Larissa Zanardo will travel to Darwin and Singapore to experience firsthand the conditions in which Australian soldiers fought and died thanks to her Anzac Day fascination.
The Wandana Heights teen was one of 22 students to receive The Premier’s Spirit of Anzac Prize this month, and the only recipient from western Victoria.
“On Anzac day I feel an emotional pang in my chest,” said the Sacred Heart College year 11 student.
Larissa’s enthusiasm to explore Australia’s wartime history drove her “to constantly dig deeper” into books and letters, and travel to the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
“The most valuable and enlightening sources were letters from the Smythe family who served in WWI,” she said.
Larissa used her research to combine poetry and painting in an artwork depicting the futility of war.
“It has the war in the background, a grenade exploding, and men fighting and dying, with a tombstone in the foreground,” she said.
Larissa drew inspiration from American novelist John Steinbeck, who described was as “a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal”.
“War has the ability to turn people into something they are not, brutally taking away everything we love and ending in sorrow,” she said.
“We can only hope that humans have developed and learnt from their mistakes.”
Larissa will represent Victoria on an all-expenses study tour of Darwin and Singapore during holidays.
