a disenfranchised grief: post-war death and memorialisation in australia after the first world war

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A Disenfranchised Grief: Post-warDeath and Memorialisation in Australiaafter the First World WarMarina LarssonPublished online: 13 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Marina Larsson (2009) A Disenfranchised Grief: Post-war Death andMemorialisation in Australia after the First World War, Australian Historical Studies, 40:1, 79-95,DOI: 10.1080/10314610802663035

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A Disenfranchised Grief : Post-warDeath and Memorial isat ion in Austral ia

af ter the Firs t World War*

MARINA LARSSON

The 1918 Armistice signalled the end of the First World War, but it did not mark the end

of war-related deaths. During the 1920s and 1930s thousands of Australian ex-

servicemen died from their war wounds. This article examines families’ experiences of

grief and loss as a consequence of post-war death, and considers how these deaths were

privately and publicly memorialised. It argues that the kin of the post-war dead

constituted a community of mourners that was distinct from the bereaved kin of the 1914-

18 dead. It reveals how the grief of the post-war bereaved was disenfranchised within

Australia’s national public commemorative traditions of war which reified the ’supreme

sacrifice’ of the battlefield dead, but rendered invisible the ’lingering sacrifice’ of deceased

ex-servicemen. By identifying and historicising families’ experiences of post-war death

and bereavement, this article asserts the distinctiveness and importance of that history,

and demonstrates its capacity to enrich and challenge our understanding of ’war death’

and patterns of grief and memorialisation after the Great War.

During the 1920s and 1930s, a ‘cult of the fallen’ sat at the heart of Australia’s

national culture of commemoration of the First World War.1 War memorials

faithfully honoured the ‘glorious dead’ and Anzac Day remembrance services

paid tribute to the men who died overseas having ‘given birth to the nation’.

Such traditions emerged to assist bereaved families to grieve in the absence of a

body and to preserve memories of the 60,000 battlefield dead and their ‘supreme

sacrifice’. The sacred status of Australia’s ‘young immortals’ of 1914-18,

however, served to overshadow publicly another population of soldiers killed

by war*the post-war dead. The exact number is not clear, but in 1926 the

Repatriation Department estimated that some 20,000 ex-servicemen had died

from their war wounds.2 By 1937, the RSSILA (Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’

Imperial League of Australia) asserted that this figure had surpassed 60,000.3

These men were not the youthful ‘fallen’ who died suddenly in the face of

enemy fire, but physically and mentally damaged men who suffered a ‘drawn

out dying’ often over many years.4 Yet even though they laid down their lives as

surely as the wartime dead, their passing had an uncertain place in Australia’s

* The author would like to thank Bart Ziino and two anonymous referees for their helpful commentson this article.

1 George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1990), 80.

2 NSW RSSILA to National RSSILA, 4/1/1926, National Library of Australia (hereafter NLA),Returned Services League (hereafter RSL) Collection, MS 6609, File 2515B.

3 Reveille, April 1937, 3. This estimate is incorrect, see n 23.4 The Optimist, March 1934, 6.

ISSN 1031-461X print/ISSN 1940-5049 online # 2009 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/1031461080266303579

Australian Historical Studies, Month 2009; 40(0): 79�95 :

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public memorialising traditions. Dead veterans were seldom named on war

memorials amongst the ‘Gallant Fallen’, and official speakers rarely spoke at

length on Anzac Day about their demise. While national commemorative

traditions spoke powerfully to bereaved relatives who had lost soldiers during

the war, the grief and loss of families whose ‘shattered’ soldiers returned home

to die was rarely acknowledged.

This article examines Australian families’ experiences of grief and loss as a

consequence of ‘post-war death’ during the 1920s and 1930s and considers how

these deaths were privately and publicly memorialised. It argues that the kin of

the post-war dead constituted a community of mourners that was distinct from

the bereaved kin of the 1914�18 dead. While some historians have emphasised

the ‘bonds of bereavement’ that unified mourners in the aftermath of war, this

article exposes differences in the modes of grief and loss experienced by these

two groups, and highlights their competing claims for remembrance.5 In doing

so, it reveals how the grief of the post-war bereaved was disenfranchised within

Australia’s national public commemorative traditions of war. Firmly focused

upon the ‘supreme sacrifice’ of the battlefield dead, dominant codes of

remembrance overlooked the ‘lingering sacrifice’ of ageing and damaged diggers

who died after the war.6 Each year at Anzac Day services across Australia, the

sentiments of the Ode*’Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn’*may well have consoled families of young men killed at Gallipoli and on the

Western Front. Less clear, however, is meaning of these words for families who

had witnessed a loved one gradually succumb to his war wounds: age had

wearied these soldiers, and the years had condemned them.

In recent years, there has been a surge of historical interest, both in

Australia and internationally, in the war dead of the First World War. Historians

have examined the commemoration of war death, exploring how bereaved

soldiers, families, and communities expressed their grief through personal acts of

remembrance and public political action.7 Underpinning most studies, however,

is a spatial and temporal assumption that the ‘war dead’ died ‘at’ and ‘during’

the war: scholars have had little to say about the deaths of returned soldiers who

died from their disabilities after the war.8 Indeed, two separate historiographies

5 Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1995), 228.

6 The Optimist, March 1934, 6.7 See Mosse; Winter; K.S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne:

Melbourne University Press, 1998); Daniel J. Sherman, The Construction of Memory in Interwar France(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memoryand Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999); TanjaLuckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War(Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004); Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves andthe Great War (Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 2007).

8 For exceptions see Pat Jalland, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War Medicineand the Funeral Business (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006), 106-126; Joy Damousi, Living with theAftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press,2001), 164-191 and 193.

80 Australian Historical Studies, 40, 2009

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have developed: one examines the ‘war dead’ and those who ‘survived’, such as

the disabled.9 The post-war dead call us to reconsider these conceptual

boundaries. Through their survival and return, they resist analysis in the

same terms as the ‘fallen’. In Australia, for example, the ‘absent body’ of the war

dead has been a central theme in most studies, but the families of the post-war

dead were able to grieve over a ‘present body’. To date, historians have neither

fully interrogated the category ‘war death’ nor explored the varieties of war-

related grief, their public and private meanings and periodisation. Indeed,

families of the post-war dead present a challenge to a fundamental assumption

of the Australian historiography of the Great War: that ‘bereavement was much

harder for those who had no body to mourn’.10

It is important to identify and disaggregate the grief of the wartime

bereaved and the post-war bereaved because they were products of particular

historical moments. Grief is profoundly affected by the type of death a

bereaved person has suffered and is grounded in personal and wider cultural

‘loss contexts’.11 Joy Damousi’s observation that ‘sacrifice has a history’

captures well the dynamic and contingent nature of war grief, and prompts

us to consider a spectrum of loss experiences during the 1920s and 1930s.12

By examining post-war death on its own terms, the distinctiveness of its

associated grief and complex meanings within memorialising cultures

becomes evident. The deaths of ex-servicemen were a familiar and constitu-

ent part of war’s aftermath. Paradoxically, however, dominant post-war

commemorative discourses remained steadfastly concentrated on the sacrifices

of the wartime dead. As Pierre Nora has observed, the ‘sites of memory’ that

emerged during the early 1920s functioned to ‘stop time’ and evoke past

memories of the fallen.13 As a consequence, dead ex-servicemen became a

commemorative anomaly: they were more part of the present than the past.

Their deaths challenged the ‘backward gaze’ of national commemorative

traditions and threatened to usurp the primacy of the ‘fallen’ by shifting the

focus to veterans’ contemporary suffering and demise.14

The marginalisation of the post-war dead within national collective memory

had a profound effect upon their families: it disenfranchised their grief. The

concept of disenfranchised grief was developed by psychologist Kenneth Doka in

the late 1980s, and has become an influential theory within the scholarship of

9 Winter, 6�7.10 Bruce Scates, ‘The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and

the Great War’, Labour History 81 (November 2001): 29�50, 40.11 Kathy Charmaz, ‘Grief and Loss of Self’, in The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the

USA, eds. Kathy Charmaz, Glennys Howarth and Allan Kellehear (London: Macmillan, 1997):229�41, 231.

12 Joy Damousi, ‘Private Loss, Public Mourning: Motherhood, Memory and Grief in Australia Duringthe Inter-War Years’, Women’s History Review 8, no. 2, (1999): 365�378, 366.

13 Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire’, Representations 26 (Spring 1989):7�24, 19.

14 Winter, 223.

Larsson: A Disenfranchised Grief 81

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grief, loss, and bereavement.15 Disenfranchised grief is experienced when a

person suffers a loss, but that loss cannot be openly acknowledged, publicly

mourned, or socially supported because society’s ‘grieving rules’ do not afford

the person a recognised right, role, or capacity to grieve.16 The death may be

stigmatised (suicide), the loss may be minimised (miscarriage), the relationship

may be devalued (the death of a gay partner), or the griever may symbolically or

actually be excluded from public rituals of mourning and commemoration.17

Disenfranchised grief is a broad concept applicable in a variety of contemporary

and historical contexts in which mourners carry a ‘hidden sorrow’ that is never

fully publicly acknowledged. Such mourners constitute an ‘underclass of

grievers’ whose marginalisation complicates their ‘mourning work’ and reduces

their sources of social support.18

Families of the post-war dead were disenfranchised grievers. This does not

mean that they were unable to find ways in which to grieve, but that their

opportunities to mourn publicly were restricted because their losses received

little validation or ‘enfranchisement’. At the very time when public recognition

may have strengthened their capacity to cope with their losses, these bereaved

relatives were left with a sense that they had suffered a war-related death

without honour or privilege. Yet, just as grief can be disenfranchised, it can also

be enfranchised. As Doka observes, marginalised mourners often seek out or

create alternative spaces of support and meaning to validate their losses.19

Families of the post-war dead lived within spheres of enfranchisement at the

national, community, and family levels. Organisations such the Returned

Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA), for example,

actively enfranchised the grief of these families by taking on the role of ‘fictive

kin’, and facilitating grieving rituals which validated the specificity of their

losses.20 While families’ ‘labours of loss’ may have been submerged within

Australia’s dominant commemorative traditions, relatives found ways to

mediate their grief and engaged sympathetic partners within their communities

to do so.

This complex history of exclusion, agency, and negotiation, however, is

difficult to uncover in the archives. Kin of the post-war dead did not tend to

mobilise publicly, nor did the community groups who assisted them always

15 See Kenneth J. Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief: Recognising Hidden Sorrow (Massachusetts:Lexington Books, 1989), 3�11; Kenneth J. Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions,Challenges, and Strategies for Practice (Illinois: Research Press, 2002). I thank Pam Rycroft forintroducing me to this concept.

16 Kenneth J. Doka, ‘Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief, 3�4.17 Thomas Attig, ‘Disenfranchised Grief Revisited: Discounting Hope and Love’, Omega 49(3), (2004):

197�215, 199�200.18 Vanderlyn R. Pine, ‘Death, Loss and Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief, 13�

23, 14; Charles A. Corr, ‘Revisiting the Concept of Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed.,Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, 39�60, 42; Doka, ‘Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed.,Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, 7.

19 See Kenneth J. Doka, ‘The Role of Ritual in the Treatment of Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed.Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, 135�47, 146.

20 Winter, 30 and 47; Scates, 39.


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document their experiences. While oral history interviews with the children of

deceased veterans offer an insight into the emotional worlds of bereaved

families, it remains a challenging task to comprehend fully relatives’ relation-

ships with public sites of memory.21 Indeed, the meaning of public memorials

was widely contested and the evidence reveals a diversity of private responses.

Some kin adapted and recast the language of battlefield sacrifice to assert their

loved ones’ equality with the ‘fallen’, while others found little relevance in

rituals designed to honour the 1914-18 dead. Responses differed within families.

Women, particularly mothers, are overrepresented amongst kin who corre-

sponded with official authorities, while fathers were more restrained in their

public expressions of grief.22 Families’ burdens of grief involved negotiating a

meaningful relationship with powerful patterns of remembrance that had

become part of Australia’s national collective memory. The extent to which

kin were successful in this endeavour remains elusive. The contours of their

grief, however, remain worthy of examination for they reveal the fraught

process of making sense of a ‘war death’ within the limits of national

commemorative codes. Kin of the post-war dead inhabited a different world

of grief to relatives of the 1914-18 dead. When the experiences of these

communities of mourners are disentangled and historicised, two intersecting

histories become visible. The history of post-war death and grief challenges us to

think beyond the limits of the 60,000 ‘fallen’, and enriches and broadens our

understanding of Australians’ experiences of loss as a consequence of war. It also

alerts us that the number of Australians bereaved by war-related death is much

larger than we usually recognise.

The Armistice of 11 November 1918 signified the cessation of hostilities, but

it did not mark the end of war-related deaths. While the 60,000 Australian

wartime dead remained a constant number, the ranks of the post-war dead

swelled during the 1920s and 1930s. Inconsistencies in Repatriation Department

statistics prior to 1925 make it difficult to accurately determine the total number

of post-war deaths. We do know, however, that between 1925 and 1940, 13,595

ex-servicemen pensioners died from officially ‘accepted’ war causes, which

equated to about two to three veterans each day.23 Ex-servicemen died of an

enormous range of war-related conditions including the effects of deteriorating

war wounds, and chronic diseases, while others succumbed to alcoholism or

took their own lives. In 1940, the comparative census data of 1933 demon-

strated that returned soldiers were dying on average four years younger than

civilian men, which the RSSILA attributed to the ‘burning out’ effects of war

service.24 A decade after the Armistice, newspapers and returned soldier

21 Winter, 116; Inglis, Sacred Places, 223; Daniel Sherman, The Construction of Memory, 5�6. This articleis part of a larger research project for which I interviewed eleven children of First World veterans.

22 On gendered responses to bereavement see Luckins, 123; Damousi, Labour of Loss, 46�64.23 A.G. Butler, The Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the war of 1914�18, vol. 3

(Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1943), 965.24 Census of the Commonwealth of Australia, 30 June 1933, Statistician’s Report, 1940, 398; Stephen

Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), 95�97.


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magazines carried ‘casualty lists’ of a new kind. ‘In Memoriam’ notices and

feature articles reported on the deaths, not of young Anzacs, but of middle-aged

ex-servicemen whose wounds had finally taken their toll.25 In 1928, for

example, the Sydney Morning Herald described the death of Frank Healy, who

had been paralysed at Gallipoli. ‘Sapper Healy Dies: 13 Year Ordeal’, cried the

headline as the article described how he had lain ‘helpless on an aircushion’

since 1915.26

Ex-servicemen’s ‘ways of death’ during the post-war years stand in stark

contrast to those of the ‘fallen’. Rather than being ‘cut down’ on the battlefield,

they typically endured years of ill health, suffering a gradual decline in the

knowledge that their wounds would ultimately claim their lives. While wartime

death overseas occurred in the public space of the battlefield or in military

hospitals, returned soldiers often passed away in more familiar settings, such as

their own homes or local repatriation hospitals. Importantly, their deaths were

characterised by the presence of family. While kin of the 1914�18 dead could

only imagine their soldiers’ final moments, relatives of returned men became

intimate witnesses to their suffering. Despite the ‘medicalisation of death’, many

ailing veterans passed away at home or died surrounded by kin at the ‘Repat’.27

Medical advances meant that life could be prolonged for a much greater time

than after previous wars. For some families, however, the grieving process began

the day their soldier returned home. Alexander Cameron was already dying

when he was invalided to Melbourne after being crushed by an ammunition

wagon in 1917. His sisters nursed him at home until he died in December

1919.28 Like the Cameron sisters, many family members watched as returned

men struggled with fatal impairments. In 1922, the wife and children of one

soldier were reported to cherish their daily life together as it was soon to pass*’he is likely to die at any minute’ observed one visitor.29

Post-war deaths had emotional consequences for families that varied greatly

according to their circumstances. A quick death was arguably easier for kin than

one that involved the gradual demise of their loved one. However, the passing of

men who had endured years of ‘living death’ could come as a relief for families, as

death brought finality to their suffering and dependence. Families sometimes

experienced a ‘double grieving’ when they reflected upon the damage wreaked by

war upon the life of the deceased soldier.30 This was particularly so for shell-

shocked or severely disabled men who had died an earlier psychological or social

death.31 Death released family members from nursing invalid soldiers and

managing the behaviours of the mentally disturbed. As households started their

25 See Reveille, 1 June 1934, 17.26 Sydney Morning Herald, 10 August 1928, 12.27 See Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840�1918 (Melbourne:

Oxford University Press, 2002), 325�28.28 See Papers of Alexander Pullar Cameron, State Library of Victoria, MS 10714.29 Tasmanian RSSILA to National RSSILA, 13/11/1922, NLA, RSL, MS 6609, File 1432B.30 Beverley Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 63.31 Doka, ‘Disenfranchised Grief’, in Doka, ed., Disenfranchised Grief: New Directions, 6.


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new rhythms, kin also had time to reflect upon ‘what might have been’. For some,

physical artefacts such as walking sticks and artificial limbs reminded them of the

challenges of their shared life together. Suicide was one of the most difficult types

of death for families. Here, the grieving process was complicated because their

loved one had chosen to abandon them.32 Distressed kin were not only left with

the stigma of suicide, but the shame that their ex-soldier may be viewed as

morally or mentally weak. Such men had little in common with the heroic

battlefield fallen, having made no apparent ‘sacrifice’ through their death.

One of the first steps toward the enfranchisement of relatives’ grief was the

official acceptance of their soldier’s death as ‘war caused’. During the war, the

war-relatedness of soldiers’ deaths was rarely in question. In the post-war

period, however, a death was not officially accepted until the Repatriation

Department had conducted an investigation. In some instances, disputes arose

when families strongly believed that the death was the result of war, but this

could not be clinically proven because of insufficient medical evidence.

‘Rejected’ families were not eligible for a funeral grant and any pension

payments immediately ceased. Importantly, they were denied the consolation

that their loved one’s death resulted from his battlefield sacrifices. Mrs N.

Fletcher’s husband died in 1929, and her anger was still palpable in 1936: ‘I

really believe that all the pain he suffered was partly responsible for his

death . . . the Repatriation Department wanted me to prove it . . . God only

knows I could not prove it . . . .’33 For such relatives, official rejection of a death

became a stumbling block to the effective resolution of grief, as well as causing

financial hardship. The Department’s disavowal of ‘war causes’ saw mourners

enter a kind of bureaucratic and emotional purgatory. As ‘unaccepted’ wives

moved forward, they struggled to claim a ‘war widow’ identity in the light of

their unrecognised post-war sacrifices and those of their husbands.34

Although the Department divided veterans’ families into two classes, the

bereaved kin of ‘rejected’ and ‘accepted’ ex-servicemen had one thing in

common: the presence of a body to mourn. This made their ‘ways of grief’

markedly different to relatives who had experienced a wartime death overseas.

Kin of the ‘fallen’ endured a ‘distant grief’ knowing that their soldier’s body would

never be returned to Australia.35 They had little say over the burial of their loved

one, and could only imagine how he was laid to rest, or request an official

photograph of the grave.36 By contrast, relatives of the post-war dead were able to

grieve in the presence of a body and could exercise a high degree of control over

funeral and burial arrangements.37 These families were custodians of their loved

32 Raphael, 30.33 N. Fletcher to Director of the Australian War Memorial (hereafter AWM), 12 November 1936,

AWM 93, 2/5/19C, Part 2.34 See Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, 193.35 Ziino, A Distant Grief.36 Argus, 20 July 1920, 9.37 See funeral arrangements for Ambrose Kerin, May 1920, Papers of Mulqueen Funerals, University

of Melbourne Archives, 82/44, Book 7, 44.


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one’s body and agents of the rituals of death. They were free to mediate their grief

through private and public rites of their own choosing. Newspaper death notices

typically represented families’ first attempt to articulate the meaning of the death

within the broader community. Some proudly affirmed the link between their

veteran’s wartime sacrifice and his passing. In August 1926, nine years after his

discharge, Harold Kenworthy’s parents placed a death notice in the Hobart Mercury

lamenting the loss of their ‘youngest beloved son’ and proudly noted that he was

‘late [of the] A.I.F. 30th Battalion’.38

At ex-soldiers’ funerals, families had the opportunity to make meaning of

their losses more fully in front of a sympathetic audience. They could grieve not

only over the death, but for other post-war losses. After the death of her limbless

soldier uncle in 1929, Beverley Broadbent recalled that mourners at his funeral

grieved over his passing, as well as the loss of his dream to make a success of his

soldier settlement block, and for the emotional and financial anguish of his

surviving wife and two boys.39 Importantly, funerals presented an opportunity

for families to draw upon the support of broader social networks. Families often

enlisted the help of the RSSILA to conduct the funeral or incorporate formal

League rituals into the service. These included draping a flag across the coffin,

displaying soldiers’ medals on top, and providing red poppies to mourners.40

Sometimes a League representative gave a speech acknowledging the effects of

war upon the soldier. For rejected families, those locked in protracted

administrative battles with the Repatriation Department, and surviving kin of

men who had taken their own lives, a formal RSSILA funeral provided a quasi-

official setting in which kin could declare the death a ‘war death’. After the

suicide of VC winner Hugo Throssell in 1933, the chaplain insisted at his funeral

that Throssell had ‘died for his country as surely as if he had perished in the

trenches’.41

Community organisations such as the RSSILA, Red Cross, and the Anzac

Fellowship of Women, formed an important network of support for kin of the

post-war dead. Through the provision of practical, emotional, and financial

assistance, they became ‘fictive kin’ who responded to families in their moment

of need. Importantly, they paved the way for the enfranchisement of families’

grief at the community level. The RSSILA, along with disabled soldier

organisations, provided funds to families unable to bear the cost of soldiers’

funerals, especially those whose deaths were rejected.42 One of Diane Nicholas’

strongest memories of her father’s death was her mother’s feelings of frustration

and powerlessness at not being able to pay for his funeral. She turned to the

RSSILA who willingly provided funds.43 Similarly, the Red Cross provided

38 Hobart Mercury, 23 August 1926, 1.39 Interview with Beverley Broadbent, 6 October 2004.40 Interviews with Beverley Broadbent, 6 October 2004; Keith Falconer, 20 October 2004.41 Ric Throssell, My Father’s Son (Melbourne: William Heinemann, 1989), 141.42 TSAS Minute Book, 8 January 1925, TSAS Collection, State Library of South Australia (hereafter

SLSA), SRG 488, Box 3A.43 Interview with Diane Nicholas, 12 October 2004.


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‘comforts’ to destitute families of the returned dead, and the Tubercular Soldiers’

Aid Society (TSAS) made ongoing weekly payments to unpensioned widows of

tubercular soldiers, whose deaths had not been officially accepted.44 During ex-

servicemen’s post-war lives, such organisations provided a hidden tier of welfare

for families struggling on disability pensions. After veterans died, they continued

to support families by validating their losses as ‘war caused’, and commemorat-

ing men’s death in those terms, thereby offering kin a sense that their grief was

recognised beyond the family sphere.

Bereaved families also found acknowledgement within informal networks

of support, such as, employment and church communities, as well as amongst

friends and extended kin. Although these private emotional transactions were

infrequently documented, there is evidence that personal supporters encour-

aged kin to find purpose in their loved one’s death. As the mate of one veteran

declared in 1934, ‘That war service was the cause of his untimely death, must be

some consolation to those he has left behind.’45 Such expressions of sympathy

were undoubtedly valued greatly by kin, because their experiences of loss were

seldom validated by larger national commemorative endeavours. Indeed, within

the public memorialising rituals which became part of the national social fabric

after the war, post-war death and families’ attendant grief had little place. On

the war memorials that came to define the Australia’s civic landscapes during

the early 1920s, names of the post-war dead were virtually never inscribed

under headings such as ‘The Heroic Dead’. Understandably, given that every

second Australian family was touched by the loss of a relative who had died

between 1914 and 1918, the ‘fallen’ became the focus of public commemora-

tion.46 As a consequence, however, the post-war dead were forever listed as

men who ‘served’, rather than as men who ‘died’ as a consequence of war.

In Australia’s towns and suburbs, war memorials were powerful ‘sites of

memory’ for kin of the wartime dead, but acted less successfully as lieux des

memoire in relation to the post-war dead. This was a population that was difficult

to memorialise publicly. In the years immediately after the war, local commu-

nities erected memorials to acknowledge the sacrifice of the wartime dead and to

act as a surrogate grave for kin whose loved one’s body had never been returned

home.47 During the design process, they debated the merits of listing the

returned dead alongside the fallen, but most were not prepared to leave an

ominous space for those ‘yet to die’, nor argue about the inclusion of those

whose deaths had not been officially ‘accepted’.48 War memorials were

constructed from imperishable materials which made inscriptions expensive

and difficult to amend in the future. Moreover, in the eyes of some, it was best

44 Australian Red Cross Society, NSW Division, Annual Report, 1930-31, 28; TSAS Minute Book, 8January 1925, TSAS Collection, SLSA, SRG 488, Box 3A.

45 Reveille, 1 June 934, 17.46 Inglis, Sacred Places, 97.47 Ibid., 180.48 See Tassie Digger, July 1921, 4�5. There were some exceptions, see Unveiling of the War Memorial at

the University (Government Printer, Brisbane, 1925).


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that the post-war dead remain nominally separate from the 1914-18 dead. Some

relatives of the fallen felt that their loss demanded a higher order of public

acknowledgement than families whose sons ‘were more fortunate and had come

back’.49 Although war memorials were ‘creations of communities’,50 many of

which had first-hand experience of veterans’ deaths, the demands of the

wartime bereaved and the exigencies of monument construction, typically saw

post-war deaths rendered invisible.

The naming of the post-war dead was also a vexed question for the

management committees of larger state war memorials. These monuments

took much longer to plan and construct. Many were only officially opened in

the late 1920s or early 1930s, by which time a larger number of ex-

servicemen had died. Yet the decisions of state committees varied. The

Western Australian State War Memorial committee ambitiously decided to

honour all who died on service as well as men who later died from injury or

illness.51 The Melbourne Shrine of Remembrance Committee similarly

recommended in 1929 that a ‘special tablet’ be erected to perpetuate the

memory of ‘those who died as a result of war injuries subsequent to

discharge’, but this was never realised.52 Despite a growing public awareness

of the challenges facing ageing and invalid veterans, the 1914-18 dead

remained the symbolic focus of most state memorials. Arguably this was

because these monuments were designed to transform battlefield death from

a mortal condition into a sacred, noble, and immortal state.53 Through its use

of ancient Greek temple design principles, Melbourne’s Shrine of Remem-

brance reminded visitors that the ‘gallant fallen’ had transcended their

suffering and been made perfect in death.54 Such monuments were built

with the integrity of the soldier’s body in mind*to celebrate his masculine

beauty before he fell*not to remind visitors of the damage that modern

artillery could wreak upon men’s bodies when they were ‘unsuccessfully

killed’.

It was not only upon civic monuments, but in the public rituals of Anzac

Day that the losses of families of the post-war dead found inconsistent

validation. During the 1920s and 1930s, the primary focus of Anzac Day

memorial services was to preserve the memory of the 1914-18 dead. Each

Anzac Day familiar rites were repeated (the Last Post, the laying of wreaths)

which allowed the bereaved to participate in a larger collective memory of

loss. Such ritualisation helped forge a common narrative about the past which

49 Bega District News, 22 May 1924.50 Bart Ziino, ‘Claiming the Dead: Great War Memorials and Their Communities’, Journal of the Royal

Australian Historical Society 89, part 2 (December 2003): 145�61.51 See AWM photograph, negative number A02814.52 Minutes, Executive Sub-Committee, National War Memorial of Victoria, 16 July 1929, PROV,

VPRS 2498, P/0000, Unit 1.53 See Edwin Heathcote, Monument Builders: Modern Architecture and Death (West Sussex: Academy

Editions, 1999), 6.54 See Ambrose Pratt and John Barnes, The National War Memorial of Victoria: An Interpretative

Appreciation of the Shrine of Remembrance (Melbourne: W.D. Joynt, 1934), 16.


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served to unify national memory of the battlefield dead and their meaning.55

Once the boundaries of remembrance had stabilised it became difficult to

accommodate newer narratives of loss. Speakers sometimes made a token

mention of the men who had come back ‘broken in health and spirit’, but rarely

mentioned those who had died after the Armistice.56 Most orators chose not to

highlight the contemporary struggles and deaths of returned soldiers, lest this

detract from families’ memories of the ‘gallant fallen’ whose heroic deeds had

become a permanent part of the nation’s history.

Yet some of the rituals designed to console bereaved kin of the 1914-18 dead

simply did not make sense in the context of post-war death. Anzac Day speakers’

insistent desire to remember ‘the deathless army whose bodies lie on Gallipoli

and other fields of the Great War’ was at odds with families’ visceral memories of

suffering and death in Mentone, Manangatang, and Marrickville.57 Little

evidence remains of the ‘private readings’ of war memorials and Anzac Day

commemorations. We must not, however, assume that the processes of social

exclusion diminished people’s capacity to engage with these ceremonies on their

own terms. Some families of the post-war dead felt distanced from Anzac Day

rituals designed to honour the 1914-18 dead. Others, however, derived some

comfort from the same rituals, reclaiming ‘Lest We Forget’ in light of their own

post-war losses to evoke memories of a ‘broken’, rather than ‘fallen’ soldier.

There is no doubt that some kin composed grief narratives which drew upon the

heroic and immortalising language of Anzac, and even believed that their loved

ones were in heaven with the 1914-18 dead.58 Yet, this is precisely the work of

disenfranchised grievers: to assert the legitimacy of their losses and insert them

into commonly accepted cultural narratives.

By the mid-1930s, as Anzac Day gradually shifted from a day of mourning to

a day upon which returned servicemen celebrated their own war service, the

grief of kin was further displaced, including that of families of the post-war

dead.59 Indeed, it is almost impossible to find any public acknowledgement of

their losses in newspaper reports of Anzac Day events during the 1930s. This was

an era in which the RSSILA increased its support to ‘decrepit diggers’ and

commentators called for greater recognition of the ‘returned wounded’.60 Yet

the youthful image of the fallen soldier*not dead veterans*remained at the

centre of mainstream commemorative events. This is perhaps because, as Jay

Winter reminds us, public commemoration infuses death with ideas of citizen-

ship.61 Within Australia’s burgeoning national foundational narrative of Anzac,

the battlefield dead had ‘given their mortal bodies, in the belief that, by their

55 Catherine Moriarty, ‘Private Grief and Public Remembrance: British First World War Memorials’,in War and Memory in the Twentieth Century, ed. Martin Evans and Ken Lunn (Oxford: Berg, 1997),125.

56 Warrnambool Standard, 26 April 1928, 5.57 Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1924, 15.58 Interview with Betsy Burchett, 3 November 2004.59 Damousi, The Labour of Loss, 26�45; Scates, 41�42; Luckins, 199-201, 183�208.60 For example see Anzac Day coverage in Sydney Morning Herald, 26 April 1935.61 Winter, 80.


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sacrifice, freedom and liberty would be enshrined in the annals of the nations of

the earth’.62 By contrast, veterans did not inspire these meanings through their

deaths. They had not perished in the glorious act of securing nationhood: they

had returned to their families and died as civilians.

On Anzac Day, families of the wartime dead became a community of

mourners whose grief was ‘entitled’, that is, its dramatisation was socially

permitted.63 They were able to draw upon common rituals and rhetoric which

reflected their experiences. By contrast, mourners of the post-war dead

constituted a community which had not yet completely formed, and whose

diverse experiences of trauma and loss on Australian soil were awkwardly

submerged in public commemorative endeavours. The resulting disenfranchise-

ment of their grief is usefully understood with reference to broader shifts within

cultures of mourning. There is a consensus amongst historians that the highly

expressive public rituals for military deaths during the First World War were

replaced with a ‘model of suppressed or silent grief’ which constrained mourners

of the civilian dead after 1918.64 As Pat Jalland has argued, the tragic mass

deaths of young soldiers, whose bodies were never returned home, rendered

individual civilian deaths in Australia relatively insignificant.65 Although

succumbing to war wounds, the post-war dead effectively died ‘domesticated

deaths’ as civilians, not soldiers.66 Arguably then, their kin were perceived as

grievers less deserving of public acknowledgement, and limited in their capacity

to claim greater recognition.67 Bereaved families of the post-war dead were

caught in a shift between an old and a new context of mourning. Their grief was

trapped between the past and the present. Families mourned a contemporary

loss, their sorrow and desire for memorialisation had its roots in the war years,

yet public commemorative cultures of war seldom spoke to their experiences.

This chronological misalignment of loss and grief, as well as the diversity of their

experiences, were not well accommodated within codified public rituals that

memorialised war death.

Given that public ‘sites of mourning’ did not recognise all families’

experiences of loss, the graves of the post-war dead became important places

of mourning. While the wartime dead were buried in European cemeteries, the

post-war dead were typically buried within their communities of origin. Families

of ‘accepted’ deceased veterans were eligible for military graves erected by the

Defence Department. Yet, while military graves were of great importance to

some families, not all eligible next-of-kin applied. Many desired a neutral resting

place, devoid of reminders of their loved one’s war service, particularly if he had

62 Brisbane Courier, 27 April 1925, 8.63 Charmaz, 236.64 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, 325.65 Ibid., 305.66 Pat Jalland, ‘Changing Ways of Grieving in Twentieth Century Australia’, Dialogue 24, no. 3

(2005): 4�18, 10.67 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, 305.


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suffered in the post-war years.68 Even on official headstones, most inscriptions

tended to be simple Christian epitaphs such as ‘Forever with the Lord’ or

‘Peacefully Sleeping’.69 Some next-of-kin, however, used the heroic language

associated with battlefield death to affirm a sense of continuity with the 1914-18

fallen. In 1920, William Starke’s relatives buried him under a headstone that

read: ‘He faced death & fatal illness with equal courage’.70 Other inscriptions

suggest that veterans’ families found little solace in asserting their loved one’s

equality of sacrifice with the battlefield dead. In 1926, Claude Hancock’s family

decided upon: ‘Sometime, someday we will understand’.71

Within local communities, the RSSILA was instrumental in attending to the

upkeep of ex-servicemen’s graves in Australia, thereby validating these deaths as

‘war caused’ and connecting their families to broader public cultures of

commemoration. The League raised money to fund civilian headstones for

‘rejected men’ and arranged for ex-soldiers’ graves to be regularly ‘spruced

up’.72 On Anzac Day it conducted special ceremonies at which the Last Post was

played.73 Similarly, the Anzac Fellowship of Women placed wreathes on the

graves of returned soldiers whose wives and mothers were not able to travel to

cemeteries in other districts on Anzac Day.74 Such local rituals at the grave

involving families’ ‘fictive kin’ were important for relatives whether or not they

were able to integrate successfully their own grief into the heroic pageantry of

mainstream commemorative events. Soldiers’ gravesides constituted a parallel

world of intimate commemoration in which bereaved relatives remembered

their loved one’s return from war, his suffering and passing without constantly

being reminded that he was not one of the 60,000 ‘noble dead’.

Returned soldiers’ graves were often of great emotional significance to their

relatives, and remained one of the few public commemorative sites that

validated their grief. However, to the dismay of many families, the official

care of military graves in Australian cemeteries often left much to be desired.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the Imperial War Graves Commission developed a

reputation for the fastidiousness with which it tended Australia’s overseas

graves. By contrast, the Department of Defence became known for its haphazard

management of war graves in Australia. While some were well tended, the

neglect of others became a source of regular complaint.75 In 1935, Peter Soutar

expressed his dismay at the unkempt state of some military graves in Sydney:

‘Many of the graves have no headstones, no flowers, [and are] painful to look

68 Ken Inglis, ‘Passing Away’, in Australians 1938, ed. Bill Gammage and Peter Spearritt (Sydney:Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates), 247.

69 See Headstones for Soldiers’ Graves, 1926�27, National Archives of Australia (hereafter NAA),MP367/1, 446/10/5306; Ziino, A Distant Grief, 149�50.

70 Erection of Headstones, June 1922 to May 1925, NAA, MP367/1, 446/10/3759.71 Headstones for Soldiers’ Graves, 1926�27, NAA, MP367/1, 446/10/5306.72 See Reveille, 1 June 1934, 17.73 Reveille, 1 June 1936, 29.74 Scates, 40.75 See Lieutenant Colonel, 2nd Military District to Military Board, Melbourne, 15 February 1933,

NAA, MP 367/1, 446/10/4917


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at . . . People returning from the Battlefields of France Flanders etc. have told me

of the well kept graves and beautiful flowers trees etc. I ask Sir why all this

neglect at the Northern Suburbs cemetery?76 In such instances, families of the

post-war dead were forced to put up with second-class graves which publicly

diminished veterans’ sacrifices. Each time kin visited, they were reminded that

their loved ones lay in a less dignified resting place than the ‘fallen’.

In the late 1920s, families of the post-war dead were informed that the

nation would officially recognise their loved ones’ deaths in a most public

manner. The Sydney Morning Herald confirmed in 1928 that the names of ‘every

Australian who died as a result of war sickness or injuries’ would be inscribed

upon the national Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial (AWM).77

This reflected the view of the Director of the Memorial, Major Treloar, and

Official War Historian, C.E.W. Bean, that an honour roll consisting only of the

names of those killed on the battlefield would discriminate against returned men

whose deaths were a direct result of their war service.78 Accordingly, the AWM

began the massive task of collecting the names of the post-war deceased. In

addition to receiving monthly lists of ‘accepted’ deaths from the Repatriation

Department, the Memorial also encouraged kin to report deaths.79 Many family

members wrote with a sense of restrained pride at the prospect of having their

loved one’s name inscribed upon the honour roll. In 1936, Dulcie Kear reported

the name of her brother, Percival, who died in 1929 from the effects of injuries

and gassing. ‘I heard your appeal over the A.B.C. Radio stations, & hasten to

send our Dear One’s, honoured name, for inclusion in the Rolls.’80 Mrs Emma

Vawser requested the naming of her son, Percy, writing: ‘I with others would

esteem it an honor to have our departed soldiers name there.’81 It was most

commonly women who took the responsibility of writing to the War Memorial,

and many adopted a quasi-sacred tone to convey the solemnity of their request.

The gathering of names created a strong expectation amongst family

members. Relatives expressed gratitude that their loved one’s name would be

inscribed*’trusting his name will be put on [an honour roll] plate thanking

you’.82 War Memorial staff individually acknowledged the letters: ‘thank you;

your brother’s name has been included.’83 The naming of their loved ones was

emotionally significant for many families. A complete listing of all the ‘war dead’

on the Roll of Honour in Canberra allowed families to feel that their sons’

suffering and death in the post-war period was equally as important as the

76 Peter Soutar to Imperial War Graves Commission, London, 27 May 1935, NAA, B1535, 746/8/910.

77 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1928, 12.78 Michael McKernan, Here is Their Spirit: A History of the Australian War Memorial (Brisbane:

University of Queensland Press/AWM, 1991), 144.79 See AWM 93, 2/5/19C/1, Part 1[A].80 Dulcie Kear to Director, AWM, 13 November 1936, AWM 93, 2/5/19C, Part 2.81 Mrs E. Vawser to Chairman, AWM, 28 November 1936, AWM 93, 2/5/19C, Part 2.82 N. McGrath to Director, AWM, 28 November 1936, AWM 93, 2/5/19C, Part 2.83 See comment on Maggie Catterall to Secretary RSA, Melbourne, 21 September 1934, AWM 93,

File 2/5/19C, Part 1.


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deaths of the ‘fallen’. Importantly, through the inscription of their names,

families stood to become part of a larger community of kin whose experiences of

loss were part of the national memory of war.

Some families, however, responded with mixed feelings when they were

invited to confirm their soldier’s details. For some, memorialisation was tinged

with sorrow about how their soldier’s life had been affected negatively by war,

bitterness about his perceived poor treatment by the government, or a deep

discomfort about whether his sacrifice had ultimately served any purpose. In

1936, Mrs N. Fletcher vented her anger about the official rejection of her

husband’s death seven years earlier. She declared: ‘I think he deserves to be put

on the Honour Roll for fighting for his country. He should at least have that

honour’.84 Some kin were angry about the expenditure of money on ‘another

stone monument’ to the dead instead of a ‘comfortable hospital’ for ailing

veterans.85 Others valued the honour shown to their husbands, but were bitter

about the financial peril in which families found themselves. Violet Aiken wrote,

‘I appreciate my husband’s name being erected in the ‘‘Hall of Memory’’

immensely but what about those left behind?’86

By 1941, the AWM had collated and confirmed approximately 90,000

eligible names, but the Roll of Honour was far from complete, and was proving a

much more formidable task than anticipated.87 By October 1952 the Memorial

had changed its policy because of the complexity of collecting the names of the

post-war dead, and of dealing with those who had not yet died. Furthermore,

the Second World War had radically altered the priorities of the Memorial. There

was simply not the room to inscribe the names of all soldiers who had died

during and after both wars. It was decided that the Great War cut-off point

would be 1 April 1921, the official date of the disbandment of the Australian

Imperial Force (AIF), and that the details of those who died after that date would

be recorded upon cards, for inscription in a supplementary roll in book form

which would be placed on display and updated as time passed.88 These cards

remain in storage to this day*they form something of a hidden roll of honour

for the post-war dead.89

Although relegated to the periphery of Australia’s public commemorative

traditions, family members continued to enfranchise their grief through a

variety of strategies. In 1926, seven years after the death of her son, Mrs

Elizabeth Cameron belatedly applied for an official ‘In Memoriam’ badge.90 It

was clearly important for Mrs Cameron to remember Alexander’s passing as a

‘war death’. She perhaps sought identification and solidarity with the commu-

84 Mrs N. Fletcher to Director, AWM, 12 November 1936, AWM 93, 2/5/19C, Part 2.85 Ibid.86 Mrs V. Aiken to AWM, received 20 November 1940, AWM 164. Quoted in Winter, 50.87 Acting Director, AWM to State Secretary, RSSILA, 19 March 1941, AWM 93, 12/8/11.88 Michael McKernan, Here is Their Spirit, 229.89 See AWM 261.90 Application for In Memoriam Badge, 6 November 1926, NAA, B2455/1 CAMERON A P

[Alexander Pullar], see n 30.


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nity that mourned the 1914�18 dead, and wished for a kind of symbolic kinship

with women who had experienced different ‘ways of grief’. Indeed within local

communities, support organisations, including the Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Fathers

Association, welcomed a spectrum of kin affected by war death and disability.

Surviving documents only hint at the complex interpersonal world of relatives’

organisations, but it is reasonable to speculate that families affected by war

death*before and after 1918*were both divided and united by their

experiences of loss. In some cases, families’ ‘grief work’ entailed coming to

terms with both modes of death. On the eve of Anzac Day 1937, Mrs Fanny

Maddern placed an ‘In Memoriam’ notice in the Age commemorating the death

of a son in 1917, the death of another son in 1920 and a brother in 1932.

MADDERN-BOWEN - In loving and proud memory of my sons and brother . . .

What though their crown a bandage

Stretcher or cot their throne;

Splints or a crutch their sceptre,

The Anzac name is their own.91

Relatives like Mrs Maddern were highly sensitive to the kind of memory of war

enshrined by Anzac Day tradition, and that which it excluded. They were aware

of the dangers of challenging it, and carefully worked towards integrating their

own experiences into it. Through her writing, Mrs Maddern asked her readers to

recognise differing modes of deaths, and to validate families’ grief in its diversity.

This poem was an act of enfranchisement. By claiming ‘the Anzac name’ for all

her loved ones, she was attempting to close the gap between the past and the

present, and assert the transcendent and inclusive potential of that commem-

orative tradition.

In war, death is usually the result of killing, but the two do not always occur

contemporaneously. Yet national public cultures of memorialisation seldom

explicitly recognise this. The exclusion of the post-war dead from Australia’s

public commemorative traditions in the 1920s and 1930s illustrates how death

and grief arising from war have been remembered and forgotten. After 1918,

Australians’ desire to mark war’s end and to make sacred the traumatic deaths of

its ‘fallen’ saw a higher commemorative value placed upon wartime death than

post-war death. The wartime dead represented the ‘end of sacrifice’,92 but the

post-war dead represented the perpetuation of suffering and death. Accordingly,

dead ex-servicemen were sidelined in collective social memory, and their

families became an invisible community of mourners. In response, these

relatives did not organise politically, nor agitate publicly for greater recognition.

Instead, they exercised more subtle, practical, and local forms of agency, often

with the assistance of sympathetic community organisations. Some embraced

the Anzac tradition of remembrance, while others resisted memorialising

narratives that privileged the battlefield dead. Their experiences suggest that

91 Age, 24 April 1937, 7.92 Winter, 5 and 95.


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we need to develop a greater sensitivity to the relationship between public

cultures of memorialisation and the private patterns of grief amongst disen-

franchised mourners.

Families of the wartime and post-war dead represented two distinct

communities of mourners after the First World War. Their experiences of loss

occurred in vastly different historical contexts, which had profound implications

for the ways in which they expressed their grief. Such is the power of the ‘fallen’

in the historical imagination, however, that historians have all but ignored post-

war death and grief, despite the significant numbers of Australians who

experienced such a loss. Yet this is a rich history with its own temporal, spatial,

and emotional contours. Understanding this past necessitates a shift in historical

thinking about what constitutes a ‘war death’*where, when and how it took

place*and the particular nature of its attendant grief. Families of the post-war

dead mourned men who died on home soil as civilians during peacetime, often

in the presence of their kin. Their burden was not to grieve in the absence of a

body, but to grieve in the absence of a dominant commemorative culture that

validated their experiences. Their history challenges scholars to extend the

chronological and conceptual boundaries of ‘war death’ and to recognise the

limitations of national commemorative discourses. It also prompts us to revisit

the 1920s and 1930s with new historical questions about grief and memorialisa-

tion. This was not simply an era during which memories of the ‘fallen’ were

sustained, but an era productive of experiences of war-related death and grief,

which saw newer memories of loss compete with older memories of loss for

public recognition.


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a disenfranchised grief: post-war death and memorialisation in australia after the first world war

Documents