But a roadside verge is not a garden per se. The liminal grandeur of the avenue as living sculpture (deceased trees aside) is of the monumental processional kind, its intimate and solemn affects differently felt from the palliative, spiritual restoration of the garden. In 2021, as trucks and cars (including this writer’s) speed along the Western Highway, what chance inclusion and ritualistic participation?

If we cannot stop for death, Australian photographer Trent Parke enables viewers to travel the avenue in gallery slow time. In 2014, Parke participated in the international exhibition The First World War in Bruges, Belgium, that marked 100 years since the German invasion of that city. For this commission, he produced the series WW1 Avenue of Honour, focusing on the Ballarat Avenue of Honour. This work, comprising twenty-two images, is now on show at the Art Gallery of Ballarat. Parke’s work augments the Avenues of Honour project, a national initiative to document, preserve, promote, and reinstate the original avenues of honour and to establish new commemorative trees.

As artefacts of the here and now, Parke’s monochrome elegies extend beyond national/nationalistic commemorations. Each image embodies a lyrical, quietly dramatic ‘capture’ of personhood. He is alert (there’s that word again) to the decay of ageing trees, to the ironies of European trees studding the edges of land where original soldier allotments were farmed. Parke also records sections of avenue encroached on by ad hoc suburban development. At a T-intersection of 1970s pattern-book housing, a one-way sign bisects the now secular space between two trees memorialising the Moore twins: Privates Clement Lockhart and Ina Tempest (John). For most enlistees, there was only ever one way in: the grinding maw of no man’s land awaited.

Trent Parke, Private Ina Tempest Moore (John) 4256, Private Clement Lockhart Moore 4257, 14th Battalion A.I.F from WW1: Avenue of Honour series, 2014–16. pigment print on paper. 50.5 x 42.0cm; frame 53.5 x 45.0cm. Purchased with funds from the Hilton White Bequest. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat. © the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery

Silhouetted trees are sometimes front-lit and shot in a blanketing dark like theatrical sets, as in ‘Sapper John Andrew Gibb McGregor 18734’. Blaring light at the foot of the tree of ‘Private William James Whatman 4617’ suggests both fallen star and/or enemy spotlight. On the night of 23 November 1916, a wounded Whatman rose from his trench and headed for German lines as fellow soldiers called out in vain.

Wall texts play a crucial role. Young soldiers providing informant statements to the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) often tell more about a dead friend than official witness requires. Grief erupts through such slippages. Non-white soldiers’ service has often been tragically overlooked in official colonial memorialisations, but ‘Private John Alfred Wunhym 4965’ has his tree. ‘I would explain him as a half-caste’, his fellow soldier attests in the racist language of his day. But other details suggest closeness: ‘He was a man subject to fits … I helped bury him that night about 400 yards to the right of Lagnicourt Village. I knew this man fairly well.’

John Gregan from Ballan enlisted underage as ‘Private Regan’ and died of chest wounds a notch past his seventeenth birthday. His father’s letter enquires about his son’s ‘allotments’ and pleads to have the misspelt name corrected, attaching precious letters from the front as proof of identity. Annie Jones writes timidly to the AIF for information on her missing husband, stitching hearsay and asking for help in her ‘great trouble’ and ‘trusting I am not asking too much of you’.

Letters and testimonies personalise the deceased, the terrible restraint of loved ones exposing the limits of formal incantatory phrases such as ‘lest we forget’. Parke, photographer and vivid storyteller, drew on files from the Red Cross Wounded and Missing to find links between biographical records and the corresponding tree’s planting position, size, shape, texture, irregularities of growth, setting in the landscape, or silhouette. It is a willed, deeply moving anthropomorphism.

Elsewhere, trees are often captured in bleached seasonal shows; winter exposes bird nests that hint, tritely perhaps, at themes of renewal. But the photographer’s own ambivalence about such redemptive details shows through as he allows the bleak landscape to gather.

Trent Parke, Private Everett Mark Rickard 5906, 22nd Battalion A.I.F from WW1: Avenue of Honour series. 2014–16. pigment print on paper. 42.0 x 50. cm; frame 53.5 x 64.0cm. Purchased with funds from the Hilton White Bequest. Collection of the Art Gallery of Ballarat. © the artist and Hugo Michell Gallery

Subtly theatrical, these works resist interplay with the colourised journalistic modes and notorious composites of AIF photographer Frank Hurley at Ypres; they are too sober and too deliberately uncanny in their affect. Their subject is singular: one tree, one man, deceased or discharged (though sadly few of the latter). But in the abstracted ‘Private Everett Mark Rickard 5906’, the tree is absent. This shocks, as if man and memorial have been blown apart. But I suddenly better understood the huge role plantings played to fill a void. A detail saves. Looming through a foggy midland landscape, Rickard’s staked nameplate appears. Blink and you will miss it.

Trent Parke’s dramatic lights and darks shift us into new modes of noticing, new forms of closeness with the real and recent past. His images and wall texts enable us to reflect anew on the horrors of the twentieth century’s first global technological war, to reconsider the cost of letting history fade into nostalgic sadness.

Trent Parke: WW1 Avenue of Honour continues at the Art Gallery of Ballarat until 14 March 2021.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.