This pin marks the Big Thing itself. If stopping, choose a safe and legal place nearby.
33.87503° S, 151.20995° E
FIELD GUIDE
The story
Four bullets stand, and three shells lie fallen. That ratio is the work.
Tony Albert's Yininmadyemi – Thou didst let fall was completed in Hyde Park in 2015, after he won the City of Sydney commission, and it honours the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women who served in Australia's military. The standing forms are the ones who came home. The fallen are the ones who did not.
The concept came from Albert's own family. He is a Girramay artist whose family has over eighty years of combined military service, and the vision for the work draws directly on their experience – which places the memorial in a specific lineage rather than making a general gesture.
That specificity matters, because the history it addresses is a hard one. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people enlisted in significant numbers across both world wars, often having to conceal their identity to do so, and returned to a country that denied them citizenship rights, excluded them from soldier settlement schemes and frequently refused them entry to the RSL clubs their comrades drank in.
Albert worked with Cracknell & Lonergan Architects to produce the work, and Dr Anita Heiss, author of Life in Gadigal Country, wrote the inscription engraved on the base of one of the fallen shells.
This record includes it as Big Art for its monumental oversized forms, not as a novelty. It is a memorial, and it sits in Hyde Park a short distance from the Anzac Memorial.
Photograph
This is a photograph, shown separately from the illustration artwork.
The work comprises four standing bullet forms and three fallen shells. It is included here as Big Art because of its monumental oversized forms, not as a novelty attraction.
ACCESS
Public memorial in Hyde Park South beside the Anzac Memorial. Treat the site respectfully; no dedicated vehicle destination is provided.
