The War Memorial became even more like a cathedral when the unknown soldier of the Great War was reburied there in 1993. The reburial speech, mainly written by historian Don Watson and read by Prime Minister Paul Keating, is now rightly admired as one of Australia’s stirring and almost spiritual speeches, and is even admired by those who do not quite subscribe to the version of Australian history embedded in it. The Hall of Memory where the soldier lies is now our version of that oblong piece of engraved floor in Westminster Abbey where the first unknown soldier was buried.

Likewise, Canberra’s amassing of Victoria Crosses from many wars, and the citations of sacrifice alongside them, can be likened to the religious relics commemorating saints in Europe or Latin America. This, then, is almost a book of relics, a word that was first used by Australia’s official collectors when they scoured the shelled villages and battlefields of France and Flanders.

Written by Nola Anderson and other senior staff at the War Memorial, and illustrated on a commanding scale, the book briefly describes how the concept of the museum began with some Canadian stimulus in World War I; how collecting began in France 1917; how the early items – from soldiers’ small pocket-bibles, with bullet holes in the middle, to the huge barrels of captured German artillery – were shipped back to Australia; and how the exotic building in Canberra was at last opened in 1941. An impressive small museum, it was not yet great. More collecting went on during the following wars. Donors added more. No other Australian museum – for the War Memorial is a museum of art, technology, and social history as well as military history – has gained from so many different donors, many of whom were people on humble incomes.

 Most historians would assume that the first troops sent on active service by an Australian government were the New South Wales soldiers sent belatedly in 1885 to fight in the Sudan; but this book argues that the first were the Victorian sailors who, in the warship Victoria, sailed from Melbourne to join in the Maori Wars in New Zealand in 1860. We see one relic of that expedition, a medal presented to ‘Boy First Class William Jones’.

Relics of the present Afghanistan war appear on several pages. One painting (‘oil on linen’) depicts a black Labrador dog trained to detect explosives. She disappeared in 2008 after the Taliban attacked the armed convoy in which she was a passenger. Miraculously, after fourteen months, she was found and was eventually sent back to Australia. Earlier canine heroes in these pages are a Blue Mountains dog, which served as mascot in the Boer War, and the German ‘Roff’ captured by Australians in France.

We see painters, sculptors, and photographers at work: Napier Waller, a returned soldier with only one arm, visits the ancient Italian city of Ravenna to inspect the wonderful mosaics before beginning his own mosaic in the Hall of Memory in Canberra; Will Dyson, gifted cartoonist, inspects the Western Front in France at his own expense in 1916 to capture Australian soldiers with ‘charcoal, brush, ink and wash on paper’. He was rightly praised for bringing to life ‘the weary detached way in which men come out of these trenches’.

Perhaps no other Australian institution has employed so many artists of talent – McCubbin, Streeton, Mackennal, Lambert, the Longstaffs, Herbert, Dargie, Hele, Fletcher, Senbergs, Amor, Churcher, Sharpe, and a few dozen more.

The book pays tribute to Australian photographers. Rarely in art books do they stand alongside painters. Frank Hurley, just back from Shackleton’s expedition in the Antarctic, proved in Palestine in 1917 that the new colour film – using the Paget process invented in England five years previously – could release colours that were usually absent in the gloom of the Western Front. Hurley, in his quest for history, followed the Australian Light Horsemen in a Ford car. Taking a Paget photograph required ten times as much exposure as a black and white, and so was more suited to stillness than to active fighting. Hurley’s double-page photograph of an elderly Australian soldier, Trooper George Redding, picking red wildflowers near the front line in Palestine is stunning. At that time most people in the world had never seen a true colour photograph. The universal practice was for an artist to tint by hand a black-and-white photograph and sell it as a postcard.

The exhibits are global. Here are frail German aircraft captured in World War I and initially put on public display at the Exhibition Building in Melbourne, the federal capital then being unbuilt. There is the Spitfire in which the ace pilot ‘Bluey’ Truscott shot down a Messerschmitt over Nazi-occupied France in 1941; the life raft salvaged that year after the HMAS Sydney vanished with all her crew in the Indian Ocean; Albert Coates’s notebook and ‘Weary’ Dunlop’s diary commenced by these notable surgeons in harsh Japanese labour camps.

We are shown a small machine gun captured in the Korean War by Australians in 1952 and smuggled home in Lance Corporal McCarthy’s greatcoat, and a larger Chinese-made gun moving on the simplest wheels and captured at Long Tan in Vietnam in 1966. Later appears an African woman whose injured head is being treated by an Australian soldier in a crowded refugee camp in Rwanda in 1995.

In such a diverse and large book, the index needs enlarging if it is to be a guide and reminder. One or two of the old illustrations – I could be wrong – appear to have been contrived, perhaps as part of wartime propaganda. Here is the well-dressed war correspondent C.E.W. Bean squeezing his way through a narrow, muddy, wartime trench in France. His clothes, even his gloves, are astonishingly clean.

Printed in China on strong classy paper, this tome is as heavy as a Sydney phone book; if it dropped on your bare feet, it could fracture a toe. In the form of a Kindle, it would be an ideal companion for those spending a week in the War Memorial. Often captivating and moving, it will be a trophy in many suburban lounge rooms; a kind of secular family bible.