI broke people beyond repair -  I’d misheard that my great-grandfather came back from World War One a broken person and that was why he passed on a legacy of child abuse.)

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My self is shown to be constructed through plural forms of collective trauma: both national and filial. Whilst the family trauma is a collective memory, it is also the lived experience of individual members of my family, myself included. There are ethical implications to telling your own story.

(Lauren Fournier) If your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth, then whose truth is truth?

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When I was a small child, my father told me that my great-grandfather ate his horse in the First World War. “He was a natural horseman, your great-grandfather. The horror of killing that horse was a burden he carried until his dying day.”