The decision to build the memorial museum was taken by Prime Minister Paul Keating in 1994 when he attended the Anzac Day at Hellfire Pass. This was the year in which a portion of the ashes of the prisoner-of-war surgeon Sir Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop were buried at Hellfire Pass.
Moved by the ceremony Keating gained the approval of the Thai government to build the memorial museum. Hellfire Pass, like many other sites that Australians sometimes claim to ‘own’ given their centrality to the national memory of war, resides on foreign territory and on land controlled by the Royal Thai Armed Forces Headquarters.