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[Dr Nelson] Our nation, Australia, has produced some remarkable men and women. Some of them
are household names, some are not. Today at the Australian War Memorial, we are
privileged; we are so privileged, to welcome our Second World War official war artist,
Mr Alan Moore, who is only one of two currently surviving official artists from the Second
World War. Alan is 99, and I think for the first time in sixty years he has been reunited
with this magnificent collection of art works that are here together. He joined the Royal Australian
Air Force in 1942, he convinced the, with the support of William Dargie, he convinced
the Council of the Australian War Memorial, to commission him as an official war artist,
following in the footsteps as he did of some of the greatest artists this country has ever
produced. Alan deployed in 1944, beginning on New Year's Day, but he went up to New Guinea,
the South West Pacific. His initial watercolours were unfortunately destroyed and damaged by
the humidity and the wet weather. He switched to oils, and then under Japanese enemy fire on the
islands off New Guinea, he continued to do the magnificent work, some of which is portrayed
and exhibited here today. He then went to Europe, the first Australian official
war artist to do so, and later in 1944, he would spend those bitter winters in Italy,
painting the open briefings for the Air Force and painting the men, and paintings of those
are here exhibited at the Australian War Memorial. And then he went on to London in 1945, and
we have just seen, as Alan has seen, his magnificent painting of the V2 bombing, more than 110
people killed, and the impact of the V2s on the people of London as it was then. He painted
the Australians who had been released from prisoner of war camps in Europe in their transit
through England. But perhaps most significantly, as important as all of those are for us, significantly
as I suspect for Mr Moore, and certainly for us, he was at Bergen-Belsen when the camp
and those who remained still living were released. The drawings that he did of the blind man
walking amongst the emaciated dead, the SS soldiers taking the bodies off the trucks,
for burial into the pits, so incredulous was one Welsh guard, that he said to Alan, you
are mad, no one will believe you, because they just will simply not understand the gravity
of the deprivation that is before us. And thinking and reflecting on that, Alan then
went and got a camera and too photographs to support the paintings that he did. [Mr
Moore] Those memories I will never forget, and I am quite sure the enemy would be experiencing
the same thing happening in their prisoner of war camps. I wanted to make it because
I thought that possibly it would stop the awfulness, the death, of the war. One of the
main things is the blind man, the blind man walking through Belsen waving a stick in front
of him that hit the bodies that were there. [Dr Nelson] AIF and it's got the number
on it, and it's got your name. [Mr Moore] Yes. [Dr Nelson] It's your beret. [Mr Moore]
That's right. [Dr Nelson] Yes.