Death and bereavement in the First World War: the Australian experience

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Death and bereavement in the First World War: the Australian experience Pat Jalland* History School, Research School of Social Sciences, Coombs Building, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia

The First World War was a turning point in the cultural history of death and bereavement in Australia. The mass deaths of some 60,000 soldiers overseas led to communal rituals of mourning for the war dead and minimal public expressions of private grief. The mass slaughter of so many young men and the interminable grief of so many families devalued the deaths of civilians at home and helped to create a new cultural model of suppressed and privatised grieving which deeply constrained the next two generations. Emotional and expressive grieving became less common, mourning ritual was minimised and sorrow became a private matter. The First World War as a turning point in the history of death and bereavement This article explores the causes and characteristics of a profound cultural transformation in the twentieth century history of death and bereavement in Australia.1 The First World War was a turning point in the cultural history of death and bereavement in Australia, as it was in Britain. Religious and demographic forces had started this process of cultural change before 1914. Christian faith declined after the 1880s, to be slowly replaced by a more secular society which tended to privatise dying and grieving. Mourning customs had usually been simpler in colonial Australia than in Britain, and they became more modest as a result of funeral reforms from the 1870s. The nineteenth century demographic pattern included a short life expectancy, relatively high mortality, and a high infant death rate. Between 1880 and 1920 there was a significant transformation with a continuous decline in mortality, improved death rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth.2 Old age replaced infancy as the most likely time of death from 1900. The First World War was itself a powerful catalyst for change in attitudes to death and mourning, particularly as the thousands of dead soldiers could not be buried in Australia, and grave-visiting for consolation was out of the question for most families. The traditional Christian *Tel.: +61 2 6281 7881. See Jalland, Pat, Changing Ways of Death in twentieth-century Australia: War, medicine and the funeral business, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006. 2 Smith, F.B., ‘The First Health Transition in Australia, 1880–1910’, in Jones, G.W., Douglas, R.M., Caldwell, J.C., & D’Souza, R.M. (eds.), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 31. Available online 17 June 2014 1

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culture of acceptance of death ceased to be the dominant model in Australia during and after the First World War. The mass slaughter of young men and the interminable grief of so many families helped to create a new model of suppressed and privatised grieving which deeply constrained the next two generations. During and after the First World War a deep social and cultural change occurred which lasted until the 1970s. Emotional and expressive grieving became less common than in the nineteenth century, mourning ritual was minimised and sorrow became a private matter. From an early date Gallipoli came to be seen as the birth of an Australian nation. The Australian correspondent of the Manchester Guardian wrote on 27 December 1915: ‘In the graves of Gallipoli lie the seeds of Australia’s immortality’.3 Anzac soldiers proved their courage at Gallipoli in 1915, where they created the seeds of an enduring national legend which converted military disaster into moral victory. The soldiers who sacrificed their lives became national heroes who provided Australia with a powerful image of the formation of national identity through war. The stories of the many military heroes have been transmitted through individual families across the generations to create and perpetuate the Anzac legend. However, this public model of military heroism created profound strains for grieving soldiers and families during and after the war. This world of soldiers’ and family experiences of death and bereavement after 1915 will be the focus of this article (Plate 1). Soldier’s experiences of death, grief and shell shock in the First World War, 1916–1918 About 60,000 Australian soldiers were killed in the First World War; one in five of those who left home for the war did not return (compared with one in eight in Britain). Ken Inglis calculated that two out of every three Australians in uniform were killed or wounded, and every second Australian family was bereaved.4 The trauma suffered by bereaved families was increased because they could neither say a last farewell to their sons’ bodies nor attend funerals, nor could they visit their distant graves as part of the mourning process. 3

Manchester Guardian, 27 Dec. 1915. Inglis, Ken, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 91–2, 97. 4

0160-9327/ß 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2014.05.005

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Plate 1. The cemetery on Queensland Point, Gallipoli, 1915, taken by CEW Bean. (AWM G01292).

While there has been a major emphasis on the Gallipoli campaign of 1915 by generations of Australian military historians, the worst years of the war for casualties were 1916–1918. As Joan Beaumont has recently noted, ‘In the seven weeks after 19 July [1916], the AIF lost at least 23,000 casualties, of whom more than a quarter were killed or died of their wounds. At Gallipoli, it had taken some eight months to incur 26,111 casualties, including 8,141 deaths.’5 The casualty rate was even higher in 1917, when over 76,000 Australians were killed or wounded or missing on the Western Front. It seemed that there was a ‘lost generation’ of dead and missing young Australians. Thus my article concentrates on the Australian experiences of death and mourning at war and at home during 1916– 1918, as well their aftermath. The First World War accelerated cultural changes already taking place, including the decline of institutionalised Protestantism, as secularisation increased among the working classes and educated people more often questioned their faith. Experience of a terrible war often reinforced soldiers’ indifference to religion, and their accounts of the war in letters and diaries rarely mentioned it. Sergeant Jack Baillie, serving in France, lost a brother and brother-in-law in 1917: ‘I have lost a great deal of faith in religion. . .since I have come abroad and seen the world’.6 During the First World War the traditional domesticated death at home was abruptly displaced by a new model of the sudden, violent death of a young hero, sacrificing his life for a noble cause. The heroic wartime model took precedence during the war, and for years afterwards, over

civilian deaths. Soldiers at the front were seen as giving their lives for their country and their God. They were usually represented as dying as heroes with courage, dignity and honour. But the deaths of heroes came at a high price for grieving families, since overt expression of individual sorrow was perceived as undermining the national cause. Bill Gammage’s classic book, The Broken Years, uses soldiers’ letters and diaries to express their experiences of the First World War. The Australian soldiers were initially encouraged to share the romantic ideals of fighting for country, imperial glory, and freedom. But by 1917 if not earlier their experiences of mass war and mass death meant they primarily fought for survival, for the sake of their mates and out of a sense of duty. By 1917 the huge Australian casualty lists reflected the fact that soldiers had to struggle day by day simply to stay alive, without the energy for extended grieving.7 Silent grief and stoicism were the soldiers’ instinctive responses to the hideous deaths of many of their mates and the constant fear of their own deaths. Psychologists such as Eric Lindemann have written of the ‘macho’ warrior identity of Western men affected by two world wars.8 The cult of manliness, the military culture and the demands of war required that they behave with courage and restraint, however terrible their experiences and their traumatic memories. Bravado and clumsy jokes helped soldiers to survive and partially reassured anxious families. The soldiers’ minimal comments about their mates’ deaths in letters home were significant in providing a

5 Beaumont, Joan, Broken Nation. Australians in the Great War, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, 2013, pp. 213, 389, 548–49. 6 Sgt John Baillie to girlfriend Nell, 20 July 1917, 7 Dec. 1917, Australian War Memorial (AWM) PR00621.

7 Gammage, Bill, The Broken Years: Australian soldiers in the Great War, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, pp. 84, 254–56, 260, 263. 8 Lindemann, E., ‘The symptomatology and management of acute grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1944; 101, 141–48.

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model for their parents’ grieving behaviour when their sons in turn were killed. They conveyed much in a few words, prescribing the culturally correct response to death from the perspective of a soldier. They told their parents how their loved sons themselves faced death and, by clear implication, how they hoped their families would grieve if they died. When Sergeant Jack Baillie, serving in France, lost his brother and brother-in-law to the war, he told his girlfriend in Newcastle in 1917 that ‘we shall only have to keep a stiff upper lip and bear up. . ..I don’t want to be sad in this letter’. Like his fellow soldiers, Baillie suppressed his deep feelings of grief on his brother’s death in writing home, while admitting it ‘hit him hard’.9 The implicit message was that individual grief on the part of bereaved families must be restrained because it was self-indulgent when compared with the enormity of mass deaths in war. Early in 1915 Joe Cumberland wrote to his sister, Una, in Scone NSW, before Joe died of wounds at Gallipoli and his brother, Oliver, was killed at Lone Pine: If anything does happen to Oliver or I, don’t let it upset any of you too much, because dear Una, you must remember that thousands of sisters are losing their brothers daily, and Una, if the boys are prepared to die fighting for their country, I reckon their sisters ought to be prepared to give them up if need be, when they know they are fighting for a noble cause . . . Don’t get gloomy over this letter.10 Two out of four sons of the Ferguson family in Enoggera in Queensland were killed in the First World War, and the family believed that intense grief ‘is responsible for poor Mater’s death’ in 1917. Two brave sons had sacrificed their lives, which required an equivalent courage by a grieving father. All four brothers were strongly influenced by the soldiers’ code of silence which had taught them to bear their sorrow internally. Malcolm Ferguson wrote to his father that quiet stoicism was the necessary response to the ‘terrible hard knocks’ of wartime: ‘just ‘‘stick’’ it, like you always have in all your troubles.’11 When Douglas was killed in August 1918, the two surviving sons, Malcolm and Norman, wrote that their father must bear up as he had done earlier: ‘you just squared your shoulders and carried on . . . you are battling through it like you always have’.12 ‘Spartan control’ was the proper demeanour expected of women as well as men in response to news of the death of a son, husband or brother. Graeme McInnes remembered Anzac Days in the 1920s, when stern-faced bereaved mothers ‘attended service standing erect and dry-eyed, their bosoms stitched with their dead sons’ medals’.13 Soldiers rarely shared their intense sorrow on comrades’ deaths with their families, who sometimes seemed to them to inhabit a different mental universe. Stuart Gilkison Love wrote unpublished reminiscences of the Great War in about 1960, drawn from his wartime diaries and correspondence. 9

Sgt John Baillie to Nell, 20 July, 30 Sept. 1917, 16 June 1918, AWM PR00621. Joe Cumberland to Una, 13 Jan., 12 Mar., 31 May, 26 July 1915, AWM PR86/147. Malcolm Ferguson to father, 26 Oct. 1917, n.d., 30 Oct. 1917, AWM PR00005, folders 4, 2. 12 Ibid., 23 Aug., 16 Sept. 1918, folder 3; Norman Ferguson to father, 25 Aug. 1918, ibid., folders 1–2. 13 Quoted by Inglis, Ken, in Lack, John (ed.), Anzac Remembered. Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis, The History Department, Melbourne University, 1998, pp. 117, 135. 10 11

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There was a notable contrast between his minimal wartime comments on his close friends’ deaths and his later reflections. In 1936, while working as a mining engineer in the Philippines, he met a man called Curtis who had been in Love’s division in France. Curtis sought to share his memories of the comrades they had lost, including some of Love’s closest friends. In turn Love poured out his profound grief for his close friend Atchison. He recalled that while on leave in 1915 that he had seen Atchison’s name in the casualty list in The Times, ‘and suddenly the sun was darkened’. Yet, during lunch with a girlfriend he disguised his grief with feigned high spirits; and his diary entries for the following weeks made no mention of his friend.14 One of the most extreme examples was that of the war veteran Marcel Caux who took eighty years to admit that he fought in the First World War – his son only learnt the truth in 1998. Caux first joined an Anzac Day march in 2001. He was one of many soldiers who was so distressed by his terrible memories that he tried to forget, destroying his records and photographs.15 Roy Grant, a Gallipoli veteran, also subsequently sought to forget many wartime experiences, especially those relating to ‘brave mates who were killed and I helped to bury them’.16 By 1916 40 per cent of casualties in combat zones were officially attributed to shell shock or neurasthenia, whose major symptoms included severe depression, hysteria and delirium. By the end of the war there were 1,624 Australian cases, with most in 1917.17 Officers were more likely to be diagnosed, though the symptoms were initially seen as evidence of cowardice. These were the official psychological casualties of the First World War.18 They were overwhelmed by death and loss while denied the opportunity to grieve. There was increased intensity at the front from 1916 in the use of artillery and machine gun fire. Many soldiers couldn’t endure the prolonged artillery bombardments, and the associated loss of so many comrades. Even the toughest soldiers could crack during the appalling attritional campaigns from 1916. Military doctors such as Dr John Springthorpe and psychologists like W. H. Rivers encouraged treatment of neurasthenia through talk and listening, but such discussion of emotions and grief contravened the war ethos of ‘militarism and masculinity’.19 Ironically, after the war few doctors were familiar with Freudian theory and at first soldiers with psychological trauma could only be accommodated in insane asylums. Some civilian doctors still viewed shell shock as evidence of cowardice. Soldiers’ burials and family responses to wartime bereavement: mourning the dead and the missing 1914– 1918 Soldiers’ burials during the war provided the only opportunity to express their grief publicly, even though it was curtailed by the ever-present military needs and culture at the front (Plate 2). 14 Love, Stuart Gilkison, ‘Episodes and memories: A personal narrative 1884–1945’, 4 vols., 1956–63, State Library of Victoria (SLV), MS 11013, box 1585-1586/1. 15 See Canberra Times, 24 April 2004. 16 Quoted in Thomson, Alistair, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 203–5. 17 Beaumont, Broken Nation, pp. 213–15. 18 Bourke, Joanna, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War, Reaktion, London, 1996, pp. 107–112. 19 Damousi, Joy, Freud in the Antipodes, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2005, pp. 37–9; Beaumont, Broken Nation, p. 527.

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Plate 2. France, August 1916: Picardie, Somme, Albert, Becourt Wood – A chaplain reads the burial service beside the grave of a fallen Australian in a cemetery in a wood, near a chateau that housed a casualty clearing station. (AWM EZ0064).

Plate 3. Two unidentified soldiers look at the inscriptions on the crosses at the cemetery at Vlamertinghe, near Ypres, Belgium, where a number of Australians who were killed in the Ypres operations were buried. Photo by Frank Hurley, 3 October 1917. (AWM E00847).

The practical necessity was to ensure that their comrades’ graves could be identified later, rather than joining the legions of the missing. Thus Private Albert Croft told his sisters and brothers in Australia in October 1914 how important it was to participate in burial services for his comrades, saying a prayer over each: ‘tears run down my face on most times when I am called upon to do it’. Otherwise ‘their loved ones at home may never know where they are laid’.20 The letters of condolence from officers and comrades to the families of dead soldiers focused on individual burials, funerals and graves rather than their feelings. These letters were a major consolation for the bereaved, who were deprived of both burial ceremonies and access to graves. The archives of the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau reveal the care taken by soldiers to give their mates a decent burial if possible (Plate 3). Parents’ searches for burial information sometimes lasted for years, as they tried to ensure that their dead sons’ last resting place was known and honoured. The Red Cross sought eyewitness accounts of death and burial, but often ‘death unknown’ could be the only outcome. Unfortunately numerous soldiers could only be remembered by name on memorial panels such as those at the Menin Gate for the missing of Ypres.21 The meagre, fragmentary evidence of individual and family grieving during the First World War suggests that the ‘massive all-pervasive pall of death’ was arguably relatively greater in Australia than in Britain.22 The mass deaths of the young soldiers in Europe rendered individual civilian deaths relatively insignificant. Communal grief for brave soldiers was privileged over individual sorrow for civilians who died at home. This stoical response to grief became entrenched as a widely disseminated emotional norm. However, ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the Australian press during the First World War did enable grieving relatives to express their individual losses in public. They

were a uniquely Australian form of commemoration of the dead with broad appeal to Australians. They were a largely secular phenomenon in Australia, starting slowly from the 1880s, and were most popular during the First World War in response to the substantial losses in major campaigns like Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele. The ‘In Memoriam’ columns expressed their loss in verse rather than prose, often selected from past newspaper Rolls of Honour with an amended word or a line. For example, one of the most common verses was: ‘Silence is no certain token/ That no hidden grief is there/Sorrow that is never spoken/Is the hardest grief to bear.’23 The ‘In Memoriam’ for Private Charles Whitaker who was killed at Gallipoli read: ‘Tis just three years; we dare not mourn or weep/Twould grieve him so, to know us all so weak’. On Anzac Day 1917 the O’Loughlin family of West Brunswick in Victoria had two sons to mourn – George was killed at Gallipoli in 1915 and Harry in France in February 1917. The grieving parents prepared verses for publication in the Argus newspaper, emphasising their physical links with their dead sons:

20

Pte Albert Croft to family, 23 Oct. 1914, AWM, PR010265. See Jalland, Changing Ways, pp. 59–64, 80–81. 22 This memorable phrase is drawn from David Cannadine’s seminal article, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’, in Whaley, Joachim (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality. Studies in the History of Death, Europa, London, 1981, p. 230. 21

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I thought I must die as I read them [their letters] through,/ and cry as I laid them there, For I could not see a spark of hope/through the stupor of my despair; I could only know my boys had gone,/and I knew as the evening came I might solace seek from their letters,/from their photos in their frames.24 Grieving families coped with their loss in many ways. The Hughes family of Sydney was a prominent Irish Catholic family who found consolation in their Christian faith on the death of their son Roger, killed in December 1916.25 Many more found some comfort in the memory of their dead son or 23 Argus, 11 Dec. 1915 (Hayson), 22 Apr. 1916 (Salter), 24 Feb. 1917 (Mancy), 17 Mar. 1917 (Lucas). 24 Argus, 25 April 1917. 25 See Jalland, Pat, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840– 1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 312–14.

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husband, a powerful traditional source of consolation, especially in the absence of Christian faith. Private memory was the primary focus of John Roberts’ grief on the death of his son Frank at Mont St Quentin in September 1918. John and his wife Berta sought refuge in sharing ‘old memories of our son and how proud we were of him’. John lovingly collected vivid recollections of his son’s final year at the front in a detailed scrapbook which reconstructed the engagements of Frank’s battalion.26 He also organised a small support group of bereaved parents to share memories and sorrow. But there are numerous passing references to the anguish – or even the deaths – of parents caused by their sons’ wartime deaths, where no grief strategies could help. Jack Baillie recalled that the shock and grief of his brother’s death in 1917 ‘utterly broke dad up’.27 When Private Reginald Gluyas died in France at the end of the war at the age of 19, his father committed suicide. We know this only from a handwritten note inside the cover of a ‘thanks for sympathy’ card held in the Australian War Memorial.28 Judge Henry Bournes Higgins’ suppressed experience of grief is representative of many sorrowing parents of soldiers killed in the war. His only child, Mervyn, was killed in Egypt in December 1916, having survived Gallipoli. Like many bereaved parents, Higgins wanted to honour his brave son in the same stoical manner as Mervyn would have wished: ‘Poor Aunt Mary and I are trying to be brave and cheerful towards life, because he would have us so’. The bereaved parents did not allow themselves to express their sorrow openly.29 Almost a year after Mervyn’s death, Judge Higgins confided in a friend: ‘Sometimes I am weighed down by the grief which you know of; but it cheers me to fancy that I am doing just what my boy would like me to do. What, after all, am I among so many who suffer? There are many homes suffering here’. He described his despair late in 1918 on hearing the first victory cheers: ‘I have no right to infect others with our grief.’ Higgins felt that ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life.’ He followed Thomas Hardy’s advice, ‘Ache deep; but make no moans/Smile out; but stilly suffer’. The grieving parents looked forward to an old age with ‘a childless home – and tears’.30 Normal grieving was impossible for those families whose sons were reported as missing, and for those whose bodies were never found. Thousands of soldiers had no known burial place. Forty-two per cent of the 60,000 Australian dead could only be commemorated by memorials to the missing like Lone Pine at Gallipoli, which was erected in 1923–24 and included the names of 4,228 Australians with no known graves.31 Psychologists define chronic grief as an extreme response to the death of a loved one, especially a young person killed violently in circumstances such as war. Chronic grief can be prolonged 26

John Roberts’s diary, Sept.–Nov. 1918, SLV MS 8183, box 265/4. Sgt John Baillie to Nell, 30 Sept. 1917, AWM PR00621. 28 Printed card on death of Reginald Gluyas, AWM PR83/179. 29 Palmer, Nettie, Henry Bournes Higgins. A Memoir, Geo. C Haines, London, 1931, p. 233; H.B. Higgins to Nettie Palmer, 30 Jan. 1917, H.B. Higgins Papers I, 1841– 1929, National Library of Australia (NLA), MS1057/1/269. 30 Higgins, elegies to his son, Easter, New Year, July 1917, ibid.; Higgins to Nettie Palmer, 24 Aug. 1917, Higgins Papers I, NLA MS 1057/1/284; Higgins to Frankfurter, 14 Dec. 1917, 3 Feb. 1918, 29 Mar. 1923, Higgins Papers II, NLA MS 2525; Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins, p. 234. 31 Beaumont, Broken Nation, pp. 132–33. 27

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Plate 4. Adelaide Cemetery, Villers-Bretonneux, France, 26 August 1919. French children tending graves of Australians killed in battle on the Western Front. (AWM E05925).

and marked by social withdrawal and intense depression.32 Bereaved families often suffered continuing anguish by imagining the possible horrors of their sons’ deaths. Many families found it impossible to come to terms with their sons’ deaths without a corpse or an identified grave. Many grieved for the remainder of their lives. Public commemoration and collective mourning: Menin Gate, Australian War Memorials and Anzac Day It was generally recognised that public displays of commemoration and collective mourning for the Australian war dead were essential to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the nation – especially because few bereaved families could ever visit the graves so far away in Europe (Plate 4). A significant public memorial overseas which drew the early attention of Australians as a mourning site was the Menin Gate Memorial on the outskirts of Ypres, which was erected in 1927 by the British. The walls of the huge arch were inscribed with the names of 54,896 Allied soldiers lost in the Ypres salient before 15 August 1917, including Australians. Photographs of Menin Gate and copies of Will Longstaff’s painting ‘Menin Gate at Midnight’ (initially known as ‘Ghosts of Menin Gate’), were widely distributed among grieving Australian families. Longstaff’s painting was exhibited across Australia in 1928, and attracted large crowds who could never visit the Menin Gate memorial in person. The painting represented the spirits of the dead marching silently across the battlefield, and connected for many with the spiritualist movement of the 1920s which tried to communicate with the ‘spirit soldiers’. Even Anzac Day speakers referred to the ‘phantom army’ of the dead (Plate 5).33 Within Australia itself Ken Inglis has noted that the large civic war memorials were constructed too late ‘to serve most bereaved people as sites of healing meditation’, since only two Australian capitals had built them by 1930. Their chief aim was not to mitigate individual grief: ‘they were public declarations, acts of formal homage . . . 32 See e.g. Parkes, C.M., Bereavement, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1991, pp. 130–42; Raphael, Beverley, Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Unwin Hyman, London, 1984, p. 60. 33 Jalland, Changing Ways, pp. 80–83; Beaumont, Broken Nation, pp. 390–92.

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Plate 5. Will Longstaff, Menin Gate at Midnight or Ghosts of Menin Gate. (AWM ART09807).

honouring the sacrifice of the dead and the service of the survivors.’34 Smaller war memorials were erected in Australian cities and towns from 1915. But public commemoration for the dead helped some bereaved families and ex-soldiers more than others. Anzac Day and the War Memorials both honoured those who died for their country, and allowed the bereaved to mourn their dead in public. Many bereaved families preferred simple memorial services and local war memorials. Others, including some veterans, were wearied by the war and preferred to forget it and not participate in any public ceremonies of remembrance.35 Anzac Day rituals and the War Memorial movement were unlikely to help the families of the 25,000 missing soldiers with no known graves. Public commemoration also held little appeal for returned soldiers like Fred Farrell who suffered shell shock after the deaths at the battle of Fromelles. He saw those deaths as a futile sacrifice and was unable to speak about the war for many years.36 Bereavement and mourning at home after 1918 Between the Great War and the 1980s there was a marked tendency to privatise the subject of death and to minimise the expression of grief and the rituals of mourning. In the circumstances of war and its aftermath individual displays of funeral pageantry for civilians seemed an unnecessary indulgence. Further, the roles of caring for the dying and preparing for the funeral moved out of the family home and largely away from the province of women. Death was increasingly under the control of doctors and hospitals, while the funeral and burial were controlled by the undertakers, who were mostly men until late in the century. My evidence suggests that these developments took place in part because women moved closer to male patterns of silent grieving in the fifty years or more after the First World War. Thus the gender gap diminished, because women 34 35 36

Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 223, 280–81. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 130. Ibid., pp. 13, 94–9.

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began to internalise their sorrow much as men had done in the previous century and often continued to do. The ‘In Memoriam’ columns of the newspapers ceased to appeal to most bereaved families of the war dead in the inter-war years, though the theme of silent sorrow continued, drawing on popular verses and phrases first used during the war: ‘We mourn for them in silence/But not with outward show;/For they who mourn sincerely,/ Mourn silently and low’.37 Further, there were relatively few ‘In Memoriam’ notices for adult civilians. These verses were usually short and formulaic, often just ‘In loving memory’ or an equivalent, and repeating the wartime verse testifying to ‘silent heartache/deep within my heart concealed’. Individual civilians who died safely at home lacked the patriotic appeal of the dead war heroes, and the minimal, stoical response to grief continued to be culturally prescribed. Indeed, throughout the period from about 1916 to the 1970s the theme of silence was a significant subsidiary to that of memory. Since words were inadequate, religious consolation was declining and emotions were harder to express, private but silent memory was all important.38 The generation who grew to adulthood in the inter-war years was overwhelmed by the obsessive grief of two decades: they saw countless photographs of dead soldiers on mantelpieces and they felt their parents’ omnipresent grief. They had learned to suppress open emotional responses to loss in favour of the stoical ‘stiff upper lip’, which continued into the interwar years and beyond. National commemoration of the war dead made some families’ grief easier to bear, but it necessarily privileged soldiers’ wartime deaths over the deaths of civilians. Moreover, the sheer necessity to survive a harsh economic depression between the wars made overt expressions of individual grief seem all the more self-indulgent.

37 38

Newcastle Morning Herald, 2 July 1921. See also 25 Apr. 1935, 9 Aug. 1930. See e.g., ibid., 4 July 1921, 13 June 1925, 9 Aug. 1930, 11 Aug. 1941, 8 Aug. 1942.

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The two world wars and changing emotional norms about mourning and grief since the 1940s The responses to the violent mass slaughter of young men in the First World War helped to shape the new model of suppressed, privatised grieving which influenced Australians deeply across the next half century. The Second World War reinforced the First in increasing chronic and unresolved grief, especially among the desolate families of the missing soldiers of the First World War; and among families of dead airmen and prisoners of war of the Japanese in the Second World War.39 The military casualties were lower in the Second World War but they were still horrific, and left most Australian families mourning lost relatives or friends. Over 500,000 served in the military outside Australia, so the number at risk was high. At least 27,000 were killed in action or died of wounds or as prisoners of war, out of a population of seven million. The physical threat was now much closer to Australia and from 1942 Australians were defending their own country. Two dominant themes are revealed in the condolence letters written to bereaved families during and after the Second World War. The first was the continuity of the denial response and the second was its increasing power. The injunction ‘to sorrow in silence’ was repeated time and again in many letters, along with advice to keep the period of mourning short. The most extreme illustration of this advice was: ‘Try not to grieve too much – as this only leads to illness.’40 Many writers just sent black-bordered Valentine condolence cards instead of writing personal letters, reflecting the long-term impact of a generation of avoidance of open expression of sorrow. Broader changes in the Australian cultural, intellectual and social climate from the 1970s encouraged more liberal attitudes and greater freedom of emotional expression.41 The Australian media was increasingly concerned from the late-1970s with the ‘50-year conspiracy of unhealthy silence’42 about death. This signalled a reaction against the dominant culture of death denial. Another generation had grown up free from the constraints on mourning imposed by war. Waves of migration from southern Europe and Asia encouraged a growing diversity in death rituals and behaviour, which helped to spread the view that open expression of grief could be healing. Further, Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the eminent Swiss-American psychiatrist, made an important contribution to changing attitudes with her popular 1969 book, On Death and Dying. Western society was evidently more open to hearing her message that it was beneficial to the dying and to the bereaved to express their feelings openly; and that the process of grieving was normal.43 This

shift was encouraged by some members of the middle class caring professions, especially by psychologists, psychiatrists and sociologists from the 1980s. They constructed helpful theories about grief, provided therapy for individuals, and advised society how best to deal with sorrow. Changing responses to death and grief in Australia did not take place in isolation, as similar shifts were happening in other western societies, including the United States and Britain, which were a few years ahead in timing.44 The changing emotional culture relating to death and bereavement can be seen today in Australia in the remarkable renewed enthusiasm for the commemoration of Anzac Day. Anzac Day seemed in decline thirty years ago with the passing of most original Anzac servicemen, but since the 1980s the climate has altered. Public discussion of death and emotional expressions of grief in war and disasters have become more acceptable, even encouraged. This was illustrated by the record crowds in recent years who remember the courage and sacrifice of the Anzacs at the Gallipoli dawn services, which year by year focus our thoughts on the First World War. Multiple stories of individual soldiers’ heroism make up the Anzac legend. All who died for their country in war are seen as heroes, and live on in the memories of later generations. Bibliography Beaumont, Joan (ed.), Australia’s War, 1914–1918, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1995. Beaumont, Joan, Broken Nation. Australians in the Great War, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2013. Damousi, Joy, The Labour of Loss. Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1999. Damousi, Joy, Freud in the Antipodes. A cultural history of psychoanalysis in Australia, University of New South Wales (UNSW) Press, Sydney, 2005. Gammage, Bill, The Broken Years: Australian soldiers in the Great War, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974. Grey, Jeffrey, A Military History of Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1990. Inglis, Ken, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1998. Jalland, Pat, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918, OUP, South Melbourne, 2002. Jalland, Pat, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006. Jalland, Pat, Death in War and Peace. A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914– 1970, OUP, Oxford, 2010. Lack, John (ed.), Anzac Remembered. Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis, The History Department, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 1998. Leed, Eric, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War 1, CUP, Cambridge, 1979. McKernan, Michael, The Australian People and the Great War, Collins, Sydney, 1984. Prior, Robin, Passchendaele: The Untold Story, 2nd ed., Yale Nota Bene, New Haven, 2002. Stanley, Peter, Men of Mont St Quentin Between Victory and Death, Scribe, Melbourne, 2009. Thomson, Alistair, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, MUP, Melbourne, 1994. Ziino, Bart, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War, UWA Press, Perth, 2007.

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Jalland, Changing Ways, chs. 6–8. Rene´ to Lois Atock, Condolence letters on death of Private Kenneth Atock, 1941, AWM 3DRL/6372. 41 Rickard, John, Australia, A Cultural History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 238–47, 268–70. 42 Age, 20 July 1979. 43 Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, Macmillan, New York, 1969. 40

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44 Jalland, Changing Ways, ch. 16; Jalland, Pat, Death in War and Peace. A History of Loss and Grief in England, 1914–1970, OUP, Oxford, 2010.