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When The War Is Over - Season 1 Episode 3 -
Afghanistan
Afghanistan
Category
😹
FunTranscript
00:00I was living in America when 9-11 exploded the world as we knew it.
00:15America's response was swift.
00:18And just weeks later, Australian forces also headed to Afghanistan,
00:25joining the war on terror.
00:27Overt operations shrouded the war in secrecy,
00:32and it lasted almost 20 years.
00:38But more than a decade into the conflict,
00:40it was one of Australia's official war artists, Ben Quilty,
00:43who laid bare the hidden truth of the price of our war in Afghanistan.
00:51And that was just the start of a national reckoning
00:54with what really happens when the war is over.
01:03I'm Rachel Griffiths,
01:04and I believe that when it comes to understanding war,
01:09art is our secret weapon.
01:11So in this series, I'm putting this theory to the test,
01:16one war and one artwork at a time.
01:22Because while journalists tell us what happened...
01:25They left in scenes that are now part of television's history.
01:28It's our performers.
01:30When the song was released, it was banned.
01:32Yeah.
01:34Filmmakers.
01:35Peter Weir from Peter Weir.
01:38Writers.
01:39The narrow road to the deep north.
01:41Artists.
01:42I was the only one not carrying a weapon.
01:44And musicians.
01:45If it's too risky to say, sing it.
01:47Who help us make sense of it.
01:51Holy shit.
01:52This is incredible.
01:57Art's not just there to be pretty and admired.
02:00Art is the magnifying glass and the mirror.
02:03This was a pub rock song that changed our lives.
02:06That's what art can do.
02:07This is when the war is over.
02:38Beauty and pain are old bedfellows when it comes to art.
02:47Wow.
02:48Well, I have to say, this is a brand new experience for me.
02:52I've looked at a lot of art.
02:54But this is...
02:55The skin is the canvas.
02:56Yes.
02:57You're the canvas.
02:58And you get to wear it all the time.
03:01Adam Maguire is a man who wears his heart and his art on his sleeve.
03:08Here we go, the big reveal.
03:10A veteran of over 28 years.
03:12The war in Afghanistan was his final deployment.
03:15Holy shit.
03:19This is...
03:21This is incredible.
03:23Can I say, this is an excellent use of love handles.
03:27Yes.
03:28Because these poppies have a beautiful three-dimensional quality.
03:33Among his tapestry of tattoos that tell stories about his and his family's decades of service, there's a tattoo for a mate who's close to his heart.
03:45There's just something special about Davey.
03:49He was a reservist when I did my first deployment in 2006.
03:53He was dead set on joining the regular army.
03:56And, like, we tried to hold him off.
03:58But he went over to Afghan.
04:00They were out doing a patrol and he ran over a very large IED.
04:04And never come back.
04:07How long was he in Afghanistan before he...
04:13Not long at all.
04:15I think it was probably a month, if not.
04:18Oh, my God.
04:19How'd you find out?
04:21I got a phone call.
04:23Sarge, I think Davey's dead.
04:26And I was like, nah, I spoke to him yesterday.
04:32You got a tattoo for him, right?
04:34Yeah, that's in my middle of my chest here.
04:36In the actual cross, it's got RAP Davey.
04:38Burdened by the loss of his mate in service, Adam chose to redeploy to Afghanistan in 2012.
04:47I couldn't say no to going to Afghan because your mates all go and some don't come back.
04:53So, you just sort of can't say no.
04:55When Australia joined the US-led war on terror in Afghanistan, the mission was to hunt Osama bin Laden, defeat his Al-Qaeda terrorists and overthrow the Taliban who harbored them.
05:19Over nearly two decades, there were almost 40,000 Australian troops deployed.
05:30Around 170,000 Afghans died in the war.
05:35America lost almost 2,500 soldiers.
05:38And while 41 Australians were killed in combat, at home, a far bigger toll was yet to come.
05:53You got a poppy for every Australian that died in Afghanistan.
05:58Yeah.
06:01Now you're seeing a lot more veterans with the tattoos, and I think that it helps.
06:07That's becoming known as form of therapy.
06:10I would say, yeah.
06:12The pain of getting a tattoo realistically lets you know you're alive.
06:16I mean, some people write journals and keep journals.
06:19My journal's in ink.
06:21It feels right to put it into images.
06:23Yeah.
06:28The hundreds of years, the stories of war and the art that tells those stories was largely populated with heroes and battles.
06:39There's generals on horses, flags above the battlement, nameless soldiers fallen in noble sacrifice.
06:45But the art of our most recent war in Afghanistan is so different.
06:53It's visceral, it's immediate, and it punches you in the gut.
06:58It is very, very personal.
07:01I took no paint to Afghanistan.
07:11I made lots and lots of film and took lots and lots of photographs and a pot of ink.
07:16And I thought that would lead to telling the story.
07:19The risk and the fear and the trauma and the danger of being there.
07:22In 2011, Ben Quilty was a celebrated and highly collected artist.
07:27And when he won the nation's most coveted art prize, his fame hit new heights.
07:32The 2011 Archibald Prize is awarded to Ben Quilty for Margaret Olly.
07:39That same year, the Australian War Memorial commissioned him as the official war artist to Afghanistan.
07:52I went in there pretty naive.
07:55I was the only one not carrying a weapon, which is an unusual feeling to be there unarmed in a war zone.
08:03Every single emotion was extreme and heightened, partly because you're living under this constant anxiety that you can be killed.
08:14And it was like nothing I'd ever seen and nothing I want to see again.
08:18I don't want to go back, that's for sure.
08:21Ben Quilty was following in the footsteps of a long line of official war artists whose role was to capture our troops at the coalface of conflict.
08:31The official war artists can be as political or as anti-war or as pro-war as they want.
08:39And that's a rare privilege, I think.
08:42Given the environment was special forces, is there a suspicion?
08:46Very suspicious.
08:47What's this artist doing here, this lefty?
08:51They didn't know who I was, they didn't know why I was there.
08:56Making a drawing of someone is very disarming because the person who's making the drawing has to opt out.
09:01They were very, very reticent to talk to me because it had been drilled into them.
09:09Do not talk to the media, never ever talk to the media.
09:15I had no idea who this guy was.
09:20We have to be careful in what we say here, that's what we're thinking, you know.
09:23Are you thinking why do we need an artist in Afghanistan?
09:26Absolutely, it's very strange.
09:29Daniel Spain was one of the youngest ADF personnel on Australia's main base.
09:34And he said, I want to take some photos of you guys doing some weird stuff.
09:38You know, I'm like, right, eh?
09:40So he says, look at the sun, and he took these photos of us.
09:47Ben's aim was to capture the human inside the uniform.
09:53Daniel Spain, he was so young, I was astonished.
09:57I asked him awkwardly when I realised how young he was, does your mother know what's happening here?
10:04And a huge tear welled in his eye.
10:07That was a real turning point for me, and that's why I have made that first painting of Daniel when I got back.
10:13I was there to tell the story of the troops.
10:20I felt aware that so many of the young men and women had this extra pressure.
10:26That they were bound by a contract not to speak about their service, not even to discuss how they felt.
10:32Recognising the crushing nature of this code of silence was a lightbulb moment for Ben.
10:49For me, the biggest story was not the combat zone, but more commonly the emotional wounds.
10:56Putting this thing that you felt and saw and heard into paint.
11:00Tell me, how does that happen?
11:01For me, the skin was everything.
11:04The way the uniform was cut to be boxy, aggressive, masculine.
11:09So I then asked them to strip off and pick a pose.
11:16Captain S was a young officer in Afghanistan.
11:20I asked him to pick a pose and he straight away said, yes, I know the pose.
11:26And he lay on his back in an unbelievably uncomfortable position.
11:31As we made the work, he told me the story of why that pose was important.
11:40And he said that there was many, many battles, but this one I remember for the physicality of being stuck on my back for so long.
11:46And they couldn't work out where they were shooting at him from and he was with a very young soldier.
11:52And the friend was hit with a bullet which went into his body and didn't come out.
12:00And I said, what did the young man say?
12:05He just kept saying over and over again, I don't want to die.
12:09I don't want to die.
12:10In this painting, I tried to leave as much of the skin blank.
12:24By leaving the skin white, it's like there's a bright light shining on it.
12:28And the light is everything that comes with the threat and the furious danger of being in a place like that.
12:36By 2013, Ben had painted 21 portraits, laying bare the trauma of return vets.
12:43It's just so vulnerable.
12:59I'm sure when Ben Quilty was on the base, this was not what the guys would have been expecting that he would come up with.
13:07Certainly quite different to an official war artists commission, maybe.
13:17It's definitely the cost of war.
13:25Pretty wild.
13:26The show's called After Afghanistan. Have you seen your painting yet before you turn up at the opening?
13:43No, I hadn't. And I was talking to someone and they're like, oh, are you one of the guys that he painted in the nude?
13:49Are you thinking, what, what, nude?
13:50Yeah, what have I done? Did I forget?
13:51What the hell?
13:52Yeah, what was happening? Because I didn't, from my memory, I didn't pose nude for Ben Quilty.
14:00Do you think he captured something about you at that time in that painting? Like?
14:07Absolutely.
14:11I was very much down on my luck, you know, feeling depressed and I was heading down a slippery slope.
14:22Yeah.
14:23Are you kind of home before you've processed where you've been?
14:37When I got out, I drank a lot.
14:39So you're not decompressed at all?
14:41No, no.
14:42And like, I scared my kids.
14:47You go to dark places and like, because of the transition, when I got out, I was like, right, are you getting out of the army now?
14:54I was like, no house, didn't know where the next dollar was going to come from as such.
14:59In my head, well, if I just write myself off, the wife and kids will get the money a lot quicker.
15:06The timeliness of the official opening and Ben reaching out and it couldn't have come at a better time.
15:19And that needed to happen to be where I am today.
15:23Through all that, Ben became quite an advocate because all his soldiers that he met had been having very similar experiences.
15:38Do you think what he was able to do with that work is an important role to have an artist witness war like that?
15:45I think every facet needs to be looked at.
15:47But he's got two there where, like, the body looks normal, but the head is just red and that's just like, almost like a pink mist.
15:56You'd say Ben captures the vulnerability of the returning soldier who's not like the photos of yesterday's war hero, right?
16:04No, he doesn't glorify it.
16:07What these paintings do, they put on the table the thing that we won't tell our families.
16:12The things that we won't, for embarrassment or fear or uncertainty of perception, we won't put in front of you as we walk down the street.
16:23A decade later, it wasn't a civilian like Ben Quilty, but a returned vet who continued this important conversation.
16:32And for her, it wasn't just art, it was evidence.
16:42In the army, you were taught loyalty up, loyalty down.
16:45So if you serve with diligence and loyalty, they'll look after you.
16:49And it just felt like that contract had been broken after we'd given so much.
16:55Artist Kat Ray served in the Australian military for 20 years, with multiple deployments in Afghanistan.
17:02Her husband, Andrew, also served there.
17:09Andrew, tell me about him coming back after his last deployment.
17:14Well, I didn't realise they'd done a suicide risk assessment on him.
17:19And I didn't know, I got a call to say, you'll need to come and collect him from Sydney Airport.
17:25With no awareness of what?
17:28No, they threw me like, I guess, a hot potato as far as mental health.
17:34He was in chronic pain.
17:36Every part of his body was physically broken.
17:38And then there was also the mental health bit.
17:41I guess, increasingly, there was domestic violence against me as well,
17:45which became more and more dangerous to be around.
17:48In 2017, Andrew died by suicide.
17:59Harnessing her grief and anger, Kat found healing through her creative process.
18:06Oh.
18:07And produced an artwork.
18:09Oh, wow.
18:10That is astonishing.
18:11God.
18:13She called it Deathmin.
18:15Deathmin is the actual paperwork from Andrew.
18:22Which was his DVA files, his medical files.
18:26It's my height and the weight of Andrew.
18:30He was trying to get all of his claims in for Department of Veterans Affairs.
18:34What was he asking for?
18:35He was asking for the support that you'd be entitled to,
18:38which is rehab and medical attention.
18:41This is, to me, an arguable totem of systemic failure on multiple levels.
18:51It's fragility as well because it has to lean against the wall.
18:54And when you join the army, you're not allowed to lean against the wall.
18:56You're not allowed to have your hands in your pockets or cross your arms.
18:59But this one has to lean against a wall because it will topple.
19:02And it's kind of defiantly doing so.
19:06How did that stack of paperwork become an artwork?
19:10I've just been keeping all of this paperwork from Andrew.
19:13And I was trying to discern what to keep and treasure for Imogen.
19:18And what I really needed to release into a more positive and more powerful way of being.
19:23And to kind of shed it from us.
19:28The conversation around veteran suicide finally gained national attention.
19:33And in July 2021, a Royal Commission was launched.
19:38Royal Commission into Defence and Veteran Suicide is now in session.
19:42Please be seated.
19:44Nearly 6,000 submissions were made, including cat rays,
19:47in an effort to find out how our nation had failed our vets.
19:52Defence has been really disappointing.
19:54They've still played the old game of cover-up, nothing to see here.
19:57It is them that needs to change.
20:04The Napier Wall of R Prize, which is for people who have served or are currently serving.
20:10You won it for this work.
20:12It was in Parliament House.
20:14And this stopped our politicians in their tracks.
20:20I hope it shook things up a little bit.
20:23I mean, there was parts of this artwork which originated in Parliament House.
20:28And we were petitioning for help.
20:31In September 2024, the Royal Commission released its findings.
20:37They were damning.
20:39We obviously feel that this report should be a line in the sand and a call to action.
20:44You made this during the Royal Commission into Veteran Suicides.
20:54you made this during the royal commission into veteran suicides it's such a powerful object for
21:12change where's the future for this piece of work well the governor-general has asked for it to go
21:21to her um residents that would be amazing i would love that to happen i hope it comes out of here
21:28and can speak to more people and be a reminder to leaders that so many families in australia need
21:35this change
21:40while affected families were begging the government for action on veteran suicides
21:52the australian war memorial was listening the result was a radical idea
22:01we're here today to announce the sufferings of war and service sculpture at the australian war memorial
22:07which will commemorate those who have experienced or witnessed the ongoing trauma that can result from
22:13military service
22:17there needed to be some acknowledgement of veteran suicide there was veterans reporting that they
22:22would stand in front of a heroic monument about death on the battlefield and not feel seen at all
22:27alexeaton is a renowned sculptor known for his work in marble
22:36so this is it that's right it's very beautiful for every drop shed in anguish
22:44the work consists of 18 large marble droplets their luminous forms suggesting blood sweat or tears
22:58so it was commissioned by the mothers whose children had died by suicide or other deaths that one might
23:08say is directly attributable to the service that's absolutely correct the more we know the more you
23:14can't turn a blind eye to the need within the community to to feel seen this can no longer
23:21be just swept under the carpet this idea of loss to find out where the tragedy lies
23:31for me it was all about choosing a stone that had poetry written into its surface
23:3736 tonne there yeah it's a little light load a little light this is beautiful um queensland marble
23:44from the traditional lands of the wakaman people so i was looking through the quarry and they kept
23:49showing me this beautiful white version of this the pearl the a-grade perfect for the kitchen but
23:54exactly it's like no i want what about that stuff up there they're like oh it's b-grade you don't want
23:57that i'm like that's exactly what i want i want these that have the scars in them
24:06red iron scars become blood-like and i think that sort of speaks to those injuries seen and unseen
24:14and there's the idea that hopefully there's a sense of resilience to them too when you put your
24:18hands upon them i'm struck by how they could make the intangible pain of grieving families tangible
24:31and yet somehow feeling them brings a sense of calm
24:39in these last year since this work has been open there's been many tributes left around the work
24:45and it becomes not just a place it becomes a site it becomes a site for specifically to hold those
24:56memories now i'd like to show you some of the tributes that have been left around the work
25:02notes medals photographs flowers let's have a look
25:19i've got a photograph as a mother of a boy that age i just i can't actually like
25:26i can't help but cry daniel we miss you every moment of every day
25:56i can't help but i can't help but i can't help but i can't help but i can't help but i can't help
25:58my god
26:04when australia and allied forces withdrew their troops in june 2021
26:09many were left questioning the cost of the war
26:15amongst the soul-searching however one thing was clear
26:19the art of this war had made the invisible visible it was a truth-telling with our soldiers at the
26:28centre and with vets themselves using art to heal it's possibly changed the stories we tell about war
26:37forever is art got a role in educating and telling your stories for the broader public definitely i mean
26:44these tattoos i suppose because they're military it becomes a bit of a talking point it sort of
26:50helps sort of break the ice
26:54i feel like the role of the war artist is to say this is what it felt like this is what it cost
27:02yeah art is a vehicle to tell every emotion to get it out of you for people to see to share the burdens
27:10to share whatever it is you're dealing with i mean i felt like that was like an unburdening on my behalf
27:18it was like you can have it now this is your responsibility oh my god there he is yeah yeah
27:28i really wanted it to be a call for arms for the people who could make decisions to improve things
27:35in the future i'm just very glad that tributes are being left and becomes meaningful for them
27:43i think that's all uh art can really do is provide permission to feel a certain way
27:49to say it's okay it's part of your experience
27:52yeah
28:03so
28:05so
28:07so
28:09so
28:11so
28:13so
28:15so
28:17so
28:19next time there was a very big story to tell here i find something hidden amongst the nation's war
28:31machines to come up with that in the squalor of a prison camp that reveals a story of prisoner of war
28:38survival i could never have imagined we forget that this is what art can do
28:49so
28:50so
28:51so
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