The idea was born in the trenches. In 1916, the official war correspondent Charles Bean - moving through the mud of the Western Front - conceived a memorial that would gather the relics of the fighting and honour the men who fell. He and John Treloar, who ran the Australian War Records Section, believed something unusual: that a museum and a shrine were inseparable, that you could not properly mourn the dead without showing what they had endured. Parliament established the Memorial by legislation in 1925. The Great Depression then stalled it for years, and the Art Deco design by Emil Sodersten and John Crust had to be cut down to fit a shrinking budget. Not until Remembrance Day 1941 - with the next war already raging - did the doors finally open.

Stand on the Memorial's forecourt and look south, and the geometry of Walter Burley Griffin's Canberra reveals itself. The building sits at the foot of Mount Ainslie, at the northern end of Anzac Parade, on the great land axis that runs 5.2 kilometres to Parliament House on Capital Hill. The alignment was deliberate. The dead were given a clear line of sight to the living institutions of the nation, and the nation a clear line of sight back. A pine on the grounds was grown from a seed carried home from Gallipoli, where the legend of the Anzacs was forged in 1915. The Roll of Honour was set into the cloister walls from 1961 onward, panel by panel, conflict by conflict, until the names stretched from the Sudan of the 1880s to Afghanistan.

Beneath the dome lies the Hall of Memory, and at its heart, since 11 November 1993, rests the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier. His remains were brought home from a cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France, where so many Australians died in 1918, and interred to mark seventy-five years since the First World War ended. For decades the country had resisted such a tomb, feeling its bond was with the Unknown Warrior buried in Westminster Abbey. By 1993, that imperial tie had loosened, and Australia wanted a son of its own to mourn. Above him, more than six million tiny glass tiles, imported from Italy, form mosaics of an airman, a sailor, a servicewoman and a soldier. The words at the head of the tomb read simply: Known unto God.

A memorial that honours the dead must eventually reckon with all of them. For most of its life the institution looked outward - to Gallipoli, the Somme, Kokoda, Korea, Vietnam - and the Hall of Valour holds 76 of the 102 Victoria Crosses awarded to Australians, the largest such collection on Earth. But a war was fought on this continent too. For decades, calls to acknowledge the frontier conflicts between colonists and Aboriginal people were turned away as too uncomfortable. In 2022 the Memorial reversed course, committing to tell that story for the first time in a gallery planned for 2028. It is a hard truth for a shrine to hold, but the dead it commemorates were never only those who sailed away.