The ANZAC Memorial is at once both a work of art and a remarkable piece of architecture. The artist was George Rayner Hoff, an English sculptor who had migrated to Sydney in the 1920s. Rayner Hoff had served in the Royal Engineers as a map maker in France during the Great War and in Germany with the the army of occupation. His collaboration with the Australian architect Charles Bruce Dellit on the ANZAC Memorial is seamless, it is impossible to identify where the work of the artist ends and that of the architect begins. It is one of the finest surviving examples of art deco style in Australia.
Dellit originally planned for numerous bronze sculptures to adorn the exterior of the Memorial. He planned for a standing figure on each of the corners, - the 'Four Seasons' and sixteen seated figures, four to a side, representing 'the Arts of Peace and War'. Hoff transformed these classicized or allegorical figures to unmistakable Australian figures from the Great War - modern Anzacs in modern military dress, stylised in modern form - which emphatically locate the Memorial in the Australian present. Their original bronze castings were changed to cast granite (ground granite packed into molds), so that they would seem to be hewn from the building itself, or flowering from the buttresses, in Dellit's own words. The figures, heroic in size and broadly sculptured in sympathy with the character of the architecture, are shown with bowed heads, as if resting after their labours and sadly contemplating the havoc of the war years.
That plaque in the middle says it all! They are all in contemplation as we will be but ours need to be saved by pictures and words as we never experienced it first hand.
