Jennifer Wellington's first monograph is an enlightening, perceptive work of scholarship that focuses on the genesis of three historical institutions forged in the aftermath of the First World War. It divulges the complex creative processes that took place in establishing three national—and imperial—sites between 1917 and 1942: the Imperial War Museum in London, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra (with previous iterations in Melbourne and Sydney), and the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. The resulting volume will appeal to scholars across disciplines, but notably modern historians, historical geographers, and museum studies scholars.

Wellington skillfully weaves together comparative linkages between these institutions, even while acknowledging that different drivers would ultimately govern their forms as commemorative spaces. All were undoubtedly bonded by their desire to future-proof—that is, to preserve a tangible record and thereby construct a durable memory of those tumultuous events between 1914 and 1918. But in rendering the conflict into something tangible—predominantly for audiences yet to come—each of these sites of remembrance molded narratives around nationhood and nation building, the latter pursued overtly by Australia and Canada. Wellington identifies the Imperial War Museum as a more collective repository of empire, suggesting that its inclusivity was driven by a desire to forge a space of encounter between the British population (who had been affected more directly by the conflict) and the material of war. The formulation of other national and local memorial sites meant that it faced a pronounced challenge in trying to “find a place amongst a dense British commemorative landscape” (285), while its intention to simultaneously act as a rupture that would defeat “the barbarity of war itself” (314) lasted for only two decades.

What proves particularly fascinating within each detailed case study are the processes of making, revealed by way of numerous well-researched examples and episodes. The politics of choosing a suitable location in which to house a national museum of war, followed by the procedures of acquisition and subsequently display, are delivered via a rich archival analysis of personalities, commissions, and committees. Further debate on the theme of authenticity precedes numerous object histories within chapters on war trophies, helping to distinguish the key momentum shift between the messages and ideologies of wartime propaganda displays, set against those that took place after November 1918. Moreover, Wellington validates the agency and agendas of individual stakeholders (not least Charles Bean) who were to prove pivotal when it came to realizing envisaged ideals at the three locations. Deliberate symbolism behind each institution imbued specific meaning for audiences, and how this meaning materialized within differing contexts and settings, is comprehensively evidenced. One pertinent example is Wellington's consideration of geography, in which she argues that perceiving the Great War as a distant, “exotic” entity allowed Canada and Australia to frame positive conceptions of specific episodes, allied to respective national trajectories.

Wellington wrestles with one inevitable frustration of the record: the relative lack of material regarding how audiences (collectively and individually, including those encountering content for the first time and others with direct experience of the war) responded to these representations. Those encounters beyond official documentation that Wellington ably sheds light on grant a sense of some of the various hopes, aspirations, and occasional disappointments for respective sites. Well-illustrated chapters outline the commissioning and integration of official war art and photography. As a visual record able to represent the conflict in unfamiliar ways, each collection constituted a highly valuable asset for each fledgling institution. Wellington's analysis of correspondence and other documentation makes clear to the reader how these works were utilized by institutions for varying purposes, through their incorporation within official public spaces. Her overarching thematic structure works effectively through interlinking examples, drawing respective case studies into comparative context and generating a detailed understanding of what roles these sites were playing during their formative years throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

What this monograph on museum making illuminates is how remarkably innovative the concept of creating contemporary institutions, which sought to capture the diversity of wartime experience, must have seemed at the time. This seems more remarkable when situated amid the broader uncertainty of this period, as nations were deciding to collectively remember their involvement within a global conflict. The subsequent distinctions in form between each site spoke to the challenges of trying to represent warfare, with each commemorative project falling somewhere between site of bereavement and educative museum. Thus, beyond the welcome new knowledge and meticulous insight Wellington contributes via these institutional histories, there appears to be an underlying message that rather than critique at face value what historical museums communicate via their exhibitions, we need to understand the legacy of what has gone before. Far from being something in the distant past, this cultural baggage remains an active force that continues to shape how these institutions endure, define, and reinvent themselves in the present.