Sacrifice

This is the central motif of the Memorial's design. It comprises 'the recumbent form of an Anzac whose soul has passed to the Great Beyond, and whose body, borne aloft on a shield by his best beloved - mother, sister, wife and child - is laid there as a symbol of that spirit which inspired him in life, the spirit of Courage, Endurance and Sacrifice'. Hoff's sculpture addresses the issue of an Australian identity based on its (and his) experience of war, a virile and modern nation prepared to sacrifice its best in an appalling but necessary cause - the survival of the country/race.

'Thousands of women, although not directly engaged in war activities, lost all that was dear them - sons they has borne and reared, husbands, fathers of their children, friends, lovers.

There was no acknowledgement of them in casualty lists of wounded, maimed and killed. They endured all men's sacrifice quietly'.

'In this spirit I have shown them, carrying their load, the sacrifice of their menfolk.'

Sacrifice is a shift away from the rhetoric of honour, glory and manly deeds manifested in earlier memorials - Hoff had seen too much of war to glorify it. He constructs a code of meaning through the eroticised relationship of male and female. Viewing from above in the Hall of Memory, one bows ones head to see the corpse of the dead soldier dominating. From the side the image of the three women and the infant is pre-eminent. Sacrifice deals with the unnatural force of death unleashed by the Great War, a force which destroys the man-female unity so insistently proclaimed in the sculpture.

Sacrifice was cast at the Morris Singer Foundry, London.