Uncover the world of camouflage with author and academic Professor Ann Elias. Explore the artists, creatives, and naturalists who shaped camouflage techniques during conflict, the challenges they faced, and how their creative contributions influenced the Australian military.
From face paint to full scale deception, you’ll discover there’s more to camouflage than meets they eye.
Transcript
LAURA THOMAS: Camouflage. It’s by design, hidden in plain sight. But it’s history in the military beyond the typical green, brown and grey uniforms has often similarly flown under the radar. The Shrine’s new exhibition, Camouflage, shines a light on this world, delving into the extraordinary intersection of nature, science, and creativity in the development of military camouflage.
From building fake trees that were used as observation posts to painting war ships in striking patterns, you’ll soon hear that the military history of camouflage is unexpected, and at times, even obscure. It’s also fraught with conflict as artists and creatives went head-to-head with the military machine.
Joining us today to uncover the hidden stories behind camouflage and just how much it has evolved is Professor Emeritus Ann Elias. Ann has published several books on camouflage, including Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science, and War. Thank you for joining me Ann…
ANN ELIAS: No problem. Thank you, Laura.
LAURA THOMAS: Firstly, what is camouflage?
ANN ELIAS: Yes, why not start with that question? But actually, it's not altogether straightforward, I have to say that, a bit like the practice itself of camouflage. Because it's found in nature and war and art and also in human society. But perhaps we could just use the word 'deception' as the beginning point. It's deception used for a strategic advantage. In terms of nature, it involves disguise and concealment. But also that is its properties in war, art and human society as well. Then this thing called mimicry, which is associated with it, which is about imitating something else, and definitely in the area of human appearances and behaviours, camouflage and mimicry are really kind of interesting areas to think about. One of the people who defined camouflage and kept trying to define it was, in fact, William Dakin, who was a zoologist, and he got involved in the Second World War, but he said the practice of camouflage is about making something invisible or making it look like something else, but if it's about looking like something else, then that thing should not be suspicious, but something expected and ordinary, because camouflage is about also surprise. So I think that's quite useful. And an example might be a fake rock that looks like a rock, but it's really a hideout for a soldier or a sniper waiting to emerge with surprise. That might be what he was thinking about. Yeah, so militaries have thought about camouflage by observing nature and studying art and focusing on human behaviours like hunting.
LAURA THOMAS: I'm probably revealing myself a bit here, but when I think of camouflage, it's usually that typical army uniform, you know, the greens and the browns and the creams, that's where camouflage is. And it surprised me researching this, and I'm sure it will surprise some listeners, and you've alluded to this, in the early days, camouflage was something that was developed by artists and naturalists. So can you tell me a little bit about that early history of camouflage?
ANN ELIAS: Yes, it's quite overlapping, as you point out. So if we think about, say, the naturalists, the famous naturalists like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, who were around in the 19th century, and some who were in the early 20th century, like an American Abbot Thayer, who was also an artist and a naturalist, they were looking at camouflage as the concealing abilities, or the abilities of animals to be concealed by blending into their surroundings. And secondly, by mimicking other animals or plants, for example. So an orchid is a good example of a plant that mimics the appearance of insects so that insects will pollinate it, and naturalists like Darwin associated all of this with survival and adaptation. But actually it's interesting because philosophers and artists have jumped in here, and they've looked at it slightly differently, and they've looked at the theatrical aspects of animal camouflage, and thought perhaps it's actually not about function, survival, but about aesthetic pleasure. This takes it in a really interesting direction, and an artist like Sidney Nolan, who went to Africa and looked at all these giraffes and leopards and zebras, he concluded that their colours and markings were for the pleasure of the animal looking at the animal. So that's a very different take. Then you bring in the artists, and you've got people like Pablo Picasso, who believed he'd invented military camouflage through Cubism. So all these histories become extremely overlapping.
LAURA THOMAS: So when was it that it started being used by the military?
ANN ELIAS: Well, that's not straightforward, because it depends what military. So if we talk about militaries, then we can go back to Sun Tzu, do you know The Art of War, the Chinese general who wrote The Art of War, and this was, what is it, 200 BC, or something, he said, 'All warfare is based on deception'. So a lot of militaries will trace those ancient origins, or even to, in fact, Greek mythology. You know the Trojan horse that brought soldiers hiding in the horse into the city of Troy. But in terms of Europe, and say, European countries, Western countries, we usually look at the First World War, and that's because it became a new science. It became a new weapon of war in World War One. It's not that it suddenly appeared, but it became formalised as a section of the French Army. And that's why the word camouflage is French, and actually is related to a person who does camouflage is called a camoufleur, which means putting on makeup for the stage. But the British also organised their own camouflage through the Royal Engineers in the First World War.
LAURA THOMAS: You mentioned earlier Abbot Thayer, who I know has been referred to as the father of camouflage. Can you tell me a little bit more about him?
ANN ELIAS: Abbot Thayer was an artist who became very passionate in the First World War about applying what he'd learnt through observing birds and animals in the field to the protection of soldiers. He produced a book, or his son produced a book of his work, and in it are some amazing illustrations by Abbot Thayer, a beautiful artist of peacocks and all sorts of birds camouflaged against their backgrounds, and he made himself very unwell for all the work he tried to put into convincing the American military, and in fact, the British as well, to apply nature's camouflage to soldiers in the field, because people were reluctant in the First World War, a lot of the time to accept those principles as war.
LAURA THOMAS: Why was that?
ANN ELIAS: Yeah, that's complicated, one or two reasons. Possibly because the militaries were emerging out of a culture where you wage war by coming forward and, you know, putting up your fists and hand-to-hand combat, and you know, direct engagement with your enemy, whereas camouflage was actually about strategic concealment and hiding and holding back in order to surprise. And a lot of soldiers found it strangely effeminate to actually conceal themselves instead of making themselves very visible, which was the masculine thing to do.
LAURA THOMAS: I mean, you see it in the evolution of uniforms that we have in the Shrine's galleries, the pre-Federation uniforms are bright red and very striking, whereas you go to the modern conflict, and it's obviously all about camouflage. So that attitude, obviously, did change. Was that with the First World War, Anne?
ANN ELIAS: I don't think so. I think the attitude started to change at the end of the Second World War, but very, very slowly through the Southwest Pacific theatre and the necessity to camouflage in rainforests. So in fact, a lot of camouflage experimentation in Australia in the Second World War went into disguising soldiers and installations in what was called the jungles of the Southwest Pacific, like islands in Papua New Guinea and so on. But it wasn't really till the Vietnam War that you see a big change in militaries taking on board the idea that wearing paint on the face is not a way of emasculating you, but rather it's a way of providing strength. And now, of course, talk about hyper-masculinity associated with camouflage patterns and also camouflage makeup. So this has been an interesting transition.
LAURA THOMAS: It has and we've spoken a bit about camouflage in the context of Europe. When did it make its way to Australian shores?
ANN ELIAS: Well, we had, in the First World War, a number of artists who were in Europe who actually undertook camouflage in the First World War, and they brought back a lot of ideas as that older generation to Australia when they returned from the First World War, people like John Moore and Adrian Feint are two good examples, and what they saw in the First World War were the trenches, which are essentially camouflage devices for hiding people under the ground, decoys, which are, you know, lures that attract attention away from a more vulnerable installation, which had become really important in the First World War, because aerial warfare was starting at that time and people were starting to realise that you could see from the air a lot, and you needed to disguise it. And then there was dazzle camouflage in the First World War, they brought back ideas about that. Think of all the battleships that were painted in amazing dazzle camouflage, which are these crazy geometrical patterns to make perceptual confusion, so that, you know, submarines, when they were looking at ships on the sea, were unable to actually determine the shape or the speed of the vehicle. So those ideas were brought back from the First World War by Australians, and then those camofleurs from the First World War got together with other artists in 1939 and they formed a group called the Sydney Camouflage Group.
LAURA THOMAS: And there were some pretty big names in that Sydney Camouflage Group.. You mentioned a couple of them that Max Dupain was within there, a few artists that I think people would recognise.
ANN ELIAS: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, the reason that the group got together, the Sydney Camouflage Group, and this was before the war, is that the publisher, the great publisher, Sydney Ure Smith, who published The Home magazine and also Art in Australia, collected together a huge group of artists that included, as you say, Max Dupain, Frank Hinder, William Dobell, Eric Thompson, who worked in Hollywood as a set designer, Clement Meadmore, who was a designer, Douglas Annand, who was a designer, and then Adrian Feint and John Moore. They all got together with a range of engineers and also biologists like William Dakin, whom I mentioned earlier, and they formed this group who thought that maybe they would be able to contribute to the Second World War by learning the new art of camouflage.
LAURA THOMAS: And why did they think that it was important that this happened in Australia and that they were developing it themselves?
ANN ELIAS: They thought that Australia was too slow in taking up in the militaries, the army in particular, that the army was too slow in taking up the idea of camouflage as a serious war weapon. That was the underlying thing. Secondly, though they knew about the artists who were involved in camouflage in the First World War, through John Moore and Adrian Feint, they knew about all the innovations, and they just felt that, since the Second World War was looming, that they could do something useful.
LAURA THOMAS: And I imagine, as artists and photographers and engineers this, this group that you've mentioned, it would have posed quite an interesting, both intellectual and creative challenge for them.
ANN ELIAS: It was, yeah, it was an intellectual challenge. It was a bureaucratic challenge. It was a challenge in all sorts of ways, to work collectively, but also with militaries. And yet, as you say, it allowed such incredible creative freedom at a time when war was so constricting, so that's a kind of interesting aspect of it. They eventually persuaded the Menzies government to see them as serious, and they became, in fact, seconded to the Department of Home Security to work in camouflage research and design.
LAURA THOMAS: So what kind of things were they researching, designing, trialling, testing, what did it look like in practice?
ANN ELIAS: Well, pretty much a lot of the things that were initiated in the First World War. So decoys were important ways of using camouflage materials, like camouflage nets to disguise strategic sites. Bankstown Airport, for example, became a very important area for experimentation in camouflage, in how to disguise aerodromes, in particular, from the aerial view of possible enemy reconnaissance, and none of it came too much. In fact, in the Second World War, the closest that anything came was, and it was serious, was under the water through the camouflage of the surface of Sydney Harbour, when those Japanese midget submarines came in disguised because of the water's opacity, and reached into the harbour. But in terms of a lot of the research that the Department of Home Security undertook, it was for the aerial enemy, and it was to disguise strategic places like aerodromes. But then the war had moved into the Southwest Pacific, and they suddenly ended up on Goodenough Island which became the camouflage centre for the Southwest Pacific. And there, what they tried to initiate was the defence of soldiers and installations through the use of camouflage uniforms, green uniforms, face paint, sound like decoys and installations, decoy installations.
LAURA THOMAS: What were some of those installations?
ANN ELIAS: Well, the Department of Home Security wasn't involved in the biggest installation in the Southwest Pacific. It was actually the work of the Australian Army, and it was an operation called Operation Hackney. And there was an installation that was installed across the entire island of Goodenough to simulate the occupation of that island by a brigade when there were actually just a few struggling soldiers trying to create the illusion that they were a stronghold. And it was a very famous, it's become a very famous undertaking, the Goodenough Island Operation Hackney. But for most of the time though, the work that the Department of Home Security undertook was much smaller in scale. It was about convincing people that they had to hide their shadow, that they had to keep still, that they had to be quiet. Shadows were a huge problem, and the colour of skin was a huge problem in the South West Pacific, pale pink skin. They tried and tried to impress on soldiers to use, what was it called, a camouflage paint that was blackening the skin, but soldiers didn't like to wear it. So it's actually not until the Vietnam War that that all changed,
LAURA THOMAS: And I've been reading a little bit about something called the Hinder Spider...
ANN ELIAS: Oh, yeah. Well, one of the things that was difficult for soldiers was the idea of being able to just pack stuff up and take it and make it mobile. And there had been a number of inventions in Britain about making mobile camouflage nets, but Frank Hinder came up with what was called the Hinder spider, which was a variation of a Wallgrove Spider and by designed by Hinder to make a mobile camouflage net that was much lighter and less expensive to produce. And he was successful with that. He won an award with it at the end of the war. He was a very inventive artist and camofleur.
LAURA THOMAS: Because he worked as well with his wife, didn't he, in some of the dummy installations and things like that? Margel Hinder?
ANN ELIAS: Yes, that's right, she was an artist, and she was involved with model making. They were stationed in Canberra for a lot of the war. They had a child, and they would make models and take them down to creeks and photograph them, the photographing of installation was the only way that people could decide whether or not those schemes were successful. So the National Archives, for example, and also the Australian War Memorial are full of photographs that are documentations of the experiments that the Hinders undertook when they were in the south, in Canberra in those war years, working for the Department of Home Security. Hinder had actually originally been conscripted to the Army, but he was seconded by Dakin, the zoologist, to work in the department of home security, because he was such a talented inventor, along with his wife, Margel.
LAURA THOMAS: Now, you mentioned that earlier in the camouflage area, artists and zoologists struggled for that military arm of things to take them seriously. Is that something that continued throughout this period as well?
ANN ELIAS: Yes, the whole history of the Second World War camouflage organisation through civilians becoming involved with the military is one of fraught tensions. The camoufleurs, as they were called in the Department of Home Security, were civilians, obviously, they were artists who were seconded to work for the government, but they were given no uniform and they had no means of identifying themselves. When they were placed in military contexts, imagine in the Southwest Pacific, for example, but even on the military bases, Max Dupain talks a lot about this. On the military bases, no one knew who they were because they couldn't be identified, and identification by uniform was pretty important in those military times, in organisations, as remains to be. So the relationships were fraught. They felt that they weren't taken seriously. They felt that artists weren't taken seriously in Australian society, and therefore artists working in war were doubly disadvantaged, and then William Daikin himself was considered to be a difficult person for the Army in particular to deal with. And what happened was eventually relations got so frayed that the Army said, 'We're going our own way. We're not going to be advised by civilians on how to do camouflage. We'll do it our way'. And Dakin was left fuming about that. He put so much time and effort into this. And in the end, it was a question of the separation of civilian knowledge and military knowledge.
LAURA THOMAS: It's, I think, a struggle that sometimes can continue still. I thought Anne that we could talk a little bit about Darwin, because that's a chapter in Australia's military history that kind of shows, I guess, the impact of the lack of camouflage in that space. Can you explain what happened in Darwin in 1941?
ANN ELIAS: What happened in 1941 is that by this stage, the Department of Home Security was up and running, right, and William Dakin was in charge as the director of camouflage, directing their military, which was fraught and full of tension. And Dakin thought, 'Look, we need to send someone up to Darwin', after the bombing of Pearl Harbour by Japanese, 'We need to send someone up to Darwin and have a look what's going on up there in terms of camouflaging the city from a potential Japanese attack'. So he sent Eric Thompson, who was a designer in Hollywood, a set designer, very talented artist. He sent Eric Thompson up to Darwin, and Thompson did a recce by plane, and could see that nothing was going to protect Darwin if there was any threat by air from Japanese. So he came back and complained about the poor state of camouflage of Darwin and Dakin got involved with an argument with the army.
ANN ELIAS: It turned out that the Army and the Navy were arguing between themselves about camouflage for Darwin, but eventually Dakin got his way and a ship called the Zealandia was sent up full of camouflage materials to Darwin. It arrived in the port of Darwin, I think, on the day that Darwin is bombed, the 19th of February, 1942 and the Zealandia, who had been a ship painted in dazzle camouflage in the First World War. In fact, the Zealandia was sunk, so all those camouflage materials went to the bottom of of the harbour, and then the town was bombed. And after that, everyone got a very good idea of what it means to be visible from the air. And things started more in earnest at that stage, and that's when Dakin and the Department of Home Security started making all their strong arguments against khaki, wear green, you know, think about your background.
LAURA THOMAS: Yeah, I can imagine having that real world example happen helped the case of the artists in saying you've got to take this seriously. It's incredibly important for us to be looking into this more.
ANN ELIAS: All the hard work was done by that stage. And then by 1943 things were cooling, (19)44 things were cooling down. By the end of the war, no one was cared less about camouflage, as Max Dupain pointed out. And so there was just an intense period, I'd say, from 41 to 45 where a lot of work was done on camouflage that then played out later in military camouflage, maybe in the Korean War, but more so in Vietnam. The importance of disguise became much more important. We know from movies like Apocalypse Now that aural or soniccamouflage was really a major progression in the Vietnam War. And I think, you know, things have become much more, let's say, high tech, where some of the ideas that were being thrown around, say, in Frank Hinder's time he was talking about a chameleon suit, that where you might disappear. Well, this wasn't in use in the Vietnam War. But that's come out of wars like Vietnam. So from what I can see, one of the evolutions of warfare and camouflage has been things like the chameleonic camouflage suit that's embedded with technologies that are chemical, that change colour, like a chameleon, so that you blend with your background. I'm not sure how widespread this is, but in the Vietnam War, it was much more like the Second World War.
LAURA THOMAS: And I've heard that there's also an invisibility cloak, as it's called, that was used by the Australian Army. The technology is just incredible. How far it's come and probably how far it will continue to go. I'm interested Annein your opinion, of how influential camouflage has been in Australia's military. We talked about in length, about how it wasn't necessarily taken seriously. But how important do you think it's been?
ANN ELIAS: Well more so after the early 20th century, what you're talking about is the scepticism that I mentioned about camouflage in the early 20th century. But then, as we've also been saying, it became naturalised as a practice for individual soldiers in the Vietnam War, and today, military camouflage patterns are hugely influential on military identity globally. So there's a huge array of designs, and there are books published on the array of camouflage designs that are there, whether it's for water, whether it's for snow, whatever the conditions are, demand a different pattern. And then you have national designs associated with particular national armies and navies and militaries. And it's developed a reputation for a kind of hyper masculinity, so very influential, but progressively influential as militaries have changed over the 20th century into the 21st century, I would say
LAURA THOMAS: Another element of camouflage history that I found absolutely fascinating is that the public were giving contributions or suggestions for what camouflage could or should be. Can you explain that a little bit more?
ANN ELIAS: Yes, so the newspapers were actually full of updates on camouflage. They had to be careful because they couldn't reveal what was going on, but they knew that there was a lot happening, and they were intrigued. Of course, the First World War had made them intrigued in decoys, in particular, how you could have a dummy tank placed on a field, and, you know, all this kind of thing was intriguing. So the public liked to come up with their own ideas about how to protect cities in Australia. And there was one person who suggested to Dakin that they redirect the visibility of a bomber, you know, an enemy bomber potentially coming over Sydney by reorganising the lights of the city so that they would direct attention to, say, Moore Park, instead of the centre of the city, where all the strategic installations, like oil tanks and so on. There was another person who suggested, Why don't you put mirrors on the sides of the battleships, thinking, maybe that was original. But of course, that had been debated and and trialled many, many times. There were lots of ideas that came to the fore, but for Dakin, it wasn't helpful, because he felt that these ideas were giving the wider public the idea that camouflage was just a bit of decoration and not deadly serious, and he needed, at that stage, to convince the militaries of its seriousness as a war weapon, so it's kind of detrimental to his cause.
LAURA THOMAS: What happened to all of these camoufleurs after the war?
ANN ELIAS: Well, the artists returned to their studios. They returned to work. They were changed people, they were changed. I'm thinking about Hinder and Dupain here. So it was no problem to return to the studio, but when they were returned to work, there were problems. So for example, when Frank Hinder went back to work in advertising, he found that he was now the older generation, that the newer generation who had replaced him while he was involved with war work, had new ideas, and they saw him as an older, perhaps out of date, designer once he returned. So he mentions that in his diaries.
ANN ELIAS: Max Dupain had different issues, and they were psychological as well, in the sense that he didn't want to return to advertising, commercial photography. He said it was a lie, and in fact, like camouflage is a lie, he could see commercial photography for beauty and fashion as a lie also, that sort of invents a kind of cosmetic world. And he wanted to do something much more real about people, and he became famously involved in documentary photography. They were changed people. And Dupain in particular, really felt the scales of humanity and how they were affected in wartime, and he wrote a lot about that. So I think pretty much what happened to them was they reevaluated their lives, and they had to do different kinds of work.
LAURA THOMAS: What legacy do you think that these artists and architects and this group of creative people left on the Australian military in the camouflage space?
ANN ELIAS: I can answer that better on what they left for artists than I can the military. As a researcher of camouflage, I was intrigued to find there was very little on camouflage research. Having published a book and written articles on it, I see my work referenced in the Australian War Memorial, for example. I think what's happened is that the legacy has come through from the subsequent research on going back and saying, this has been an overlooked history. The artists who worked in camouflage, you can't see them in books on Australian Art History. Starting to happen now, if you have a look at Helen Ennis new biography on Max Dupain, she includes a lot of research on camouflage that you'll find in my book that refers specifically to Dupain. So the legacy has come through subsequent research, and that has been helpful for getting the names of these artists more public, but it's been too late for them, because they passed on before this interest that you're showing, for example, has become public.
LAURA THOMAS: And it's a legacy that we hope to share more through this exhibition that we have on the Shrine, because it's such an important impact. And as we've spoken about, camouflage is vital for modern Army, Navy, Air Force today. So thank you so much, Anne for shedding light on this story. It's been wonderful to chat with you.
ANN ELIAS: Thank you, Laura.
LAURA THOMAS: Thank you for listening to this episode of the podcast. The Shrine's new exhibition, Camouflage, is on display in our galleries now. It's free to visit, just head to shrine.org.au for all the details. For more, make sure you subscribe to our podcast wherever you listen.
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