A collection of handkerchiefs carrying messages of hope from Afghani women will be on display at the Australian War Memorial

And, when it comes to communicating the extent of loss through war, a message or image sewn on a handkerchief is a poignant reminder of wartime circumstances.

A recently acquired collection of such handkerchiefs, exchanged between Australian and Afghan women, will take pride of place at the Australian War Memorial when it opens its new Afghanistan display in 2025.

The Handkerchief Project, founded by Melbourne artist Gali Weiss, began as a way of supporting women in Afghanistan in their quest to acquire and use literacy skills, in a time when these were severely under threat.

"In 2009, there were lots and lots of articles coming out about women's desperate situations in Afghanistan ... about the lack of being able to access literacy skills," she said.

"And the thing is that the reaction towards that was so violent, both in terms of violence towards them, and their own suicide and self-immolation. Things like that really struck me especially because I had just finished my own PhD, and this just so accentuated it, because it's not about privilege, it's about rights."

Wanting to do something, anything, to show these women they were supported overseas, Weiss gathered together a group of women artist friends who stood ready to help.

She also made contact with a vocational centre in Kabul, where women were acquiring sewing skills to be able to make a living.

"We needed something compact and small - and then I thought, well, their background is in sewing skills," Weiss said, adding that the first part of the project involved tiny artists' books.

"Then handkerchiefs seemed the answer because even though we don't use them much here in Australia, they're loaded with history and emotions too. We use them the world over for sad experiences and for happy experiences, so it was something that we could connect the cultures to as well."

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The handkerchiefs in the project are all ones that had been pre-owned, often by family members, and the first marks on each reflect the Australian artist's environment, including themes of place, nature and history.

They were then delivered to the vocational centre in Kabul, where Afghan women learning literacy skills there were invited to write or embroider directly on, over or around the Australian women's imagery.

The 43 that came back to Australia bore messages such as: "My aim is to become a judge"; "Our country needs peace"; "I wish to see my family healthy"; "I want to live in freedom forever"; and "I hope that no more Afghan mothers shed tears from the loss of their children".

Memorial curator Ally Roche said The Handkerchief Project, even while it did not involve members of the military or an official war artist, was an important reminder of why the Australian Defence Force was in Afghanistan in the first place.

"It's actually the Afghanistan people speaking about what the war did to them, and what they wanted to achieve as well," she said.

"These voices are now going to be in our galleries, for all of the Australian populace to see and learn about what the civilians go through during a war."

She said they would have pride of place in the memorial's Afghan Galleries, and would be displayed in batches.

"They're a very delicate medium, but they're also a very emotional medium," she said.

"They're a keepsake as well for a lot of people, especially in Afghan society, but also in our society. You think about the older generations - the lace handkerchief was always prominent on our citizens."

Weiss said the project was about the importance of education for all.

"Those handkerchiefs, because they've been touched, and they've been handled, and they're not clean anymore, they're not pristine - there are two people on each space of the handkerchiefs," she said.

"It's an entity but it's two people - it's a presence of the people there ... with their hopes and their messages and it's a record of a particular time.

"These women would have been an absence, nobody would have heard them.

"They were learning those literacy skills only about a year, and here with their hopes, they were able to actually verbalise them.

"They need to have that voice because they're part of the war. I talk about this sense of responsibility, and I know that some of the others do too, because Australia has been involved in Afghanistan, that responsibility reflects on us as well."

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