Bushmaster

"I met a young man who’d been in the back of a Bushmaster [armoured vehicle] that had blown up. The Bushmaster is the big armoured four-wheel drive vehicle that’s saving a lot of Australian lives, but even so the explosion caused every single young man inside that vehicle to suffer from concussion and one of them was blown out of the gun turret and landed in front of the vehicle among possibly more hidden explosive devices."
Ben Quilty

In Afghanistan, official war artist Ben Quilty (b. 1973) witnessed the destruction that could be wrought on an armoured vehicle specifically designed to safely transport passengers in one of the most dangerous places in the world.
In this work, the destroyed vehicle reflects the soldiers’ identity and is a vestige of their physical experience. The notion of mortality is present in this work: the Bushmaster has become a vanitas motif, a reminder of the transience of life and the dangerous nature of the Australian deployment in Afghanistan.