CHANGING WAYS OF DEATH
I N T W E N T I ET H-CE N T U RY AUST R A L I A
Death and bereavement come to us all. This is t...
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CHANGING WAYS OF DEATH
I N T W E N T I ET H-CE N T U RY AUST R A L I A
Death and bereavement come to us all. This is the first book to help us explain and understand their history across twentieth-century Australia. It draws aside the veil of silence that surrounded death for fifty years after 1918 – characterised by denial, minimal ritual and private sorrow – and explores the changes since the 1980s. Emotional and compelling, awardwinning writer Pat Jalland’s important book looks at the World Wars and the impact of medicine, with many stories drawn from letters and diaries. She also discusses cancer, euthanasia,
Changing ways of
DEATH in t went iet h-centur y Aust ra lia WA R , M E D I C I N E A N D T H E FU N E R A L B US I N E SS
palliative care, the funeral business, cemeteries and cremation.
As in her previous studies of death in Britain and Australia, though with an even surer hand, Jalland here combines rigorous and ingenious scholarship with profound human understanding of grief and pain. KEN INGLIS, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
UNSW PRESS
JALLAND
UNSW
PRESS
PAT J A L L A N D
Changing ways of
DEATH in twentieth-century Australia
PAT JALLAND is Professor of History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She is the author of Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1914 and Death in the Victorian Family, which won the New South Wales Premier’s Prize for History. Her other four books explore aspects of women’s history and the Irish question in British politics.
Changing ways of
DEATH in twentieth-century Australia
WAR, MEDICINE AND THE FUNERAL BUSINESS
PAT JALLAND UNSW PRESS
A UNSW Press book Published by University of New South Wales Press Ltd University of New South Wales Sydney NSW 2052 AUSTRALIA www.unswpress.com.au © Pat Jalland 2006 First published 2006 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher. National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Jalland, Pat. Changing ways of death in twentieth-century Australia: war, medicine and the funeral business. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 86840 905 7. 1. Death – Social aspects – Australia. 2. Grief – Australia. 3. Death – History. I. Title. 306.90994 Design Di Quick Cover photo Di Quick Print Everbest, China
contents
Acknowledgments
PART I A transformed culture of death and grief 1
Introduction: The world we have lost
2
‘Death denial’ and silent grief
PART II The two World Wars and denial of death
vii
1 3 17
39
3
The Great War: Heroic deaths and distant graves
41
4
The ‘silent heartache’ of the Great War
75
5
Private and secular grief: Katharine Susannah Prichard
106
6
Airmen missing, presumed dead: ‘Without emotion, without witness, without farewell’
127
7
The ‘horrible nightmare’ of prisoners of war in the Asia–Pacific
152
8
The Second World War and the suppression of sorrow
171
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Changing ways of death in twentieth-century Australia
PART III Medicine and dying in the twentieth century 9
The medicalisation of death
191 193
10 Kylie Tennant and the war against cancer
208
11 Euthanasia and the doctors
235
12 Palliative care and the hospice movement
258
PART IV The funeral business, cemeteries and cremation
279
13 The funeral business in Australia: ‘A racket in human sorrow’?
281
14 Overcrowded burial grounds, modern lawn cemeteries and mausolea
304
15 Cremation in Australia since 1914
328
PART V The second cultural shift
349
16 The revival of expressive grief
351
Notes
373
Select Bibliography
392
Index
399
acknowledgments
I am grateful to the Australian Research Council for a three-year Discovery Grant which provided essential funding for this project. Warm thanks go to my excellent research assistants – including several postgraduate students – who worked with efficiency and good humour for varying periods in particular areas: Pam Crichton, Kirsty Douglas, Janet Doust, Russell Doust, Malcolm Wood and Ruth Wood. Rani Kerin worked on the project for a longer period and provided outstanding commitment and organisational skills at several key stages. John Thompson gave expert help in the search for appropriate illustrations. I am also very grateful to Kay Nantes for her skills in converting my manuscript drafts into electronic form with splendid efficiency and a meticulous attention to detail. I dedicate this book to my colleagues and friends, Ken Inglis and Barry Smith, to express my deep appreciation for their wisdom and generosity. They have read entire drafts of all my books over the last twenty years, offering invaluable advice and unstinting support. I am indebted to Hank Nelson who kindly provided detailed expert comments on my three chapters on the Second World War, and introduced me to Roy Mills’ diary. Jill Roe, Barry Higman and Tim Rowse have commented helpfully on
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Changing ways of death in twentieth-century Australia
particular chapters, and I have benefited from discussions with Geoffrey Bolton, Joy Damousi, John Hooper, Chris Lloyd, Janet McCalman, Peter Read and Eric Richards. At the University of New South Wales Press I have been delighted by Phillipa McGuinness’s enthusiastic response to my book: she took the time to read the manuscript, offering constructive advice for improvement as well as encouragement. Phillipa has been ably supported by her colleagues, Heather Cam, Rosie Marson, Nella Soeterboek, and James Drown, who also compiled the index. Many thanks also go to the staff of the major libraries who facilitated research and offered useful advice on copyright permissions: especially the Australian War Memorial; the Battye Library, Library and Information Services of Western Australia; the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; the National Library of Australia; the Mortlock Library, State Library of South Australia; and the State Library of Victoria. Permissions for quotations from manuscript sources have been kindly granted by Karen Throssell, Bennison Rodd, Jane Drake Brockman, Elizabeth Backhouse, Monica Ward (nee Chase), Arthur Jessup and Betty Collins; also by the Mitchell Library as copyright owner of the Miles Franklin Collection. Copyright permissions for extracts from published works have been granted by Curtis Brown (Ric Throssell, Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers and My Father’s Son). I offer my apologies to any copyright owners I have been unable to identify or locate.
For Ken Inglis and Barry Smith with gratitude and affection
Part I A transformed culture of death and grief
1 Introduction: The world we have lost
The history of death and grief is a significant part of human history which has been overlooked until recently. Death and bereavement come to us all. We must all confront the inevitability of our own mortality. A study of dying and grieving takes us to the heart of any culture and sharpens our understanding of the meaning of our lives. My book, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia, explores the features and causes of a profound cultural transformation in the history of death and grief. After the First World War a deep cultural shift occurred which lasted until the 1970s: emotional and expressive dying and grieving became less common than in the nineteenth century; thoughts and feelings about death were often avoided, ritual was minimised and sorrow became a private matter. Only since about 1980 have death and loss again become topics of intense public concern and discussion, stimulated by the AIDS epidemic, by debates about euthanasia and palliative care, and by a reaction against the medicalisation of death. We can appreciate the full depth and meaning of these cultural changes over time only if we examine the contrasts between the two centuries. It is true that death in Australia was an individual and diverse experience in both centuries, with multiple modes of
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death and grieving, and considerable fluidity over time. Even so, it is possible to identify dominant contrasting models. In the nineteenth century the urban middle class and respectable working class were strongly influenced by Christian beliefs. But these values changed after the 1880s, to be slowly replaced in a more secular society which tended to privatise dying and grieving, and to minimise rituals.
Demography and religion Two major agents of change affecting death and bereavement were common to both centuries, but their nature and relative influence altered. Demography was a significant common force for change, but its effects differ from one century to the next. The most obvious feature of this demographic transformation was that old age replaced infancy as the most likely time of death from about 1904. The nineteenth-century demographic pattern was marked by relatively high mortality, a short life expectancy and a high infant death rate. Between 1880 and 1920 a significant transition took place, displacing the traditional pattern with a new one. This was marked by a continuous decline in mortality, improved survival rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth. The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep decline after 1904, and by 1930 this rate had more than halved.1 Parents today expect their children to survive at least to adulthood, and many people do not experience death until their elderly parents die. By contrast, colonial parents often had to suffer the deaths of their babies and children under five. These common tragedies sharply distance the experience of colonial families from those living today. In the 1880s, about 90 per cent of babies might live to twelve months, and only about 78 per cent reached adulthood.2 The transformation was largely due to a decline in the diarrhoeal and intestinal diseases, and the infectious diseases such as tuberculosis, whooping cough and scarlet fever. The main killers
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of the twentieth century were heart disease and cancer, which chiefly affected older people. Christian faith was a profound influence on nineteenthcentury attitudes to death, on deathbed scenes and rituals, on funeral practices, and on the consolations available in mourning. Many colonists brought with them from Britain and Ireland a rich Christian culture of death and elaborate mourning rituals which deeply influenced the urban middle classes and the respectable working classes. Some tried to recreate a European Christian ideal of a ‘good death’, which required devout spiritual preparation and submission to God’s will, as well as fortitude in the face of suffering. The good death was expected to take place ideally in a Christian home, surrounded by a loving family, with the dying person farewelling family members. Families, like the Bussells in Western Australia, eagerly sought ‘particulars’ of family death scenes and circulated copies to relatives, with instructions to ‘read and pass on’.3 Good death scenes were meant to be edifying, though they were rare in real life except among devout members of the comfortable classes. Religious faith gave Christian families a model of acceptance of death as the will of God. It allowed them to express sorrow in overtly emotional terms, using the language of the Bible, the Prayer Book and familiar hymns: this Christian language of consolation permeated the vernacular in a way unimaginable to many people today. Children, often conditioned by the deaths of siblings, learned like adults to regard death as an inevitable part of life. Their understanding of death in devout Christian families came from family discussions of bible stories, and familiarity with the death themes of many hymns. Thus 15-year-old Edmund Cooke, dying from the nineteenth-century killer disease, pulmonary tuberculosis, in 1872 reassured his uncle Trevor Winter of Murndal, Victoria: ‘I am dying but I am quite happy. My only thought is those who will be left to mourn for me … But those who truly trust in Jesus and repent earnestly of their sins will soon join me.’4
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Devout Christian parents might be comforted on the death of a child by their faith, though it could be tested to the utmost. Many nineteenth-century parents believed that the death of their child was the will of God, who had removed the child from a world of pain, sin and temptation. Pious writers of condolence letters emphasised happy family reunions in the next life and the children’s happiness in heaven as angels with God. When scarlet fever suddenly killed Charlotte Suttor’s beloved four-year-old son Edward in 1850, she was frantic with shock and grief. The struggle for submission to God’s will was so painful that she initially saw the blow as a punishment for the sins of the parents, but she was gradually reconciled by her belief that ‘my darling child is now an angel before the throne of God’.5 Many immigrants to Australia were already unbelievers before they left Britain, and the Christian culture was fragile in early colonial Australia, especially in the bush and among the poor. Moreover, the Christian religion declined more fundamentally from the 1870s due to the combined impact of biblical criticism, evolutionary theory and a growing disillusionment with institutional Christianity. Yet despite the undoubted decline in Christian faith, many people retained a residual belief which affected their attitude to death. Christian forms of consolation, however nebulous, lingered well into the twentieth century, long after church attendance may have ended. Only from the 1950s did extensive Catholic and Orthodox immigration from southern Europe reinforce the surviving Christian sects. The Catholic culture of death was more robust and enduring than the Protestant, and facilitated continuity between the two centuries. It relied on a vital combination of traditional ritual and comforting sacraments, backed up by private spiritual discussion between priest and dying person. Catholic Christianity was less vulnerable than individualistic Protestantism to the challenges of scientific rationalism and evolutionary theory. The Catholic belief in purgatory as an intermediate state between hell and heaven also
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gave more hope of ultimate salvation to most sinful human beings than the stark alternatives offered by Protestantism. Moreover, time in purgatory could be reduced for the Catholic faithful through prayers of intercession and good works of others after an individual’s death. At Catholic deathbeds the role of the priest and a clearly defined ritual made a sudden or delirious death less fearful than for Protestants, for whom dying confessions of faith were so important. The familiar sacraments of the Catholic priest could be deeply comforting at a time of physical and emotional anguish. The correspondence and diaries of the women in the devout Catholic Rowe and O’Leary families from 1878 to the 1930s show how the familiar rituals of death and mourning could help to alleviate the initial shock and grief; and for many years afterwards these rituals allowed the families to believe they could assist the progress of their loved ones through purgatory. For several generations these families regularly visited the graves and memorials of their loved ones and went to mass to offer prayers for their souls, especially on birthdays and anniversaries. Visiting the graves of loved relatives was a vital source of consolation and an important part of the ritual of grieving for many. Graves served several purposes, as sites for remembrance and meditation as well as for Christian devotional ritual. They helped to associate the deceased with a particular place which became a shrine to preserve the memory of the loved one.6 In 1914 the deaths of two generations of the family – including Fanny O’Leary’s aged mother and her husband Dennis – were remembered together in grave-visiting and church ceremonies. In 1919–20 the ritual was extended yet again to include a third generation, on the deaths of Fanny’s two daughters and her sister. Fanny O’Leary’s diary for 1921 was a record of intense grief for her two daughters, with cemetery visits twice a week in the first year, usually followed by confession or mass. Yet in all this anguished grave-visiting she did not neglect the anniversaries of all
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A transformed culture of death and grief
her other loved ones. She also introduced younger generations of her family to the ritual of church ceremonies to pray for the dead, and grave-visiting to remember them.7 Throughout Australia in the twentieth century Catholic faith and ritual were reinforced by growing numbers of Catholics from southern Europe.
Memory and gender Memory and gender had significant influences on death practices and attitudes in both centuries. Memory played a complex role in relation to death and bereavement, becoming more important in the twentieth century as religious faith declined. Memory has different meanings and can be interpreted in diverse ways. It has recently been perceived as an integral component of cultural history: popular memory in the form of individual oral testimonies is captured and recorded as a valuable source for history. Geoff Ely has defined this broader use of memory ‘as a general name for the construction of the past’s cultural meanings and the associated representational archive’.8 In relation to death and bereavement, memory was both a vital component in the dynamics of grief and a powerful force in the public commemoration of war. Historians such as Ken Inglis, Joy Damousi, Stephen Garton and Alistair Thomson have published outstanding work on the process of memorialisation and the role of national memory in sustaining the powerful Anzac legend. As Paula Hamilton and Kate Darian-Smith note, collective memories are reinforced through rituals and commemorative ceremonies, including Anzac Day parades.9 But collective commemoration and memorialisation are not the primary focus of this book, especially as they have now received so much attention. Memory is a recurring theme throughout my book, though it plays a more subsidiary, albeit important, role – usually as a vital consoling force in individual bereavement and as a component in the dynamic process of grief. Its roots go back long before 1914. Certainly the power and significance of memory have increased in
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the twentieth century, in part to compensate for the decline of religious faith. Even so, the letters and diaries of colonists in nineteenth-century Australia provide ample evidence of the central role of memory in the process of grieving, especially in the frequent recall of treasured memories of the lost loved one. When her six-year-old son, Vernon, drowned in York, Western Australia, in 1844, Eliza Brown kept his memory vividly alive in long letters to her father in England: she talked through the memories of her son’s life and death with ‘all the neighbourhood’; and she sat around Vernon’s grave with her two remaining children, taking comfort in creating their store of memories for the future. Seven years later, four-year-old Matilda had the sad story not only ‘by heart but at heart’.10 Tangible material reminders of dead loved ones could be just as important as memories recalled in letters and conversations. Many bereaved people found comfort in external symbols of memory such as locks of hair, photographs or precious keepsakes. Such material mementoes were seen to be especially valuable in the early period of intense yearning when the bereaved person was obsessively preoccupied with the physical memory of the loved one: brooches, lockets and memorial rings containing locks of the loved one’s hair were often treasured. Dr John Springthorpe of Melbourne was still wearing a ring containing a lock of his beloved wife’s hair two years after her death in 1897.11 Photographic ‘likenesses’ of the recently dead were tangible reminders of the loved one which were cherished by many families, as Flora Windeyer acknowledged after Rachel Blomfield’s death in 1870: The one giving her side face is excellent and I have put it in a little oval frame like the one in which I have Mamma’s … What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes.12
It is no accident that ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the press, which
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were a more public and largely secular form of commemoration, began in Australia in the 1880s at a time of increasing religious doubt and indifference. They provided a unique form of private commemoration of the dead, based on the consolations of memory, made public through the press. Such notices held particular appeal to working-class mourners who had lost contact with institutionalised religion. The chief emphasis of such notices from the start was on memory, while those which centred on religion, though substantial at first, became shorter and less frequent. The notices based on memory drew on short, simple verses which remained popular over the decades, like one from the Argus in 1916: ‘So long as life and memory last / We will remember thee’. Most references were no more than a phrase or a line, such as ‘The memory of the just is blessed’ or ‘In loving memory’.13 The quality of the poetry and its repetition mattered less than the genuine sentiment. I will use ‘In Memoriam’ notices as an important source for popular responses to death and loss at crucial points in the book, especially when other sources are limited. Separate spheres and a gendered division of labour operated in death, as in life, in the nineteenth century. These gendered differences in death practices, rituals and emotional responses were stronger in the nineteenth century than the twentieth, and colonial Australian women were considerably more active than men in performing the roles and rituals which often helped people to come to terms with death and grieving. Nurses at the deathbed were almost always women, because the care of sick and dying family members was perceived as a natural part of women’s nurturing role. Thus women, both family members and female servants, attended to the rituals which followed a death, including the laying out and dressing of the body. Women were likely to be more familiar than men with the physical deterioration of corpses and ritualised ways of disguising the odours of decomposition. Women also supervised the viewing of the body – an important ritual allowing family members to farewell their loved one and
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accept the reality of death. Thus many functions delegated to undertakers in the twentieth century were still the province of women before 1914, especially as the body usually remained in the home until the funeral. However, the men in the family organised the funeral, sometimes leaving the women at home to prepare the funeral feast, lest the women failed to contain their emotions.14 Colonial women also played a more active role than men in the ritualised process of mourning the dead. This gendered difference was powerfully demonstrated by the middle-class practice of encouraging widowers to return rapidly to work, and to seek solace in an early remarriage, in the interests of the bereaved children. Widows, by contrast, were expected to grieve quietly at home for up to two years, their sorrow marked symbolically by the wearing of formal black mourning dress, following traditional etiquette rules which restricted their social behaviour. Mourning dress had some value in identifying mourners and reminding others that its wearer might welcome support, but it was less useful than other mourning rituals, not least because of its costly discomfort. In practice the conventions of mourning were usually more relaxed in Australia than in England, especially in rural areas, and even more so from the 1880s with the influence of mourning reform associations. And though the wearing of black was temporarily revived during the Great War, in response to mass deaths of young men, the conventions were probably most carefully observed by older Catholic women.15 There were also marked gender differences in the expression of emotions on bereavement: men were expected to be more restrained in communicating their sorrow, and women more emotional. This was chiefly a response to powerful cultural conditioning as to the requisite behaviour of men and women, though some suggest that it may also reflect a natural tendency for men to be more reserved in expressing feelings. Men felt obliged to meet cultural expectations of masculinity, which were heightened by a
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tough pioneering culture and by the Great War. Silent repression of sorrow by colonial men seems to have been most painful on the death of children, when some men were unable to communicate their grief to their wives. This may also have been an inheritance from an English past. Eliza and Will Shaw, recent English migrants, suffered severely when their two young sons were accidentally drowned in the Swan River near Perth in 1830. The parents were affected differently by their grief. In time Eliza found consolation in her religious faith and in frequent recollections of the memories of her sons. But the tragedy turned Will from a cheerful extrovert into a deeply depressed man who was never able to speak of his lost sons again, but sought refuge in excessive labour and utter exhaustion. His will expressed his wish to be buried with his boys, but his emotions were evidently too powerful and intense for him to speak of them.16 This gendered gap in the expression of sorrow is also captured in Ted Murray-Prior’s response to the death of his sister’s child in 1876: ‘I am a bad hand at condoling or comforting not because I don’t feel for those in trouble but it seems quite out of my line’.17 Thus women in colonial Australia were the chief mourners; their sphere included the supervision of mourning rituals and the offering of emotional comfort and consolation. Women played a vital role in writing about their sorrow and memorialising the death of a loved one. And they were active in sustaining other women through their grief. In 1863 Jane Macartney in Melbourne provided loving support to her relative and friend Jane Griffith through the agony of the first weeks of widowhood. She invited her bereaved friend to stay with her for the first 17 days of acute sorrow, and encouraged her to recall countless memories of her dead husband. Jane Macartney, like many nineteenth-century women, appreciated the need for such continual ‘sad remembering night and day’, and responded patiently and generously with emotional and spiritual support.18 Women also wrote most condolence letters, especially on the death of babies, when it seemed to
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be widely assumed that only mothers could truly empathise with other bereaved mothers. Some gendered differences in response to death and bereavement survive through into the twentieth century, especially the contrasts in emotional expression of grief. As we shall see, Bill Hayden was in 1966 just as incapable of sharing with his wife his intense sorrow on the death of his child as was Will Shaw in 1830. But in other respects there were major changes. After the Great War the roles of caring for the dying and preparing for the funeral moved out of the family home and largely away from the female sphere – death to the control of doctors and hospitals, and the funeral and burial to the mostly male undertakers. Moreover, 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. These developments took place in part because women moved closer to male patterns of silent grieving in the 50 years or more after the Great War. Thus the gender gap diminished, because women began to internalise their sorrow much as men had done in the previous century and continued to do.
War and medicine The chief focus of my book is on war and medicine as the two dominant motors of change affecting death and grief in the twentieth century, when the influence of religion declined. The 1920s are usually identified as the approximate start of ‘death denial’ but the coincidence of timing with the end of the Great War is not adequately explained. It seems likely that the war itself contributed significantly to a profound cultural shift. The tragic mass slaughter of young men in the Great War undoubtedly helped to create the new model of suppressed, privatised grieving that so deeply constrained the next two generations. The complex questions raised about the relationship between the losses of that war and the transformed character of the grieving process are
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discussed in chapters 3 to 5. How far did the war promote chronic, long-term and unresolved grief, especially among the desolate families of the 25 000 missing soldiers with no known graves – blown to bits or left for dead in no-man’s-land? How far did mass wartime bereavement render insignificant the grief of individual survivors safe at home? Twentieth-century attitudes to death and grieving were moulded not merely by one terrible world war, but the cumulative impact of two in little more than 30 years. Chapters 6 to 8 explore the continuing impact on survivors’ capacity to cope in the face of such a massive overload of death and sorrow in the Second World War. They draw on the extensive collection of wartime letters and diaries for airmen and prisoners of war in the Australian War Memorial. A high proportion of Australian deaths on active service took place in awful circumstances, which had little parallel in the earlier war. Over 10 000 (38 per cent) of those killed were airmen, and more than 8000 (30 per cent) died in captivity as prisoners of war. I analyse the responses of servicemen to the likely prospect of their own and their comrades’ deaths, and the different experiences of mourning families who endured sorrow which was often traumatic and prolonged. The role of medicine in the twentieth century history of death was as powerful as that of the Christian religion in the previous century. The advent of the sulfonamides in the 1930s led to cures for a wide range of diseases and the possibility that biomedical scientists might challenge death or at least prolong life. Once doctors came to believe they could cure most diseases, the death of a patient represented failure, and death became a topic to be evaded. Moreover, as medical science and modern technology progressed, terminal illnesses and death increasingly moved from home to hospitals where intervention was possible to prolong life. Thus death was removed from the control of the family at home to that of doctors in a sterile institution concerned with technical efficiency. Inevitably the medicalisation and hospitalisation of
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death, as discussed in chapter 9, reinforced the growing culture of death denial, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern biomedicine and advanced medical technology brought great benefits, but from the 1970s prolonging life artificially could threaten the dignity of dying and created new ethical questions. The limitations of medical science have been demonstrated most powerfully by the challenge of cancer, which has often inspired a kind of cultural terror. Cancer is represented in chapter 10 as the archetypal twentieth-century disease, analogous to tuberculosis in the nineteenth. The euthanasia campaign and the palliative care movement were both community reactions against over-medicalisation; they were products of similar forces, which also included the ageing of the population and a concern for the rights of the terminally ill, especially those suffering from cancer. Chapters 11 and 12 examine these two significant but very different movements in the last 30 years of the century. Opinion on euthanasia in Australia has become polarised, and the subject remains highly controversial. Opponents of medically assisted suicide often advocate modern palliative care as the better solution. The purpose of palliative care is to allow terminally ill patients to experience death in a manner which takes into account spiritual and emotional needs as well as the physical need to relieve extreme pain. Chapters 13 to 15 explore the transformation in the funeral business and the shift from burial to cremation, which followed cultural change rather than creating it. The funeral industry tells us much about attitudes and rituals relating to death, especially as funeral directors took from families their control over the management of funerals and disposal of bodies. Cremation met with widespread hostility in the early twentieth century, but subsequently developed alongside the advance in secularisation in Australian society. Cremations finally outstripped burials in the 1990s, as more Australians looked to cremation as a complete solution to issues of space, health and environment. Cremation
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discourages ceremony, with its tight schedules and industrial hardware which seem to suit a society increasingly inclined to keep death at a distance. It has come to symbolise, for many, the modern way of death in Australia. The final chapter considers the revival of more emotional responses to death and bereavement from the 1980s. Since Freud, some psychologists had argued that bereaved people needed to express their sorrow openly and that suppression of grief could be harmful, but too few people listened until the 1980s. Then at last psychologists had an increasing audience in a concerned community more anxious to participate in grief counselling, especially following disasters and traumatic deaths. Moreover, 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.
2 ‘Death denial’ and silent grief
From the 1970s the Australian media began to express concern that Australia was ‘a death-denying society’ with a fear and horror of death which induced a ‘conspiracy of silence’. The Canberra Times observed in 1970 that ‘death is a subject that most of us avoid’. Six years later the West Australian noted: ‘With some exceptions – some individual, some ethnic – our society is steadily moving down a path that is taking us further and further away from involvement with death’. The frail aged were often institutionalised so their families faced less disruption. The Age in 1980 charged that ‘the symbols of death make Western man quail. Our horror of death – our fear of dying and our abhorrence of the dead – is stronger than it is in other cultures, or had been at other times than in our own.’ The Sydney Daily Telegraph in 1983 was more sensational: Australia is a death-denying society, and we pay the price for it. Left frightened and defenceless by relatives and friends, who can’t accept death, many people are going to their graves as victims of a conspiracy of silence. They die lonely and often bitter deaths.1
Such criticisms were echoed in a personal letter by writer Betty Collins, who experienced in 1980 ‘something repellent in attempts made in our culture to stave off death at all costs, to fight it to the
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last … It lacks even the spirituality of an old cat who will accept its own death.’ She considered it very hard to die in modern Western society.2 Neither Betty Collins nor the journalists were evidently aware that cultural attitudes were already slowly starting to change in the 1980s, just as they condemned them; nor that the ‘conspiracy of silence’ they criticised was not a new phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s, but had been gathering strength for 50 years since the Great War. My book aims to define the features of this so-called ‘deathdenying society’ and to explore how and why it developed after the Great War, and why it began to change again from the 1980s. It is, of course, a considerable challenge to examine the nature of a death culture characterised by silence and avoidance, as the evidence is fragmentary and sparse, especially in the interwar years. Different cultures have varying attitudes and ideas about death and grief. Moreover, people within the same culture can perceive death and respond to grief differently at various times in their lives. This change over time is demonstrated by the marked contrast between death attitudes, experiences and practices in Australia in the century before the Great War compared with the half-century afterwards. In general terms there was a shift from a dominant Christian culture of acceptance of death and more open expression of grief before 1914, to one of avoidance and silence from 1918 to the 1980s. The challenge for the historian is all the more complex because acceptance and avoidance can, and do, exist side by side in the same society; the balance between the two extremes can vary considerably at different times, and between different individuals and groups. It is not so much a matter of right or wrong approaches, but of achieving some sort of balance: either extreme might be harmful in excess. The concept of ‘death denial’ was first introduced by Sigmund Freud in his 1915 essay ‘Our attitude towards death’. Freud argued that ‘death denial’ had already commenced before the Great War: ‘We showed an unmistakable tendency to put death on
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one side, to eliminate it from life. We tried to hush it up.’ Freud’s timing was a little premature: the causal forces of demography and religious decline were already at work and some symptoms were showing, but the Great War had still to accelerate the process.3 Moreover, Freud wrongly presumed that the trauma of a terrible war might induce a return to death acceptance, instead of a swifter march in the direction of denial. The German philosopher and sociologist, Norbert Elias, argued in his book, The Loneliness of the Dying, in 1982 that there was a strong tendency in advanced Western societies to conceal and repress the ‘unwelcome idea’ of death. He believed such avoidance operated at an individual level, through socially instilled defence mechanisms, and also at a broader level in society. The dying were hygienically screened away behind the activity of normal social life; the living were embarrassed by their presence and did not know how to communicate with them. The withdrawal of the living from the dying continued after death, as the care of the dead and their graves was transferred to paid specialists. For Elias these trends in relation to death were part of a broader shift in emotional history, whereby many people were unwilling or unable to express strong emotions in public, and sometimes also in private.4 The phrase ‘death-denial’ needs to be used with care, because it is value-laden, and it has different meanings for psychologists and sociologists. Jeffrey Kauffman, a psychologist, defines denial of death as ‘keeping the pain of loss, or the meaning of a loss, or reality of a loss out of consciousness’. He acknowledges that the concept in psychology derives from Freud, who used it to mean a defensive refusal to accept a death and to recognise its reality: ‘When loss is grossly denied, there is no internal sense of grief’. Yet an element of denial occurs throughout normal mourning, as the reality of loss is slowly acknowledged. Sometimes psychological denial can be usefully adaptive in keeping people functional by containing overwhelming grief – as was the case for many Great
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War soldiers.5 The sociologist, Allan Kellehear, on the other hand, argues that the popular psychological concept of death denial has been too often generalised to include all kinds of individual ‘death-avoiding conduct’, thus over-simplifying diverse cultural responses to death.6 As a social and cultural historian I try to be careful and economical in my use of the term ‘denial’, having noted its multiple meanings for other disciplines. Sometimes it cannot be avoided because it is used by others and occasionally it is helpful to apply it in a general sense to cover a range of related meanings, including avoidance of death’s reality, suppression of emotions, silence about death and minimisation of rituals. Indeed Beverley Raphael, an Australian psychiatrist, used the term ‘death denial’ in this broad sense in 1984 in her book Anatomy of Bereavement, which draws on her Australian experience: ‘It is commonly assumed that many contemporary societies are death denying … Various dimensions of death anxiety have been identified: death avoidance, death fear, death denial, and reluctance to interact with the dying.’7 My intended meaning will usually be clear from the context, especially where an illustration or a case study elaborates. It is now a popular phrase, commonly applied in contrast to ‘acceptance’ of death, and used here to describe a dominant cultural norm in the half-century after the Great War. My occasional use of the term does not suggest that everybody fitted into this category, and accepts that particular individuals may have altered their attitude and behaviour over time.
Denial and dying Five narratives will illustrate different meanings of ‘death-denial’ by examining the diverse kinds of death-avoidance behaviour and attitudes adopted by various individuals and families. All are taken from peacetime years, because the two World Wars will be explored more deeply in the chapters that follow. The narratives demonstrate the profound contrast between the dominant cultural
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norms relating to death and grief in the half-century after the Great War when compared with the previous century. One of the most obvious changes was the disappearance of accounts of deathbed scenes. Descriptions of the detailed ‘particulars’ of good Christian deathbeds exist in archival papers of nineteenth-century families, but there are very few after 1900 and none that I could find after 1918. Indeed, after the Great War the silence extends from deathbed scenes to domesticated death more generally, in contrast to patriotic deaths in war. I will start with two brief personal stories which illustrate different reductionist extremes of the modern way of death. On 22 October 1922 William Manifold, a pastoralist aged around 60, of Weerite near Camperdown, Victoria, died from heart disease. The dead man’s son, John, described the circumstances of the unexpected death in a letter to his brother which clearly revealed his great shock. On a hot day their father had travelled to inspect some bullocks when his car became stuck, and he had a seizure in the aftermath. John Manifold’s letter makes two significant points about his father’s death. First, he initially believed their father ‘knew nothing at all, which is the way he would have chosen to go out, and there is some comfort in this’. Such a view contrasts sharply with that of pious nineteenth-century Christians who hoped for a slow death with their faculties intact, allowing time for spiritual preparation to meet their God. Second, the family subsequently learned from their doctor that their father had known for 12 months that his heart condition was serious: it could not be improved by medication, and he could die at any time. Yet their father told no-one, including his family, and asked the doctor to respect his secret. As his son John regretted: ‘It is mighty sad to think he was going about with this death sentence hanging over him’. But this choice enabled William Manifold to avoid a discussion with his family about his disease and impending death, which he might find embarrassing and confronting. His silence also allowed him, if he chose, to push the threat of death
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to the back of his own mind. His son John clearly inherited these traits: he certainly found the open expressions of sympathy offered at the funeral distressing: ‘The whole thing broke me up and people expressing their sorrow finished me completely. I am thankful to Max for getting hold of me and taking me out of it. The reaction to things laid me low for a few days.’8 While the Manifold family experience illustrates one extreme form of the denial of death, Iris Chapman Aria’s demise represents another, half a century later. As she intended, we have little information on her death in 1974. We know, however, that she was a widowed journalist, who wrote for Woman’s Day in the 1960s; she died in St Vincent’s Hospital, Darlinghurst, of cerebral thrombosis and chronic renal failure at the age of 67. She was twice married, and the widow of AJ Aria, also a journalist; they had no children and lived in Woollahra. Iris Aria’s papers in the Mitchell Library include family correspondence with parents and a brother, dated between 1939 and 1947, but nothing for the 20 years leading up to her death.9 Fragmentary notes written by Iris in shaky writing were found on her body after her final collapse. They advised ‘think coronary’, and supplied her doctor’s name. She insisted ‘No one present at cremation’ and ‘funds and expense to be spared’. She provided the name of her chosen funeral director and requested that her solicitors must look after everything. Further instructions were written on the outside of her will, dated 20 March 1974. She wished to be privately cremated in the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, with nobody present, and her ashes were to be scattered in her garden. The death notice was not to appear until a week after her death or three days after the cremation, and was to be written exactly as she prescribed. Her will divided her estate between her husband and two other people, presumably relatives.10 This was a case of a dying woman determining her own extraordinary minimal form of disposal. Personal emotions were eliminated as far as possible.
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Deaths of Christians in the years before 1980 often included a mixture of traditional religious acceptance and more modern denial features. The death of Revd Denis Deasey, an Anglican clergyman aged 65, in Melbourne in 1942, is a case in point. It was described in a long letter from his daughter Kathleen, then at Newnham College, Cambridge, to his son Denison, a teacher and writer. It illustrates the different perspectives of two generations, as well as those of Christians and unbelievers. The cause of death was itself characteristically modern: sudden death from heart seizure was one of the most common deaths of the twentieth century, compared with a long-drawn out nineteenth-century death from tuberculosis. The family of a Christian clergyman might have preferred a slower death for him, but the Deasey family was reassured by the comment of Dean O’Brien of St Mary’s Cathedral that ‘doubtless he was well prepared’. The family believed that the dean expressed what they all felt. Kathleen saw her father’s death as a ‘glorious’ Christian death, with ‘no pain, no suffering or regrets’.11 Yet Kathleen Deasey’s long letter also revealed traces of a more modern view of death and dying. Revd Deasey had died while travelling by train to a church meeting at Geelong; he was sleeping in a railway carriage he happened to share with three working men, who asked for the train to be stopped as their unknown companion appeared very ill. This was far removed from a Christian deathbed scene of the nineteenth century, but his family felt it appropriate for a devout clergyman in 1942. His daughter, Kathleen, saw it as ‘a glorious end’, in part for modern reasons, ‘because there was nothing of the sickroom’. In her view it was not a ‘morbid’ death, but a clean and natural end; her father might have liked three working men to witness his death in a railway carriage.12 Generational change within the Deasey family was illustrated by the difference of opinion about viewing the body in the traditional Christian manner. As Kathleen expressed it: ‘Mum insisted
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on seeing Dad and the others felt it was terrible – too harrowing’. Maude Deasey saw her husband’s body, despite the opposition of most of her seven children, and she thought he appeared ‘beautifully peaceful’. There was no public funeral, as there might have been in the previous century, only a small private funeral. In concluding her letter, Kathleen expressed the hope that Denison would not find her detailed account of their father’s death ‘all too harrowing’. This would not have been a concern in an earlier Christian family. Kathleen concluded, ‘I must try not to grieve to make others miserable’. Again, this was a modern response, for earlier generations would have expected to express and share their sorrow.13 Elizabeth Backhouse’s oral testimony about her father’s death in 1952 is interesting for the contrasts it draws between attitudes to death within the same family. She was a novelist and playwright, born in Northam, Western Australia, in 1917. As a child she went to church regularly, but later found difficulty in accepting all the beliefs of institutional religion. But she retained a firm faith in God and became a Freemason with a belief in reincarnation, which removed her fear of death. She saw Freemasonry as a search for truth and a philosophy of living dedicated to service, which she inherited from her father. She was present at the deaths of her parents, both musicians; her father died in 1952 and her mother in 1975. Afterwards she felt no ‘great tragedy of death’, just a sense of loss, because she always knew ‘they were somewhere’.14 Elizabeth Backhouse’s views on death were unusual, as were those of her father, but her mother’s were more representative of the period. In Elizabeth’s view, her mother was ‘a very human person with faults’, whereas her father was ‘a sweet intelligent person’, a ‘more advanced soul’ who was closer than most to spiritual perfection. After some years in England, Elizabeth returned to Australia in 1951 at her mother’s request, because of her father’s serious illness. He had never mentioned his condi-
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tion, probably because her mother strongly disliked illness and had an aversion to death. Elizabeth’s mother firmly believed that sick people should disregard and overcome ill health and carry on with their lives. But glaucoma had almost blinded her husband who also had a serious heart condition, following a severe heart attack, and had been weakened by tuberculosis as a child. Her mother had no interest in caring for an invalid; Elizabeth worked in the day time, but in the evenings read to her father, played records, talked and bathed him. She felt close to him but was well aware that he was slowly dying. It became clear that her mother ‘didn’t want him to die at home. It was something she was very much afraid of.’ Finally the doctor said her father must go into the Mount Hospital in Perth, as Elizabeth related: I took him in the taxi. He had his hand in mine. He was just staring straight ahead. He could see nothing of course, but his thoughts. I could see by his face he knew that he was really driving to his own death. His face had a grief in it and I suppose, sadness in a way, that he was being taken away from home which I revolted against very much, but could do nothing. It was out of my hands.15
This moving account suggests that in 1952 Elizabeth’s father remembered home deaths in his own family as having been the norm. The idea that death should usually take place in hospital only became more common from the 1940s, with advances in medical science and technology, as we shall see later. Elizabeth and her father would have preferred a home death, but they could not prevail against the insistence of her mother and the doctor. For three days Elizabeth spent all the time with her father which the hospital allowed, only going home to sleep at night before returning to the hospital by 7:00 am. She spent some time trying to contact her brother Clive, to persuade him to sit with their father. Like their mother, Clive preferred not to recognise that their father was dying, and clearly disliked the hospital,
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which he would visit infrequently for a few minutes each time. On the day of her father’s death, Elizabeth spent more time on the phone, trying to contact her mother and brother to bring them to the hospital. She finally had to ask her own friend, Marie, to leave work, and accompany her mother to the hospital by taxi. Meanwhile she found her father in the act of dying, while the nurse called his name repeatedly, asking him to ‘come back’. Elizabeth had to ask the nurse twice to ‘let him go … what was the point in dragging a soul back when probably it was already well on the way’. Her mother and brother finally arrived, but it was too late: ‘so it was all over and we just all went home’.16 This was probably a not unrepresentative hospital death for 1952, though details would differ. Elizabeth’s mother and her brother were extremely uncomfortable with the prospect of death in the family and did their best to avoid it; even the hospital nurse tried in vain to postpone the moment of death. This was a world removed from the Victorian middle-class Christian family death, with the family kneeling around the bed. The lonely death in 1954 of the distinguished writer Miles Franklin, at the age of 74, also illustrates some features of death denial. Her story is well known. After a tough childhood she published her ‘marvellously rebellious’ My Brilliant Career in 1899 to great acclaim, before spending many years in Chicago and London.17 At the height of her literary powers she finally returned to Sydney in 1932, following her father’s death a year earlier. Miles had good reason to fear death: three of her siblings died in childhood and a fourth at 25 years of age.18 Miles Franklin did not hide her profound fear of death. As David Martin observed in his obituary in Overland in 1954, ‘Poor Miles Franklin! She hated the thought of death, but not only for herself … She would have liked to give mankind the gift of eternal youth.’19 Miles was deeply afraid of suffering a prolonged and debilitating final illness. As she wrote to her mother after her father’s death in 1931: ‘It would be all right if one could be sure
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that the end would come without a long and painful struggle’.20 In the nineteenth century many people must have feared death, but that fear was palliated for Christians by the hope of a future life, which might even include family reunions. For Miles, death held out no hopes of eternal life in a heavenly hereafter. Following a friend’s death in 1952, Miles had discussed her fears with her friend Henrietta Drake-Brockman, the Western Australian novelist and playwright. Henrietta had followed up with a thoughtful letter saying she wished Miles was less shocked by the ‘Dark Angel’, especially when his blow fell swiftly: If there was no death, there could be no birth! – no growth – no life … We did talk about this when you were here, and I do know the terrible reasons you have for feeling as you do – when death comes in giving life – well, it is horrible. But when it comes swiftly to an older person, I cannot feel the way you do – because as you know, I watched my father at 55 die after much agony, and bad as shocks are to those who remain, I simply cannot get appalled by sudden death, I can only regard it as merciful … I don’t know what to say to help you, for you get so terribly unhappy over it.21
Miles Franklin’s obsession with personal privacy and her desire to avoid personal confrontations were also evident in her responses to death and bereavement. When she did return to Australia it was ‘to draining, uneventful domesticity at Carlton’, living with a possessive and demanding mother, who died in 1938 aged 88.22 Miles was already 59 when her mother died, leaving her feeling bereft. As she confided to Nettie Palmer in 1944 when Nettie’s mother died: ‘It’s a dreadful feeling when one’s mother has gone beyond communication anywhere on earth. I do not recover from the devastation that swallowed me upon the realisation that never again would I do anything for mother nor she do anything for me.’23 In a series of letters to Dymphna Cusack, Miles again reflected on the impact of the loss of her mother. In 1944 she noted that this was the sixth anniversary of her mother ‘being carried from the house’. Sometimes she thought she was
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recovered, but ‘today the desolation returns more blightingly than ever’, perhaps because young men were again slaughtering each other in a World War, ‘and there is no spiritual refuge anywhere’. Again, commenting on her reduced supplies of energy, she observed that ‘the death of my mother, followed by the going of my brother [Norman, in 1942], dried me up’. In 1946 the ‘ordeal’ of Christmas day magnified the ‘sense of emptiness … left by the going of every family member’. Increasingly she used metaphors of death to describe her own ‘dreary and distracted’ state: ‘I had been feeling like decayed soap … and desolate to death’.24 Miles’ hatred of death was linked with her memories of childhood losses, but it became more intense with the loneliness of encroaching age and the loss of old friends. Her suffering was increased from 1949 by her attempts to care for her nephew John Franklin, who had been broken by his awful experiences as an airman in the war and was eventually classified as schizophrenic. Miles was increasingly frail and anxious about her own poor health in her seventies, with a weak heart and a constant cough. She experienced intense personal anguish on the deaths of close friends, including her next door neighbour in June 1952, when Miles was 75. He died from coronary occlusion, the cause of Miles’ own death. Her neighbour had looked after Miles when her brother died – he accompanied her to the registrar and the funeral director’s – and she could seek his help at any time. ‘He was one of the dearest souls I ever knew.’ His son came to her for help and she had found her neighbour dead. On the day of her neighbour’s funeral she wrote to JK Moir, businessman and collector of Australiana: ‘I’m shattered at present. I don’t take the death of my friends lightly, and there is no use in telling me we all must meet it etc. I loathe death, and the dead are so pitilessly silent, there is no comfort in them … I feel blank and ill by this sudden loss.’25 Three days later Miles repeated her story to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, writing that she still could not get
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over the shock, ‘the piteousness of seeing him there and that awful surrounding silence’.26 Just over a year later, another dear neighbour died suddenly – possibly the wife of the man who had died earlier – this time of peritonitis, ‘a terrible blow’. The neighbour’s daughter came at dawn to say her mother had just died. Miles told Moir, ‘It was a great shock as she had promised a day earlier if she were the one to find me dead that she would let none see me; and she had the phone too and said if I could crawl to that and let her know she would be in any minute. It is a great gap without her.’27 This underlines the anxiety Miles experienced, as death approached, about her expectation that she would die alone and that she must rely on her neighbour to find her and advise her cousin. Miles had almost reached the point when most of her elders, neighbours and friends had gone before her, to ‘leave me alone in this lonely world’.28 Miles Franklin died just a year after her second neighbour, on 19 September 1954. As she died in a private hospital in Drummoyne, she was at least spared the indignity of an isolated death alone at home, which she had so dreaded. Miles’ relative, Leslie Bridle, described the funeral and ‘the drabness of a cold wet day and a bare coffin’. That morning she had picked an armful of Miles’ beloved native flowers from a nearby hill and arranged them along the coffin; but the ‘old battle-axe of a nurse’ who made the funeral arrangements had them thrown out. At least the young clergyman took the trouble to read Miles’ book All that Swagger and spoke of her deep love for Australia.29 Miles was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. Katharine Susannah Prichard felt deeply saddened for her friend when she heard, especially as she knew that Miles ‘was so afraid of death’, and had no immediate family to mourn her deeply, while her life denied and deprived her of so much. Katharine was able to contemplate her own death, by contrast, in a far more positive light: ‘Death has no fears for me’.30
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Silent sorrow Since psychiatrist Beverley Raphael is a prominent Australian expert on bereavement, her comments on the 50 years of suppression of sorrowful emotions are invaluable. Writing in the mid1970s, having completed a thesis on the management of bereavement, she understood more than most people about the cultural climate in which she was working: ‘The pain of grief is often denied, suppressed or disowned. Particularly for adults in our society there are strong pressures to be in control of one’s emotions at all times; not to break down with grief, as this is seen as an indication of weakness.’ When Raphael asked bereaved patients to talk about the circumstances of recent family deaths, for many it was their first experience of such open communication, ‘so great is the level of denial about death and so great the difficulty of speaking of it’. Often the undertaker had been the only person prepared to discuss the death in an open and helpful way: For everyone else the deceased has ‘passed away’ and become unmentionable, and the bereaved has been given very clear communications that it is highly improper to upset herself and others by any undue emotional display, with the implication that further support will be withdrawn if she does.
In many cases the social network was not supportive, with advice to the bereaved to forget the deceased and avoid talking about him. Strong cultural norms for the suppression of grief even persuaded some medical practitioners to ‘collude with this avoidance of grief’ by prescribing medication.31 We will see later that Raphael’s work, along with that of John Bowlby and Colin Murray Parkes in the United Kingdom, helped to change this cultural climate of avoidance. An important social survey of bereavement in British society conducted in 1963 by sociologist Geoffrey Gorer also has some relevance, given Australia’s British heritage and the absence of any
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similar Australian evidence. Whereas most recorded human societies had formal mourning rituals, Gorer found that the bereaved in 1960s Britain had to face intense grief without rituals, guidance or support. The common assumption seemed to be that rational people could control their grief by will power, giving it no public expression and indulging it in private, if at all.32 Gorer’s conclusions were based on a questionnaire study of a representative sample of 359 bereaved people who had lost a significant family member in the previous five years. Gorer examined variations in grieving patterns and rituals according to region, class, age, gender and religious belief. In general, the minority who continued to follow mourning rituals and more expressive modes of grieving were people over 45, from the unskilled working classes, concentrated in the north of England and Scotland, and many were Catholics. Those who abandoned rituals and hid their grief were more likely to come from the upper middle and professional classes in the south and midlands of England, and the larger towns.33 Half the deaths noted in the survey had taken place in hospital, where doctors told relatives but not the patients themselves that they were dying. Most people died alone: less than a quarter of those surveyed were present at their relative’s death. Customs of social mourning after the funeral had almost disappeared in England: most people hid their grief and acted as if nothing had happened. Some widows believed the only way to cope was to ‘keep busy’ and ‘put a bright face on’. They hid their sorrow for the sake of their families and friends: ‘you do your mourning quietly, alone. The same as you might do praying.’34 The broad conclusions have some relevance for Australia, where the urban middle classes and respectable working classes were probably the more likely to hide their grief. The 20 years between the two World Wars were permeated by a profound grief which was formally expressed in public commemoration for the 60 000 dead servicemen. This made it more difficult to mourn individual civilians whose deaths sank
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into insignificance by comparison with the mass deaths of young soldiers who had become national heroes. Moreover, the sheer necessity to survive a dreadful economic depression between the wars made overt expressions of individual grief seem all the more a personal indulgence which few could afford. Consequently I found only three detailed accounts of the experience of grieving for individual civilians in peacetime, either in the interwar years or even the 25 years after the Second World War. The story of Katharine Susannah Prichard’s experience of death and sorrow is told in chapter 5. It is instructive that my other two narratives date from the late 1960s but were not actually written and published until 30 years later, when society had relaxed its cultural inhibitions against the open expression of sorrow. Ruth Park’s traumatic experience of bereavement can stand for many in the years between 1918 and the 1980s. I include her story for that reason and because it offers a thoughtful analysis of the potentially destructive nature of denial: it dates from 1967, towards the end of the years of silence. Though born in New Zealand, Ruth and husband D’Arcy Niland earned a distinguished joint reputation as Australian writers. For over six years after D’Arcy’s death from heart disease in 1967, Ruth suffered from a terrible destructive grief that ‘very nearly killed me’, in addition to the adverse financial consequences of widowhood. In 1993 when revelations of distressing bereavement experiences were again permissible, even encouraged, in a new age of ‘death awareness’, Ruth described this terrible period in her life in her autobiography, Fishing in the Styx: When my husband died I handled grief very badly. People remarked on my calm or the capable manner in which I handled the innumerable complexities that follow a sudden death. I was unlikely to embarrass or distress them by weeping or throwing myself in front of a truck, and though their desire to console was genuine, they were secretly relieved. ‘You’re being wonderful’, they said. To be wonderful is to handle grief badly. And so I nearly died.
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In a way I did die, as one might die of shock after an amputation or a dreadful wound. My own character and disposition made things worse for me, terribly worse. Reserve, independence, stoicism are not the qualities needed in grief. My sorrow when Mera my father died had taught me only one thing, that I could survive that sorrow. Not how one survived. Our culture knows little about meeting grief head-on. It has come to be our most impregnable Tower of Babel, the very symbol of non-communication. We stand about in tears, wishing we could assuage the pain of persons dumbfounded by woe, but mostly we don’t know what to say. Better to make no reference at all? Better, more tactful, to allow them to get over it in their own time? It is all kindness, and no help. Thus, thrown entirely upon oneself in a comfortless darkness, one has the choice either of being wonderful or falling to pieces. And if you have children or others dependent upon you, you cannot afford to fall to pieces. So mourning is not done, and the tears that run down inside turn to acid that may corrode your soul for years.35
For a long time after 1967 Ruth Park found nobody able to help or advise her in this ‘strange country’ of bereavement: ‘there was no one in those times to tell me anything’. The doctor offered tranquillisers and the clergy inadequate religious consolation, all incapable of understanding or responding to the depth of her despair. She came to believe that people only learn about bereavement through tough experience. Ultimately, only her fellow bereaved were able to help her find her way through. The person who eventually enabled her to cry was a kindly Italian shopkeeper who came from a culture accustomed to express sorrow openly: he understood her grief because he had lost his baby daughter in an accident and communicated his sympathy. Ruth Park was afterwards able to gain some relief through tears, but her own cultural inhibitions remained strong enough to ensure nobody every saw her cry. In the years after 1973, Zen Buddhism taught her how to recover from the destructive grief which had made her ‘hurt all over’ for so long.36
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With the benefit of hindsight and new knowledge in 1993, Ruth Park was able to understand so much that society had not known in 1967: ‘today we know of the effect of extreme sorrow or shock on the hypothalamus, and how a stressed body can succumb to much graver diseases, such as cancer. But we didn’t know then.’ She now realised that intense grief slows the body down and the immune system is weakened so that many minor illnesses can occur. Her hair had changed colour in three weeks in 1967, her teeth began to decay and she suffered numerous bodily disorders. But nobody explained the physical effects of grief to her in 1967, and she suffered for years.37 It is no coincidence that the only other narrative of bereavement which is detailed and thoughtful also dates from a traumatic death experience in the 1960s which was at last poured out in writing in a book published in the 1990s. On 23 October 1966, politician Bill Hayden was away from home attending a campaign meeting for the forthcoming election. That day, he and his wife Dallas suffered their ‘most awful personal tragedy’ when their five-year old daughter Michaela was accidentally killed by a car near their Ipswich home. In his autobiography, Hayden described ‘the long, painful loneliness of the nights following the death, the nights of emotional torture’ and the ‘days when your sanity is in doubt’. He spent days pacing about their lounge room, unable to keep still: ‘Every atom of my existence was in pain and distress; I felt bitter resentment at a wicked injustice I could not comprehend’. He experienced ‘constant distress and confusion’ which made concentration very difficult. Hayden took refuge in a desperate fantasy world in which the report of Michaela’s death was a mistake and she would return unharmed years later. Part of him understood this as an effort to deny reality, and the dreamworld was abruptly shattered when the bleak mourning cars arrived before the funeral. The trauma was even greater for his wife who was breast-feeding their youngest child: ‘The flow of milk dried up on the instant. She suffered the most excruciating
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distress, of a kind, I believe, only a mother could fully understand, for part of her had been violently torn away and destroyed. We felt as if we could never recover from the shock.’38 The anguish was infinitely worse because the shattered parents were unable to share their grief. Bill Hayden found he could not talk about it and refused to discuss it for 30 years: Here we are thirty years after Michaela’s death and while Dallas wishes we could talk about [Michaela] at times, I find I still cannot, which I know is unfair of me. If I attempt to do so an old and painful wound, deep in the psyche, opens up and my composure falls apart. I cannot shake off the conditioning of a lifetime, the imperative that ‘real men don’t cry’.
Bill Hayden’s statement is powerful and moving. It is also illuminating about the continuing gender gap in grieving and about the second shift in cultural behaviour and attitudes which started in Australia in the 1980s and continues still. Like Ruth Park’s experience, moreover, it also reveals far more than most fragmentary accounts about the tangible feel of the silences surrounding death in the 50 years up to the 1980s, and about their corrosive consequences. I suggest that several forces explain why Bill Hayden’s cultural conditioning was different from that of his wife. He emphasised the pressure of a powerful masculine culture of emotional repression in response to death – a culture which was also influential in the nineteenth century, as we saw in the case of Will Shaw who was utterly unable to speak about the deaths of his two sons in 1830, despite obvious deep distress. In the twentieth century, these repressed male responses to loss were mightily reinforced by the effects of the two World Wars; the silences spread among men across the classes, and also affected many women. Moreover, in the Haydens’ case there was the additional anguish caused by the comparative rarity of children’s deaths after 1914. Given this devastating situation, it is valuable to explore the ways in which the Haydens learned to cope at all, so that life would go on for the family and their remaining children. Bill
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Hayden initially looked to religious consolation: ‘In my sheer desperation I went to the Catholic presbytery’ to talk to a young priest who was also a friend. This seemed an obvious course, despite his atheism, because he believed that people with a deep inner faith were often able to sustain themselves at times of great loss. He was badly in need of support in his crisis and ‘I desperately wanted to believe’. The long talk with the priest was comforting, but he found himself too embarrassed to sink to his knees to join his friend in prayer. Hayden’s reason did not allow him to make a leap of faith which would have seemed hypocritical. He regretted his atheism, but it forced him to cope with his crisis alone and in silence. Condolence letters were also unhelpful to him because their dominant form of consolation was a Christian belief that Michaela’s death was God’s will. Such letters provoked both pain and anger in an atheist, though their sympathy was welcome.39 Only two sources of consolation proved valuable to Bill Hayden in his silent despair in 1966. He and Dallas were ‘too devastated to do much’, and Dallas’ extended family network of coal mining relatives took over the practical management of organising the funeral and the mourning. The gender factor was again at work here: it was the mining women who took the lead, as they had learnt how to cope with mining disasters. They discreetly organised a roster to enable them to receive mourners on behalf of the grieving parents.40 We might suspect that the miners’ wives also provided vital support for Dallas Hayden who must have suffered acutely from her husband’s silence. The second genuine form of sustenance for the grieving Hayden parents in 1966 came from other parents who had lost their children. Those parents, who had suffered in the same way, told the Haydens they were not alone. Indeed, Bill Hayden’s reason for including this painful personal tragedy in his autobiography was the hope that it would help other bereaved parents ‘who feel desolately alone and not understood’. His final message was that life continues and
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they would make a recovery of sorts, though their lives would never be the same, and they would never forget.41 ___ My book will explain how and why this culture of silence about death and grief developed, and explore the role of the two World Wars and the medicalisation of death. I will also examine the second cultural shift of the late twentieth century, which has restored the option of more open emotional responses.
Part II The two World Wars and denial of death
3 The Great War: Heroic deaths and distant graves
The Great War was a watershed in the Australian cultural, social and emotional history of dying and grieving. Religious and demographic forces had started the process before 1914, but the war was itself a powerful catalyst of change: the traditional Christian culture of death ceased to be the dominant model. The mass slaughter of young men and the interminable grief of countless families went far to create a new model of suppressed and privatised grieving which deeply constrained the next two generations. The human cost of the Great War to Australia was unprecedented in 1914, with about 60 000 soldiers killed; one in five of those who left home for the war did not return. By Ken Inglis’s calculation, two out of every three Australians in uniform were killed or wounded and every second Australian family was bereaved.1 The stark facts of numbers killed have even more meaning when we remember that they were all young volunteers and that they all died within a space of four years. The trauma suffered by their bereaved families was increased because they could not say a last farewell to their bodies nor attend their sons’ funerals, nor visit their distant graves as part of the mourning process. About 42 per cent of the bereaved never knew exactly how their sons died, where they were buried or indeed whether they were buried at all. They were left with years of anguish: were
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their sons blown to bits or buried alive? They would never know for sure, and imagined deaths might be worse than the reality. About 25 000 Australians who died in action were never identified and have no known burial place: they could be commemorated only in the anonymous memorials to the missing.2 The Great War also accelerated changes already taking place, including the decline of institutionalised Protestantism, as secularisation increased among the working classes and intellectuals 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. Sgt Jack Baillie, serving in France, lost a brother and brother-in-law to the war in 1917: ‘I have lost a great deal of faith in religion and the whole pale of religion since I have come abroad and seen the world’.3 Moreover, bereaved families were denied traditional church-based funeral and mourning rituals, as well as the loss of Christian consolations.
‘In Memoriam’: The voice of bereaved families ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the press during the Great War became a remarkable voice of grieving relatives reflecting on their loss. Their resonance during that war was greater than before or since. Families were unable to pay tribute to their sons at funeral or burial services, and these newspaper notices became a popular and vital substitute. I will use ‘In Memoriam’ notices from the Melbourne Argus, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Newcastle Morning Herald as an illuminating commentary by ordinary bereaved people on the values of heroism and patriotism, the significance of the graves of the fallen, and their response to profound grief. Bereaved families followed the examples of their soldier sons in coping with wartime deaths largely in silence. The ‘In Memoriam’ columns of the newspapers offer a unique source for their emotional response to loss, expressed in verse which was
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often makeshift but was nevertheless poignant and revealing. It is ironic that bereaved families should make their private grief public in this way and yet frequently refer to sorrow borne in silence. This silent grief was primarily a way of coping with mass deaths in wartime. It acknowledged that their sons died as heroes who deserved public celebration: expressive individual grief was inappropriate, and disparaged their sons’ patriotic sacrifice. These verses often originated in response to prolonged major campaigns, notably Gallipoli, the Somme, and Passchendaele – the third battle of Ypres. A grieving family – such as the O’Loughlins introduced below – might compose an initial verse which spoke to their own sorrow. Other families might have sat around kitchen tables with newspaper Rolls of Honour spread around, to decide which best answered their own need, often altering a word or a line to suit their circumstances. If they had an Australian model, it derived from nineteenth-century ballad versification and the work of Henry Lawson, Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson. But ‘In Memoriams’ also show the influences of traditional Christian sources of solace – popular hymns, the Bible and the Prayer Book. Moreover the imagery is sometimes drawn from English literature – possibly learned by rote in school – from Kipling, Tennyson, Keats, Shelley and Milton. Constant repetition and popular verse might make these wartime notices formulaic, but rarely hackneyed. It is impossible to read through the Great War Rolls of Honour in these newspapers without being moved, even today. ‘In Memoriam’ notices were a largely secular phenomenon in Australia, starting slowly from the 1880s, reinforced by the decline in Christian faith, and reaching a peak of popularity during the Great War. They provided a uniquely Australian form of commemoration of the dead in the 30 years before the Great War. In England such columns only commenced after 1914, and were not as popular. They made a broad appeal to the Australian working classes, especially in cities such as Newcastle, with its substantial mining population. ‘In Memoriams’ self-evidently
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based their primary appeal on memory, though they also called on subsidiary consolations, including Christian faith and patriotism. Religious references became fewer from 1914, as the Great War stimulated a new and stronger emphasis on patriotism. I will introduce my chapters on the Great War with the moving story of the Irish O’Loughlin family of West Brunswick, Victoria, as told by family members through the ‘In Memoriam’ columns of the Argus. Their story stands for many. The O’Loughlins were among the more unfortunate of the bereaved families of the Great War, in losing two sons in action: Cpl George O’Loughlin was killed at Gallipoli in the first landing in 1915, aged 20. His eldest brother, Capt Harry O’Loughlin, was killed at Bapaume in France on 28 February 1917, aged 32. They left three sisters and three brothers to share their parents’ intense grief. Their family notices were longer than most and they dwelt on one vital form of consolation – their belief that their two sons were heroes who died for their country in a noble and just cause. Running through their many verses were brief acknowledgments of a terrible but largely silent grief and the quiet support of their Catholic faith. On Anzac Day 1916 the O’Loughlins inserted four long notices on the anniversary of George’s death at Gallipoli the year before. George’s sisters, Maisie and Doris, wrote that ‘our poor heart is breaking’, as they longed for him and looked at his photograph. The parents and the two surviving soldier sons each contributed notices of 20 lines, rather than the usual four. They evidently compiled them from a combination of their own efforts and stanzas drawn from other family notices. The tone of the notice by the parents, Maude and Henry, was one of quiet resignation reinforced by pride in Harry’s heroism, and an always understated faith in God: In Gallipoli’s lonely graveyard, Beneath the lonely sod, There lies my dearest son, Resting in peace with God …
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In a soldier’s grave he’s sleeping, One of earth’s bravest and best.
The two serving brothers, Harry and Sydney, cobbled together a 20-line verse telling a patriotic story of ‘how our noble George fell’. It cannot have been easy for them to contribute this from the Western front, though it was common practice for ‘fellow mates’ to salute lost comrades in this way: How he strove to bear the banner In the thickest of the fight, And uphold his country’s honour In the strength of manhood bright.4
A year later, on Anzac Day 1917, the O’Loughlin family had two sons to mourn, as Harry had been killed two months before at Bapaume in France. The pain of Harry’s death was increased because he was reported missing for some time before being presumed dead. It took his mother two years to accept that he was indeed dead, though she did not know where he was buried: ‘For two long years I hoped and prayed, but it was all in vain’.5 In 1917, the surviving siblings together published an ‘In Memoriam’ of eight lines, concluding, ‘We miss them and mourn them in silence unseen’. The 16 lines composed by the grief-stricken parents seem to have been an original testimony to the mixture of consolation and anguish they drew from their dead sons’ letters and photos; and also to the mother’s courageous effort to conceal her grief: ‘I dared not weep, “for a soldier mother” must try and bear her woe’. This poignant ‘In Memoriam’ with its focus on the dead sons’ letters deserves reproduction almost in full: They were folded carefully, tied with string, and laid as carefully by, I had tutored my heart, it made no sign, no sob did it heave, or sigh, As I put them away under lock and key my treasures of treasures hid …
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How often I want their letters to read, and, coward-like, I shrink From looking at their writing there, and looking upon my own, For each as I put them away from me had turned my heart to stone; I thought I must die as I read them 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.6
As if the family had not suffered enough, the father, Henry, a station-master aged 55, was himself dead within five months of Harry. On 9 August 1917 he was killed in an accident at Flemington Bridge railway station. The surviving siblings published a popular ‘In Memoriam’ stanza which spoke to their own enduring grief for their three lost men: Never can our hearts forget The sorrows of the past: When grief has left so deep a wound The pain must always last.
Their poor mother, Maude, wrote that ‘the dearest spot on earth to me / Is where my loved ones lie’. She now had a third collection of letters and memories to add to her sacred ‘treasures’. Nobody could doubt that her 1918 testimony came from the heart, as she spoke to other mothers who sacrificed their gallant sons at Gallipoli and Ypres: Oh! Mothers, ye whose hearts are torn With sorrow like my own … There came a shock, an awful pain, And the world has never seemed the same;
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To have, to love, and then to part, Is the saddest story of the human heart Did he whisper my name at the last, Or breathe out a parting prayer? Where did they bury my darling one? Does anyone know or care? … A mother’s heart is a breaking heart Through many a lonely year.7
For the O’Loughlins, unlike many families without their faith, the Catholic religion brought hope of an afterlife, which may have made resignation easier. On the anniversary of Harry’s death on 28 February 1918, his siblings wrote of their brothers, ‘With the crucifix their passport / To yon bright and happy land’. It is notable, however, that this 1918 notice was the first since George’s death in 1915 to make more than a passing reference to the family’s faith. The mother, Maude, still focused on her terrible loss and stressed that her sacrificial role as a soldier’s mother was to bear in silence ‘the anguish none can trace’: The secret grey within my soul No human eye can trace For I will hide an aching heart Behind a smiling face.
But if Maude could not yet reconcile herself to the death of her boys killed in war, at least she could imagine reunion in heaven with her husband in her ‘In Memoriam’ on the anniversary of his death in August 1919.8 We can only hope her faith sustained her yet again in November 1919, when her eldest daughter Alice died suddenly from an unspecified cause, possibly influenza.
Deaths of heroes The dominant idealised model of death in the nineteenth century was a peaceful decline at home with the Christian family around the bedside. During the Great War, this traditional domesticated
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death was abruptly displaced by a new model of the sudden, violent death of a young hero, sacrificing his life for a noble cause. This heroic wartime model took precedence during the war, and for years afterwards, over civilian deaths. Soldiers at the front gave 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 price for grieving families, since overt expression of individual sorrow was perceived as denigrating the national cause. Most soldiers must have felt fear of death, especially when action began, but they did not usually express it openly because it signified cowardice, and undermined their comrades. Masculinity dictated such repression of emotions, reinforced by a stoical inheritance from an Australian bush tradition and an English heritage. The culture defined crying by males as weakness: men should be silent and strong in the face of wartime horrors and the deaths of their closest friends. Bill Gammage’s classic book, The Broken Years, makes eloquent use of soldiers’ letters and diaries to portray their experiences of the horrors of the Great War. The soldiers’ early romantic ideals of fighting for imperial glory, freedom and patriotism were displaced by 1917 by more limited notions of keeping going for the sake of duty, honour, manhood and their mates. Gammage demonstrates that soldiers became accustomed to the brutality and frequency of death: they had to be fatalistic about death, even callous, in order to win the war. By 1917 the long casualty lists in France guaranteed that soldiers intentionally suppressed thoughts of death, because such statistics and the deaths of most of their mates left no doubt of their own likely fate. As Gammage shows, those who survived the longest often did so by a curious psychological state of mind. They could not afford to think too much about the deaths of their mates, because they would then be contemplating their own deaths and undermining their courage. In the end they lived in a world apart where most men expected to die.9
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Soldiers’ letters home were usually written to parents and siblings, since 80 per cent of the AIF were young and unmarried. Letters home tended to be less frank and explicit than diaries, with an eye to censorship and a wish not to increase family anxiety. Soldiers developed a restrained language of understatement and stoicism, using abstractions and euphemisms to disguise the awful realities. William Bruce, like many others, admitted that ‘one soon gets used to the sight of dead and wounded men, and becomes callous’.10 William James, a Victorian farmer, commented at Lone Pine in September 1915: ‘It is astonishing how cheap is life in War … Nettle of B [company] had his head blown clean off, a most ghastly sight, but a mere detail here.’11 Bravado and clumsy jokes helped soldiers to survive and reassured anxious families. Cyril Lawrence, aged 25, wrote to his father from Gallipoli in December 1915: ‘the Australian has learned to laugh at everything now … And it’s a blessing that the men see things in this light or otherwise we’d go mad in this God forsaken hole.’12 About 7600 Anzac soldiers proved their courage at Gallipoli in 1915 where they helped forge an enduring national legend which converted military disaster into moral victory. Those soldiers who sacrificed their lives became national heroes who provided Australia with a powerful image of the formation of national identity. From an early date Gallipoli came to be seen as the birth of a 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’.13 The Newcastle Morning Herald gave its own verdict on its heroes on Anzac Day 1916: The fame of the Australian soldier as a fighting man, his heroism, his reckless disregard of danger, is now known all over Europe and throughout Asiatic Turkey. As they go into battle again elsewhere the same qualities will distinguish them. Anzac Day, therefore, marks the date on which the value and grit of the young Australian soldiery astonished and startled the world.14
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The Anzac legend was forged out of a disastrous campaign at Gallipoli, in part because this was the first major engagement with death for the Australian soldiers: they still believed in the grand chivalric ideals, that they were fighting for God and Empire, for honour, glory, freedom and a better world. The Australian War Memorial files of three Anzac soldiers who served at Gallipoli demonstrate their faith in a noble cause as well as their determination to live up to it by their own gallantry and sacrifice. The stories of many heroes like these have been transmitted through individual families across the generations to create and perpetuate the Anzac legend. Their comrades believed that the most capable, dedicated and courageous men were the most likely to die, since the very qualities which qualified them for leadership ensured that they went over the top first and fought bravely to the bitter end.15 Lt Alfred C Youdale, a commercial traveller from Ashfield, New South Wales, aged 28, served five months at Gallipoli in the 7th Light Horse Regiment, and sent a combined letter-diary to his family in Australia. Youdale admitted that he was frightened the first time he came under shell fire after the landing at Suvla Bay, which was ‘grand and awful’. Later, there was a ‘rush of killed and wounded’, with about 4000 casualties between 6 and 8 August. He described mounds of bloodstained corpses in ‘shell battered trenches, mangled human forms and evil smell … in this little hell’. The mass of corpses was sickening but they dared not let it worry them ‘or you would become morbid’. As successive waves of men were sent over the top, many to their deaths, their numbers were rapidly reduced. It became for Youdale a matter of waiting until his number came up: he hoped a big shell would land right at his feet. Meanwhile he wrote home to rearrange his affairs in the event of his anticipated death and was promoted to sergeant. But Youdale survived Gallipoli, against the odds and despite numerous ‘close shaves’. He made light of it all, and in 1917 became a pilot operating in France – his gallantry earned him a bar to his Military Cross and a promotion to squadron commander in
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December 1917. But such luck could not hold, and a month later Youdale was killed. His commanding officer and his chaplain assured his mother that he was a magnificent soldier who made a ‘sublime self-sacrifice’. He was ‘a very king among pilots’ who set an inspiring example to his men and did not die in vain. In Youdale’s case this rhetoric of heroism was evidently deserved.16 By contrast Lt George Henderson Smith had only a few weeks to prove his heroism: he was killed at Anzac Cove by a bullet in the head on 31 May 1915 at the age of 20. Henderson Smith’s bravery brought accolades even in the British press. The Sunday Times reported that he had helped save a wounded comrade and that he and another soldier had accounted for an incredible 600 Turks. The Daily Mail displayed a large photo under the caption ‘the burial of an Australian hero’. His commanding officer told his father that ‘he died a soldier’s death, the finest death a man can die … a noble sacrifice for the Empire and its people’. Col S Weir regretted that it was ‘an awful calamity to see so many strong and brave men cut down just as they are coming to manhood’. They were the first to land and had to participate in ‘frightful attacks’ with huge losses. As several war correspondents noted, soldiers became heroes at Gallipoli simply because they did their duty and went over the top to be killed. But some, like Henderson Smith and Youdale, displayed exceptional courage, and these tributes seem sincere.17 Lt Wilfred Addison was a bank accountant from Sydney who died at Gallipoli in August 1915 at the age of 28. His uncle, Lt Charles Addison, had a meal and a long talk with Wilfred a few days earlier, when ‘the poor boy’ said he expected to be wounded or to die. Sgt Roberts confirmed this in a letter to Addison’s mother: ‘he knew full well on the evening of the 21st that he was going to his death on the following day’. He told his troops before the attack that he expected to be among the first to fall, and his demeanour showed that he believed it. Yet in Roberts’ view, Addison did not flinch. Indeed the prospect of certain death
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seemed to inspire him to greater feats of courage. He went into action to see ‘his company “D” being chopped to bits and half his battalion lost’, as they ran across open ground to seize and occupy Turkish trenches. Many men fell in taking the first trench but Addison rallied the rest and charged on towards the second, encouraging his men all the time, until he was shot himself. Roberts described Addison just before he fell: ‘With dead, dying and wounded all around and the bullets from the machine guns tearing up the ground where he was standing he was waving his revolver and signaling us to go on’. He ‘went nobly on’ despite receiving two hits, until he was killed instantly by a shot in the head: And so died another of Australia’s Heroes: because someone had blundered, we, the pawns in the great game of war, must pay the price. Whatever memories you cherish of your son add this one to it. He died nobly in action leading his men to victory.18
The heroism of Youdale, Henderson Smith and Addison can stand for that of countless other Australian soldiers killed at Gallipoli and the Western front. Multiple stories like these made up the Anzac legend. In the collective mind of the nation all who died for their country were such heroes. Thousands of notices in newspaper Rolls of Honour proclaimed the belief of the mourning masses that their sons died as heroes in a noble cause; this was illustrated by a popular ‘In Memoriam’ notice in the Argus, which may have drawn on an English public school song: His country called, and honour bade him go To battle ’gainst a grim and deadly foe; He helped to bring Australia into fame, To build for her a never-dying name. Foremost was he, in the thickest strife, For King and country he laid down his life.19
Most ‘In Memoriam’ notices focused on the patriotic cause of death, as the most common phrases demonstrate: ‘he died a hero’;
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‘he gave his life for his country’; ‘Anzac hero’; ‘duty nobly done’; ‘he died for King and country’.20 Such patriotic tributes to dead sons and husbands were essential to grieving families, especially in the absence of bodies, burials and funerals. They could only come to terms with the war and their own losses if they believed that their soldier sons had sacrificed their lives in a noble and just cause. Tributes like ‘he died a hero’ were not platitudes: they offered the most important consolation available. Grieving parents could not bear the loss if their son’s death had no justification, if the war was fought in vain. Today we tend to overstate the extent to which civilians in 1916–18 saw the Great War as futile. We are influenced by the critical writings of the 1930s and later which condemned the war, and by contrast with the Second World War which could be more easily justified as a war against evil. Tributes to the heroism of dead soldiers in the Rolls of Honour of the Great War need to be taken at face value if we are to understand their meanings for bereaved families at the time. Indeed, it is remarkable that they betrayed so few notes of bitterness, given the scale of the massacres. The Elliot family of Essendon was unusual in asking in an ‘In Memoriam’ in the Argus in April 1918, ‘Must they all keep on till they fall?’ Far more common was the response of the Whitakers of Moonee Ponds, to the death of their son at Gallipoli: ‘The memory of his splendid life, his brave and fearless end / Bids all who loved him “Carry on” for Britain and her men.’21 Indeed the Whitaker family urged the soldiers in France in 1918 ‘to fight till death if needs be … God lead them on to victory’.22 Bereaved families often felt a desperate need for an allied victory to justify their loss: ‘God grant us the victory that he may not be sacrificed in vain’.23 Many ‘In Memoriam’ notices emphasised that the heroes who sacrificed their lives came from all classes and all military ranks. Two entries in the Newcastle Morning Herald on 12 October 1918 vouched for the democracy of heroism in remembering two
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soldiers killed at Passchendaele a year earlier. Pte George’s family wrote that ‘Australia is proud of her hero / Who was only a private – that’s all’. The tribute to Sgt FE Phillips came from his ‘fond’ brother-in-law, still on active service: His footsteps never faltered, His courage never failed; Though he wore no glittering medals, Could not sing his name VC, Yet we know he died a hero, Just to keep Australia free.24
The Smith family of Port Pirie in South Australia placed their entry in the Advertiser in August 1917 in memory of Pte Bobbie Smith, killed in action in France a year earlier, at the age of 19. The Advertiser’s Roll of Honour was appropriately entitled, ‘Heroes of the Great War’: He was no coward or shirker, He fought for honour’s sake. He fought hard in muddy trenches For the pride of Britain’s race.25
Bobbie Smith’s heroism did not lie in decorations for bravery, but in dying for his country after fighting hard for ‘his mates’ and for ‘honour’s sake’. The Smith family may have been recent migrants from Britain who still identified primarily with Britain. However, throughout the ‘In Memoriam’ columns, countless families declared that their sons and husbands died for their country, which was variously identified as Britain, Australia or Empire. Many individual families contributed several notices which mentioned both Britain and Australia, suggesting that they still saw themselves as belonging to both countries. The Hughes family and friends sent in five entries to the Newcastle Morning Herald on 12 October 1918 for Pte JE Hughes, killed in action a year earlier. Three ‘cobbers’ – probably still serving in France – declared that he ‘died for Britain’; his sister-in-law thought he died
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in the name of Australia; and his sisters claimed he died for the Empire.26 In the course of the war, however, the number of such references to Australia increased.
Stoical sorrow and soldiers’ graves Soldiers’ references to the deaths of mates in their letters home were often understated and laconic – inadequate to convey the full depth of affection and sorrow they felt on the death of a close friend. Yet these restrained statements could be significant in providing a model for their parents’ grieving behaviour when their sons were in turn killed. These letters home convey much in few words about the culturally correct response to death from the perspective of a soldier. They left an enduring imprint on the minds of devastated parents when their sons were killed: they told their parents how their loved sons themselves faced death, and by clear implication also how they hoped their families would grieve if they died. When Sgt Jack Baillie, serving in France, lost his brother and brother-in-law to the war, he told his girlfriend in Newcastle that ‘we shall only have to keep a stiff upper lip and bear up’. He added ‘I don’t want to be sad in this letter’, reinforcing the required stoical response in facing death.27 Like many other serving soldiers, Baillie suppressed his feelings of grief on his brother’s death in writing home, though admitting it ‘hit him hard’. Soldiers also conveyed the implicit message to their families that individual grief on the part of bereaved families must be restrained because it was self-indulgent when compared with mass deaths of young men in war. This is illustrated by a letter early in 1915 from Joe Cumberland to his sister Una, in Scone, New South Wales (before Joe died of wounds after the Gallipoli landing 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
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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 because we are not dead yet by a long way.
Despite Oliver’s subsequent sorrow on Joe’s death, all he could admit to his sister was that ‘losing Joe has broken me up a bit’. Oliver himself was later reported as missing presumed dead after Lone Pine, and Una had to wait seven years to learn that his remains had finally been officially identified. We can only imagine the grief for Una Cumberland who had been surrogate mother to Joe and Oliver after their parents’ deaths.28 The Ferguson family in Enoggera, Queensland, paid a heavy price for their four sons’ participation in the Great War: two were killed and the family believed that ‘the war is responsible for poor Mater’s death’ in 1917. The correspondence between the two surviving sons and their businessman father illuminates the transmission of expectations about appropriate grieving behaviour between serving soldiers and their parents. Two brave sons had sacrificed their lives, requiring an equivalent courage by a grieving father. Lt Hector Ferguson was the first to be killed on 21 October 1917, after two years’ active service, and soon after their mother’s death. But Malcolm Ferguson’s letters to his bereaved father offered little consolation: ‘It has happened Father, and we miss him terribly – but I must not keep writing like this.’ All four brothers were strongly influenced by the soldiers’ code of silence which had taught them to bear their sorrow internally, because overt expressions of emotion signified masculine weakness and showed poor discipline in war. In a later letter Malcolm indicated 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’.29 Indeed, when Douglas Ferguson was also killed, in August 1918, the surviving sons, Malcolm and Norman, reinforced their father’s courage: he must bear these dreadful
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blows as he had the earlier trials, ‘you just squared your shoulders and carried on … you are battling through it like you always have’.30 The unpublished memoir of Stuart Gilkison Love, written between 1956 and 1963, demonstrates the remarkable contrast between his minimal wartime comments on friends’ deaths and the real force of suppressed emotions which surfaced years later. Born in 1884, Love studied mining engineering at the University of Melbourne. His four unpublished volumes of reminiscences drew extensively on quotations from his own diaries and correspondence from the Great War, allowing for direct comparisons between the feelings he expressed at the time and those he remembered decades later.31 In 1936, when Love was working at Amalgamated Minerals in the Philippines, a man called Curtis came to see him, having read a brief account of Love’s life in the Manila Bulletin. Curtis had been in Love’s Division in France, though Love could not recall him well, and Curtis now sought to share his memories of the comrades they had lost. One by one, Curtis recollected the names of men Love had known, until he came to some of Love’s closest friends: I discovered that he had known Atchison very well indeed … This was too much for me altogether. He had already brought up Blogg who taught me war and whom I admired and loved ‘this side of idolatry’ – killed on the 15 March 1916: Bray, killed on the 23rd March 1918: Ferguson, my trusted Captain for a year and a half … and now – Atchison, whom I loved more than I have ever loved any man – killed on the 13th July 1915. And I cried – ‘You old Ghostraiser! don’t call up any more spirits from the nasty deep to torment me’.
Thus in 1936 Love poured out his profound grief for Atchison whom he had loved deeply, while remembering his silent misery in July 1915 when he heard the terrible news during leave in London. He had seen Atchison’s name in the casualty list in The Times, as he waited for a girl called Carmen, ‘and suddenly the sun
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was darkened and that airy room was filled with mist’. Atchison was another mining engineer with whom Love worked for years in Australia before the war, and they had joined up together. Just as he read the fateful list he was paged to meet Carmen in her gayest mood. ‘We chatted and laughed through lunch and through that long golden afternoon, I, with that cold hand on my heart and with that passing bell tolling continuously in my ears’. He said nothing to Carmen about the death of his beloved friend, disguising his grief with feigned high spirits. Love kept and treasured the phlegmatic official obituary and the captain’s letter of condolence to Atchison’s family which was similarly stoical, noting that he was a fearless and invaluable officer. The closest to an expression of emotion was the statement that all the men who had known Atchison ‘were fearfully cut up at his death’. Love admitted years later that his diary entries for the following weeks were ‘laconic’, briefly noting numbers killed and wounded, with no mention of his intense grief for his friend.32 On the death of another close friend, Maj Bray, in March 1918, he had merely written: ‘so passed a very gallant man – and a very great friend’. Love finally crossed to England in March 1919, precisely four years after he landed in France: ‘I felt on this, my last crossing, the “ghosts of dead men watching me there”’.33 Soldiers of the Great War, like Love, usually kept their feelings about comrades’ deaths to themselves, rarely sharing them with families who sometimes seemed to them to inhabit a different mental universe. Veteran Marcel Caux died recently at the age of 105. It took him 80 years even to admit that he had fought in the Great War; his son only learnt the truth in 1998. Caux first participated in an Anzac Day march in 2001. He was one of many soldiers who fought through the campaigns of the Great War and was so distressed by his terrible memories that he tried to forget, destroying his records and photographs.34 Roy Grant, a Gallipoli veteran, subsequently sought to forget many wartime experiences, especially those relating to ‘brave mates who were killed and I helped to bury them’.35
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Soldiers’ burials and distant graves The graves of the Anzac soldiers who died on Gallipoli in 1915 held a special symbolic place in the construction of the Anzac legend from the start. What is extraordinary is how early that legend became established and how powerful was the central role of the Anzac graves, even in Britain. On 27 December 1915 the Manchester Guardian published an article on ‘The Anzac Graves’, by an Australian correspondent who emphasised the sorrow of the Australians at leaving Gallipoli because they were forced to abandon the graves of their ‘best pals’. Gallipoli was in his mind ‘peopled today with the spirits of all the heroes who have died. The Anzac men never rested till they gave them what decent burial they could – happiest if they could raise some lasting memorial.’ Burials on Gallipoli were usually held at night, with religious services held over the grave whenever possible. Some graves were marked by individual crosses but others were inscribed ‘To the memory of sixty Australians’. Even such mass graves were better than none at all. The Guardian correspondent concluded: The graves of Gallipoli are perhaps the greatest gift that Australasia has given to the Empire. In the splendour of their conspicuous isolation they have compelled the Empire’s recognition of her Southern sons. In the graves of Gallipoli lie the seeds of Australia’s immortality.36
During the war, soldiers’ burials served a valuable function at an individual emotional level for thousands of soldiers who were not permitted to grieve openly for their dead mates. They often channelled their affection and sorrow into a practical concern to ensure their comrades received appropriate burials and graves that could be identified later. Participation in funerals and burial of bodies were practical symbolic actions which allowed servicemen to pour out displaced grief in a manner permitted by the military authorities. Thus Pte Albert Croft in October 1914 told his sisters
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and brothers in Australia how glad he was to participate in burial services for his comrades. When three privates and a captain were killed on 23 October, he helped to bury them in the graveyard: I read the Burial Service and committed their remains to the ground and made a prayer over each … I feel so glad to be able to do this last little Act for these brave lads and I am not ashamed to say that tears run down my face on most times when I am called upon to do it.
Pte Croft had already conducted four such burials under the noise of the guns – it was all in a day’s work, though his tears were probably unusual. Otherwise ‘their loved ones at home may never know where they are laid’ – in his view, a ‘terrible’ outcome.37
The cemetery by the beach, Queensland Point, Gallipoli, 1915. CEW Bean: AWM G01292
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Letters of condolence sent by officers and comrades to the families of dead soldiers usually contained more information about burials, funerals and graves than about their emotions. This was partly a matter of concern for bereaved families, and respect for the dead and for the sanctity of graves. The prospect that a beloved son or husband might not be buried induced anguish and horror, as the need to honour the dead and respect their bodies through burial was still deep-rooted. It was also a symbolic way to express their own grief by implication. The detailed descriptions were a real consolation to the bereaved who were deprived of such ceremonies.
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Capt W Hinton described the burial of Lt Wilfred Addison, killed, as we have seen, at Gallipoli in August 1915. Although the circumstances of mass burial would have been appalling in peacetime, during the Great War they were better than no information at all. After Addison was killed, they were unable to reach his body as it was lying under Turkish fire. But they hurriedly retrieved it during the night, and buried him in a communal grave with many of his own platoon. The necessary haste was so great
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that Addison had to be buried ‘as he was’ and it was impossible to recover personal items. Hinton hoped Addison might have liked such a ‘soldier’s death’.38 Throughout the long campaigns of attrition from 1916, huge mass graves were dug even before battles commenced. Bodies could be left to rot for weeks or months if they fell in no-man’s land or during a protracted campaign. Many families had to be satisfied with little or no information. A nephew wrote to tell
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Lance Cpl Reginald McGregor’s parents that he was shot while trying to escape as a prisoner of war: ‘It is a consolation to know he got a decent burial as hundreds of bodies are left out in the open for months before they are collected or buried and then very seldom there is any mark to show where they were buried’.39 The most detailed information about the grieving relatives’ need for particulars of burials and graves, as well as the willingness of soldiers to supply them, comes from the archives of the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau. They testify not only to the despair of many families but also to the frequent care taken by soldiers to give their mates a decent burial where circumstances allowed. Sometimes parents persisted for years with searches for information, because of their need to be reassured that their sons were honoured through decent burials. Red Cross Information Bureaux were created in 1915 in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, with offices also in London, Paris and Cairo. Their volunteer staff provided more detailed and frank information than was usually conveyed in the army’s formulaic condolence letters. The Australian searchers in Europe visited war fronts and talked to fellow soldiers to obtain particulars of the manner of death and burial, if the soldier was found to be dead. The Red Cross was thorough, seeking up to six eyewitness accounts if possible, as well as second-hand information from other informants. They made a judgment of the most likely story, which they conveyed officially to the family in prosaic rather than sentimental language. Thus the Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing files provide extensive information from soldiers who were often mates of the dead men about their deaths and the care taken with burials. The Red Cross sometimes had to resolve conflicting evidence. Lance Cpl Alexander Joseph (Jack) Lance, aged 25, of the 2nd Field Ambulance, was killed at Bullecourt in 1917 by a high explosive shell which was initially presumed to have blown him to pieces while he was stretcher-bearing. JJ Kennedy’s report indicated the difficulty of the Red Cross’s task in reconstruction: ‘I did not see
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him actually knocked, but it was impossible to see him afterwards as there was literally nothing left of him. I do not think it would have been possible to bury him.’ This turned out to be incorrect. The top of Jack’s head was fractured but the rest of his body was intact. Pte Bennet remembered that Pte Bradley, a close friend of Jack and a fellow stretcher-bearer who subsequently became a chaplain, ‘one of the bravest fellows … went through a barrage to bury them and hold a proper service’. And so the Red Cross elicited a three-page letter from Pte Bradley, who stated that he and a Presbyterian minister in the ranks buried his friend Jack and three others killed by the same shell with a proper burial service: We had to bury them in the [railway] cutting itself as it would have been impossible to get them away to a proper cemetery … I and the others could not leave them to be buried as ‘Unknowns’. They were the first to be buried in the trench and rough crosses with penciled and scratched information were put by us at their heads at the one large grave.
The 2nd Field Ambulance carpenter later made a beautiful cross inscribed with the names and dates. Bradley’s letter concluded that Jack died immediately, without pain, and with a good conscience, having spoken earlier about ‘the certainty of his belief in God’.40 The diligent work of the Red Cross ensured that Jack Lance’s family was left with a memory of a decent burial for their son, rather than a verdict of ‘unknown’, reinforced by Kennedy’s incorrect report that he was blown to bits. Many Red Cross reports were able to confirm the death of the soldier, but could provide only inadequate or conflicting reports of burial. Many men had to be buried in the field of battle where they fell; some of these were not identified and were reported as missing. Cpl Leslie Jeffreys of the 22nd Battalion was killed by a shell at Ypres in 1917, ‘very badly knocked about’, and buried where he fell. But at least a cross was later erected at the spot.41 Lt James Judd’s dead body was found by the 35th Battalion
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burying party during an attack near St Quentin in August 1918, but informants gave varying accounts of his burial. One said he was buried where he was found, with others, by the battalion padre, who reported the body as badly mangled but recognisable. Another said he was buried in a French Military Cemetery.42 Red Cross files testify to soldiers’ problems in attempting to recover the bodies of comrades who were killed in no-man’s land, too close to the German lines. Pte Alfred Johnson of 38th Battalion was reported killed by a machine gun at Armentieres after a raid on 1 January 1917, his body hanging on the barbed wire entanglements. Before his death, Johnson had told Sgt Roe to leave him on Two unidentified soldiers study the inscriptions on the massed crosses at the cemetery at Vlamertinghe, near Ypres, Belgium, where many Australians were buried, October 1917. Photograph by Frank Hurley: AWM E00847
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the wire as more lives would be risked to bring him in. Other men on the raiding party reported leaving Johnson on the wire for dead, though uncertainty was created because two men named Johnson were evidently included in the party of sixteen. Some said the eleven dead were left exposed for a week, while others said the Germans recovered the bodies the following night. We do not know what the Red Cross told Johnson’s family, but it could not have been comforting, however carefully edited.43 In a similar case, Lance Cpl Andrew John Forbes was shot in the stomach and left for dead during a night patrol near Le Transloy, France, on 31 March 1917. Six comrades testified that his body could not be recovered due to heavy shell fire on his position near the German lines. Two days later when the Germans retired, no bodies or graves were discovered, and nine months after the incident Forbes was reported as killed in action. The Red Cross wrote to his mother that there was little hope he was alive and no information on his burial: ‘we know how terribly hard it is to endure silence and suspense’.44 In other cases, attempts to recover bodies failed because of sniping, and many witnesses could offer no information about burials.45 ‘A decent burial’ after the Third Battle of Ypres in 1917, sometimes called Passchendaele, was a relative matter, its meaning shifting as the front line moved backwards and forwards. Pte TP Murphy wrote in November 1917 to the mother of his friend, Pte Erle Neaves, to provide information about Erle’s death and his burial at Ypres. Erle had been killed instantly in action soon after he enlisted, when a shell landed in his dugout: ‘when I saw him after the shell had exploded it nearly broke my heart’. Nothing could be done, so he buried his friend himself, ‘to make sure that he got a decent burial’. Murphy sent Mrs Emma Neaves the photo in her son’s pocket and a small locket from round his neck. The Red Cross reports requested later by Mrs Neaves noted that Erle was buried in a nearby cemetery, with a cross on his grave. But in 1921 Mrs Neaves was still attempting to obtain official informa-
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tion on the burial locations of both her sons – Harry had been killed at Flers in November 1916, a year before Erle’s death. The official response merely noted that both sons were buried where they were killed in action and no report was yet received of their exhumation: ‘but an intensive search is now being made over all old battlefields with a view to locating unregistered graves’. Erle’s body, at least, was not recovered and he had to be remembered on a panel at the Menin Gate Memorial to the Missing of Ypres.46 In the absence of bodies and funerals, the thoughts of bereaved families tended to dwell obsessively on their loved sons’ graves on the other side of the earth, in countries they had never seen. The graves also assumed a symbolic significance because they could be idealised by families and made to represent some sort of normality in their manner of dying, quite divorced from the likely brutal reality. ‘In Memoriam’ verses in the newspapers often began with the phrase, ‘Somewhere in France he is lying’, which underlined the ignorance of many families about the location of the graves, if they existed at all. The most common verses from 1916 emphasised the family’s great distance in Australia from an unknown grave in a foreign land: He sleeps not in his native land, But under foreign skies, Far from those who love him, In a hero’s grave he lies.47
A few unusual verses attempted to see the stark silent graves so far away as an appropriate form of burial for war heroes. Pte William McWilliams was killed in action in France in August 1916, and his family and friends sent eleven ‘In Memoriam’ notices to the Newcastle Morning Herald, including one from his ‘sorrowing parents’: No sculptured marble here, nor pompous lay, No storied urn or animated bust, Your silent grave points out the nation’s way, To pour its sorrow o’er a patriot’s dust.48
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Most families understood they could never afford to travel to Europe to visit these distant graves after the war. The Hughes family had lost two sons in 1917, but they stoically accepted they were buried ‘in a far-off land / In a grave we shall never see’.49 The best some families could hope for was that French families might one day tend their sons’ graves: the Byars family trusted that strangers would ‘perchance kneel by our loved one’s grave, somewhere in France’.50 It was seen as particularly important to remember the unknown graves of the missing after the war, as the Knowles family acknowledged after their son George was killed in action in October 1917: He sleeps beside his comrades, In a hallowed grave unknown … Forget not him that died when peace Shall reign once more. Remember still that lonely grave Beyond some foreign shore. Not marked by marble cross, Maybe not marked at all, Just buried neath the grass-grown sod, In the place they saw him fall.51
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But many families could never come to terms with those unknown graves of the missing, so far away. The Rees family of Newcastle, like many other families of the missing, felt bitter that Pte Thomas Rees paid the supreme sacrifice when he was killed at Passchendaele in October 1917, yet they were unable to mourn him properly: The unknown grave is the bitterest blow, None but aching hearts can know, We often sit and think of him, And wonder how he died.52
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The bodies of Australian soldiers exhumed from the battlefields, covered and laid out in rows, awaiting reburial at the Adelaide Cemetery in France. A cross has been placed on top of each body. This is a very rare photograph of bodies of the dead, especially en masse. AWM E05432
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In the absence of bodies they could farewell or funerals they could attend, the graves of dead soldiers from the Great War held immense emotional significance for their bereaved families (I will return to this in the next chapter). It was vitally necessary for the War Graves Commission after the war to exhume and re-inter the bodies of the known dead in an attempt to restore their dignity.53 But soldiers’ experiences of burials during the Great War also had a longer-term impact on general community attitudes to disposal of bodies. Australians before the war had such a powerful belief in the sanctity of burial that few people had adopted cremation as an alternative. The Great War helped to transform this pattern, not just because of the decline in Christian faith. The terrible memories of the impact of trench warfare went far to undermine any commitment to the sanctity of burial: soldiers would never forget the piles of rotting bodies around the trenches, the bodies blown to bits in no-man’s land, and the graves uncovered by advancing armies which fought across burial sites. These awful images could be passed on to grieving families, who never knew the fate of sons and husbands reported missing. It is not surprising that some former soldiers requested cremation in the inter-war years, nor that cremation at last became established in Australia in the 1930s and 1940s.
4 The ‘silent heartache’ of the Great War
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. Moreover, civilians and military superiors expected them to be unaffected by months or years of exposure to the trauma of trench warfare, violent deaths and mutilated bodies. Psychologists such as Eric Lindemann have written of the ‘macho’ warrior identity of Western men affected by two world wars.1 Returned soldiers were not allowed to show emotional responses to their traumatic experiences, but had to cope in silence. The cult of manliness and the military culture demanded that they behave ‘like a man’, however terrible their experiences and their memories. Cultural prescriptions of grieving behaviour extended beyond the soldiers themselves to the countless bereaved families. As we have seen in the previous chapter, many soldiers urged their families to grieve for them silently if they died, following the soldiers’ example. As Ken Inglis notes, ‘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. The acting prime minister, WA Watt, applauded Australia’s women on Armistice Day 1918 ‘as worthy mothers, wives and sisters of the great Anzac breed’. Graeme McInnes remembered Anzac Days in the 1920s,
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when stern-faced bereaved mothers ‘attended service standing erect and dry-eyed, their bosoms stitched with their dead sons’ medals’.2 If some women failed to sustain ‘spartan control’ at Anzac Day services, it was not for want of trying, unless they were among the relatively small minority of Italian or Greek women accustomed to an openly emotional culture of sorrow. Psychiatrist Colin Murray Parkes has observed that ‘it is societies that have recently experienced war or see themselves as “warriors” that are most likely to minimise mourning’.3 Other psychologists have observed a significant distinction between the public and private construction of grieving after the Great War. The public construction was that soldiers died as heroes for a noble cause, which demanded the celebration of their deaths, and perceived public sorrow as unpatriotic.4 This chapter, however, is more concerned with private and individual grief than with collective commemoration, war memorials, and public memory, which have been served so well by other historians, notably Ken Inglis, Stephen Garton, Alistair Thomson and Joy Damousi.5 Bereaved individuals may have needed the public rhetoric of patriotism to reassure them that their sons or brothers did not die in vain. It was guaranteed to ensure that they maintained the ‘stiff upper lip’ as best they could, especially in public. There was of course some conflict for individuals between public patriotism and private sorrow, but the behaviour prescribed for bereaved families by a nation at war usually won the day. Indeed, as the stories in this chapter tell, many families may have succeeded in reconciling the conflict by effectively structuring their private sorrow around the public concepts of patriotism, honour and sacrifice.
Varied family responses to wartime bereavement The meagre, fragmentary evidence of individual grieving is impossible to quantify, but the ‘massive all-pervasive pall of death’ was arguably even greater in Australia than in Britain.6 Sixty thousand
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Australians died out of 332 000 soldiers who went to war, or one in five, compared with one in eight in Britain. Not only was the deathrate higher but these soldiers were all volunteers, whereas men were conscripted in Britain from 1916. The sacrifice of citizen soldiers in the only army comprised entirely of volunteers demanded a more generous acknowledgment by the state. A smaller Australian population also had a higher proportion of war dead to mourn. Moreover, wartime policy decreed that the bodies of the dead were buried where they fell on European battlefields, 10 000 miles away from their grieving relatives on the other side of the world. Few bereaved Australians could afford to travel so far to visit those graves, though the privileged minority who made those pilgrimages in the inter-war years doubtless derived some comfort.7 ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the Argus, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Newcastle Morning Herald repeatedly wrote about a deep but silent sorrow of mourning families. Maude O’Loughlin had written that a soldier’s mother ‘dared not weep’ but must try to bear her grief, and many other families responded similarly. The Bath family mourned their son Sgt Allan Bath killed at Pozieres in 1917, but concluded: ‘He has finished his part: we must still keep on / Trying like him to be brave’. The family of Pte Charles Whitaker, killed at Gallipoli, noted in the Argus: Tis just three years; we dare not mourn or weep; Twould grieve him so, to know us all so weak. The memory of his splendid life his brave and fearless end, Bids all who loved him ‘Carry on’ for Britain and her men.
The Stratton family merely observed of their son Ben, a signaller killed in France in 1917: ‘You were so brave, we dare not weep’.8 Many ‘In Memoriam’ notices testify to a deep heartache, and to the families’ need to bear their grief in silence. One of the most common reads: Silence is no certain token That no hidden grief is there
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Sorrow that is never spoken Is the hardest grief to bear.9
Hundreds of families drew on these same verses for inspiration, altering a word here or there. The parents of Pte Jack Embleton, killed at Passchendaele in October 1917 at the age of 23, spoke for countless others: There are griefs that cannot find comfort, And wounds that cannot be healed There are sorrows so deep in the human heart That cannot be half revealed.10
Maggie Rowan also spoke for many with a verse in the Argus on 4 August 1917. Her husband, Pte John Rowan, was presumed killed in action in France late in July 1916, one of the missing of the Somme whose bodies could not be identified and buried. Yet she put a brave face on the anguish of not knowing: Friends may think I have forgotten When they see me smile, But no one knows the aching heart That smile hides all the while.11
There are many variants of this popular verse, the most common used by the Johnson family in the Newcastle Morning Herald on 12 October 1918 to commemorate their twin sons killed in action in France in 1917, only six months apart, aged 24: No one knows how much we miss them, Friends may think the wound is healed, But they little know the anguish That is in our hearts concealed.12
The increasing numbers of ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the final months of the war testified to the dread of many bereaved families: peace would bring the surviving troops home to a cheery welcome which would only reinforce their own sad certainty that
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their sons would never come home. The Burke family of Newcastle lost two sons, Edward and Ben, within three days of each other at Passchendaele in October 1917. The pain was increased because Ben was reported missing for some time. The first anniversary of their death was not eased by the prospect of other soldiers returning shortly: The saddest day is yet to come, When the boys come marching home; Oh, God, have pity for the watching ones, Whose loved ones will never return.13
Australian families responded to wartime bereavement in many ways, most of them impossible to trace because they remained private and often silent, leaving no records. We know most about a tiny minority of families and individuals who left accounts of their bereavement. The Hughes family of Sydney showed how a prominent Irish Catholic family found consolation in their Christian faith on the death of their son Roger, killed in December 1916. Sir Thomas Hughes, three times lord mayor of Sydney, shared with his wife and two surviving sons a deep belief in the power of the Catholic faith as consolation and support through war. Roger himself saw war as ‘a glorious adventure’ for God and Empire, and his father thanked God that ‘Roger died an heroic martyr’s death, and is now safe for ever in heaven’. His parents would never cease to pray for him and offer masses for his soul. Christian consolations were reinforced by the memory of their son: ‘we see him and feel his presence in every corner of the house.’ They believed his spirit was close and watching over them, one of many testimonies that the spirits of the war dead remained near their families. In 1917 Lady Hughes collected some of their ‘dearest remembrances of Roger’ so that one day his own son would learn ‘something definite and beautiful of the heroic man who bore him’. She made an oak-lined box with a brass plaque inscribed with Roger’s name and date of death, to keep photos and his ‘little personal things’ for his son.14 The testi-
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mony of the Hughes family confirms the survival of the Christian way of death and grieving among a significant minority of families, especially Catholics. For the rest, of lapsed or no faith, the Great War challenged grieving families to develop alternative, secular responses to the mass deaths of soldiers, at a time when traditional faith and ritual were in decline. The spiritualist movement was the most popular alternative source of consolation because it allowed bereaved families to believe they could still communicate with their dead sons – even to hope they were still alive, if in another world. It was the supreme form of private denial of death. British migrants brought spiritualism to Australia in the 1850s, and after a decline in popularity before 1900, it was revived by the urgent needs of the bereaved from the Great War to communicate with their dead. There were 2378 spiritualists identified in the census in 1911, increasing to 4332 in 1921, and then declining to 1807 by 1933.15 Some soldiers at the front, surrounded by the dead, found belief in the supernatural to be helpful, and felt that the spirits of their dead mates remained close; families at home sometimes shared this faith. Cpl Colin Patterson was killed at Bullecourt in 1917. Among his belongings was a verse from Christina Rossetti: ‘But death may bring our friend exceeding near / The dead may be around us dear and dead.’16 In 1917 Douglas Ferguson wrote from service in Europe to his father in Queensland on his mother’s death: ‘we know that although she has passed away, she in her spirit form, is with us all, just the same’.17 In the 1920s there was growing interest in ‘spirit soldiers’ as bereaved families tried to communicate with their lost sons or husbands. The spiritualist, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, attracted large audiences to his lectures across Australia in 1920–21, including more than 10 000 spiritualists in Sydney. Speakers at Anzac Day memorial services ‘invoked the war dead as a phantom army’ with particular appeal to returned soldiers grieving for dead comrades. Will Longstaff’s painting, Menin Gate at Midnight, commemorates the missing soldiers: it was known initially as Ghosts of Menin
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Gate. It was hugely popular in Australia when it was exhibited in 1928 because it was such an evocative representation of the Menin Gate memorial to the missing at Ypres which most bereaved families would never see. Masses of figures which initially seem to be flowers in the cornfields emerge gradually as ghostly soldiers in steel helmets – spirits of the dead rising from the ground at midnight to march silently across the battlefield where they died. The painting drew awed crowds as it toured Australia, not least from returned soldiers and the families of the 6000 missing.18 Many more found some comfort in conscientiously maintaining the memory of their dead son or husband, especially in the absence of Christian faith. John Garibaldi Roberts, known as Garry, an accountant with the Melbourne Tramways Board, aged 57, lost his 30-year-old son Frank at Mont St Quentin in September 1918. The primary focus of Roberts’ grief was private memory – a powerful traditional source of consolation on bereavement. He and his wife Berta sought refuge in sharing ‘old memories of our son and how proud we were of him’. Frank’s orchard in the Dandenongs ‘was endeared to us by a thousand memories’. They spent an evening addressing mourning envelopes for the 400 memorial cards they sent out which displayed photos of Frank. Garry Roberts preserved and treasured all Frank’s postcards and letters, and wrote for detailed information from Frank’s fellow soldiers regarding his death and burial. He also contacted the parents of soldiers buried with his son, and established a small support group of bereaved parents who met to share their memories and their sorrow. He collected vivid memories of his son’s final year at the front through a scrap book which reconstructed the engagements of Frank’s battalion.19 Such strategies in grief were probably largely confined to families who had confirmation of their sons’ deaths and places of burial, which allowed them to begin the grieving process. The Hughes and Roberts families were also helped in their responses to bereavement by a consoling faith and a supportive network of friends and family. We will never know how many more families grieved privately and
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in virtual silence, since little or no evidence survives in archives or biographies of the immense burden of such silent grief. Yet there are numerous passing references to the anguish – or even the deaths – of parents caused by sons’ wartime deaths. Jack Baillie recalled that the shock and grief of his brother’s death in 1917 ‘utterly broke dad up’.20 When Pte 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.21
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Tanja Luckins has used the archives of the Victorian hospitals for the insane to find out more about mothers who suffered emotional and mental breakdown because of wartime loss. Mothers were expected by society to bear this burden, but some buckled under the weight of this cultural prescription. Towards
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the end of the war and afterwards there was an increase in the numbers of women admitted to hospitals for the insane because of melancholia and mental anxiety due to wartime loss. The hospital records show some women in despair, shouting or crying, while others ‘remain silent, overwhelmed by loss’. One evocative case was that of Constance D, aged 50, whose son George was killed at Gallipoli in April 1915. She learned the news in distressing instalments through a newspaper in Melbourne. On the first anniversary of George’s death, her family called a local doctor, explaining that she had been mentally unbalanced since his death, introverted and remaining in bed, until the anniversary, ‘a symbol of memory, acted as a cognitive trigger’. She was ‘peculiar’ for days after the anniversary and she died a month after admission to hospital. Susan W, a widow with four children, was admitted to Yarra Bend in 1916, following news of her son’s death in France. She died just before Christmas 1917, the cause cited as grief intensified by menopause.22 These are extreme examples of bereaved mothers who failed to cope with the deaths of their sons in the Great War. But between these and the more positive responses of the Roberts’ and the Hughes’ families, at the other end of the spectrum, are vast numbers of bereaved people who did not articulate their sorrow, which left no tangible trace. Justice Henry Bournes Higgins’ experience of grief can stand for many of the silent because he was a prominent public figure who left fragmentary evidence of his suffering. His only child, Mervyn, having survived Gallipoli, was killed in Egypt in December 1916. Like many bereaved parents, Higgins wanted to honour his brave son’s code of manly courage in the same stoical manner, to prove himself worthy of his son’s sacrifice. He admitted to his niece, Nettie Palmer: ‘I thought I had steeled myself for an event like this, but I had not … Poor Aunt Mary and I are trying to be brave and cheerful towards life, because he would have us so.’ As Palmer noted, the impact of this blow was all the greater because the bereaved parents were deter-
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mined not to be overcome by it. The consequence was that they did not allow themselves to express their sorrow openly.23 Ten months after Mervyn’s death, Higgins confided in a close friend in the United States: I take as much care as I can of my health, in order to do my work efficiently. Sometimes, however, 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; we have lost about 52 000 men (deaths alone).
Thus, apart from his conviction that Mervyn would have wished him to show ‘a brave and cheerful’ face to the world, Higgins shared the common belief that mass wartime bereavement rendered insignificant the grief of individual parents safe at home. Higgins reinforced this view in a subsequent letter to his friend, describing his despair late in 1918 on hearing the first victory cheers: ‘I have no right to infect others with our grief’. The use of the word ‘infect’ is revealing, likening grief and the potential loss of control in public to a contagious disease. Thousands of other boys would return to their parents, ‘but never our boy’. Instead Higgins must brace up to life and work: ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life’. We have some glimpses of the way Higgins and his wife endured the inter-war years. In 1920 he confessed to his American friend, ‘If you visited Australia, you would find us sadly trying to do our duty in such life as is left to us’. He felt his sorrows as keenly as ever, but followed Thomas Hardy’s advice: ‘Ache deep; but make no moans / Smile out; but stilly suffer’. His wife was wonderfully brave, but so very sad.24 Higgins had few consolations in his intense and prolonged grief, other than his judicial work and his memories of Mervyn. He composed occasional elegies to Mervyn to relieve the strain of grief: ‘Ah, lad! You taste not of our deep despair / Our bitter sense that our high hope is dead.’ The grieving parents could look forward only to an old age with ‘a childless home – and tears’.25
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Ken Inglis has calculated that two out of every three Australians in uniform were killed or wounded, and that every second Australian family was bereaved. 26 The grief was omnipresent. In some cases the bereaved family suffered the agony of losing more than one son. And some villages or small towns endured a disproportionate share of fatalities. Richard Sproull reported recently in The Australian on the impact of the Great War on the inhabitants of Yacka, a little village of less than 400 people in the wheat-farming area north of Adelaide. Thirteen men from Yacka were killed at Gallipoli and on the Western Front; the town suffered losses of one in three dead compared with the national average of one in five. Sam and Edwin Gale, both in their twenties, left Yacka on the same day with five other local men, who were each presented with a leather-encased wristwatch and a pair of socks on departure. The Gale brothers left behind their mother and eight siblings on the family wheat farm, their father having died earlier. The men enlisted partly for the pay, but mainly out of ‘sheer patriotism’ and a desire to save the Empire. Sam and Edwin Gale were killed in France, as were Billie Harvey and his brother Edgar, and Albert Burford. Some of the grief of the Yacka families was directed into funding and building a modest but elegant war memorial to their 13 dead in the centre of the town ‘as a symbolic return home’. The memorial was unveiled by the mothers of the Gale and Harvey boys in August 1921 amidst ‘a truly bitter sense of mourning and loss’.27 The Bower and Greenhalgh families of Singleton, New South Wales, suffered as much as the Gales and Harveys. However, we have more than usual documentary evidence of their experiences because David Greenhalgh in 1996 compiled a splendid unpublished volume of the families’ correspondence and diaries from the Great War, which he donated to the Australian War Memorial. Two of the three Greenhalgh brothers who went to war did not return: Lance Cpl Ted Greenhalgh, aged 25, was killed at Fleurbaix in July 1916, and Pte Fred Greenhalgh died of pneumo-
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nia in October 1918 at the age of 41. Ted’s diary ended the day before his death in 1916, with reference to ‘heavy bombardment’ at Fleurbaix; he was killed instantly by an artillery barrage. Archie Bower, Ted’s brother-in-law, wrote to his sister from France in a typical understatement, relating ‘a bit of sad news … of poor old Ted’s death … Poor Ted’s time had come, and can’t be helped. He fought the good fight and fell a gallant soldier’. Fred Greenhalgh wrote from France to tell his own family the sad news: ‘the hardest letter I ever wrote’. He received word of Ted’s death in time to cycle eight miles to be at his graveside, where five soldiers were buried. He wrote that ‘it felt a bit hard’ but soldiers had to expect death if they did their duty. His effort to suppress his emotions showed in his advice to his family, ‘There is nothing to worry about’. Fred later reported to Lily Bower that Ted’s funeral was ‘terribly painful’ but he was glad that he saw his brother’s body before the burial and was relieved to know precisely where he was buried – far better than just ‘somewhere in France’.28 This again highlights the importance of precise knowledge of a loved one’s burial location. Warkworth Church, Singleton, was filled for the Memorial Service for Ted Greenhalgh on 3 August 1916. The Singleton Argus glorified the ‘dead hero’ who sacrificed his ‘noble’ life, and exhorted Ted’s family to ‘be brave in this hour of extreme grief, and to remember how, and why, he died’. These themes became common: patriotic heroism by soldiers required courage in sorrow from bereaved families. The printed sympathy cards included in the bound volume also emphasised patriotism: ‘For King and Country he laid down his life’. But these noble sentiments were reserved for memorial services and printed condolence cards, while the soldiers in the family remained stoical: Archie Bower’s sympathy letter to his brother-in-law Jack Greenhalgh acknowledged prosaically: ‘we must lose some and never know who’s turn it is’.29 Just over two years later, in October 1918, Ted’s older brother, Fred Greenhalgh, died of pneumonia in a French hospital, having
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been wounded twice in battle, and suffering health problems for some time. His death was described as ‘peaceful’ and he received a proper burial in a spot marked by a cross. On this occasion two sisters’ responses have survived, displaying far more emotion than their soldier brothers, especially as the death of a second brother seemed too tough to bear. Emmie Bower sent her sympathy to Emily Greenhalgh on mourning notepaper: ‘I know what it is Emily and I don’t know how his poor mother and father will bear it all. Fancy to think two of their poor boys being buried over there. It is a hard blow to anyone.’ A poem attributed to Fred’s mother, Sarah Greenhalgh, clearly derived from ‘In Memoriam’ notices, spoke from the heart of the mother’s loss of two sons to war. This was again compounded by losing one at the very end of the war, and having to witness other mothers’ joy on welcoming their hero sons home: Now the cruel war is over And the absent ones return … So amidst the joyous welcome Many hearts will throb with pain, Thinking of the many loved ones That will not return again.30
The anguish of the bereaved parents was poignantly demonstrated by their own deaths within six years of Fred’s, both in their sixties. Their daughter Annie Greenhalgh sent a bitter letter to a Maj Lean in June 1921, informing him that her father died on 10 January 1919, only six weeks after receiving the news of his second son’s death. The medical adviser had stated that the war was the cause of their father’s death. Annie regretted that the Great War had played such a tragic role in their family’s history. The family continued to be concerned about their mother’s health, which was very poor since her now triple bereavement. Sarah Greenhalgh’s grief was exacerbated by the persistence of the military authorities in wrongly demoting the rank of her son Ted. At the time, Ted’s captain had assured his mother that Ted died ‘the most glorious of deaths’ and as a non-
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commissioned officer, showed commendable courage under fire. The inscription on Ted’s grave rightly stated his rank as ‘lance corporal’, but the army in 1921 insisted he was merely ‘Private Greenhalgh’. Annie wrote that their mother wanted the injustice to Ted’s rank corrected. Three months later Sarah Greenhalgh herself wrote to Maj Lean to complain that no alteration had been made despite the family’s protests: ‘The way I have been treated I am [only] sorry any of mine ever went to help in the struggle’. The story ended sadly. Over three years later the army authorities belatedly amended Ted’s rank to ‘lance-corporal’, but this came too late for Sarah Greenhalgh who had already died at the age of 67.31 Bert Bower, one of the three soldiers who survived out of the two families, tried to offer the soldiers’ perspective on bereavement to Emily Greenhalgh: he wrote from England in 1919 while recovering from gas attacks, about the death of another soldier, Bert Bates. He hoped that Bates’ wife, Coralie, would cope, but in his view millions were worse off than Coralie – some had lost five sons ‘and they take it the right way’. If this was a broad hint to the Greenhalgh women about the soldiers’ code on grieving, it would not have been helpful after the deaths of two brothers and a father. It is perhaps not surprising that no member of the Greenhalgh family visited the war graves of Ted and Fred in France until 1982. They probably could not afford the journey, and the legacy of Sarah Greenhalgh’s bitterness would not have encouraged it. But above that, the deaths of two soldier brothers, and the related deaths of their parents, perhaps required a generation or two of silent and private grief; the family was little likely to be comforted by war memorials and Anzac Day ceremonies in the meantime. It was over 60 years after the Great War ended before David Greenhalgh visited his relatives’ graves in France and subsequently compiled this compelling memorial. It is significant that his public commemoration of the families’ sacrifice in the Great War took place at last in the 1980s, when the cultural climate relating to expressive grieving was changing.32
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Mourning the missing Grief could be intense for bereaved parents who knew how their soldier sons died and where they were buried; it could be protracted agony for those whose sons were reported as missing and whose bodies were never recovered. Hopes were initially raised without firm foundation, only to be dashed months or years later. Thousands of soldiers had no known burial place because their bodies were shattered by shells or never found. Burial was sometimes impossible because corpses which had to be abandoned after one battle, when it was too dangerous to recover them, were scattered in subsequent engagements. Many corpses were too broken to be identified; and some soldiers were initially buried after a battle but their graves were later lost. A significantly high 42 per cent of the Australian dead could only be commemorated communally by memorials to the missing – like that at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, inscribed with the names of 4228 Australians. More than 6000 Australian soldiers lost in Belgium are remembered only by inscriptions on the Menin Gate memorial at the entrance to the shattered city of Ypres. The fate of parents of these 25 000 missing soldiers may perhaps be compared with that of parents of young people today who just disappear and are reported as missing indefinitely. But probably the continuing mental distress of bereaved parents of the missing of the Great War was magnified, because its horrors became well known in the inter-war years to anyone who cared to investigate: families could suffer continuing anguish by imagining smashed bodies, hideous mutilation and terrible pain. Indeed, much of the abhorrence of that war in the memories of survivors arose from the loss and dismemberment of corpses. Families probably found it impossible to come to terms with the reality and finality of their sons’ deaths without a corpse or an identified grave, initially dreading maybe that their loved ones were not dead, but maimed and helpless ‘somewhere in France’. Many doubtless grieved intensely but privately for the remainder of their
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lives, traumatised by losses which they never properly accepted. Under such circumstances any normal process of grieving was out of the question for most. Psychologists define ‘chronic grief’ as an extreme response to the death of a loved one, especially a young person killed violently in acutely distressing circumstances such as war. Such grief can be prolonged and marked by social withdrawal and intense depression.33 When soldiers bodies’ were shattered or buried deeply by an explosion they were often reported as missing because of the absence of physical evidence. This was the fate of Cpl Patrick Whelan, aged 35, who was hit by a shell on 6 October 1917. The soldiers who assisted in digging to recover Whelan and others found no trace. They were almost certain Whelan must be dead and could not have become a prisoner of war, but they could not prove this without his body. Therefore he was reported as missing for more than six months, before being officially certified as killed in action on 13 May 1918.34 The search for missing soldiers was intended to discover whether they were in fact dead and if so, where they were buried. If graves could be located and identified, then the fate of the missing was at least settled; the families knew for certain that their son or husband was dead and could begin to grieve. Volunteer staff of the Red Cross Missing and Wounded Inquiry Bureau aimed to end the awful suspense about the missing and conveyed messages of comfort where possible. In 1917 the searchers sent in more than 30 000 reports on missing soldiers in their efforts to establish reliable evidence of their fate beyond reasonable doubt. Thousands of grieving relatives searched for information on the fate of missing loved ones, sometimes for years and frequently with no outcome; some also pursued their own inquiries through the military authorities and their sons’ comrades.35 Lt Clarence Tunbrell Collier, a solicitor, aged 33, was missing, presumed killed at Fromelles on 19 July 1916. His parents made enquiries with the Red Cross after he was posted missing, and
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these elicited several responses. The chaplain reported that Collier fell in a desperate charge on German trenches. The Germans later flooded their old trenches and forced the Australians to retire, so that ‘1500 dead had to be left behind unburied’. Since their bodies could not be recovered they were reported as ‘missing’. Although 400 soldiers were taken prisoner, Collier was not one of them. AO Crassingham, a comrade, saw Collier wounded in the foot and heard him tell the sergeant to ‘carry on’: ‘The bombardment was terrific, and it was easily possible for him to be blown to bits after he was wounded’. Collier’s father and sister visited Crassingham in hospital at Randwick, where he told them all he knew – hopefully toning down his assumptions about the fate of the body.36 There are no further items in this file – nothing about commemoration – and it seems likely that this family of a missing soldier, with no identified grave, grieved privately in silence for years. The heartache of parents of the missing is illustrated by an ‘In Memoriam’ notice in October 1918 placed in the Newcastle Morning Herald by the father of Pte Charles Askie, aged 19, presumed killed in action a year earlier: Oh, the anguish of his father, Oh, the bitter tears he shed, When he heard his boy was missing, And he wondered, is he dead? Oh, those weeks and months of torture, Oh, the agony and pain. He weeps, and prays, and wonders, Will his boy come home again? Killed in action came still later, Still I’ll watch and wait for him.37
‘In Memoriams’ were for many grieving families an integral part of the mourning process, but most families of the missing, who never discovered the truth, usually felt unable to participate. Askie’s family was unusual in contributing an ‘In Memoriam’
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notice which highlighted his status as still missing; those few which mentioned the missing usually only did so after death had been presumed or confirmed. Relatives continued to hope that the missing might yet be found alive, whereas ‘In Memoriams’ acknowledged their deaths. The Lindsay family was a rare exception in placing an entry in the Adelaide Advertiser in 1918 for Lance Cpl Walter Lindsay, ‘reported wounded and missing since October 12, 1917’ at Passchendaele: He is wounded, he is missing, That is all the tale they tell: Of our dear young lad that loved us, Of the lad we loved so well, Alive, dead, wounded, missing, One of these must be true; Let this little token tell, dear Walter, How we long for news of you.
The Lindsays repeated the refrain of the O’Loughlins that ‘a package of letters’ was all that remained of Walter.38 The Faulkes family of Wallsend, Newcastle, lost their son Billy in similar circumstances to Walter Lindsay at Passchendaele. They also regretted that they knew nothing of how he spent the final months of his life, ‘What his last words, look, or thought’.39 Archival evidence on the Adams family of South Brisbane offers unusual insights into the ordeal of a missing soldier’s family. They lost two sons in action in the Dardanelles in 1915, William on 29 May and Douglas in November, but the surviving correspondence reveals far more trauma attached to Willie’s death. He was first reported as missing on 29 May, but it was some months before he was officially presumed killed in action on that date, and even longer before the grief-stricken family accepted that decision. By contrast, there are few surviving documents or family letters relating to Doug’s death, about which there was no question. There was a memorial card for Doug, ‘In
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Memory of a fallen Hero / We rejoice to think twas nobly that he died’. The family had official confirmation of his death in action, and could therefore begin to mourn; they could build their grief around the patriotic concept that he died bravely in a noble cause.40 Grieving for Willie was quite different, though the information in the family letters is fragmentary. The family seems to have been officially advised that Willie did not return from an engagement on 29 May 1915 and was therefore reported as missing: there was no definite evidence of his death but little official hope that he was alive. For three months Jane Adams, Willie’s mother, received letters of sympathy on her son’s presumed death. Several consoled her that Willie died a ‘glorious’ death fighting for his country, and trusted that knowledge would help her survive the heavy blow. But the mother lacked any certainty that he was indeed dead, and knew nothing of the nature of his death, glorious or otherwise. Most condolence letter writers advised her to ‘be brave’, ‘cheer up’ and ‘bear up’ for the sake of her other boys. Many repeated her sister’s point: ‘look how many Poor Mothers are in the same sorrow as yourself’.41 Meanwhile, Jane was not convinced of Willie’s death, and was receiving mixed information through her son Doug in Egypt and from the authorities. On 12 September 1915 she wrote to Doug about the ‘good news’ that the army had apparently made a mistake about Willie’s death, confusing him with another soldier called Adams, who happened to be a friend of his. Jane complained about the varying reports: first they reported him missing in action, then presumed dead, and now ‘not killed’. A friend wrote to Jane, ‘you won’t know what to believe after so many reports’ and hoped the latest information would prove correct. Doug’s girlfriend, Gladys Nelson, considered it ‘most cruel’ to have such different reports of Willie. Though Jane had received no letters from Willie she continued to write to him as if he were alive. On 12 September she told Willie that all were in
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deep mourning for him and only God knew whether he was living or dead: she had been through an ‘awful time’ and could not understand how such a terrible mistake could have been made. But she now had hope again.42 Early in October 1915 Jane Adams’ renewed hopes were dashed by a communication from the Defence Department that her son had in fact been killed, while the other Adams boy had been wounded. Jane Adams collapsed and became seriously ill at this reversal of fortunes. Her illness was classified as German measles, but the family believed it was a ‘general breakdown’ caused by months of anxiety and suspense. The renewed hope had ‘kept the wound open’ for months longer than an initial notification of certain death might have done. As late as 13 November a letter came to Jane from Driver G Black in Egypt, in response to her earlier request for definite news of Willie. Black had written to other soldiers for information and feared that Willie was indeed dead: he thought the Defence Department had dealt very badly with ‘a mother who has made such a big forfeit’. In November Jane’s grief was greatly increased by the dreadful news that her second son, Sgt Douglas Adams, had also been killed in the Dardanelles. Jane’s loving letters sent to both sons at the front for months past were eventually returned to her.43 Jane Adams now had to cope with another crop of generally unhelpful condolence letters for both sons, advising her to ‘cheer up’ and ‘be brave’. Catherine Keiller thought that it would be easier now that Jane had definite news that Willie was dead, as the false reports had kept the wound open too long. Even worse were those letters which again tried to console her with the thought that she was only one of countless bereaved parents – an argument which trivialised her own terrible loss. ‘Alf’, a soldier, wrote from Europe: ‘You must not give way you know, yours is a great sorrow I know but we must think of the thousands that have been bereaved by this awful war’.44
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Public commemoration and private grieving in the inter-war years The Great War had a profound impact on emotions, attitudes and practices related to death and grief for 50 years or more, reinforced and prolonged by the 1919 influenza pandemic, by an economic depression and another world war.45 The public commemoration of the mass deaths of the nation’s young soldiers in Europe rendered individual civilian deaths relatively insignificant. Communal grief for brave soldiers was privileged over individual sorrow for civilians who died domesticated deaths. The silent response to grief became entrenched in the nation’s psyche as a widely disseminated emotional norm long after the war was over. It was generally recognised that a public display of commemoration and collective mourning was essential to honour those who sacrificed their lives for the nation – even more so in Australia because few bereaved families could ever visit their loved ones’ graves. The monuments erected to their memories in Australia had to serve as a substitute for their graves. But Alistair Thomson goes beyond this in Anzac Memories to argue that ‘Public memorials and remembrance rituals transform personal mourning and sadness’, and addressed the widespread need to cope with sorrow and make sense of loss. In his view, monuments and ceremonies served as focal points for mourning, whereby individual bereaved people could share their suffering and find solace through collective affirmation of the significance of the deaths.46 I am more convinced by Ken Inglis’s more qualified verdict on the therapeutic value of war memorials. He notes that the large civic war memorials were constructed too late ‘to serve most bereaved people as sites of healing meditation’, since only two Australian capital cities had built them by 1930. And, he adds, their chief aim was not to mitigate individual grief: ‘they were public declarations, acts of formal homage … honouring the sacrifice of the dead and the service of the survivors’.47 Clearly public commemoration helped some bereaved families
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and ex-soldiers more than others. Certainly there were tensions between the two functions of Anzac Day and the war memorials: they had to honour and celebrate those who died for their country, but they also had to allow the bereaved to mourn their dead. It was not always easy to achieve both, especially as mourning the dead could be seen as disparaging the heroic sacrifice. Thomson accepts that some bereaved families preferred simple memorial services and local war memorials ‘without the trappings of the national pageant’. Others, including some returned soldiers, were wearied by the war and preferred to forget it.48 Many chose not to attend public ceremonies. It is impossible to know how far national war commemoration actually helped to console grieving families and returned soldiers at a private and individual level. It probably made bereavement more bearable for many, but by no means all. It was most effective for those who succeeded in structuring their grieving around patriotic concepts of honour, duty and noble sacrifice. It offered them formal assurance that their loved one had not died in vain and would be remembered by the nation. Anzac Day ceremonies and war memorials were more likely to give solace to families with unambiguous information about their loved ones’ deaths and known grave sites. Public commemoration undoubtedly had least appeal to returned soldiers like Fred Farrell, who suffered shell shock after the deaths of many of his closest friends at the battle of Fromelles. He saw those deaths as a futile sacrifice which left him unable to speak about the war for many years.49 It is also difficult to see Anzac Day rituals and the war memorial movement giving significant help to the families of the missing. The desolate families of the 25 000 missing soldiers with no known graves probably needed support and solace most of all – but my impression is that they were least open to it because they continued to search and to doubt that their loved ones were dead. Probably large numbers of bereaved parents and widows remained in a prolonged state of chronic, silent grief.
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The impact of heroic soldiers’ deaths in the Great War deeply affected the way individual families mourned their civilian dead in subsequent years. Private funeral and mourning rituals for civilians were already in decline when powerful public and collective rituals were created to commemorate the Great War heroes. 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. This process was intensified by the Great War, particularly as war heroes could not be buried in Australia and grave-visiting for consolation was out of the question. During the war, individual displays of funeral pageantry for civilians seemed an unnecessary indulgence. Although the wearing of mourning black by widows became more common during the war, it declined again afterwards (more slowly in poorer workingclass communities and among Greek and Italian immigrants). For civilians in the interwar years, however, ‘In Memoriam’ columns of the newspapers ceased to be a powerful voice of bereaved families. Individual civilians who died safe at home lacked the patriotic appeal of the dead war heroes and a stoical response to grief was now culturally prescribed. There were relatively few ‘In Memoriam’ notices in the Newcastle Morning Herald for adult civilians in the inter-war years; those were usually short and formulaic, often just ‘In loving memory’ or an equivalent. The theme of silent sorrow ran through them, 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.50
Many repeated the wartime verse telling of ‘silent heartache / deep within my heart concealed’. There were numerous variants on ‘we mourn her in silence unseen’ and ‘the silent tear in secret wept’. Many also affirmed the inadequacy of words to express
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their sorrow: ‘words cannot say how we loved him’, and ‘not speech nor silence can tell the loss’. 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.51 Condolence letters further illustrated the new cultural prescription that individuals should face sorrow with silence and the ‘stiff upper lip’. A significant letter on the death of the famous poet and writer Henry Lawson in 1922 indicated this trend. J Knibbs wrote from the Public Library of New South Wales to Lawson’s daughter Bertha Jago, a librarian, offering sympathy, but concerned about her return to work: Some of us know from our own experience how difficult it is to return to one’s daily work and to meet the spoken expressions of sympathy from members of the staff. Will you please understand, therefore, that our silent sympathy is intended to spare you unnecessary pain.52
Such a letter would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century, but starkly demonstrates the change in the degrees of emotional expression considered appropriate in public places by 1922. Letters to Lucy Denholm, on the death of her husband, Andrew, a teacher, in 1934, are revealing on the consolations offered in rural Queensland, carrying echoes of Ruth Park’s later experience. The most remarkable for its insensitivity came from Neta and Frank Lehr of Kin Kin: ‘Never mind Mrs Denholm, let’s hope for the best in the future … One thing we can’t do is avoid the Grim Reaper … I hope things turn out brighter and lighten your path to success in whatever you do.’ Others urged Lucy Denholm to ‘look on the bright side … Try and bear up.’ The emphasis throughout was on Lucy’s need to ‘bear up’ for the sake of her boys, who must not be ‘too saddened’.53 The more unhelp-
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ful letters suggest there was some wisdom in the shift in the 1950s from handwritten letters of condolence to printed cards on which mourners need only write their names. This was indeed a significant symbol of a vital change in the standards of emotional culture.
National disasters transformed Responses to national and community disasters are also revealing about the strict cultural conventions which determined what was emotionally appropriate in the inter-war years. There were severe constraints on what was considered permissible in reporting disasters and in a community’s behaviour in dealing with disaster and loss. These firmly marked a boundary between correct behaviour for a community in grief and that of individuals. Disasters received considerable coverage in the newspapers, though less than they usually do today. Unlike individual domesticated deaths, victims of disasters were often represented as analogous in some respects to soldiers’ deaths. Indeed, community disasters were unusual in that they were among the few types of death which received any press coverage in these years. The Bellbird Colliery disaster at Cessnock, New South Wales on 1 September 1926 killed 20 miners and one rescuer, following mine explosions. The Sydney Morning Herald described it as ‘one of the worst mining tragedies in New South Wales’ with its ‘harrowing spectacles’ and ‘unrecognisable dead’. The language was graphic but few names were revealed and few particulars, except for those of the ‘heroic’ rescuers, who were described in the rhetoric usually reserved for Great War heroes. John Brown, the mine manager and rescuer, the only identified individual, was depicted as ‘a brave and noble man’ who sacrificed his life to save others. The Sydney Morning Herald applauded the ‘heroism of these noble souls’: ‘men had done great deeds of bravery in the heat of battle, but men on this occasion had deliberately made up their minds to go to certain death’ to save the lives of their
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comrades. Press attention then moved from the attempted rescues to the impressive ceremonial funeral in a small town where everyone knew the victims, and the collieries were closed for the day. There was ‘universal mourning’ as a continuous solemn procession of relatives and friends queued for hours to view the 14 coffins in the new Soldiers’ Memorial Hall – another telling connection to the war – and the funeral procession was the longest known in the northern coalfields.54 By contrast, the press paid little attention to the bereaved (again unlike media coverage of disasters today). There was brief acknowledgment of ‘community mourning’ in ‘a grief-stricken town’, but not of individual sorrow. The bereaved were not identified. The close comrades of the dead miners who walked by the black-draped lorries carrying the coffins showed the community how to mourn: they were ‘stalwart, stern-faced miners, whose grief was none the less deep though they bore themselves bravely’. This was masculine stoical grief modelled on that of the Anzacs. The common view was that grieving families could only be assisted by formal expressions of sympathy and generous ‘practical’ help. The day after the funeral the Sydney Morning Herald stated that ‘behind the closed doors and drawn blinds of these humble Bellbird cottages stark grief walked unchecked’. The only consolations offered, however, were ‘time alone’, and a generous relief fund to provide material aid. Nothing was written about the emotional needs of the shattered families, nor was their sorrow described as it often is today: individual grief had to be suffered in private with doors shut and curtains drawn.55 At least we can be fairly sure that the women in these working-class mining families in the 1920s would offer neighbourly support and sympathy, and that they were more accustomed to death at working ages than many. The Black Friday bushfires in Victoria in January 1939 also starkly demonstrated the impact of the prevailing cultural prescription for grief on the shattered families of the 71 dead. Even such a
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profound trauma did not alter patterns of emotional response to disaster and death which had become deeply entrenched since the Great War. The Argus published heartbreaking stories of agonising and gruesome deaths, while also demonstrating great concern for the loss of homes and property. As at Cessnock, the Argus celebrated the heroism of rescuers and the courage of many survivors; these included women who had barely escaped alive when their homes were swept away, yet they ‘walked up and down and talked bravely of the future. Not one betrayed any sign of despair.’ At the old goldmining town of Woods Point, many people escaped with only the clothes they wore as their town was gutted: ‘Yet the men were undaunted. Women drew their trembling lips tight.’56 The Argus powerfully indicated the prescribed responses to the needs of the bereaved in a stirring editorial on 16 January 1939, regretting the ‘appalling magnitude’ of the tragedy: ‘there are losses that cannot be shared, except to the extent of sympathising deeply … Our pity for [the bereaved] can best be expressed in terms of our pocket and our purse.’ The Bairnsdale newspaper, Every Week, echoed this view that ‘nought can be done but offer sympathy’ and financial aid.57 The Argus reported on 13 January 1939 the ‘pathetic’ case of Mrs Le Brun, widow of one of the Rubican fire victims. She was expecting a child any day but had lost her husband, her home, her furniture and clothes. Six days later the Argus rejoiced that ‘practical sympathy’ had been offered to the distressed widow by the people of Victoria in the form of donations of clothes and money.58 The relief committee of Warrandyte recognised that after the initial nervous exhaustion wore off the survivors and bereaved would need help ‘to take their minds off the tragedy’: wireless sets and games would be welcome, while the women would need such aids to ‘a peaceful mind’ as needles, thread and knitting. The concept of distracting the bereaved and the survivors from their loss contrasts sharply with today’s belief in psychological counselling which encourages people to talk directly through their distress.59
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Tom Griffiths has written evocatively that the week-long inferno ‘shocked Australian society to its core … and left enduring emotional and physical scars’.60 But the scars of 71 deaths were generally kept hidden, until an ABC online documentary revealed life-long trauma in 2004. John Rigby, co-ordinating chaplain for the Country Fire Authority, spoke about firefighters’ need today to talk through their emotions after a serious fire, especially if they were traumatised by deaths or injuries to comrades. He recognised that such support mechanisms did not exist in 1939 when ‘there was an ethos … to just get on with life’: The ongoing result for individuals who never had a chance to let go of the trauma they have suffered and the resulting disconnection, are feelings of anger, alcoholism, a need to control, depression, relationships breakdown, conflict in the work situations, and an inability to concentrate … What repercussions have there been for us socially, as a culture, I wonder?61
Many of the elderly interviewees who survived Black Friday remarked on the lack of counselling for rescuers and firefighters. Murray Thompson, aged 88 in 2004, worked for the Forestry Commission at Narbethong in 1939, when he was a member of the rescue party which found the Kerslake family already dead from the violence of the fire: ‘The trauma and physical exhaustion caused by the fire took such a toll … In those days of course, there was no such thing as post-trauma counselling. We did get a week with paid holiday though.’ Mick O’Meara’s brother Tom was a young engine driver at a sawmill in 1939 and he also battled the fire and found the bodies of the Kerslake family and several others on the Acheron Way: ‘[Tom] was a man that was absolutely shattered. His eyes were back in his head. And he was really bad, he was devastated.’ Mick likened his brother’s state to that of men who came out of the front line in the Great War. Reaction had set in but no counselling was then available for Tom: ‘You just pulled your socks up and you went back to work’, to rebuild the burntout mill.62
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Violet Barling, aged 97 when interviewed, was a young mother with three children under five at the time of the Black Friday fires. Her husband Jack, a Forestry Commission officer, was trapped and killed, carrying his mate on his back, while burning fire breaks near Toolangi. Violet’s testimony was understated and stoical. She saw herself as just one of many suffering widows: ‘These things happen to people, some of them really dreadful. And just think of all the other women who lost their husbands at that particular time … Life just had to go on. You had to feed your children.’ Violet cried very little: ‘I was bearing up alright, I think’. She did not attend her husband’s funeral because ‘women didn’t go to funerals in those times’. She remembered just ‘one comforting thing’ – the closest she came to counselling. On the day of the funeral their family doctor attended a little service in the house: he put his arm around her shoulder and told her that Jack would have been overcome by smoke rather than burned to death. She had indeed been haunted by dreadful visions of his terrible death. The family received substantial material assistance but not emotional support – the lord mayor’s fund helped them for many years.63 A friend of Violet Barling’s children has a different perspective on the impact of her grief. He recalls that Violet used to sit silently in the kitchen for hours on end, remote from her children, and she never mentioned the fire or her husband’s death.64 Looking back to 1939, Bruce Esplin, head of the Victorian Bushfire Inquiry of 2003, observed: ‘I think we underestimate the cost of grief to our societies … a lot of people [in 1939] would have made the argument that time heals all – obviously it doesn’t’.65 ___ The Great War had profound significance for emotions and attitudes to death and grief in Australia for the next half-century, its impact reinforced by another terrible world war within 20 years. Bereaved families had learned from their soldier sons and public
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rhetoric to suppress open emotional responses to loss in favour of the stoical ‘stiff upper lip’, which continued into the inter-war years and beyond. National commemoration of the war dead made some families’ grief easier to bear, but it necessarily privileged soldiers’ wartime deaths over domestic civilian deaths, which seemed insignificant by comparison. Emotional expressions of sorrow for individual soldiers seemed an indulgence to Justice Higgins in 1918: ‘I have no right to infect others with our grief’. Overt grief for civilians – even those killed in bush fires – was out of the question, and remained so through another war and two further peacetime decades.
5 Private and secular grief: Katharine Susannah Prichard
Katharine Susannah Prichard’s experience of death and bereavement illustrates her family’s response to a significant shift in grieving patterns following the Great War. Her story is important and deserves telling because it was so rare in the interwar years, and is also so detailed and reflective. After 1918 few bereaved people described their individual experiences of sorrow, because the national focus was on the collective commemoration of the sacrifice of the AIF heroes, while individual grief by and for civilians was devalued. The older generation who were adults during the war were perhaps more likely to suppress their sorrow and grieve privately and silently, often for a prolonged period, as Katharine did. Some of their surviving children, however, like Katharine’s son Ric Throssell, may have been more prone to react against the saturation with sorrow and the deep melancholy of the interwar years. He responded to the deaths of his war-hero father and his first wife with actual denial and a determination to forget: ‘mourn not the dead’. Doubtless many of the generation who grew to adulthood in the interwar years were oppressed by the all-pervasive but largely privatised grief of those two decades. Drusilla Modjeska observes that Katharine Prichard was a central figure in the literary developments of the 1930s: ‘Her influence lay in the use she made of a novel form that drew on both
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romanticism and realism, and in her unswerving political commitment’. Katharine Prichard became a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia in 1920, but she is better known for her novels which were at the time widely read and appreciated by critics and general readers alike.1 Her background was middleclass, urban and educated, though poorer than many other women writers of the period. She was born in Fiji in 1883, the daughter of Tom Prichard, editor of the Fiji Times, and later she attended the South Melbourne College. She could not afford to go to university, studying instead at night in the public library. She spent two years as a governess before becoming a journalist with the Melbourne Herald in 1908. The first loss of Katharine Prichard’s life was her father’s suicide in 1907, when she was 24 years old. Tom Prichard failed as editor of newspapers in both Melbourne and Launceston, due to financial losses and his own serious depressive illness. Katharine wrote that ‘Father’s nervous exhaustion and mental breakdown was the most terrible thing that had ever happened to us. It was heartbreaking to see him so distraught.’ He became utterly depressed, unable to sleep and agonised about his failure to provide for his family. He refused to eat in the final weeks, and asked his family to kneel down in prayer with him every evening as he poured out his tormented soul to God. For Katharine ‘it was torture to see the agony of mind he was suffering, and Mother’s anguish as she wept quietly beside him’.2 Katharine endured a crisis of faith during her father’s breakdown, reinforced when he took his own life in 1907. During the evening prayer sessions she bargained with God, asking him for help and committing herself to faith if her father recovered. But she blamed God for allowing such suffering and humiliation, eventually concluding that it was a ‘tragic farce’ to expect a god to avert their pain. She had read sufficiently widely, in geology, evolutionary theory and biblical criticism to question the family’s religion even before her father’s suicide. When it
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occurred, it ended any remaining faith in ‘religious superstitions’. Katharine could not accept the terrible manner of her father’s death, and kept silent about it for the next 60 years, even from her son – a silence which was to become a major defence against death in the future. As Ric Throssell observed, ‘The death of her father left a wound that would not heal; pain that returned through the years again and again; a question to which there was no answer’.3 And that pain became cumulative years later when her husband also committed suicide, again leaving no explanation. Suicide is often the worst kind of death for the survivors, who feel betrayed and often experience guilt at their failure to prevent the tragedy.
The Great War and Hugo Throssell’s suicide The Great War profoundly affected Katharine Prichard, killing her brother Alan and contributing to her husband’s subsequent suicide. She spent the years between 1907 and 1916 as a journalist in London, Paris and North America. She won the Hodder and Stoughton All-Empire prize for her 1915 novel, The Pioneers, which gave her confidence in her writing, as well as an international reputation. The news of her brother Alan’s death in Flanders in 1916 reached Katharine on her return to Melbourne: ‘Our sorrow was an abyss into which we sank deeper and deeper. We had to learn to live with the memory of Alan.’ She believed his life was wasted by the blunders of military commanders and could not share her mother’s Christian resignation: ‘I hated the war bitterly and furiously, and every circumstance which threw men into this madness of slaughtering each other’. The many tributes to her brother’s gallantry, his sacrifice and his ‘truly noble character’ reinforced her sense of outrage at the waste of such a life. Alan’s death inspired her to ‘devote her life to the cause of peace’, and to strive to prevent ‘the diabolical slaughter caused by war’. Four years later she become an active Communist.4
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The suicide of Katharine’s husband, the war hero Hugo Throssell VC, in 1933, was also closely linked with the Great War. We know a good deal about Hugo Throssell (known as Jim or Jimmy to his family) through Ric’s book, My Father’s Son, a moving account of his father’s life and death. Hugo came from a conservative, Anglican land-owning family in Northam, Western Australia.5 Hugo and his brother Ric enlisted for the Great War in 1914 in the newly-formed 10th Australian Light Horse Regiment. Lt Hugo Throssell at the age of 30 loved adventure and welcomed a heroic war for God, glory and Empire. He had learned the code of honour and chivalry from his conservative father and his public school, including the requirement to ‘crack hardy’ when hurt. He was charming, good-natured, self-assured, courageous and supremely fit. After training in Egypt, Hugo was sent in 1915 to join the 10th Light Horse on Gallipoli where his regiment had already suffered long lists of dead and wounded after the landing. The commanding officer’s report noted that Hugo Throssell ‘fought magnificently’ in the attack on Hill 60 (near Anzac Cove) and kept up the spirits of his men by his personal example, even though twice seriously wounded. They held the captured trench throughout the night, inspired by Hugo’s bravery, in the face of incessant bombing by the Turks. He won the Victoria Cross, the Empire’s highest military award.6 Recuperating from his wounds at Wandsworth Hospital, London, Hugo was introduced to the young Australian journalist, Katharine Prichard. They were immediately attracted to each other, but made no promises in this time of war. When Hugo recovered sufficiently, he briefly enjoyed the public fame accorded the hero of Hill 60, described as ‘seven feet of gallant manhood’ in Wills Cigarette Cards of the war’s bravest heroes. Hugo received his Victoria Cross from the King at Buckingham Palace before a recuperative visit to Australia which became a triumphal tour. He visited Katharine Prichard in Melbourne, where they enjoyed ‘a whirlwind of desperate wartime gaiety’ but decided not to marry until the war ended.7
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Hugo Throssell returned to the war in March 1917 for the Palestine campaign. In the attack on Gaza, following the fall of Baghdad, the 10th Light Horse sustained their heaviest losses since Gallipoli, including the death of Hugo’s brother Ric. Ric’s death devastated Hugo and destroyed his heroic illusions about the war. His captain blamed the bombs for the change in Hugo after Gaza, but his son Ric understood the truth: There could be no more adventure in it for him when Ric was killed. The war became savage reality where even victory was a tragedy, the price of which was pain and death. The strange joy of battle that sustained him at the Nek and Hill 60 and inspired the men who fought with him died after the Gaza Action.
Hugo had been devoted to his elder brother, so his grief went deep as he recovered in hospital from serious wounds to his thigh and foot. Afterwards he continued to fight in Egypt and Palestine under Gen Allenby, but spent half of his final war year in hospitals with malaria.8 The essayist, Nettie Palmer, later commented: ‘Jimmy Throssell had been broken by the war: he was broken already when he returned here [Australia] on leave in 1916: then he went back to the desert campaign’.9 Perhaps Nettie should have used the word ‘transformed’ rather than ‘broken’ – certainly he was now prepared to move far from his family’s conservatism to join Katharine Prichard in her Communism. Despite the profound impact of the war on his life and his thinking he never talked about it – another significant silence in his family. While Hugo fought the desert campaign, Katharine had returned from five years overseas to a productive period of creative solitude and sorrow in her cottage at Emerald, a legacy from her brother Alan, in the foothills of the Dandenong Ranges beyond Melbourne. There she enjoyed her friendships with Vance and Nettie Palmer and Louis and Hilda Esson (later Dr Hilda Bull). Emerald was a place of sanctuary where she worked through her grief for her brother in the peace of the bush and
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through the writing of poems of sorrow. She wrote to Nettie Palmer that Nettie had her home, her husband and her baby – ‘I have only / The ache of my heart’. The years at Emerald were also pivotal for Katharine for her discovery of Communism as a solution to the world’s insanity. She had read and discussed theories of war and socialism with her literary friends, but the Russian Revolution proved to her that socialism in action could be effective. The works of Marx and Engels convinced her that a dedicated organisation of working people might succeed in Australia: My mind was illuminated by the discovery. It was the answer to what I had been seeking: a satisfactory explanation of the wealth and power which control our lives … so that poverty, disease, prostitution, superstition and war should be eliminated.10
She joined the Communist Party of Australia, to which she became as deeply devoted as she was to literature. Hugo Throssell and Katharine Susannah Prichard were married in January 1919 and spent their honeymoon at Emerald. As their son later observed, Katharine’s ‘life for the next fourteen years was to be dedicated to my father, in love and happiness; and in the pain he brought her’. They were blissfully content for the first few years. Katharine wrote to Frank Wilmot, ‘My husband is truly, I believe, the best thing that ever happened to me’. Nettie Palmer considered that ‘Katharine and Jimmy had one of the finest relationships possible between two people with widely different natures and experiences’.11 They both made compromises which changed their lives. Katharine moved from her group of literary friends in the Melbourne area to the isolation of Greenmount in the Darling Ranges, 13 miles from Perth in Western Australia. But she grew to love the small weatherboard house in the hills with its sweeping views across the plain to Perth, and its peace was good for her writing. Just as they already shared a horror and hatred of war, Hugo
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was willing to be re-educated by Katharine to share her socialist views. Although, like so many other returned soldiers, he never spoke of the war, he could not forget it and had nightmares of the dead and wounded at Hill 60 and Gaza. Hugo wanted some explanation for the horror and destruction, and was genuinely receptive to Katharine’s ideas about socialism. After Gaza he had completely lost his faith in God, and the war made him a socialist. He saw himself as Katharine’s partner in life, including her politics. Katharine’s Communism meant active involvement and commitment, and her intellectual intensity surpassed that of Hugo, though he admired it. She really believed in the possibility of a socialist Australia and followed strict party discipline, which could be extremely demanding of her time and energy.12 The early years of their marriage were productive, for Katharine wrote some of her best work at this time. Louis Esson pronounced Working Bullocks ‘astonishingly good’, and her ambitious novel, Coonardoo, won the prestigious Bulletin prize. Years later Vance Palmer recalled that these two books together were a revelation: ‘they brought indisputable evidence that a new writer had arisen, one of lyric freshness, of original vision, of dramatic power’. Katharine herself remembered those years as the best of her life: ‘My best literary work was done there. Our joy brimmed over when our son was born.’13 Their idyllic years ended with the depression. Hugo lost his job with the Returned Soldiers’ Land Settlement Board, probably because of Katharine’s Communist activities. Hugo was only one of about a million long-term unemployed in a total full-time workforce about twice that size. Stuart Macintyre writes of ‘a caste of pariahs’ whose lives were transformed by hardships which included the loss of daily routines and a sense of inadequacy. The unemployed from the formerly comfortable classes were often affected profoundly: the loss of earning capacity could be ‘a crippling blow to their self-esteem’.14 Katharine described the descent of her family’s fortunes in her autobiography:
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Financial anxieties pressed heavily upon us. Under them Jim’s gay optimism collapsed … Jim tried desperately to find some way of reducing the accumulating burden of our debts. His passion for land had involved him in reckless expenditures and obligations to the banks.
Hugo was not an effective business manager and under stress he was tempted into wild schemes to salvage their financial fortunes, buying shares in a useless oilfield in the north-west, and failing in a real estate business. Katharine came close to being as disillusioned as she was exhausted and depressed. In 1931 she confided to Nettie Palmer that she could not sleep and was racked with migraine: ‘Jim with no job and colossal debts, having to be sheered-off and cheered-off nervous breakdown all the time’. Hugo had not told his wife the full extent of his financial troubles, nor did she understand how deeply depressed he was. Had she realised it, she would not have embarked on her sixmonth tour of the Soviet Union to see for herself the realities of Communism. She later acknowledged it was ‘a terrible mistake to go’.15 In Katharine’s absence Hugo’s despair, sleeplessness and depression deepened to the point where he tried to pawn his Victoria Cross. Ric was sent to stay with friends nearby, and Hugo began to believe that death was the only answer. He could not sleep, hated the empty house and the long nights, and finally shot himself in the head at the age of 49. He had rewritten his will, leaving his estate to Katharine, such as it was; on the back of the will he wrote, ‘I have never recovered from my 1914–18 experiences’ and appealed to the state to ensure that his wife obtained the usual war pension. The official verdict was that his death was self-inflicted while his mind was deranged due to war wounds, and he was buried with full military honours. The chaplain’s eulogy at his grave justly observed that ‘he died for his country as surely as if he had perished in the trenches’.16
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A secular philosophy of grief Ric Throssell devoted half of his book, My Father’s Son, to understanding why his father committed suicide. At the age of eleven, Ric was told only that his father had an accident, but he saw a newspaper headline, ‘WAR HERO FOUND SHOT’, which told him the truth. Meanwhile his mother was in London en route from Russia. Ric wanted to believe that it was an accident, that his beloved father could not have chosen to leave him. When the terrible truth forced itself upon him, ‘the emptiness of loss was deepened by cold resentment and pain. My mother and I were alone then. Deserted it seemed.’ Later he tried to reassure himself with happy childhood memories. Later still, he came to realise that his father’s suicide would never be fully explained but that there were several interconnected causes: in part his father had chosen to sacrifice his hero’s reputation in taking what conventional society called the coward’s way out, so that his wife and son would have a pension. Hugo would at least salvage that from the mess. Moreover, ‘his death had been the result of … real and immediate anxieties: overwhelming debts, depression and the inescapable sense of failure’.17 But the official story that the suicide was war-related also contained part of the truth. Ric Throssell later described his mother’s shattered response to the news of Hugo’s suicide: Like the bush creatures she loved, Katharine kept her wounds to herself, hidden away in some secret place until the hurt was healed. She felt too deeply for it to be seen by others. It was impossible for her grief to become a public display. Only to the closest friends would she sometimes speak of the tragedies in her life: and, later, to me.18
Both mother and son responded with silence to the world. Thirteen years later, however, when Ric’s wife died in 1946, Katharine revealed in her consoling letters to her son some of the shock, pain and bewilderment of her own greatest tragedy:
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Think of me, alone in a London boarding-house – reading that terrible news about daddy in the morning paper! How I lived through the shock and grief, I don’t know. And it was weeks and weeks before I could hear what happened. But you were there, and the thought of you helped me to survive … I know, too, the utter desolation of this loss of the loved one and mate. I’ve never been able to understand how daddy could leave me like that – despite all the mental distress and tragedy of his failure to cope with financial difficulties. At least, you haven’t got such a thought to haunt you forever.19
Both Katharine and Ric internalised their grief at Hugo’s death with its unanswered questions. Neither was able to mourn in the open and expressive way psychologists such as Beverley Raphael recommend to promote healing.20 For Ric the four weeks of his mother’s long sea voyage back from London seemed endless, as he returned to school to face the unsparing questions of his classmates about his father’s suicide. His mother had written briefly from London telling him to be a brave boy. Well-meaning friends reminded him that boys did not cry – ‘no tears’ – and that he must always ‘crack hardy’. Ric did his best but felt deserted by both parents in those early weeks. When Katharine’s ship at last arrived in Fremantle, Ric longed to be able to cry in her arms, but when he saw her, he knew that he must be the one to comfort her if he could: ‘I hardly knew her. Her eyes were sunken; her face drawn and splotched with grief. She could barely walk without assistance; so hunched and thin. There was no welcoming smile, no arms to hold me.’21 Mother and son returned to their lonely home in Greenmount. ‘We didn’t talk about him; couldn’t, either of us.’ Yet there were two important differences in their initial responses to grief. Ric failed to understand how his mother ‘could bear to go back to the locked, empty house: rooms closed and still; blinds drawn that were always open’.22 Katharine’s perspective was quite different, as she explained years later when Ric’s wife died:
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Although there may be much to remind you of your loss in the place where you have been together, I feel that one is far more at rest in the place where the loved one has been, than away, as so many people think. Perhaps that’s why I love Greenmount. There’s always something of my Jimmie there.23
The other difference between them related to the value of memory. Everything about Greenmount during that endless summer reminded Ric of his father. ‘I wanted to forget. Katharine found some comfort in remembering.’24 Katharine consoled her son in 1946 on his wife’s death: There is nothing to do but hold fast to the time you had together. Though nothing in the world will ever be the same again, the memory of this loving and sincere companionship will always be with you. I feel my Jimmy with me still … My Jimmy and I were great lovers. Nobody could ever take his place with me.25
Memory often played a more significant role in the dynamics of grief for individuals like Katharine who had had lost their religious faith. For her memory was a central part of the grieving process and an important consoling force. But memory did not always work positively. Some people, like Ric or Hugo and many former soldiers, simply could not bear to remember and for them memory was a curse. Two other consolations helped Katharine through her grief. Most important was Ric himself: ‘the only consolation in all my life is that you should be there, and go on with your life to its full flowering … I don’t know, now, how I pulled through when your daddy died. It was only by thinking of you.’ The second sustaining force, mentioned many times in her letters to her son in 1946, was ‘The work I had to do in the world – trying to eliminate myself and feel my suffering was part of the suffering of the world’. Here she was referring both to her novels and her commitment to the Communist Party, which gave discipline and purpose to her life. In another letter she warned, ‘We have to stand up to
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things and go on with our job. It’s the test of real quality in a man or woman … the routine of work carries one over. There are times when work to be done helps one to survive.’ And on another occasion: ‘The work we have to do is greater than personal considerations. That, in the end, is the anodyne, I think [which] enables us to rise above personal suffering and make our lives one of service to great objectives.’26 Katharine’s wise advice to Ric following his wife’s death was securely based on her own hard-fought experience of working through her grief on Hugo’s death. Ric underlined this in two terse sentences in two different books: ‘My mother went about her work with mechanical absorption, writing, writing’, and ‘Katharine went about the household jobs, remote, withdrawn; doing what had to be done; somehow making it home again’.27 Her work included the awful job of resolving the financial chaos that helped to destroy her husband. She started by saving the house at Greenmount and the land around it. Her literary work was a more difficult challenge in the early years of mourning when she published comparatively little by her own prolific standards. Great grief can drain energy and enthusiasm vital to creative writing, but she was driven by the necessity to earn an income, at least from short stories. She also completed a book on her 30 000 miles of travels through the USSR, undertaken in that fateful period while Hugo was sinking into deep depression.28 Katharine’s commitment to the Communist Party contributed significantly to her will to survive, as she recognised: ‘Only my belief in the need to work for the great ideas of communism and world peace helped me to survive a grief so shattering’. Communism had effectively replaced her lost Christian faith: it was a secular ideology which looked to an emancipated future rather than to the past. It gave her shattered life a larger meaning and purpose, beyond her individual grief. Still she protested to Vance Palmer in 1935 that the party’s demands were devastating, sometimes requiring 18 hours a day and often leaving only one
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day a month for her literary work. When the Spanish Civil War began in 1936, she devoted her energy to organising the Spanish Relief Committee in Western Australia. Katharine produced articles and addressed numerous meetings in the cause of the Spanish Republic. She also marched in Perth demonstrations and spoke in rallies, though she hated public speaking.29 Katharine’s plunge into intense activity might seem an extraordinary way to mourn the dead, but she undoubtedly suffered profound and prolonged grief. In Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, her son Ric titled the chapter on the three years following Hugo’s death, ‘Mourn not the dead’, but that described his own way of mourning, rather than his mother’s. Both Katharine and Ric grieved deeply in private for Hugo, albeit in different ways. They may have appeared to the interested observer not to mourn because they did so mainly in silence and in private while continuing with their daily routine activities. Katharine’s response was not ‘denial’ of grief, which meant repression of sorrow, but instead a very private grieving for a dearly loved man. Katharine was clear in her recognition of the need to confront grief directly, and not deny or avoid it. ‘Don’t try to put your grief from you’, she advised Ric in 1946: You must hold it as something sacred and precious you are entitled to. Face the reality of it, I mean; but with the understanding that we don’t live for ourselves alone. Every human being has some tragedy to reckon with, as devastating to him or her, as our own. We are just part of the sum total of suffering in the world.30
Katharine had earlier mourned her soldier brother Alan in the bush retreat at Emerald in the Dandenongs in solitude, and wrote poems for Alan and later for Hugo. She sent a poem of grief addressed to her husband to console her son on his wife’s death: But neither sun nor birdsongs wake you now, and I must live alone.
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How could you leave me so, To take the beauty of the world with pain, Because you are not here, my love?31
Katharine’s secular philosophy of grief was drawn from her years of suffering. She did not believe that bereaved people should wallow in misery or indulge themselves in a sterile or extravagant melancholy. She knew the need of many mourners for solitude, as she indicated in an inspiring letter to her son in 1946: My darling, I know so well how you are feeling: how difficult it has been to pick up the threads and go about again. For me too, it has been like that, not wanting to see people, or be seen by them when one has been so hurt, and deprived of the joy which so many are still finding in their every day lives. One feels so apart from all that is going on round you. But, it isn’t so, really. Almost everybody has had, or will have, some personal tragedy and though for the time being we can only do the best possible to survive our own, ultimately, you will know that your own sorrow unites you with the human stream.32
Katharine’s experience of bereavement also taught her that inner strength and courage were essential qualities in confronting grief directly. As she told Ric, intense grief could evoke ‘a strength that is greater than death’s in that it can restore a sense of the living sweetness of the beloved’. It was necessary to discover in grief and deprivation the strength to ‘withstand all the flows of “outrageous fortune”’. If grief was overcome through such strength of character, then the reward would be new vitality and confidence in the life that followed.33
‘I wanted to forget: I would not be ruled by grief’ During the 13 years between his father’s death in 1933 and his wife’s death in 1946, Ric Throssell completed his formal education. He later served in New Guinea for a while before winning a
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diplomatic cadetship in the Department of External Affairs based in Canberra. Katharine was meanwhile working on her epic trilogy of the goldfields in Western Australia which consumed much of her time between 1940 and 1950.34 Ric Throssell fell in love with Bea Gallacher, a stenographer in the Attorney-General’s Department in Canberra. After the war, Ric was posted as Third Secretary to the Australian legation in Moscow, so they decided to get married. Ric flew to Moscow, while Bea stayed with Katharine before following several months later by sea. But only a few months after Bea arrived in Moscow, tragedy struck Ric yet again. In July 1946 Bea was suddenly taken ill with fever and headache, which they thought initially was influenza. When Bea realised with horror that she could not walk, they moved her to hospital where the paralysis spread and she became unconscious. Tests showed that she had poliomyelitis, known at the time as infantile paralysis, which attacked many people of Bea’s age. The doctor told Ric that there was no cure: Ric needed once more to be strong. He sat by his dying wife, holding her hand as she fought for breath, and he waited for her terrible struggle to be over. It took a week.35 Ric Throssell was left a widower at the age of 23. He stayed on in Moscow for a few weeks hoping that his work at the legation would help, ‘but nothing seemed to ease the emptiness’. However, he received inspirational letters of heart-broken sympathy and support from his mother in Australia, who had grown to love Bea like a daughter in the six weeks before she sailed for Moscow. As Ric observed: Bea’s death was devastating to Katharine, not only in sympathy with my grief, but because of her own love for the frail, gentle girl who had become so dear to her. The memories of her anguish at my father’s death flooded back, overwhelming her senses. Her letters poured out her love and sympathy; comforting, consoling; aware of the utter emptiness of anything that could be said.36
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I have already quoted extensively from these letters to illustrate Katharine’s own consolations in confronting her grief on Hugo’s death. We are fortunate that Ric succeeded in saving these precious letters from Katharine in 1946, given her passion for privacy. In 1969 she wrote to Ric that she was burning piles of letters, including ‘most of the heart-breaking ones from Moscow over which I wept and wept. I did love Bea you know. Nothing has ever quite so devastated me as the news about her – on your account, I suppose, lovey’.37 Consequently Ric’s replies are lost, but we know that mother and son had different views on significant aspects of grieving. Whereas Katharine’s letters emphasised the importance of remembering lost loved ones, Ric ‘wanted to forget’, just as he had sought to shut out memories after his father’s suicide.38 When he returned to Greenmount to his mother’s care, ‘We did not speak of Bea. I could not think of her without pain. I wanted to forget.’ Katharine urged Ric to face grief directly, but he could not bear to do so. He had other ghosts to hide from since childhood, father and grandfather having both committed suicide. And Ric admitted to himself that his mother was afraid he might do the same. The terrible and unexpected death of his young wife when he was only 23, coming only twelve years after his father’s suicide, was almost more than he could bear. Repression of intolerable grief was the only way for him. ‘Mourn not the Dead’ was Ric’s only way of surviving. His decision to marry again only 15 months later may have been part of this denial. As he explained in My Father’s Son: I could feel no obligation to what convention might prescribe as a formal period of mourning. The past was over for me. Nothing would bring it back again. Nothing would change my memories of Bea. I felt no sense of disloyalty to her. Only once as I slept, not long after she died, had I believed that there was any continuing existence for her, some sort of spiritual life after death. Then, yearning for her in my grief and loneliness, I had seen her smiling at me from the end of my bed and woken to the heart-breaking
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realisation of the absolute finality of her death. I knew that my life had to go on without her. I decided then that I would not be ruled by grief. The forms of conventional mourning seemed hypocrisy, the public display of grief a sham.39
No wonder ‘grief and anxiety’ brought Katharine close to collapse. Ric must have communicated to his mother enough of his own views – so different from hers – to give her good cause. She was not afraid of his ‘wallowing in misery, or running amuck, as so many young men would’, but she feared that he would neglect his health. And always the ultimate fear persisted – of a third suicide in her immediate family. The closest she came to betraying this anxiety to Ric was in her warning, ‘never put a strain on your brain when it’s weary and over-taxed … We sensitive, highly-strung people have got to watch the mental apparatus like a cat watches a mouse.’40 So Katharine tried in vain to help Ric with the consolations of memory and the value of confronting grief head on. She had more success in assuring him that work and routine would help. She kept on encouraging Ric to ‘talk to me: to tell me just what you are thinking and feeling. That’s the only way we can bridge the distance between us … just to share what is in your mind, is better than to keep it all to yourself.’41 But Ric did not confide in her as much as she hoped. Katharine offered other consolations in her desperation to help Ric. She suggested that it was preferable that Bea died suddenly while she was young and happy rather than suffering years of helplessness and prolonged misery. She told Ric that he had the inner strength to overcome this terrible time of grief: ‘I know, too, the stuff you are made of. It will stand up [to things] and achieve its own serenity – some day!’ She reassured Ric that there was no infidelity in developing new interests in life, as he would never forget Bea: ‘first love is not last love. There will be other, different experiences for you … Happiness will come, other and deep happiness.’42 Nowhere in her letters did Katharine mention religious consolation. The closest she came was an admission that ‘I have found
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that these Eastern ways of tranquillising the mind, do have physical results’. She sent Ric the lines of a Buddhist prayer that she often used as a sort of mantra to send herself to sleep. But Alex Borthwick, a diplomat friend of Ric’s, did comment in a letter on the problems of finding adequate consolation in the absence of religion: ‘Our generation I am afraid lacks any of the comfort drawn from the faith that these things [are] all part of God’s mysterious and beneficent purpose … but it does throw a person most brutally on his own resources’.43 Afterwards Ric spent a long summer leave with his mother at Greenmount sustained by her loving care despite their silence about Bea’s death. Katharine later spent several months with Ric in Canberra but eventually returned to Greenmount as she valued her independence. Just over a year after Bea’s death, Ric married Dorothy Jordan, who worked in his own department. Ric’s landlady thought it was too soon, but he had no regard for conventions about formal mourning. More importantly, his mother approved of Dodie: ‘I am pleased that the lad has found someone with whom he can be happy and have a normal life’.44 Ric was fortunate. He possessed the strength of character his mother hoped for, and was probably correct in his belief that denial was the best way for him to deal with his first wife’s death.
‘Death has no fears for me’ The death in 1954 of her old friend, Miles Franklin, caused Katharine to contemplate her own death. She felt deeply saddened for Miles because ‘she was so afraid of death’. By contrast Katharine could confront death directly and count her blessings, as she told Ric: When I die I’ll have a sense of the fullness of my life: that I’ve had so much in love and work. To have had the best that life could give in your father and you, my darling. In my work, too. To be able to write what I wanted to, and to have used my energy and intellect
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for the things I believed in. That’s why, I suppose, Death has no fears for me. To have lived to the fulfilment of the individual self, means that the logical end can be looked forward to quite serenely.45
That was a beautiful letter for her son to receive – almost a perfect epitaph for Katharine. The only aspect of death she was anxious about was the possibility of ‘tragic old age and helplessness’. She thought highly of the Eskimo way of inviting friends to a farewell party ‘and making one’s exit at it’. She did not want to ‘dodder on’ and be a burden.46 Katharine had the dignified and resigned death she wished for, in 1969, over a decade after her closest friends. She remained independent to the end, certainly no burden to family or friends. And she was fully prepared, spiritually and mentally, to confront death. A heart attack obliged her to stop work for a time on her autobiography, but Child of the Hurricane was published before she was 80. In the final decade of her life Katharine continued to work for the peace movement, making speeches, attending conferences and distributing ‘Ban the Bomb’ leaflets. She at last began to feel old and regretted that she tired easily, but she enjoyed her friends and most of all the visits of Ric and his family. When she was 80 Katharine suffered a severe stroke, her right hand was paralysed and she thought she was dying: I am haunted by the memory of a night of horror … I had lost control of my mental processes. They whirled turbulently in utter disorder … and I had always imagined I possessed a centre of inner serenity … I felt that [friends] thought I was dying and was satisfied that it should be so.
Then the doctor sternly told her to exert the will to live, to exercise spiritual strength and courage in the effort. And she forced herself to ‘crack hardy’ yet again. She had devoted friends who visited her daily during long weeks in hospital. When one visitor talked about saving her soul, she replied that ‘immortality was an
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impermissible belief’, though she allowed that personality survives in its effects on other people.47 Two years later Katharine was able to return to her writing, at a slower pace and aided by dictation. She had good friends to help and occasionally employed paid companions, but she valued her ‘single blessedness’ and preferred to manage alone. She took great pleasure in listening to music and to her favourite radio programmes. She was determined to live out her life as fully and usefully as possible, and she constantly counted her blessings: ‘My wild garden is looking so lovely … I feel so fortunate to have this beautiful place to grow old in.’48 Katharine died just an hour before Ric’s visit on 2 October 1969, aged 86, with her friend and doctor Alex Jolly by her side. She was fully prepared for death and met it with dignity, strength, and no fear. She retained what she called her ‘centre of inner calm’ to the end. It was a secular death far removed from a nineteenthcentury Christian deathbed scene, but nonetheless a ‘good death’. As Ric noted later, her life was filled with ‘triumphant dedication; her death was a commemoration of her devotion to the things she had believed in.’ Ric arranged the Communist funeral his mother had requested, with no orations or eulogies, just Victor Williams’ poem to Katharine, ending with the line ‘Writer and fighter in one human heart’. The coffin was draped in the red flag, which in turn was covered in the Australian native leschenaultia – the ‘blue flame of hope’ – the tribute of a neighbour. As she had wished, her remains were cremated and Ric scattered her ashes on the slopes of Greenmount, in view of her beloved house. She had written: ‘Good to think of becoming part of the earth, and perhaps nourishing a wild flower’.49 It was a remarkably unorthodox funeral for 1969 but entirely in keeping with Katharine’s life.
6 Airmen missing, presumed dead: ‘Without emotion, without witness, without farewell’ The Second World War was a devastating global contest which resulted in the deaths of more than 60 million people. The two World Wars were different in several respects. In the Great War, nearly 60 000 Australian servicemen were killed of the 300 000 who served overseas, out of a total population of less than five million. The casualties were lower in the Second World War but were still horrific, and left most Australian families mourning relatives or close friends. Over 500 000 served outside Australia, out of a population of seven million, so the number at risk was high. At least 27 000 were killed in action, or died of wounds or as prisoners of war. The death toll was closer to 40 000 if accidents, illness and deaths while training are included.1 Attitudes to the two wars were also different. The Great War commenced with patriotic enthusiasm for God, glory and Empire, and a belief in war as noble and heroic. This deteriorated into disillusionment as the casualties soared. By contrast, the Second World War was long-expected, and the reasons for it understood and respected. Most people accepted it with resignation as a necessity and without the illusions of 1914, and support grew rather than declined. The physical threat was also much closer to Australia, and from 1942 Australians were defending their own country. The Second World War wrecked all those hopes that the Great War
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was indeed the war to end all wars. In 1939 many families felt anguish at the prospect of losing another family member only 22 years after the end of the last war. In the Second World War, many servicemen died in circumstances which had little parallel in the earlier war and which were sometimes even more terrible. Over 10 000 (38 per cent) of those killed were airmen, and more than 8000 (30 per cent) died in captivity as prisoners of war. Two-thirds of fatalities came in these two categories. A higher proportion of airmen were killed than of the other armed services, and the manner of their deaths and often its uncertainty brought a special kind of pain to their relatives. Joan Beaumont has observed that ‘Despite the fact that airpower was vital to operations in the Second World War, the memory of the RAAF’s contribution is dim’. This was partly because the Anzac legend was drawn from land forces. It was also due to the integration of the RAAF with the Royal Air Force through the Empire Air Training Scheme from October 1939. Over 26 000 Australian aircrew members served in the RAF under British control. Of the 10 264 Australian airmen killed in the war, more than 6500 died in the war in Europe and North Africa, and the remainder in the war in the Asia-Pacific.2
Airmen confront death Though many Australians did not fully appreciate the vital role of Australian airmen in the war, the 10 264 fatalities meant that large numbers of families mourned their loss. Their grief was often more prolonged and traumatic because of the circumstances of such deaths – shot down over sea or enemy territory, with little certainty of whether they survived, were captured or rescued. The airmen themselves also had to deal with the likely prospect of their own and their mates’ deaths in potentially grim manner. Airmen in Bomber Command had a precise knowledge of the high risk of death. On most raids, the loss averaged 3 per cent, but on a long flight over Berlin with a heavy fuel and bomb load it could reach
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6 per cent. Crew usually flew a tour of 30 operations with repeated risks and a very high probability of death.3 Responses of the airmen are well illustrated by the diaries and letters of Errol Crapp, son of a Methodist minister in Singleton, New South Wales. During training with the RAF in Lichfield, England, he kept a diary which was very revealing about his attitude to his mates’ deaths and his own probable death. On 19 July 1942 he overheard a lunch-time conversation about a third plane crash in three days, with all crew killed: ‘I couldn’t realise it had happened, and must say I was pretty much shaken by the news … Three planes and 11 men in 3 days is not the best!’ Such characteristic understatements do not deceive. Erroll Crapp had become very friendly with two of the dead men while training in Canada and spent time with both the previous afternoon. Many of the other airmen were also distressed. A day later another aircraft crashed, making the toll 16 men lost in four days, which ‘leaves a nasty taste in the mouth’. Six weeks later he heard that another friend was missing after a raid on Germany, but he professed to be no longer so deeply affected, because ‘I am becoming quite accustomed to hearing about chaps I know being killed or reported missing’. He confided in his father soon after: ‘That’s my two best cobbers gone now. There certainly is no future in this Air Force game!’4 On 13 September 1942, Errol Crapp experienced his first operational flight over Bremen, where they had ‘a tough time’ over the target. Three days later his plane was hit in the port wing over Essen, but they managed to reach England before he parachuted out. The traumatic Bremen raid led him to write a deeply thoughtful and honest letter to his parents acknowledging the likelihood of his early death: I’ve never been so scared in my life. Now I realise that there is not much between life and death in this racket, and we have to face the fact that Jerry might get us at any minute on these excursions. So, without being morbid, I want to say that if he does get us, please
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don’t grieve. Our troubles are over; and don’t feel bitter, because hundreds of families have made bigger sacrifices … Please don’t consider me morbid – I am merely facing facts.5
In asking his parents not to grieve, he was offering the same advice as that given by Anzacs in the Great War to their own families. This sentiment was commonly expressed in the Second World War, often closely followed by that other saying, ‘don’t feel bitter, because hundreds of families have made bigger sacrifices.’ This was the argument that individual sorrow was far outweighed by overwhelming mass grief. It was calculated to encourage families to repress their sorrow in the supposed interest of patriotism and fortitude – though it was hardly guaranteed to help them cope with their own personal anguish. A source of greater comfort to Errol Crapp was his Christian faith, demonstrated through his attendance at the harvest thanksgiving service at Lichfield Methodist Church the following Sunday. The service had special significance for him as he thanked God for safe deliverance after two active operations that week. Again on Christmas Day he thought of ‘God’s wonderful goodness in keeping me safe from harm’, while still deeply sorrowful on the deaths of his two close friends and many other comrades. He prayed that God would spare him but, above all, ‘His will be done’. In January 1943 he noted with resignation ‘the usual sad news about missing crews’. By mid-February he seemed depressed as he wondered where he would be a year later: ‘Doesn’t matter much, I guess. Lives are cheap these days.’ His last entry on 3 March 1943 noted that he would probably fly next day. That was the day he died.6 He had served only six months in active operations. The Keith Murdoch Sound Archive at the Australian War Memorial contains interviews with many airmen conducted between 1988 and 1991, reflecting on the way they dealt with the deaths of their mates. Peter O’Connor, an airman at Bomber Command, was ‘absolutely devastated’ when his ‘bosom pal’
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Brian Jennings’ plane was hit alongside his own. It took him so many weeks to recover that his commanding officer had to warn him to ‘snap out of it’ – to stop worrying about Brian and think of the safety of his own crew. O’Connor was almost as distressed to learn later that Brian was a prisoner of war. But he admitted that during his time on the squadron many dozens of men he knew were shot down – some were killed and others became prisoners of war. In time he modified his response: ‘Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. And let’s face it, I suppose that was the sensible thing to do. What was the good of sitting around moping, you had a job to do, they were gone, there was nothing you could do about it.’7 Arthur Doubleday, as a squadron commander at Bomber Command, took a tough attitude. When his aircrew saw an aircraft shot down and burning on the ground, he told them to keep their eyes on the sky and their minds on their quota for the night – they could do nothing for the heaps of burning metal on the ground. ‘You can’t think about it while you’re up there.’ He knew that human beings were very adaptable and that action provided a degree of defence against grief. After heavy losses it was essential to continue fighting the war, even though they might think about the missing men next day.8 Other airmen, as well as men in the AIF, commented that they rarely cried on the death of mates, though they often wanted to. As Laurie Howson remarked: ‘You get hardened that quick … You sort of control yourself at the time and you’re frightened some others will see you break down.’ Each man had to toughen himself against expectation that he might die at any time, which made acting and responding in wartime different from peacetime. The prospect of one’s own imminent death left little spare energy for mourning.9 Most airmen interviewed for the Murdoch Archive said they became accustomed to heavy casualties and they were encouraged not to dwell on them. Had they brooded on their losses morale would have suffered. There was little serious talk amongst them
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about death, except perhaps to say ‘Poor old Joe’ or ‘let’s have another drink’. Several men admitted, like ‘Jum’ Falkiner, that they became callous, ‘because if one didn’t, you wouldn’t have lasted … you were busy, you were doing what you had to do’. Instead, they often confessed to a feeling of relief: ‘you were just grateful it wasn’t you’.10 Leo Allen of RAAF Catalina Squadrons commented: ‘The war’s the thing. You just take it for granted, you lose a lot of friends and mates and you’re fighting for all of them, and you just don’t connect yourself, or you don’t think of those things.’ Don Watt of 2/7th Battalion noted that airmen became hardened to German mortar and shelling attacks in Crete: ‘it became part of the process’, which was about survival in Crete, where they were helping each other ‘fight to the finish’.11 Several airmen added that youth made them more tolerant. Pilot David Leicester of Bomber Command compared his responses to the deaths in the 1980s of former comrades with those during wartime: ‘I’m feeling their deaths more now than possibly I did in those days when it was sort of an everyday occurrence’.12 Most airmen confessed that it was far harder to wipe the deaths of close friends out of their minds. Bill Minty of RAAF Catalina Squadrons admitted that his ‘greatest emotional experience’ came when a very close friend was killed and he wrote a letter to help his mate’s mother come to terms with her loss. Several others, including Geoffrey Coombes of Bomber Command, acknowledged that the loss of close friends was ‘pretty devastating’: ‘you’d have breakfast this morning and the next morning they weren’t there … and they’d be wrapping their gear up and packing it off’.13 Only two airmen out of the 25 interviewed confessed to a more profound emotional response. Arthur Hoyle of Bomber Command was notable for his honesty about his fear of dying shamefully, though others undoubtedly shared that secret fear: I was always frightened, as I’m sure many other air crews were, that I would not be able to die properly, that I would die badly, I
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would die in great fear and I would die in shame. And that, even at various times when I was absolutely terrified, it was the fear of dying badly that kept me going.
The interviewer understandably linked this admission with a possible Christian faith, leading Hoyle on to another interesting comment on the role of religion in the war. Though he had been a Methodist in his youth, and retained a residual faith, he was always critical of institutional religion, which ‘didn’t really help me at all during the war’. The few times when he expected to die in his plane, ‘I found myself angry. I didn’t find myself praying.’ He noted that very few airmen ever went to church, though he tried it himself a few times to no avail. Hoyle recited a prayer written by a wartime comrade which tugged powerfully at his own heart, concluding, ‘Almighty God, Who also died / Teach me the way that I should die’ – a powerful sign that Hoyle was not alone in his fears or in his residual faith.14 The testimony of Harold Wright of Bomber Command and Pathfinder Force was also illuminating, though in different ways. It could be that Hoyle and Wright represented extremes of the emotional spectrum, and it is also possible that they were more honest than others. Wright believed the majority of airmen suppressed their sorrow when their friends or crew were shot down: ‘But it was always there in the back of your mind. You bottled it up, but otherwise, in my opinion, you’d go mad.’ He was devastated when his own crew was shot down while he was grounded in hospital; he and a friend were ‘both bawling over the phone’ in response to the news: I always maintain it was the old booze that kept me sane … I always seemed to be able to realise when the old nerves were being stretched a bit too much … And so I’d declare a week on the booze and every night we weren’t flying I’d get a tummyful and I tended to relax. After the war it took me seven years to get rid of the nightmares.15
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Chaplains interviewed for the Murdoch Archive also illuminated the emotional responses of servicemen to the deaths around them. Monsignor James McCosker, Catholic chaplain to the 15th Brigade in New Guinea, acknowledged that airmen sometimes needed to talk after a crash when a number of their comrades were killed. But he recalled that there was little or no bereavement counselling as it is understood today, because ‘there was no grief as we know it in civil life’. This remarkable statement says more about the official expectations of servicemen than about their actual feelings. McCosker explained that airmen’s high level of acceptance of casualties in war was determined by their understanding that death was anticipated and imminent; he likened the airmen’s term of active service to a tragic terminal illness, ‘they might be the next at any time, so it was rather different [from civil life]’. They knew they could be working with all their faculties as normal one day, and dead the next day. Some servicemen needed to talk about spiritual preparation for sudden and possibly terrible death: ‘if you’re so near death, and it’s all around you … it makes you think of the hereafter’. Airmen sometimes asked Monsignor McCosker why God allowed such wartime horror, and some experienced a crisis of faith. The chaplain responded that man had free will and that Hitler caused the war, not God. One suspects that McCosker was not the most sympathetic of chaplains and that he viewed his role in a more limited way than some: ‘Saying mass, administering the sacraments is the priest’s essential role, counselling is secondary. Frequently had mass for the fellows doing a stunt [bombing raid], then given them holy communion, and then soon after that buried the same fellows.’16 Chaplains had the duty of organising burials, knowing that airmen – possibly even more than other servicemen – regarded an appropriate funeral as vitally important. They liked to see their comrades buried if possible, especially as burial was an amenity denied to many airmen killed in air crashes. Of the 750 chaplains who served in the RAAF, 15 were killed and 37 taken prisoner, so
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they shared in the sacrifices, acted as advisers and tried to maintain morale. Monsignor McCosker described his duties after a crash as ‘undertaker and funeral director and … headstone maker’.17 Chaplain Canon Charles Sherlock of No 7 Squadron explained that responsibilities varied with circumstances. He recalled one occasion when an aircraft was shot down soon after take-off, enabling them ‘to recover the major parts of the four bodies of the men’. In this case the squadron wished for a common grave since the four died together. It was his job as chaplain to arrange with the warrant officer in charge of discipline to organise a party of volunteers to dig the common grave. There was never a shortage of volunteers for such duty. They always tried to make rough coffins, as far as possible from available timber or cardboard cartons. The bodies were buried and marked, and a service of committal was always held. More often, however, after a crash there were no bodies to bury. When crews were lost without radio contact, their possessions were quickly removed from their tents, and all signs of the missing men disappeared. On other occasions crew in nearby aircraft would witness a crash, and though bodies could not be recovered, the men would usually be presumed dead.18
Families respond to loss and intolerable suspense The commanding officer had the painful duty of writing the initial formal letter after a crash, advising the family of the airman’s death. Arthur Doubleday, squadron commander at Bomber Command, gave considerable thought to the task of informing the next of kin, anxious that his letters were not formulaic. He did his best to personalise each letter, to show parents that he really knew their son and appreciated his contribution. But this was hard to do with airmen who had only recently arrived, especially when two crashes on one day required 14 letters to be written.19 The chaplain’s letter to the relatives was intended to convey spiritual
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consolation as well as personal sympathy. Canon Charles Sherlock, chaplain in New Guinea, often knew the men quite well and would try to offer supportive and truthful consolations of a personal nature, and even visit the families on his leave in Australia.20 Revd Fred McKay revealed the more painful features of his duty as an RAAF chaplain in advising families of deaths. Since chaplains were responsible for organising burials and collecting personal effects of crews, they frequently knew more than they
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told bereaved families: ‘You’d be burying boys and there was hardly anything left of them, just a bit of bone, and you would never, you know, say very much about it but you’d always talk about … how they faced up to their service’. On one occasion McKay was distressed when he penetrated into no-man’s-land with his driver to bury a young pilot, but had to conduct a burial service for a hand only. After an aircraft was burnt out it was often impossible to establish from the remaining scattered bones that all the crew were killed. The official record in such cases stated only ‘missing, believed killed’, though the doctor and chaplain were certain of the deaths. One pilot’s wife never accepted the indeterminate verdict: ‘she thought he was still wandering around somewhere’. McKay commented that it used to ‘rake at my conscience’ to have to write such ‘awful’ letters, which could be misleading by omission. Yet he still exercised his Christian faith and human care to offer all possible consolation to help the bereaved face life again.21 Chaplain D Trathen, a Methodist with 8 Squadron RAAF in Townsville in 1943 and 1944, kept copies of the replies he received to his letters of sympathy from 22 families. These are an illuminating source for the immediate responses of bereaved Australians to those fateful letters advising them that a husband, son, or brother was dead, missing, or possibly a prisoner of war. These letters still make a powerful impact on the reader by their honesty, pain and courage. In the midst of profound grief it was astonishing how many families expressed a deeply felt gratitude to the chaplain for taking such trouble to write meaningful personal letters. Several, like Emily Hooper of Ascot, Victoria, appreciated the contrast between the official communications and the chaplain’s care: ‘Your letter has been the greatest help and comfort to me. The matter-of-fact communications from Dept of Air are like a douche of cold water after the fearful shock one is dealt by the shattering news of the loss of one’s son in air operations.’22 Lilian Miller of Auburn, New South Wales, wrote that she owed the
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chaplain an ‘immeasurable gratitude’ for his letter which she would treasure all her life.23 Families were devastated by the terrible uncertainty of not knowing whether their lost airman was alive, missing, dead, or a prisoner of war. Herbert and Lill Fletcher agreed with the chaplain that ‘Missing is very unsatisfactory’, and Ben Drakes and his wife from Perth found the suspense intolerable.24 Pilot Officer Alan Harrison’s mother, from Geebung, Queensland, described the sequence of unsatisfactory departmental communications. The family knew Alan had flown over Japanese territory earlier, but did not know he was on a raid at the time of the crash, so they were entirely unprepared and severely shocked. On 9 November 1943 they received a telegram to say Alan was missing; three months later another telegram stated that there were no witnesses as the plane crash happened about 2:00 am, and the Herald’s report of his death was not official. Alan Harrison’s mother told the chaplain about a dream she had at precisely the time of her son’s crash – she heard a man in the water choking but trying to speak. She had not told Alan’s wife, but thought her son was trying to convey a message to her to look after his wife and child.25 Hettie Tonkin of Camberwell, Victoria, was the motherin-law of Geoff Allan, another missing crewman on the same plane. She reported that her daughter was going through ‘a very great nervous strain … My daughter is just living on her hopes, she is very brave.’ She asked the chaplain if the category ‘missing’ allowed them still to hope. If the pilot was indeed dead as the Herald reported, would the crew also have been killed, or could they have bailed out and been taken prisoner?26 Chaplain Trathen’s correspondents often sought more detailed information from him in response to his initial letter. Most of them requested the honest truth as far as it could be ascertained. Ruby Goodisson of Trawalla, Victoria, was grateful for the chaplain’s first letter, but needed to know precise details of her son’s last hours after the crash: ‘Exactly what his serious injuries were,
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do not try to spare me the sorrow of it all. Please I want to know everything – John & his “Pals” could take it and now “So can I”.’27 This was another indication of bereaved parents’ need to live up to the standard of courage set by their sons. Mr L Poole of Toorak, Melbourne, sought directions to the exact location of his only son’s final flight: ‘Some day I want to stand there and pay him my final respect, that of a comrade. Also how bad was my boy hurt, was he conscious of his end, perhaps he spoke some word – some wish.’28 Fred Pitman of Kunjin, Western Australia, wrote that he and his wife found it hard to realise that their son would never return and wanted more personal information to confirm the reality of his life in the air force: ‘Anything relating to the loved one who will never return is read with eagerness. If there is anything you could write of his life among you we would be grateful.’29 Ben Drakes of Perth was eager for any news – ‘even if it must be the worst’. He requested that the chaplain ask an airman who witnessed his son’s crash to write to ‘give us his ideas of what has happened’. Could the crew have parachuted from the bomber before the crash, possibly landing in enemy territory?30 Most of those whose sons or husbands were posted as missing continued to hope. Fred Pitman and his wife were ‘trying desperately to cling to a hope that somehow our boy got out of the aircraft and swam to shore’.31 Dr TA Price, former air vice marshal, still hoped his son Owen had escaped from the plane and they would see him again. He understood that many men reported as missing had turned up after many months.32 Mimosa Sudholy of Southport, Queensland, could not accept that her husband was dead: ‘I still find it hard to give up hope completely and keep praying for miracles’.33 Where death was confirmed and burial had been possible, bereaved relatives were eager and grateful for details. Relatives knew they were privileged if burial took place since plane crashes left few bodies which could be recovered. Jack Mitchell’s mother thanked the chaplain for the comfort his letter of sympathy
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conveyed: ‘We have a lot to be thankful for, a Christian burial with pals around him which so many never get’.34 Thelma Courtman of Tweed River, New South Wales, was relieved to learn that her husband Dan had ‘a good burial with full service honours’.35 Mrs A White of Camberwell, Victoria, was comforted to know that her son was ‘reverently’ buried, though she also asked if he was buried on Goodenough Island where his plane crashed.36 Lilian Miller of Auburn found consolation in the knowledge that her son Stan had a Christian burial, and requested a photograph of his grave.37 Eight out of 22 families in this sample found consolation in their religious faith; though this was a minority of 36 per cent, it was substantial. It may be that Christian families were more inclined to respond to a letter from a Methodist chaplain and that these replies reflected a somewhat higher proportion of people with an active Christian faith than in the total population. Jack Mitchell’s parents were comforted by their Christian beliefs, though ‘it requires all our faith to stand up to this awful loss of our darling boy’. On his last leave Jack had told his parents that ‘a wonderful sermon’ recently ‘took all fear of death’ from the airmen in the congregation. Jack’s mother concluded, ‘We must be worthy to meet him later on’, presuming the possibility of reunion with her dead son in heaven. But a year later, even these devout parents confessed to the chaplain that they were struggling with their faith: ‘We all find it very hard to be resigned about our boy. He was such a fine type and one wonders what it was all for, this sacrifice of lovely young lives.’38 Chaplain Trathen would have been sympathetic with Mrs Mitchell. Perhaps he comforted her with sentiments like those confided to his own diary in January 1943: Death: Do we live again? It all seems so final. There is no question which so makes one face the meaning of life – if there is meaning. It’s a mood that is lacking in faith, I know. But there are dry periods and we must face them. Despair or hope? Futility or faith?39
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Several other families mentioned that their personal tragedies had not destroyed their faith in God. Mavis Davies of Gaythorne, Queensland, had been notified by the Air Board that her son David was missing believed dead. While he was posted ‘missing’ she ‘held steadfastly to my faith that “All things are possible to God”’. Since he was reported as killed she had given up hope for his worldly safety but had not lost her faith in God or her belief that David would be well cared for in the ‘hereafter’. The chaplain’s ‘beautiful’ letter of information on the circumstances of his death comforted her with the knowledge that the crash was quick and he did not suffer.40 Herbert and Lill Fletcher were devout Christians who committed their missing son Norm ‘into the Lord’s keeping … He will deliver in His own time’.41 Mrs A White of Camberwell had received the news of her son’s crash and burial but, like the Fletchers, she and her husband were wonderfully comforted by their faith: ‘We know our dear one is lovingly in the hands of the Father and is still in his mission’.42 Hector A Maclean and his wife of Baralaba, Queensland, were now too old to expect to recover from such ‘a dreadful blow. Something has gone from our lives that can never be replaced.’ But they were resigned to the will of God, however dreadful: ‘The way of the Lord seems hard, but we must accept it’.43 These letters of tribute to Christian faith in the face of tragedy are a valuable reminder of the continuing strength of Christian belief in the community, even as late as the Second World War. They differed in one important respect, however, from Christian condolences on the Great War: reunion in heaven was rarely mentioned. Most families expressed pride in their lost airman, and the consolation of their memories, but in terms quite different from the patriotic rhetoric of the Great War, with its emphasis on heroic and glorious sacrifice. That rhetoric was deemed necessary in 1918 after a terrible war with catastrophic casualties which had seemed to some, in its later stages and afterwards, to have been fought for no great purpose. Families needed to know that their
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sons’ lives had not been sacrificed in vain, and in the Second World War they were more confident of that. Ruby Goodisson of Trawalla believed that her ‘wonderful son John died that we might live, leaving behind with us, a Monument of beautiful Memories’.44 When Hugh Pitman’s mother had earlier warned her son that an airman’s life was short, Hugh’s response came closest to the early ideals of the Great War Anzacs: ‘Hugh replied that it was better to die young and to have accomplished something, than to live long and accomplish nothing. To die that others might live is certainly the greatest thing any man can do.’45 Most families believed that their lost sons and husbands fought well and took pride in their courage, but such expressions were more muted than in 1918. As Mr L Harrison wrote of his missing son and his comrades: ‘It did much to allay our sorrow … to know that they did their duty and did it well. One can do no more than that.’ Again the point is made collectively.46 Instead of a patriotic or heroic emphasis, most families dwelt on the consolation of their memories. Lilian Miller’s letter affirmed the importance of her ‘beautiful memories … of my devoted only child Stan’, especially as the two of them had been alone together since Stan was born. She was evidently building up a store of material memories: she mentioned she would treasure the chaplain’s letter all her life; and the photo of Stan’s grave ‘would serve to be added to a Beautiful Memory of a Gallant Son’.47 We may imagine her albums of memorabilia, including all her son’s letters and postcards and the fateful official communications, as in so many collections in the Australian War Memorial. Dr KA Stephenson was glad that his son left so many ‘pleasant memories’, and he took comfort in the two girls and one boy still left to them.48 Mimosa Sudholy of Southport knew her husband Bill ‘would hate me to be morbid, as he himself was always so bright and full of the joy of living’, so she would try not to think too often of their shattered dreams and concentrate instead on their happy memories. She felt she was more fortunate than many
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as she would soon have the joy of her baby’s company – a powerful memory of her husband. She would love and treasure any photos of her husband and his friends.49 A considerable minority mentioned the consolation and support they gained from contact with the bereaved families of their son’s or husband’s friends. Jack Mitchell’s mother often visited Mrs Cole, the mother of Jack’s navigator: ‘We have made friends with one another, through our maternal sorrow and try to help one another’. She was comforted further by letters from the mothers of two other members of Jack’s crew, paying tribute to the trust of their sons in Jack’s skills.50 Alice Spooner of Eastwood, New South Wales, asked Chaplain Trathen for the addresses of her brother’s crew because she had obtained more information about their last fatal flight and wished to pass it on to their families.51 Mr L Poole of Toorak asked the chaplain to keep in touch with him and to pass on squadron news, ‘for I feel an unbreakable link with you all’. He and his wife would like to be of service to any members of the squadron. Moreover, he sought to form an association with pilots from the Great War ‘to right the wrongs that exist in the service’, and the chaplains might help them to identify these problems.52 A common thread through these letters to Chaplain Trathen is the emphasis on the collective rather than the individual loss. Jack Mitchell’s mother was one of many who paid tribute to the collective ‘sacrifice of lovely young lives’.53 Marjorie Bailey’s heart was ‘just frozen’ on receiving the news that her airman husband was missing, believed dead, after a crash, leaving three fatherless children. Yet even she acknowledged ‘there are thousands of wives and mothers like myself’.54 Emily Hooper of Ascot was devastated that her son Tom’s plane was shot down, but instead of focusing on her own sorrow, she wrote, ‘Like so many mothers all the world over, I can now only wait and hope and pray’.55 They were responding to their common belief, inherited from the Great War, that mass bereavement rendered insignificant the grief of individ-
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ual parents. What was the sorrow of any one parent among the vast suffering of so many? The sense of communal loss may have consoled some, but the more damaging consequence of this line of thought was the assumption that the individual must be strong and suffer in silence. In addition to Chaplain Trathen’s correspondence of 1943–44, other valuable evidence has survived of family responses to the deaths of airmen, which allows us to follow the story further in time. The Newton archive in the Australian War Memorial is significant because Flight Lt William E Newton suffered the most horrific death after his plane crashed – the kind of death many families dreaded when their son or husband was posted ‘missing’. On 18 March 1943, a Boston aircraft of 22 Squadron RAAF was shot down while attacking Japanese positions at Salamaua on the north coast of New Guinea. Newton, the pilot, had flown 52 operational sorties with courage and success, and now brought the blazing aircraft down on water. He swam ashore with Flight Sgt Lyon, but both were captured by the Japanese and taken to their headquarters at Lae. Here, Lyon was killed with a bayonet in the back. Newton, as a pilot, was seen as more important, and was sent back to Salamaua to be executed by the unit which captured him. Lt Komai had the ‘honour’ of beheading Newton on 29 March 1943, an event described in a Japanese diary which was later captured. The RAAF learned it was usual Japanese practice to execute captured airmen, including at least 51 RAAF as well as many American airmen. Newton’s body was found in a bomb crater at Salamaua six months later and buried at the War Cemetery at Lae.56 This awful death was the type of horror which haunted families of missing airmen. Newton’s execution attracted world-wide publicity, compounded when he was honoured by a posthumous Victoria Cross. Some fragmentary evidence reveals how agonising this spotlight was for his grieving mother. Following the award of the VC in November 1945, GH Knox, speaker of the Common-
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wealth Parliament, complimented Mrs Minnie Newton on her ‘splendid bearing’ at the ceremony, observing that ‘it was a moment of intense pride to you, but of great sorrow’. He wanted to tell ‘the mother of a truly noble son’ that the hearts of all present were with her. The Newton archive contains an undated statement by Mrs Newton concerning her son’s execution which must have been written in 1955: ‘It really distresses me to go over it again. For 12 years I have been endeavouring to fight it from my thoughts, and have not kept any newspaper accounts, some of which have been untrue.’ (One such inaccurate press cutting included a picture purporting wrongly to record Newton’s execution.)57 Mrs Newton must have experienced unusually mixed feelings on receiving the VC for her son – the pride in public recognition of his valour tempered by acute distress at the impact of the publicity on her raw emotions. Her attempt at denial was entirely understandable in these traumatic circumstances, though it may have prolonged her anguish. Ethel Freeth of Kelso, New South Wales, was another pilot’s mother who suffered for many years after her son John was reported ‘missing presumed dead’ in May 1943. Sgt John Samuel Freeth, aged 23, served in Scotland, flying Hampden bombers with 455 Squadron RAF. The final entry in his flying log book was the stark statement, ‘failed to return’ when he was reported missing, followed in April 1944 by the note ‘presumed dead’. He was killed when his torpedo bomber collided with a fighter aircraft during an exercise over the North Sea. The Hampden caught fire and plunged into the sea. Sgt Freeth’s mother could not accept the indeterminate verdict of presumed death, in the absence of a body or an eye-witness statement, indeed information of any kind. John’s friends at Angus & Coote Jewellers realised that John’s mother refused to give up hope, and they made a gallant effort to persuade her to accept her son’s death. They gave Mrs Freeth a gold cameo brooch containing a miniature photo of her son, hanging below an embossed RAAF eagle clasp. Engraved on
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the back of the brooch were the words: ‘To dear John Freeth’s Mother. With regard from his friends at Angus & Coote. 1944.’58 Sadly, this poignant gift failed to console Ethel Freeth. She conducted a search for John for at least the next six years, interviewing his comrades, advertising in newspapers, and continually writing to the Department of Air. She ended a hysterical letter to the RAAF Central Repository in 1945 about her son’s personal effects: ‘Trusting you will understand my persistence in believing that my darling son will eventually come back to me please put yourself in my place what would you believe under the circumstances’.59 Mrs Freeth understandably clutched at straws in her desperation. She allowed herself to believe that another man, pilot Leonard Lobb who participated in the Trans-Tasman flight in 1946, was her son. The Department of Air had difficulty convincing her otherwise. She visited various departments of the RAAF expressing her conviction, based on a newspaper photograph, that Lobb was her son, suffering from loss of memory. She pursued her campaign to the top, finally receiving an assurance from Prime Minister Ben Chifley’s private secretary that a full enquiry would be made. Indeed, the Department of Air was diligent in response to Mrs Freeth’s claims, ‘in view of her unfortunate state of mind’, supplying her with a comparison of the very different personal details of Lobb and her son, including 20 pounds variation in weight, four inches in height and six years in age. She was advised there were no grounds for hoping her son was alive: no member of the RAAF who had been presumed dead was subsequently found alive. As late as 1950, Mrs Freeth called again at the Department of Air, requesting new photographs of Lobb to compare with photographs in the press, even though she had actually met Lobb by then. As a Department minute noted: ‘There appears to be no possibility of convincing her that her son is dead’.60 The Department of Air was patient with the unfortunate mother because of personal sympathy and the knowledge that there were many other parents in similar trauma. In 1947, Acting
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Minister HC Barnard had assured Mrs Freeth of his sympathy, ‘having had a somewhat similar experience myself’. And a 1950 department minute commented that the evidence of Freeth’s death was conclusive, ‘but Mrs Freeth is one of the numerous mothers who will not accept evidence’ of their son’s deaths. In August 1949 she appealed to the Sunday Sun to help her find her son, not because she sought publicity: ‘It is simply that I want peace of mind’. Sadly, one correspondent cruelly suggested that her son might still be alive but prefer not to return to his mother.61 Ethel Freeth was not the only mother of a missing airman who continued to search and to mourn for the rest of her life. It is unlikely she was comforted to learn in 1949 that her son’s name would be included on a memorial to be erected later to the memory of war dead with no known graves.62 Flight Sgt Leonard Williams was an Australian pilot who served with the RAF in Coastal Command in Britain and was posted missing ten days after his 21st birthday, in August 1942. His plane was missing over the North Sea and the crew disappeared. Both parents continued to write to Len, assuring him they loved him and felt close to him, knowing he might never receive their letters. A deeply religious couple, they told Len they remembered him in their prayers, but had to leave him in God’s hands. They went on hoping that he had been rescued by a passing ship or become a prisoner of war, but the long absence of news forced them to face the tragic reality. Two months after Len was posted missing an official letter announced his death with a patriotic flourish: ‘What finer death could you ask than that in the service of our country’. But his former workmates at Amalgamated Wireless of Australia struck a truer note. Out of respect for his Salvation Army beliefs they refrained from offering a eulogy composed of ‘familiar platitudes’. Instead they suggested that he might even have preferred this particular death, ‘without emotion, without witness, without farewell’. That was a rare attempt at a positive perspective on the trauma of missing airmen’s families,
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without bodies or burial, and with no information on the manner of their death, only images in the imagination.63 In August 1943, Lt Col RJA Massie received a telegram to advise with ‘profound sympathy’, that his son Capt John H Massie of the RAAF’s Air Liaison Group was reported missing. Col Brian O’Neill followed up the telegram with a letter explaining that John’s B25 bomber was missing in action over enemy territory, but they hoped he might be a prisoner of war. A comrade of John’s also wrote immediately to Col Massie providing more information and a more realistic interpretation of the few known facts. John’s plane had been shot down by an enemy fighter plane near Wewak in New Guinea; it had crashed into the sea, and it was very unlikely anyone escaped. This operation was vital to the battle for New Guinea, and John had participated in more than 40 operations, having been an officer since 1942. The writer seemed genuine when he wrote: ‘amongst all our gallant dead no death has affected me more than that of John’, adding that he greatly liked and admired him.64 John Massie remained ‘missing’ for two and a half years until 18 January 1946, when another telegram announced ‘with deep regret … Captain John Massie previously reported missing is now reported killed in action’. Friends in high places had been unable to help a father in Col Massie’s excruciating state of uncertainty, but he had continued to search and ask questions in all possible quarters. Even Gen Thomas Blamey, commander of the land forces, wrote in September 1943 to Col Massie with additional information – Blamey noted references to the capture of a B25 crew, but regretted they could not be sure it was ‘young John’s’ plane since three other B25s had been lost in ten days. A letter from a correspondent in New Guinea in September 1943 reassured the father that they had not lost hope for John’s safety. The crewmen of one of the four B25s were indeed prisoners of war, but the fighting was fierce and the losses awful. Yet John’s pilot was experienced and hope could not yet be abandoned. Col Massie
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himself wrote in 1946 that he ‘left no stone unturned to find John’. Even as late as 1946 he contacted Lt James McMurria who had been a prisoner of war in Rabaul to discover whether any USAAF prisoners had mentioned his son’s name. Massie insisted that he wanted to know the truth, whatever it was, for he had by now assumed the Japanese would have killed his airman son immediately. He wrote to one correspondent, ‘I never wish to see a Jap again’. No doubt he wrote many other such letters.65 ___ We have little more information about the manner in which these devastated families dealt with their grief in the years to come. However, Joy Damousi’s interviews with war widows offer one sad insight. Shirley Tilley was widowed in April 1944 when her airman husband, Arthur Thornton, was reported missing, presumed dead, only two years after their wedding. Years later they found the debris of his plane which presumably exploded in the air. For years Shirley was obsessed by her lack of information regarding his death, hoping that he might one day come home. In the interview she regretted that she had never been able to mourn him adequately: ‘All my life I have not been able to grieve properly because I never saw him dead and I don’t know how he died’. After the war her family encouraged her to end her mourning and move on to a new life. When she married again her mother even destroyed her first husband’s letters and photographs to persuade Shirley to relinquish memories of her airman husband. But these efforts to repress both her grief and her memories had the opposite effect and ‘her life-long grief never moved towards resolution’. Only after her second husband died – after a disappointing marriage – did she finally allow herself to grieve for the lost airman, Arthur Thornton.66 These stories can stand for those of the numerous other parents who continued to search for missing airmen sons, sometimes long after hope might have been expected to evaporate.
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These were bereaved parents sometimes trapped in a state of perpetual mourning with no certainty of death; with terrible images in their minds of the various possible alternatives to death and the dreadful form that death itself might take. Their uncertainty was reinforced by the fact that the RAAF also continued to search for the missing – aircraft are still discovered and the remains identified and buried. Ten years after the war ended, the RAAF still listed 3000 as missing.67
7 The ‘horrible nightmare’ of prisoners of war in the Asia–Pacific Prisoners of war of the Japanese have recently attained a dominant place in Australians’ collective memory of the Second World War, alongside the heroes of the Kokoda Trail. This is partly due to the sheer numbers of prisoner deaths. Over 22 000 Australians became prisoners of the Japanese in South-East Asia out of a total of 30 000 prisoners of war. Of these, 8031 (or one-third) died as prisoners of the Japanese, and only 265 (or 3 per cent) died as prisoners of the Germans. These figures represent 21 per cent of all Australian Second World War deaths. By contrast, only one in ten prisoners of war died in captivity during the Great War, and only 625 Australians died on the Kokoda Trail in 1942.1 The prominence now given to prisoners of the Japanese is due to the fine work of historians like Hank Nelson, the powerful literature of captivity and the absence of an alternative dominant focus to match the Gallipoli campaign. In the 1940s the Australian community failed to recognise the sheer scale of the horror experienced by prisoners of the Japanese. News of the captors’ brutality and their defiance of international conventions protecting prisoners filtered through very slowly. The experiences of prisoners of the Japanese – including the manner of their deaths – were so dreadful that they are now imprinted in the national consciousness, but this process has taken decades. When Nelson published Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon in
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1985, he regretted that ‘the prisoners have received no permanent place in Australian history’: By any quantitative measure the imprisonment of so many Australians is a major event in Australian history. For many soldiers it was living – and dying – in captivity which made World War II different from that of World War I … Where the horror, stoicism and gallantry of Gallipoli have become part of a common tradition shared by all Australians, the ex-prisoners are granted just the horror … All ex-prisoners are aware of the gap between their own memories and popular knowledge.2
Nelson’s moving account of prisoners’ courage and deprivation has illuminated the subject, assisted by the increasing readiness of former prisoners to end their own silence. It was no coincidence that they were more willing to talk about their wartime experiences in the 1980s. Most were now in their sixties and recently retired, with more time and inclination for reflection and reunions. Equally important was the changed cultural and emotional climate of the 1980s which encouraged open expression of emotions. More than 8000 Australians died as prisoners of war of the Japanese, including 2646 on the infamous Burma–Thailand railway. The Japanese used Allied prisoners and Asian labour to build the railway to provide an overland supply route for their army in Burma. Even higher death rates were recorded at Sandakan and Ranau camps in North Borneo, where nearly 100 per cent were killed. Deaths on the railway and in North Borneo together accounted for more than half the total Australian prisoner of war deaths.3 These will be the subject of this chapter.
Deaths on the Burma–Thailand railway In August 1946 and again in 1991 Sir Edward (Weary) Dunlop made formal statements about Japanese treatment of Australian prisoners of war on the railway, from his own experience. One of his examples of callous neglect and brutality by Japanese commanders can stand for many:
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Lt Col Ishii (The Laughing Colonel) as commander of all Group 4 PW, was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of men by his neglect to ensure provision of sufficient food, clothing, shelter and medicines, to the working camps during 1943. At Mintok and Konyu PW under Lt Col Ishii’s administration were treated with the utmost brutality and violence, the sick being driven to work in large numbers, thus directly causing many deaths.4 The funeral of a prisoner of war who died during the construction of the Burma–Thailand railway, Ronsi, Burma, c 1943. AWM P00406.031
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Prisoners of the Japanese working on the railway were forced to manage the daily reality of deaths in appalling circumstances. In the early stages they tried to provide simple burial services with marked graves. But as the prisoners became debilitated and exhausted they were unable to bury increasing numbers of dead properly, especially when infectious diseases were involved.5 Capt Harry Jessup of the 8th Division AIF kept a detailed diary of the journey in 1943 from Changi prison to the Burma border. The march killed about one-third of E force, one of the five forces slaving on the railway:
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14 July 1943 – The other day I had to supervise the erection of a funeral pyre for the cremation of five bodies, including one of my own company. I also had to supervise the actual burning – a grisly job – but I find I have grown pretty callous … 3 November 1943 – At 0400 hours I was informed that Pte Hales had died. Japs insisted on immediate burial. Henderson and I and two others digging a shallow grave in the jungle by flickering candlelight and then the burial itself. I said the Lord’s Prayer over the grave. No Cross – no record. The jungle will hide all within a couple of weeks. Life is cheap in this country and no one has time to indulge in sentiment.6
The terrible conditions on the Burma–Thailand railway were also powerfully documented by Dr Roy Mills, medical officer to 718 men from F Force. Mills was a remarkable and courageous human being, as well as a good doctor, despite his medical inexperience. F Force suffered more than 1000 deaths out of the 2646 Australian deaths on the railway. Mills, then 26 years old, kept a diary in 1943 of his dreadful experiences on the railway: During that six months more than 40 percent of F Force [including the British] died from starvation, malaria, dysentery, cholera and large tropical ulcers, aggravated by exposure to monsoons and being forced to work long hours, day after day, under frightful conditions.7
Cholera was the worst of the killer diseases, but starvation was the chief cause of death. The men had to work 12 to 16 hours a day on the railway. The sick and even dying men were obliged to work. Roy Mills’ frustration was often intense as the death toll could have been dramatically reduced with more food and less slave labour. Even so, his commanding officer, Lt Col SAF Pond, gave Mills the credit for reducing disease to the minimum possible under the appalling conditions, with limited medicines and equipment.8 F Force slaved on the central section of the railway through uninhabited, mountainous territory, often dense jungle, fighting
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dreadful heat and thirst. By 4 June 1943, Mills noted that 365 men were unfit to work, including 200 with malaria; but 95 per cent of those classified as fit by the Japanese would have been admitted to hospital under Australian standards. Mills finally recognised in late June that the Japanese army regarded the Australian prisoners as utterly expendable labour: ‘we were no longer human beings – we were animated persons to do their will – to be cast aside when useless – to die – to rot – to be cremated if we died from cholera’. Thereafter Mills was unable to conceal his contempt for his captors and suffered several severe beatings as a result. Between 9 and 20 July he recorded ten deaths from cholera out of 49 cases: It has been hell – accommodation inadequate and even then muddy … Cholera area is a mud quagmire … One eternal sick parade all day long seeing about 350 men sick in lines – some very sick mainly debility following on malaria and dysentery with subsequent exposure, malnutrition and a chronic state of diarrhoea.9
On 4 September 1943, Mills described the previous two months at Takunun as a ‘horrible nightmare’. He noted 44 cholera deaths out of 102 cases and 27 other deaths by the time they reached Krau Kree.10 The patients were always packed like sardines, and even the medical orderlies were often sick with malaria, as he was himself. Between May 1943 and April 1944, 1058 men of F Force in the AIF died out of 3662 (29 per cent). In November 1943, hygiene was terrible in the filthy camp and the hospital was sadly deficient in everything normally necessary. Moves along the railway’s route were frequent, with dreadful marching ordeals when the sick had to be carried.11 In early April 1944, F Force at last returned to Changi gaol, which almost seemed like heaven after the hell of the railway, especially as they were no longer forced to work under intolerable conditions. Two months later Mills developed pleurisy, which usually preceded active pulmonary tuberculosis, and he was in
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hospital as a patient for months. When the war ended in August 1945 he learned that he was definitely consumptive and spent seven months convalescing. He became a chest physician, caring for patients with tuberculosis, but was obliged to retire prematurely in 1984 because of medical conditions attributed to prolonged malnutrition and untreated disease during captivity. By the late 1970s, it became evident that many former prisoners of war were ageing prematurely, or had failing memories or psychological problems. In 1950, Mills formed an association of the surviving members of 2/10th Field Ambulance unit, aiming to meet each year on the night before Anzac Day. Although they enjoyed each other’s company, it was many years before they talked about their shared experiences during the war – and in some cases they never did communicate. Mills, who mislaid his diary for many years, discovered it in 1988, but another five years passed before he offered it to his wife to read. In 1993 they at last talked about his wartime experience, encouraged no doubt by society’s increasing tolerance of open discussion of emotions.12 The case of Pte Lewis Wynn of F Force highlights the silences surrounding prisoner of war deaths. Mills recorded in his diary that Wynn died on 28 June 1943 from cholera at Krai Kree on the Burma–Thailand railway route.13 But Wynn’s parents had to wait more than two years to receive this news. In July 1942 they were told that their son was posted missing. A year later a telegram advised that he was now reported a prisoner of war – though by then he was, in fact, dead. Not until September 1945 did his parents learn officially that Lou died of cholera while a prisoner of war in Malaya. Mrs Wynn, distrusting this official advice and desperately needing further information, advertised in the Sun on 3 January 1946, seeking news of her son captured on the fall of Singapore.14 Mrs Wynn was fortunate to receive two immediate wellinformed responses, from Mills, then at the Concord Military Hospital, and from WR Perkins of Parramatta, her son’s platoon
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sergeant. The two letters together related Lou Wynn’s story, though Perkins provided more information as he knew Lou better. They understood Mrs Wynn’s anxiety since official military information was brief and incomplete. They were also concerned about being insensitive and adding to her wounds. As Perkins put it: ‘no words of mine could replace your beloved son nor adequately do justice to the feelings which now remain in my heart, for one so worthy’. Mills was afraid his account would seem ‘brutal and callous’, but felt Lou’s mother would want to know everything. They explained that after the fall of Singapore, Lou became one of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war in F Force. After leaving Changi, Lou was taken by train from Singapore to Thailand, where he and other prisoners marched 250 miles through the Thai jungle to build the railway. They spent 20 dreadful days marching by night to Konkoita where Lou contracted ‘deadly cholera’. Mills’s letter took up the story at this point. A runner gave the doctor an urgent message on 21 June 1943 that Pte Wynn was a new cholera case at Konkoita, so Mills went ahead to Konkoita with two nursing orderlies and medical supplies. They reached Wynn in an hour and he initially responded well to saline intravenous infusions. As there were further cholera cases elsewhere, Dr Mills had to move on, leaving the two medical orderlies to care for Lou Wynn.15 Wynn’s comrades were distressed, as Perkins reported, because they knew he had little chance. They built him a shack where he improved, but then they received orders to move on to Krai Kree, seven kilometres south of Konkoita, whence Wynn was carried by stretcher. Again marching orders were given, but this time those unable to march had to remain at Krai Kree with medical orderlies. Several weeks later, Perkins and Mills learned that Lou died there shortly after they left. For Mills, this was one of the lowest points of the worst six months of the terrible march, and Wynn was one of the many casualties.16 Mills told Mrs Wynn that recovering cholera patients required decent food and good conditions,
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neither of which were available at Krai Kree; but he reassured her that Lou suffered no pain and would have quickly passed into coma in a quiet part of that ‘dreadful area’, in a tent with a bamboo floor. Both letters were written with great humanity and sensitivity. Perkins arranged for John Coe, Lou’s closest friend, to visit Mrs Wynn on his return home. Perkins had already told all he knew to Lou’s father, in person, and Roy Mills wrote that he was happy to meet Mrs Wynn at Concord Hospital.17 The notorious prisoner of war camps on North Borneo were responsible for nearly 2000 deaths of Australian prisoners of the Japanese (23 per cent of the total). The Japanese exterminated almost an entire prisoner of war camp at Sandakan in North Borneo, by reducing their rice ration in late 1944 and stopping it completely in early 1945. Medical supplies were cut and severe beatings common. Hank Nelson tells this terrible story through the testimonies of the survivors. Bombadier Dick Braithwaite said that deaths were commonplace: ‘it was a way of life that you learned to accept, and expected’. Allied victories in the Pacific led the Japanese to fear invasion and they began forcing starving men on a ‘death march’ to an isolated camp at Ranau across 250 kilometres of ‘mangrove and jungle swamps’. The Japanese first burned the Sandakan camp, leaving the sick behind to die. Further horrors awaited those who survived as far as the Ranau camp: about 620 died from starvation and brutal treatment. The remaining 33 men were executed in August 1945 (the last of them after the general surrender) to prevent their telling of the appalling massacres. Of about 2000 Australian prisoners at Sandakan early in 1945, only six survived. Thousands of other Australian prisoners elsewhere were rescued from a similar fate by the defeat of Japan.18
The ordeal of waiting families The 8031 Australian prisoners of war who died in Japanese prison camps had an impact on the community far beyond their numbers. As one bereaved father of a prisoner son wrote in February 1947:
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‘We have never had one happy day since we heard of his death … It is not the loss of the boy that hurts so much as the rotten conditions he died under.’19 During the war, hundreds of parents knew only that their son was missing, and they suffered terribly for years as they imagined all sorts of horrors and brutality. Many went to the Red Cross weekly for information, but to no avail. Once the war ended the slow pace of sorting the names of the dead from the survivors and informing relatives prolonged the agony of waiting. In many cases this uncertainty and anxiety dated back as far as the fall of Singapore in 1942, since many parents waited months or years for definite information that their son was a prisoner of war, and not merely missing. Some only found out, for better or for worse, after the peace, since the Japanese released little prisoners’ mail and provided no lists of names of prisoners in camps.20 The families of those who died in those killer camps in North Borneo had a traumatic time trying to discover the real meanings of categories such as ‘missing’, ‘possible death’ and ‘death but cause unknown’. Their search for information could consume miserable years. Red Cross workers were aware of the ambiguities of the term ‘missing’. For the army it meant ‘not yet accounted for’ and was used until doubts were removed about death or capture. For some families the word ‘missing’ conveyed hope, but it led others to fear the worst, sometimes unnecessarily.21 Michael McKernan has observed: We have few ways of knowing how the families of Australian prisoners coped with the years of waiting and anxiety, although we may reasonably assume that they suffered more grievously than almost any other class of Australians on the homefront.22
The papers of Stan Folkard in the Australian War Memorial reveal the dreadful ordeal of his family as they waited years for news of his fate. Stanley Folkard was a driver in the Australian Army Signal Corps, 8th Division, who enlisted in 1940 and became a prisoner of war when Singapore was taken. In November 1943,
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his parents learned from the Red Cross that Stan was a prisoner of war at Sandakan in Borneo, and that they were only allowed to write once a fortnight. The parents were frantic with worry. Only two prisoner of war lettercards ever arrived from Stan, in 1943 and 1945. A letter to Stan from his parents in August 1945 reveals their anxiety as they waited for news of him now that the war was over. They had tried to ‘keep smiling’ as they promised him they would, but it had been a very long four years of waiting.23 In October 1945, when they had heard nothing, the Folkard family agreed that Stan’s brother, Cpl John Folkard, would visit Borneo through the auspices of the Red Cross to look for him. A series of complex communications then took place between the family, the Red Cross, and the military authorities about Stan’s fate and the situation in Borneo. On 9 October 1945, LG Darling wrote a crucial letter to John Folkard about the prisoner of war deaths in North Borneo. He explained that deaths at the Sandakan camp had mounted daily and that food shortage had been acute. The Japanese had moved most prisoners to Ranau, but 250 prisoners had stayed at Sandakan hospital because they were too sick to move and the last had died in August. There were 50 per cent casualties on the first Sandakan-Ranau march, and those too sick to march were shot. All prisoners of war at Ranau were dead by mid-August. The military authorities had checked the whole route of the march and all hope was now gone. This was a terrible letter for the family of a missing prisoner of war in North Borneo to receive. Even in November 1945 families of more than 200 Sandakan prisoners still had no information as to whether their sons or husbands were dead or alive. The suspense must have been intolerable in the long months of waiting.24 Presumably John Folkard decided not to travel to Borneo. Meanwhile the Folkard family was receiving ‘condolence’ letters from friends and relatives who had been reading the atrocity stories from Borneo in the newspapers over the last two months and presumed Stan was dead. These were not consoling
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letters for a family in anguish who still hoped for news of their son. Three representative letters from female friends will suffice, all written in December 1945. Nell Law touched on a common wartime theme when she wrote that this was ‘a very sad and trying time for lots of parents’: an understatement that trivialised the grief of individuals. Such collective consolations made it harder to mourn only one death when ‘lots of parents’ suffered. Nell feared the recent publicity given to massacres and brutal treatment of prisoners was ‘a disgraceful welcome’ to those who were spared – it would surely dishearten them. Marion McMillan hoped the Japanese would be repaid for their cruelty: ‘all those poor boys had such a dreadful time – it is a miracle that any of them lived through it’. Elizabeth Carter wrote that the past year had been unbearable in its suspense after all the years of hoping, but Stan would wish his parents to ‘be brave now and face up to this’ for his sake. These were common themes of Second World War condolence letters, as we shall see.25 Not until February 1946 was the official statement on Stan Folkard updated to ‘missing believed deceased’. On 29 July 1946, Stan’s father expressed his anger, pain and exasperation in a powerful letter of protest to the officer in charge of Eastern Command Records in Sydney. Mr Folkard requested the latest date his son was recorded as alive and asked for information about Stan from the six survivors of the Sandakan death marches. Then he exploded: ‘The general public opinion is that the Army authorities are entirely apathetic as to whether the cases of single men without dependents and allotments are ever cleared up and that they are treating their cases with callous indifference’. This blast caught the army’s attention at last. That same day the family received a telegram from Victoria Barracks, Sydney, offering deep regret that Pte Folkard was reported missing on 10 June 1945. For official purposes he was presumed dead. But LG Darling regretted that he was not allowed to give the family the names of the six survivors of the Sandakan death marches, to protect them from
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being bombarded by letters from bereaved families. At least the Australian military authorities now made more effort to supply information, however uncertain and inadequate. They could not provide the latest date on which Stan Folkard was reported alive as there was little or no information. They thought he was sent out on one of the forced death marches in North Borneo, but the probability that he was alive was extremely remote. It was most difficult to supply any definite information over a long period – hence the category ‘missing believed deceased’. However, the army authorities sympathised with the family’s ‘prolonged anxiety and distress’ at the absence of news for so long.26 Finally, on 27 August 1946, Col Henderson wrote to Stan’s father that after much research and investigation his son was now ‘presumed dead’, no longer ‘missing’. The authorities had thoroughly questioned a number of Japanese as well as those few Australian prisoners who survived the Sandakan-Ranau marches. They were informed that Stan Folkard took part in the second death march but did not reach Ranau. They were now sure beyond all reasonable doubt that he was dead. Henderson claimed no further details were available (he kept from the parents the recent information that those who dropped out of the second march were shot by the Japanese). He advised that the authorities would adopt the date of 10 June 1945 – the middle of the second death march – for Stan’s presumed death. Mr Folkard protested yet again at the Army’s insensitivity and their inept system of notification of presumed death, especially since the chosen death date was that of his eldest son’s birthday. In response the Army regretted his distress, but stated that many systems of notification of presumed death had been tried and all had their limitations.27 One can at least understand the dilemma of the military authorities in this. There was no easy way of announcing fatalities in such dreadful circumstances to thousands of parents. Mr Folkard’s anger towards the military authorities was fairly common among bereaved families who needed somebody to blame for their loss.
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His prolonged correspondence illustrates the emotional trauma and anger experienced by many such families. The case of Pte Robert (Bob) Lindsay of the 2/18th Battalion also demonstrates the importance of the search for an individual grave in those cases where this was even a remote possibility. In July 1942, Lindsay’s mother learned from the Australian Military Forces that he was posted as missing, and the Army reassured her that they appreciated her anxiety at the absence of further particulars. Mrs Ethel Lindsay evidently contacted Bob’s army colleagues and comrades for news of him, but the few replies contained little information. An undated telegram from the army in 1943 reported Robert a prisoner of war in an unspecified Borneo camp. Later that year the parents received a card from Bob and shared their delight with a friend who also had news ‘after those awful 19 months of waiting’. But the Army Department advised that careful examination of Japanese death certificates established that their son died from malaria. In January 1946, the Directorate of War Graves Services sent their regrets at their inability to supply his exact place of burial. The family finally discovered that Bob was buried in the Labuan War Cemetery in North Borneo; but their request for a photograph of his individual grave ‘was found to be impracticable’. Instead they received a brochure providing ‘general views of the construction and horticultural treatment of the Cemetery’ to convey its beauty and peace. The military authorities’ purview lay beyond individual grief and mourning.28 Light is thrown on the frustrating work of the Australian Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit by a document written by Jack Leeman, officer in command of an Australian war graves unit, working in areas from New Guinea to the Burma–Thailand railway. His men were responsible for the location, exhumation, identification and relocation of men killed on active service. Location was tough in cases of poor map references and rapid jungle growth, though ‘local natives’ were very helpful. If there
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was no formal burial return from the man’s unit, then identification relied on an identity disc, pay book, letters, tooth chart or the cross on the grave. The man would then be buried in a temporary War Cemetery in a grave marked by the standard wooden cross. If in doubt about identification, they used the phrase ‘believed to be’ with the name inscribed on the cross. For those with no known graves, a permanent memorial would exist somewhere, usually at the man’s last port of embarkation.29 The War Graves Enquiries Unit was least successful in areas such as North Borneo, Ambon, Hainan and the route of the Burma–Thailand railway, where the death toll was very high through starvation, slave labour or brutality, and the Japanese took steps to cover their tracks. The Japanese refused to cooperate with the efforts of the International Red Cross to locate the missing, ascertain the circumstances of death and the location of graves. Identification discs could not withstand the humidity in New Guinea, and bodies decomposed rapidly in the tropics.30 There was a natural human compassion in Australia for the families who learned eventually that their sons had died as prisoners of war, many from starvation or disease, others from years of terrible neglect, brutality and slave labour. These families had suffered intensely for months or years and the final notice of death would rarely provide them with information to ease their fears. There is no doubt that the Sandakan atrocity stories released by the press between October and December 1945 must have traumatised the relatives as they waited for news of prisoners in Borneo. And later the war crimes trials again brought horrific revelations to stricken parents, wives and other bereaved relatives. This led to a growing feeling in the community and among military and medical authorities that the atrocity stories must be minimised to limit the distress and pain to relatives. The authorities’ silence coincided with the feelings of returned prisoners who generally chose not to talk about the brutality and degradation they had endured. Most were silent about their ordeal
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for years or forever. Tom Uren, later a member of parliament, spoke for many: ‘I couldn’t talk about what I’d been through: I just wanted to forget about it and get on with life’. Dick Braithwaite thought that people would not believe him if he told them how ‘all my friends had starved to death’. His wife confirmed that Dick would not talk about it, and most people knew nothing of his past until the 1980s. Many relatives felt hurt and rejected at this failure to share war experiences, but they colluded in it by not asking questions which might reopen old wounds. Returned prisoners hid the truth not just for themselves, but also to spare relatives of the dead soldiers these terrible stories. Hank Nelson describes the consequence as ‘a wall of almost wilful incomprehension’.31 McKernan argues that returned prisoners and their families colluded in this denial of reality. The silence was compounded on the prisoners’ side by the fear that being a prisoner of war might seem dishonourable, and by the knowledge that death in the camps was often demeaning, never glorious and rarely heroic. And so they tried to make light of their illnesses and their awful experiences. The wall of silence was reinforced by the official military decision to treat returning prisoners of war like all the other returned soldiers and send them home immediately to their families, instead of assuming prisoners needed special care and treatment because of their emotional, psychological and physical problems.32 But in the long term, this denial of reality was bound to fail. Many were victims of what is now known as traumatic stress, and their bodies and minds were unable to maintain the deceit. Even the obviously heroic Weary Dunlop confessed to his own emotional and psychological traumas after the war. He believed that the Japanese brutality in the camps had shortened prisoners’ life expectancy by at least 25 per cent. Sixty-five former prisoners of war committed suicide between 1945 and 1960; and 900 former prisoners died before 1960, still relatively young, after
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years of nightmares, depression, inability to work, and extensive personal and psychological problems. McKernan argues that the Sandakan tragedy and the Burma–Thailand railway horrors did not join the defining stories of the nation because of the wall of silence after the war. The deaths and suffering of so many Australians in the Second World War were ignored for decades because they were so terrible, and because the telling would have caused even more pain to relatives who had already suffered so much.33 ___ Half a century later Australia has begun to accept the prisoners of war of the Japanese as heroes, thanks to historians like Hank Nelson and Michael McKernan. The prisoners on the railway, and at notorious camps in North Borneo and Ambon were just as worthy to be Australia’s iconic heroes as were the Anzacs at the Dardanelles; perhaps even more so, for many prisoners of the Japanese suffered greatly at the hands of their captors for years. They had no illusions about the nobility of their cause or the glory of their own deaths. By ignoring or denying the deaths and suffering of the prisoners of war of the Japanese for several decades the community was reinforcing the denial of death and grieving which commenced with the Great War. The silences of returned soldiers denied the monstrous impact of the two wars, and powerfully affected the community’s perceptions of death itself and the need to grieve. By trying to ignore death they also blocked grief. These themes will be explored more fully in the next chapter.
8 The Second World War and the suppression of sorrow
Attitudes to death and grieving in the twentieth century were moulded not by one terrible war, but the cumulative impact of two, during little more than 30 years. We saw earlier that the Great War contributed significantly to the profound cultural shift towards ‘death denial’. The violent mass slaughter of young men in the Great War undoubtedly helped to create the new model of suppressed, privatised grieving which affected Australians deeply across the next half century. The Second World War powerfully reinforced the First in discouraging open and expressive individual sorrow. The wars increased the prevalence of chronic, long-term and unresolved grief. This was especially so among the desolate families of the missing soldiers of the Great War with no known graves, and among families of dead airmen and prisoners of war of the Japanese in the Second World War. Justice Henry Bournes Higgins had shared the common belief after the Great War that mass bereavement rendered insignificant the sorrow of individual civilians. Despite the death of his beloved only son in 1916, he wrote: ‘What, after all, am I among so many who suffer? There are many homes suffering here.’1 In the face of such a massive overload of death and sorrow in just a few decades, there may have been a generational shift in emotional responses in some families, as we saw with Katharine Susannah Prichard and
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her son. Where grief was often expressed silently and privately by bereaved parents and wives of the Great War soldiers, some of their surviving children were more likely after the Second War to resort to denial of death as well as sorrow. The generation who grew to adulthood in the inter-war years were overwhelmed by the obsessive grief of two decades: they saw countless photographs of dead soldiers on mantelpieces and they felt their parents’ omnipresent grief, even if it was rarely expressed. Some of them, like Ric Throssell, were determined to try to forget sorrow – to grieve quickly as well as quietly.
Consolations of friends: ‘Try not to grieve too much’ The culmination of this interwar shift is revealed in the condolence letters written to bereaved families during and after the Second World War, in which two themes dominate. The first is the continuity of the denial response and its increasing strength. The injunction ‘not to grieve’ was repeated time and again in the majority of letters – more often than in condolence letters of the Great War. The most extreme statement of this advice was: ‘Try not to grieve too much – as this only leads to illness’.2 Psychologists usually offer the opposite advice, that it can be helpful for bereaved people to express their sorrow openly since otherwise their health may suffer. Many condolence letter writers in the 1940s – like Henry Higgins in the earlier war – encouraged the bereaved not to grieve because their fallen heroes would wish them to follow their example in being strong and stoical. As E Harrison of Darling Point wrote to Jim Gordon, the poet, on his son’s death in 1945, ‘We can only do what the boys would have us do and that is keep our chins up’.3 This was also the message of the Great War; continuity from one generation to the next is maintained in the repetition of this advice in the Second World War, where it is offered more frequently. Likewise, Clare Clack of Killara observed in her
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letter to Owen Williams’ grieving parents in July 1945: ‘I think your idea of trying to act and feel as your son would have liked is a very noble and helpful one’.4 Just as men at war were expected to be strong and silent, keeping their sadness inside, so their bereaved families owed it to their sons to follow their example. To some extent this involved a gendered shift, as many mourning women who followed this injunction suppressed their more open and emotional female patterns of grieving in line with those of men. This rejection of expressive sorrow is marked in many condolence letters of the Second World War, but most of all in workingclass letters, where the impact is stark. Many writers regretted that ‘I have no words in which to convey my deep feeling of sorrow’, or just ‘words are inadequate’.5 This was partly due to the loss of a Christian language of solace, drawn from the Bible and prayer book, and from popular hymns. It was compounded in the case of working-class families by a more limited vocabulary, a less fluent control of appropriate language, and an unwillingness to articulate emotions in words. It is clearly illustrated in the condolence letters sent to the semi-literate parents of Pte Laurie Robbins of Clunes, Victoria, on his death in 1943. Laurie’s brother Charlie, also on active service, wrote: ‘I do not no [sic] what to put in the letter but you will no [sic] how I feel about poor Laurie – I can not write any more so this letter leaves me very worried.’ He managed to say that his brother’s death was a shock and he was grieved, but went on to write about the weather and the mail. Laurie’s uncle could offer no more than that he was very sorry: ‘we do hope that you are all feeling a little better so with best of luck’.6 In addition there was a perceived need to avoid expressions of sorrow and a belief that the period of grieving should be brief and was best observed in silence. By the 1940s the language of denial seems to have been widespread among the secular working classes in response to death. Many writers just sent black-bordered Valentine condolence cards to the Robbins family, instead of
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writing personal letters. The terse handwritten message inside one such card stated merely, ‘Mrs RE Lee & Family one who has lost be brave dear’. The printed verse included the significant lines, ‘Tho’ many a sympathetic thought / Remains unspoken’. One family sent an economical sympathy note to the bereaved Robbins family which coupled the well-worn phrase ‘Words fail me’, with ‘Bear up brave hearts’. Concern was frequently expressed that any words of sympathy might ‘reopen the wound’. One well-wisher wrote to Laurie’s sister, Mavis, to offer sympathy: ‘I hope you are keeping well and not going down too much. Do not show this letter to your mother if you think it will upset her unnecessarily.’ Another well-meaning friend, Myra from Ballarat, advised: ‘Chin up Mena & Roy. Try and look on the Bright side.’ A few writers urged spiritual consolations on the Robbins family, but modern printed religious verse could sometimes be as unhelpful as the secular: ‘And when He sends you sorrow / It’s part of His plan for you’.7 Pilot Officer Jack Bairstow, from Wagin in rural Western Australia, was killed in action in August 1944 in a flying accident in England. Eighteen very short letters of condolence have survived – many from Wagin – along with numerous simple cards giving little more than names. Several friends wrote that ‘words just can’t express my sincere sorrow’ or that it was ‘not easy to say anything comforting’. But the dominant message was ‘Try not to grieve too much. I’m sure he’d not want that’ – repeated in only slightly varied words in several letters, again with the inference that indulging in sorrow would be an injustice to the dead airman. And several repeated ‘Keep the old chin up’.8 They were distancing themselves lest emotion catch them. More educated writers also used words of denial in letters of sympathy on the death of Pte Kenneth Gordon, aged 22, son of the poet Jim Gordon. Known as Jim Grahame, his poems were published in numerous magazines, while he earned a living as a government inspector of farms. Kenneth (known as ‘Jimmie’), one
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of Grahame’s five children, was killed in action in May 1945. Grahame’s poem, ‘Departing’, was based on his wife’s experience of anticipating their son’s home leave and having to part again. The poem speaks volumes about the family’s way of dealing with emotions: She jokes with him, and laughs with him. (He must not see her grieve), She wears the mask of gaiety For his last days of leave; And as the train pulls slowly out, Hands wave and wave and wave, Then stiff of lip she turns away, The bravest of the brave. Those watching thought her unconcerned, Some thought that she was hard, As firm of step and straight of form, She leaves the station yard; But on her dark and lonely way, Gone is the smile that lied, Her head is bowed her cheek is wet, The mask is cast aside.9
Just as Grahame’s wife displayed the stiff upper lip in this poem, so also did most of their friends in their consolation letters on Kenneth’s death. The reality of war and the possibility of death had been absent from the two surviving letters Kenneth sent to his parents shortly before his death, with their focus on such items as the weather, meals and films. Frank Maher of Griffith, New South Wales, repeated the common injunction, ‘Keep your chin up Jim’, and trusted that ‘Time, the great Healer’, would eventually efface the scars. But two writers were unusual in acknowledging that the usual platitudes were both hollow and tough. A female correspondent urged Mrs Gordon to ‘show your British spirit and take it as well as possible for Mr Gordon and the family’s sake’. But while
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recommending British reticence and ‘grit’, she frankly doubted whether she herself could be brave in the dreadful circumstances. The poet also received a wonderfully honest letter from Jim Seymour of Gippsland in June 1945, describing himself as an ‘old digger’, and revealing the fragility of the usual platitudes in his own case: It is expected of a man of the world that he take these things ‘on the chin’ and just ‘keep on keeping on’, but, coming as it did in a long series of shocks, I was hit pretty solidly. Up to then it was the third notice served on me. When I got home there were three more waiting. My old nerves aren’t what they were, and the list sent me to bed for a day … You know how an old digger feels about these things. It is always pretty bitter and most of it is unprintable.10
Lois Atock waited many months in 1941–42 before she finally learned that her son Pte Ken Atock, initially posted missing and later a prisoner of war in Crete, had been killed while trying to escape. Her son’s friend Allan Fry understood the ‘awful strain’, but encouraged her to ‘keep your chin up and don’t worry’. Her friends were free with prescriptive advice about the appropriate behaviour on the loss of a beloved only son. The condolence note from Harold and Corrie Herbert of South Yarra was a mere 12 words: ‘Everything is wrong and upside down. Be a brave and proud woman.’ K Allen encouraged Lois to ‘be your usual bright self … cheer up and be the same lovable Lois as always’. Numerous writers congratulated Lois on her fine spirit and gallant behaviour in grief. Indeed Kathleen Kirkwood of Glen Iris devoted her entire brief letter to approval of Lois’s conduct: ‘It is not all of us that could have carried on as you have done. That is the Spirit the boys go away with, and are wonderfully proud and happy if they know those dear ones they leave behind are able to carry on so bravely.’ Again, there was the assumption that bereaved parents owed it to their heroic sons to respond with a similar courage and stoicism. Other correspondents commended Lois’ fortitude in
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withstanding the ordeal of anxious uncertainty, but warned that her courage must continue so Ken would be proud of her.11 The second major feature of these Second World War condolence letters is their transmission of a strong sense of a whole community in mourning, suffering a collective sacrifice. Consolation letters to Pte Laurie Robbins’ parents in 1943 placed considerable emphasis on the universal and collective nature of war deaths – with the corollary that individual grief must be borne silently with courage. James Cook wrote that many other parents shared their sorrow on the deaths of the many Australian heroes. Several friends conceded that their son’s death was indeed a great blow, but ‘still it is something which we all must suffer’. One friend observed that they had many deaths in North Brighton recently, including three funerals in the last week. Many letters mentioned at least one other war death, with a frequent refrain that ‘so many are suffering in the same way’.12 This point is reinforced by the fact that army units tended to have a local focus when first formed. Therefore telegrams announcing deaths would often hit a community at the one time. The 2/40th Battalion was largely drawn from northern Tasmania, and went into action and imprisonment on Timor in February 1942. Subsequent deaths affected particular Tasmanian communities disproportionately.13 Such letters were intended to show that others could empathise, and at best might be genuinely supportive. But there was a negative aspect to this kind of consolation which could be hurtful. The constant refrain that so many others suffered the same tragedy could trivialise the suffering of the particular family and the individual. On the death of Pte Ian MacDougall in 1945 after four long years as a prisoner of war in Germany, his sister Nan received several such letters of sympathy. Marie Monckton of the local Shakespeare Society wrote that Ian was ‘one more of the many splendid young lives sacrificed in this cruel war’. Elena Cowden remarked that ‘the world is full of suffering and sorrow’, failing to see that this was not helpful to Nan. Most insensitive
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was E Wenton who wrote: ‘Don’t let it get you down. There are many poor things in the same trouble.’14 The burden of grief was heavier if the death in question was represented merely as one of countless thousands, insignificant in the broader scheme of things. Moreover, implicit in this perspective was the presumption that bereaved families had no right to express individual grief when so many others suffered the same sorrow. Most letters of consolation from working-class people focussed on the two themes considered so far, together with a few short comments on their memories of the dead man and his heroism, and brief religious consolations if appropriate. Usually the letters were short and their numbers small. By contrast, one particularly large collection in the Australian War Memorial – on the death of Capt Owen Williams – is revealing about more varied responses to grief and the consolations available to a substantial group of educated middle-class people in the Sydney area. On the question of the collective nature of wartime grief, the letters to the Williams’ parents followed the patterns identified so far. In other respects they were often different in perspective, tone and emotional fluency.15 They remind us of the diversity of grief responses and the ability of more educated people to articulate more helpful sources of comfort in writing. Capt Owen Williams, an only son, was a 27-year-old medical officer serving in New Guinea. He received the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) for the courage displayed at his death at Aitape in 1945 while dressing wounds under fire. The collection contains over 220 condolence letters, including about 50 from relatives and 170 from friends and community. Only about 20 per cent of the letters were written by men, suggesting yet again that women were more often expected to write such letters and were more comfortable in articulating emotions in writing. Most were addressed to Kathleen, Owen’s mother, while many of those written by men were addressed to Ted, the father. The 40 or so letters written by men were usually shorter, more
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formal, and more likely to mention the inadequacy of words to convey their sorrow.16 Writers usually expressed their sympathy to the Williams family fairly fluently and with deep feeling, and few needed to take refuge in platitudes. Most significant, only one correspondent, cousin Rosie of Edgecliff, writing on 12 July 1948, hoped that Owen’s mother was ‘not grieving too much over Owen’s death’. Indeed, many correspondents understood the parents’ need to grieve because they had personal experience of deep sorrow on the death of a son or husband in the war. A moving letter in this vein was sent by Muriel Hughes of Roseville on 9 July 1945: There are so many of our friends who have lost their sons, & I find it hard to write all that I am feeling for them. Our lads are all so courageous in fighting this war for us – but the mothers and fathers need great courage too, to help them carry on to the end of their lives – without their dear lads.17
Margot of North Star, a bereaved widow, was neither shocked nor surprised to see Owen’s name in the casualty list, as if she had long known it would appear one day. Her letter implied that it was indeed common practice to offer advice against open sorrow in the 1940s, and also that it was unusual to reject it: I know very well how you feel. Having been through it all when Geoff was killed. There is nothing I can say to help you. Nothing I can say to soften the blow. It is no use saying ‘don’t grieve’ ’cos I know you will, you can’t help it when you love and adore someone as much as you did Owen and as much as I did Geoff.18
Most writers paid tribute to Owen’s character and courage but surprisingly few did so in a formally patriotic context, especially when compared with the required emphasis of Great War condolences on noble heroism. Eveline of Wahroonga was unusual in noting on 9 July 1945: ‘The thought which tempers or mitigates your sorrow is knowing that he fell at his post in a battle zone while doing everything he could to save his fellows’. Kathleen’s
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uncle, CW Slomm, was also certain that her grief would be alleviated by the knowledge that Owen gave his life for his country. Otherwise, soldiers rather than civilians mentioned Owen’s sense of duty, his courage and sacrifice; but these comments were more muted than in the earlier war, when there was greater need to counter bitterness about horrific casualty lists and to reassure relatives that their loved ones did not die in vain in a futile war.19 Less than one-third of the correspondents briefly mentioned Christian faith as a source of consolation, but they were matched by those, like Lorna Le Gay Brereton, writing on 8 July 1945, who thought ‘the war makes it harder to believe in a Beneficent Deity’. However, she sought help instead from secular, humanist sources, observing that brave men like Owen ‘give us faith in the grandeur and progress of human character’. There was a depth of human understanding in these letters to the Williams’ parents which drew on realism based on tough personal experience. Ethel of Mosman knew what Owen’s death would mean: ‘without one’s only son, all one’s ambitions, hopes and everything else seems gone’. Ida Jones of Forbes wrote from her own experience: ‘It is so difficult to realise that our dear ones have left us forever in this world as it is here that we long for them & as time goes on the longing increases … There will always be that aching void.’ Janet Baker of Dubbo offered secular consolation drawing on nature: ‘You will, in time, I feel sure, discover him again in all the things he loved and in every flower you grow’.20 The ‘In Memoriams’ of the Second World War, usually written not by concerned friends but by bereaved families themselves, reinforced the major themes drawn from condolence letters. They were fewer, shorter and far less evocative than those of the Great War. This partly reflected the differences between the two wars, and partly the loss of the traditional language of consolation –– writers were no longer so familiar with classical English poetry or with the words of the psalms, the Bible and popular hymns. The contrast also demonstrated the impact of a generation of avoidance of open
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expression of sorrow. Indeed the majority of verses consisted of only a line or a phrase, dominated above all by ‘In silence we remember’. Variants included: ‘I think of you in silence. No eyes can see me weep’ and ‘with a silent tear and a breaking heart’. Similar short notices continued for decades after the war until the 1980s, when ‘In Memoriams’ became more colloquial and more overtly emotional, with a distinct change of tone, as we shall see later.21
‘I too am a soldier: A brave son must have a brave mother’ Besides these short public notices, however, we have little direct written evidence of how individual bereaved people responded to the wartime deaths of their soldier sons and husbands, and how they coped with the business of bereavement. This is scarcely surprising given the frequent injunctions not to grieve or to do so silently in private. But two significant accounts from the Gill and Johnson families reinforce the evidence thus far. They illustrate both the attempts to suppress sorrow and the different forms this could take. Lt George Gill, known as Tasman or Tas, served in North Africa and the Middle East, but was reported killed in action at Tel El Eisa in July 1942. Three letters have survived from Tasman’s mother in Prospect, South Australia, to his sister, Marjorie, a nursing sister in a military hospital in the Middle East, providing a remarkable account of her response to the shock of overwhelming grief. Mrs Gill’s letters described the arrival of the cable in July 1942, when she was alone, almost dressed to go into town. The shock hit her hard; she ‘reeled’ into her neighbour’s house, where the kindly woman saw something dreadful had occurred, held her tightly and phoned her second daughter Julie to come home. Julie responded magnificently, not leaving her mother for six days, keeping an eye on her night and day. On the first day Mrs Gill let the tears fall, but thereafter she felt constrained to cry only at night in private: ‘My tears are very close but Julie sits
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before me and sees my every move and I dare not. Alone, in my bed I can do as I feel and cry my heart out for him.’ She and Julie spent these six nights and days mostly alone together, often sitting before the fire with folded hands and ‘almost dumb’. (Their silences and suppressed tears contrast sharply with the continual ‘sad remembering night and day’ when Jane Macartney in 1863 comforted her friend Jane Griffith throughout the first anguish of widowhood.) Moreover the traditional rituals of mourning were not adopted, as Mrs Gill accepted Julie’s advice that they would not wear black mourning dress: ‘we both think our dear one wouldn’t wish it’.22 The refrain ran through Mrs Gill’s letters to Marjorie that she must be brave as Tas would wish: Everybody tells me how brave I am – Ede Mitchell expected to find me prostrated. I told her a brave son must have a brave mother; but darling more than half my waking hours I can’t believe it, he seems to be near me and supporting me all the time. It’s in the early morn before dawn I always awaken, and then I’m not a brave mother at all. I’m heart broken and the dreadful ‘never again’ is more than I can bear … I feel that half my world has gone.
Most tellingly, Mrs Gill assured Marjorie that she must not worry, because ‘I too am a soldier’. This is striking evidence of the common desire of bereaved mothers as well as fathers to emulate their sons’ masculine and military mode of meeting death with fortitude and stoicism. Mrs Gill promised her daughter that ‘I’d carry on and not go under … Your mother is made of sterner stuff than that.’ She reiterated her commitment not to ‘go under’, like a mantra to reinforce her resolution.23 But the cost of Mrs Gill’s courage was great. As she wrote several times, ‘my heart is breaking’, and ‘nothing can bring him back’. She found ways of keeping the profound distress and desperation to herself after the first week of Julie’s care. She was just living a day at a time, not looking far ahead. Indeed she wondered if ‘the necessary things saved my life’, especially as she
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was ‘on my own to do the house and cooking’. She rose in the morning, prepared breakfast and tried to follow her normal daily routine as before. Her husband seemed to be involved in war work or living separately and they appeared not to be close. Thus she was not sure in August ‘how he is taking it’.24 Mrs Gill believed that ‘comforts find people’ and she was not short of consolations, in part because she positively sought them. Among these was a rather nebulous belief in God and the hereafter, as she assured Marjorie there must be a silver lining: ‘There is because behind it all stands God and we must believe that our darling is safe and happy somewhere’. And though Mrs Gill rejected formal mourning costume, she was comforted by the traditional female community of neighbours. By 8 August the news of her loss had spread quickly so she had ‘one line of callers’ including all her friends and acquaintances, as well as dozens of letters and telegrams. For at least three weeks after the telegram arrived she did not venture out anywhere and had no wish to do so. The neighbours were kind and considerate, making sure she had at least one caller each day in later weeks, and sending food and flowers. In addition to the mutual love and support of Julie and Marjorie, Tasman’s girlfriend Marjorie Fulcher ‘has been very close to me’, having loved her son for years.25 Memory also played a vital and consoling role in the dynamics of Mrs Gill’s grief: ‘Through my sorrow I’m proud of my boy and thank God for the beautiful 27 years of his life’. She found comfort in the photographs Tas sent back to her before he died, which recalled poignant memories of his happy life. Memory also played a vital role in her communications with Tas’s colleagues. She gained immense consolation from the high praise of her son’s courage which came from the letters and visits from comrades in his battalion. Lt Mellett described Tas as a hero – ‘the finest soldier and the best man in the battalion’. Better still, he wanted to meet his friend’s mother when this ‘ghastly business is over’, so they could each share their different memories of Tas’s life.26
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Mrs Gill seemed to find less solace than some bereaved parents in receiving news about her son’s burial and his grave in El Alamein War Cemetery. The battalion chaplain sent her a ‘nice letter’ containing a photo of Tas’s grave, but she found it distressing to confront: ‘I won’t dwell on that’ – in itself a form of denial. Tas’s closest battalion friend, Captain Keith Bishop, wrote to say he had visited Tas’s grave and offered up a prayer, but Mrs Gill confided to Marjorie that such letters could be ‘terribly upsetting’.27 Mrs Gill’s letters are both poignant and revealing. Like Katharine Susannah Prichard she mourned deeply, but privately and silently. And like Katharine she gained immense support from her children, in this case two daughters, who expected their mother to be restrained in her overt expressions of grief. Mrs Gill’s experience also illuminates the gendered differences in expectations and responses; she found great solace in the affection and quiet support offered by her female neighbours and her daughters, but apparently little from her husband. And yet her own restraint in sorrow again shows that, like many other women, she saw the need to imitate male patterns of silent sorrow. The family of Cpl John Leslie Johnson also left substantial evidence in the Australian War Memorial of their strong denial response on his death at Tobruk in May 1941. Johnson was aged 38 when he enlisted in 1940; he was married with seven children and his wife Josephine was pregnant with their eighth child, Josie, who never met her father. Failing to find work as a builder in Melbourne during the depression, John and his large family were obliged to live a hard life with John’s parents on their farm at Walwa. Josephine was proud when her husband volunteered for the AIF in 1940, but he was killed less than a year later by a sniper’s bullet at Tobruk as he lifted a wounded man onto his carrier. He was buried along with his two closest comrades in a temporary war cemetery, after a short prayer by the chaplain.28 The Johnson family did not receive the dreadful news for ten
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days. Len was seven-years old when he learned that his father had been killed by the war. Years later he commented: ‘I was very unhappy. I then wandered off to the front verandah feeling really bad, though I know I showed no outward sign of distress. Even today I am amazed that I understood so much of what was happening.’ A seven-year-old already knew that he was expected to keep his sorrow and shock to himself. Len’s brother Alex wrote that ‘it was the saddest day of my life’. Barry, another brother, was ‘devastated’, and recorded his grandmother’s anguished response: ‘It was terrible with Grandma crying out, calling for her baby. Gran cried so much – she never got over it.’ Old people born in the nineteenth century still felt free to grieve openly, whereas their children and grandchildren sought to hide their sorrow. Josephine was proud of her husband’s heroic death. She framed the formal sympathy letter from King George at Buckingham Palace and placed it on the sideboard in the dining room, where it sat undisturbed for 30 years.29 The condolence letters which reached the Johnson family were much like those considered earlier; writers sent brief letters focusing on the courage required to grieve in silence and the need to follow John’s heroic example. He had written a poem at Tobruk, just before his death, which included two lines highlighting his own stoical position: ‘I’m only a flaming soldier but I’ll see the business out / And if I stop a bullet I’ll die without a moan.’ Josephine carefully copied out the poem which remained an important tangible memento of her husband. Letters from her family and friends made much of the need for her to emulate John’s fortitude. A sorrowful sister-in-law in Albury wrote, ‘There is just one thing left for you and us all and that is to be brave like Johnnie was’. Several writers wrote, ‘We trust you will not grieve too deeply’. Josephine’s cousin in Sydney, Mary Wall, sent a loving and deeply sympathetic letter to ‘My Dear Josie’: I felt so upset about Dear old John and so lonely for you … [John] did his duty and did it well, he gave his all … I believe you also lost
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another great pal your Mother. God rest all their dear Souls. I am glad to hear you are keeping up so Bravely, this you must do for your children’s sakes, their future was John’s great concern and I feel you will not let him down in anyway, and will do your utmost to be both Father and Mother to them.30
Neil Mackenzie, one of her husband’s comrades, added to the intense pressure to ‘keep your chin up … Please Mrs Johnson don’t take your husbands death too hard … I know Johno would not want you to grieve and make yourself miserable.’31 Josephine Johnson rose to the challenge, despite her poverty and the responsibility for eight children. Seven months after her husband’s death she wrote to Pte Charlie Fraser, another of John’s crewmen, revealing the depth of her wounds and the strength of her sense of duty: ‘You lads who knew him so intimately know how great my loss is. I will never get over it. It is purely and simply hell trying to carry on without him but I must do it and with a smile too, as I promised him I would.’ She offered Charlie ‘the thanks of one whose life is over and I will carry on for his sake’.32 Josephine’s youngest daughter, Josie, born after her father’s death, best understood that her mother’s profound grief never ended, though it was unspoken: My earliest image of my mother affected me deeply … I was standing in the cold passageway at home … I could see my mother lying on her bed and hear her crying the most mournful keening; she lay on her back and held out her arms and called my father’s name in a heart-broken voice. I knew then that I was cold comfort.33
Josie’s sister Sylvia also remembered her mother crying in bed, ‘I guess because her heart was broken’.34 The family’s ‘In Memoriam’ notice to John Johnson on the anniversary of his death in 1942 included the lines, ‘In memory a constant thought / In heart a silent sorrow’. Theirs was indeed ‘a silent sorrow’ about a death that was never forgotten and a grief that remained unexpressed. Len Johnson wrote later, ‘I have never
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forgotten Dad or that terrible day in June when Mum told me he would never come home. Every time I remembered him I silently cried.’35 The youngest child, Josie, felt an ‘outsider’ in her own family because she had never known her father and that ‘magical dreamtime’ before the war. Josie wrote of her adolescence, when economic pressures were less compelling because several brothers were earning wages: Nevertheless, the long struggle was far from over. Something else of great importance was happening to our family. The great bleeding wound that Dad’s death had left was slowly crusting over. The scar would always be there, never discussed, sadly tender, but the unbearable hurt was being not so much healed as handled, dealt with. Their own life forces had picked up the boys and set them on further paths. For me, the healing was to be harder and longer because my hurt was caused by my awareness of my mother’s rather than my own loss and she remained bewildered by it until her own violent death.36
The most poignant statement was that ‘the great bleeding wound’ was ‘never discussed’ in all those years of a family’s grief. The emotional trauma for the Johnson family was exacerbated by years of poverty, bitterness and anger. In May 1942 Josephine Johnson had moved the large family from Walwa to a Victorian Housing Commission house in Melbourne, as her war widow’s pension could not pay the high cost of renting a private house. The move was partly in the interests of the children’s education, but Josephine also needed to escape the ‘cramped emotions’ of John’s Walwa family, who demanded ‘the price of humility’ from the fatherless family. For the children the Newmarket Street house in Northcote, Melbourne, had an atmosphere of ‘strangeness, coldness, anxiety and misery’. Len and Josie Johnson both expressed bitterness at ‘the whole system [which] took away our economic future and left us with only emotion’. Many people had pledged that their father’s ‘glorious death and noble sacrifice’ would never be forgotten and that the nation owed a debt to
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fatherless families. Instead ‘a callous and uncaring society’ failed and humiliated them and kept them ‘just below the poverty line’. They were condemned to years of poverty ‘in a new Australian under class’.37 Josie, who became a teacher, commented that her mother instilled in her family ‘a sense of righteous grievance which I know to be common to war widows and their children: that the country owed us something for the loss of our fathers’ – but the war promises were quickly forgotten. Josie continued to live with and support her mother until she was tragically killed in a car accident when Josie was 28. The daughter spent years trying to compensate her mother for the tragedy of her father’s wartime loss which cast such a long shadow over a poor family.38 ___ Josephine Johnson’s story is powerfully echoed by Joy Damousi’s outstanding analysis of war widows’ responses to loss, drawn from oral testimonies. She argues in Living with the Aftermath that Australian war widows internalised the sacrifices of their husbands and absorbed their silences, traumas and pain at lack of public recognition. The loss of war-hero husbands in a sacrificial context remained for many women a permanent part of their identity as war widows. Their grief was not permitted full expression for thirty years after 1945 because of the prevalent culture of ‘denial of death’. Widows tended to idealise lost soldier-husbands and to deny their deaths by retreating into nostalgic memories. Attempts to move on were impeded by the cultural wisdom of the 1940s, that sorrow was best expressed with restraint, even in private, and not indulged in for long. When men returned from wars, they rarely discussed their horrific experiences and the deaths of beloved comrades with their wives, but communicated – if at all – with wartime friends. Such silences were reinforced by the cultural climate that made it socially unacceptable for men to grieve openly in public, and wives effectively colluded by respecting this silence. Significant
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change came only after the end of the Vietnam War in the 1970s, when veterans’ assertive demands for recognition coincided with a greater acceptance of public expression of grief. Yet the silences of the veterans sometimes broke down in the 1980s and 1990s, after years in which grief and anguish had been hidden from their families.39
Part III Medicine and dying in the twentieth century
9 The medicalisation of death
In 1980, novelist Betty Collins wrote to Kylie Tennant after the death of Kylie’s husband, Lewis Rodd, from cancer: There is something quite repellent in the attempts made in our culture to stave off death at all costs, to fight it to the last, to still go on feeding and injecting and dripping into a body where even the animating force has already left. It lacks even the spirituality of an old cat who will accept its own death with such gentle self-abandonment and peace … Of itself, our culture’s attitude to dying creates these awful dependencies, and prolongs the process almost beyond endurance. My father is dying at the moment – aged eighty-six, he almost went last October, but somehow got enough energy and nourishment (in hospital) to fight back from the brink; he went home, to be nursed by my stepmother and after a fall and a stroke is back in hospital again, – getting the very best of treatment and ‘all that can be done for him’ to maybe get out again; it’s a good deal harder to die in Western society, both from a medical and spiritual point of view, than it is to get one’s self born.1
A revolution in medicine from the 1930s provided a mighty reinforcement for the denial of death initiated by the Great War and by demographic and religious changes. Doctors could do little to cure disease before the 1930s, though they sometimes compen-
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sated by a good record of care and palliative management among wealthy urban patients. In the twentieth century, new theories of the causes of disease led to more effective treatment, allied to a new body of scientifically based knowledge and improved technology. The discovery of the sulfonamide drugs in the 1930s provided cures for a wide range of diseases, and the possibility of challenging death from disease. Twentieth-century progress in medical science contributed significantly to the transformation in attitudes and responses to death, from the more open and emotional to the silent and stoical. Once doctors came to believe they could cure most diseases, the death of a patient represented failure and death became a topic to be evaded. Moreover, as medical science and modern technology have progressed, terminal illnesses and death have increasingly taken place in hospitals, where complex equipment and competent specialists can attempt intervention to prolong life. Thus death was removed from the family home to a sterile institution concerned with technical efficiency which was likely to de-personalise the process of dying. The dying patient might face pain, indignity and isolation unprepared and alone. There were no guidelines on how to die with dignity, and doctors controlled the new rituals of death in institutions designed to save lives rather than manage death.2
Medicine and death: 1880–1920 In nineteenth-century Australia, the inability of the medical profession to cure most diseases reinforced the Christian concept of disease as the will of God. For nineteenth-century Christians the belief in the immortality of the soul and reunion in heaven made an idealised ‘good Christian death’ theoretically possible. Between about 1840 and 1914 the definitions of bad and good deaths were practically reversed as a consequence of declining religious beliefs, advances in medical science and demographic
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changes. The emphasis shifted from the spiritual to the physical ordeal. The focus of family accounts of deathbed scenes from the 1870s – where they existed at all – moved away from a pious concern with the spiritual state of the sufferer’s soul to an increased anxiety to reduce the physical suffering of dying people. Instead of detailed ‘particulars’ of the Christian triumph over tribulation, grieving relatives preferred brief reassurance that the end was painless, peaceful or a merciful release. Whereas sudden death was dreaded in the first half of the century, it was more often welcomed by 1900 because it could mean freedom from prolonged suffering and it also meant that the dying person was unaware of imminent death.3 The only medical treatment offered to wealthy patients suffering from diseases such as cancer and typhoid in the nineteenth century was an increase or reduction of food, fluids and alcohol, according to the degree of stimulation considered appropriate, combined with the use of opiates for sleep and pain. The doctors knew they were helpless to cure, but they were paid to offer comfort and attentive reassurance to the dying person and his or her family, and to treat the symptoms as best they could. For the wealthy elite in the cities who could afford such doctors, the best of them offered caring terminal nursing and invaluable opiates. Nineteenth-century doctors did not usually perceive death as a personal failure, since they were well aware of the limitations of medical science.4 The weakening of Christian faith in the later nineteenth century coincided with a revised view of disease, which attributed death to specific diseases rather than to divine intervention. If death was God’s will, then there was still a definite limit to the doctor’s power; if the natural effects of disease were the cause, then the doctor’s role was potentially greater. But therapeutic medicine still had a limited power to cure disease before 1900. The causes of disease remained obscure and there was no systematic knowledge of either causes or treatment. Moreover, the status
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and qualifications of the medical profession in Australia were low in the nineteenth century and did not improve substantially until after 1900. Less than a quarter of doctors in Victoria were certified practitioners, while the majority were herbalists, quacks, chemists and midwives. After 1900 an increasing proportion of the population sought medical care from doctors and hospitals as new theories of the causes of disease led to more effective treatment with new drugs, antitoxins and vaccines. Antiseptic techniques were applied more effectively in hospitals from the 1890s thus reducing hospital infection, and the competence of doctors improved with better training in the new scientific knowledge which was matched by improved technology.5 Between 1880 and 1920 advances in medical science were paralleled by a fundamental health and demographic transformation. The traditional pattern, marked by relatively high mortality, a short life expectancy and a high infant death rate, was replaced by a new pattern with a continuous decline in mortality, improved survival rates for infants and children, and increased life expectancy at birth. The infant mortality rate fell from the 1880s, with a steep decline after 1904, and by 1930 this rate had more than halved. The most obvious feature of this transformation was that old age replaced infancy as the most probable time of death. In 1893, 27 per cent of all deaths were of infants under the age of one, whereas in 1993 infants constituted only 1.3 per cent of all deaths.6
Changing causes, place and age of death Another significant feature of the transformation in demography and health between 1880 and 1920 was the great change in the major killers. Statistics for Victoria and New South Wales show that pulmonary tuberculosis was still the largest single cause of death in the 1890s, but by 1909 heart disease had displaced it, with cancer as second.7 This trend continued throughout the
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twentieth century. By the 1990s, cancer, heart disease and cerebrovascular disease (stroke) were responsible for 60 per cent of all deaths.8 A valuable perspective on the changing causes, place and age of death is provided by Dr AH Tebbutt’s comparison in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1950 between hospital pathology and mortality at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, in 1910 with that in 1948. He was resident pathologist throughout those 38 years. Patient admissions in 1948 were about five times those in 1910, at 30 613 compared to 5788; yet the total number of deaths in hospital was only twice as great, at 848 to 395. The mortality rate in 1910 at 6.8 per cent was more than three times that in 1948 at 2.1 per cent. Dr Tebbutt concluded that in less than 40 years ‘a revolution has quietly taken place in hospital practice and in the contribution of clinical pathology to diagnosis and treatment’. Laboratory procedures had increased dramatically in number and variety between 1910 and 1948. As he put it, ‘a new star had dawned in medicine, the bright star of biochemistry, and in particular blood chemistry’.9 Tebbutt made illuminating comparisons of the changes in the major killer diseases between 1910 and 1948. He pointed out the decline in deaths from infectious diseases such as typhoid fever, gastroenteritis and respiratory infections, noting that infants were no longer admitted. In 1910 there were 140 cases of typhoid fever with 27 deaths, reduced to two cases and no deaths in 1948 – a remarkable advance attributed by Tebbutt mainly to the Metropolitan Water, Sewerage and Drainage Board. Twelve autopsy diagnoses of pneumonia in 1910 were reduced to nine in 1948 by the sulfonamides – ‘a definite relative decrease’ given that the hospital admissions were five times as great. Apart from these major advances, Tebbutt also examined the two new killer diseases of the twentieth century – coronary disease and cancer. In 1948 some 31 autopsies found that coronary disease probably caused cardiac failure. Thirty-eight years earlier the terminology
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was different and only three deaths appeared to be caused by coronary disease. There was probably a substantial increase in both the recognition and the actual incidence of both coronary disease and cancer by 1948. Only 16 autopsies were attributed to cancer in 1910 compared with 137 in 1948.10 Another useful commentary on changing hospital morbidity and mortality, and on the increasing hospital emphasis on longstay elderly chronic cases, came from the Royal Perth Hospital in the late 1950s. Prof Eric G Saint investigated which socioeconomic classes were the predominant users of large general hospitals in the 1950s and which diseases chiefly accounted for their mortality. His article in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1960 analysed statistics relating to 1908 consecutive admissions to a medical unit in this general teaching hospital from 1956 to 1959. Hospital admissions were increasing considerably faster than the population growth and re-admissions doubled in this three-year period. Saint emphasised that modern treatment was keeping patients alive longer, while more people were now in the age groups most susceptible to chronic respiratory disease, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Only 8.5 per cent of the patients were non-British born and only seven individuals were Aboriginal.11 As many as 40 per cent of admissions were drawn from the older age groups in the inner suburbs, while most of the remainder were from the outlying working-class suburbs. Half of the patients were aged over 60 years and one-quarter of the morbidity occurred in those over 70 years; thus ‘the physician of today needs must be a geriatrician’. Male morbidity became significant over 50 years of age, whereas in females this was delayed by a decade. Saint concluded that ‘A disproportionate number of patients were old and resided in the poorer, more congested, residential areas’. Morbidity rates were higher among old-age pensioners, the unemployed and the socially and mentally unfit.12 Saint’s statistics identified a vital new problem in the modern general hospital of the 1950s. It was no longer just a hospital for
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acute cases: long-stay chronic illness of the elderly accounted for 25 per cent of medical admissions and this proportion was likely to increase. Eighty-five of the 1908 sampled patients remained in the hospital for more than 61 days, including about 40 per cent suffering from cardiovascular disease. One-third of these 85 longstay patients, including many terminal cancer cases, died in hospital. Saint noted that it had become necessary to keep so many elderly infirm patients in a teaching hospital for so long because of an absence of beds elsewhere and because they needed expensive, skilled medicine. The mortality rate for all 1908 admissions was 16 per cent in males and 13 per cent in females; the chief causes of death accurately reflected the order in the registrargeneral’s statistics: heart disease first, cerebrovascular accidents second, cancer third, and pneumonia and bronchitis last. Saint concluded that the demand for hospital beds would continue to increase over the next half century as the population aged and more people entered the heavy morbidity age groups: ‘With more intensified urbanisation of our society and with the cure and prevention of infection in the very young, the volume of genetic and psychogenic morbidity in the later decades of life may increase in future years’.13 Saint’s prediction proved correct. In 1960, Dr CJ Cummins reported to the New South Wales Department of Public Health on the daunting new problem posed by the rapid increase in numbers of elderly patients with degenerative diseases. He stated that the care of frail old people was a problem in every age, but was now greater because those aged over 65 years were increasing in numbers faster than those of working age. Unfortunately, in Cummins’ view, the consequent social problems were accentuated by prosperity which bred selfishness. The frail elderly could not contribute to material prosperity and were often seen as an intolerable social and economic burden on productive family members. A major problem was the lack of institutional accommodation for the elderly suffering long-term illness, reinforced by the growing
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belief that hospital beds would be more efficiently used for acute cases. The only solution was to ‘condition the community conscience’ to care for a larger proportion of the chronically ill and dying at home, through a community educational program. In other words, current trends should be reversed. But other doctors, including Eric Saint, argued that home care was not suited to the constant, specialised medical care of the incapacitated and dying elderly, and that relatives often lacked the time, the expertise, the resources and the willingness to undertake it.14 This fundamental debate about the appropriate location for long-term and terminal care of elderly people with degenerative diseases continued for the next half century. Geriatric medicine was slower to develop in Australia than Britain, where special geriatric units were established in general hospitals under the national health system. In Australia the issue was complicated by the division of responsibility between the Commonwealth for institutional care of the chronically sick and the states’ management of acute hospitals. The states claimed that expensive acute hospital beds were inappropriate for long-term chronic disease in old people. The chief Commonwealth Government initiative from the 1960s was to subsidise privately operated nursing homes. This led to a massive unco-ordinated increase in nursing home accommodation supported by taxpayers at the expense of alternative approaches such as hostels and homenursing services. The pressure for hospital-based geriatric medicine increased from the 1970s. The Kingston Centre in Melbourne led the way, anxious to distinguish between disease and the process of ageing. In the longer term, developments in geriatric medicine led to better facilities and treatment for the terminally ill.15
The hospitalisation of death One of the most significant results of the twentieth-century medical revolution for family experiences of death was the move from home to hospital as the most common place of death. The
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comfortable classes generally died at home until the inter-war years when they gradually moved to the hospitals. They had chosen not to die in hospitals in the years before 1914 when hospitals were often un-sterile and prone to infectious diseases. By contrast, the poor and the destitute often had no choice but death in a hospital or benevolent asylum before 1920. There has been a misleading tendency to assume that the institutionalisation of death has been a relatively recent phenomenon from the mid-1960s and that most people had previously died at home. In fact, the trend to the institutionalisation of death was well under way in the second half of the nineteenth century and had already accelerated by 1920. In New South Wales the percentage of all deaths occurring in public institutions rose from about 11 per cent in 1860; to 20 per cent in 1896; and to 35 per cent by 1920 – considerably higher than in England and Wales. The removal of death from the home to the institution was a fundamental social change which took place more rapidly in Australia’s first colony than in the mother country. In 1860 deaths in public institutions in New South Wales were fairly evenly divided between benevolent asylums and hospitals; but the proportion of such deaths in hospitals increased from 46 per cent of total institutional deaths in 1860 to 77 per cent by 1920. As hospitals became more specialised, effective and aseptic, their rate of use increased.16 Mortality statistics in Australia have not usually recorded place of death, but we have a detailed analysis of changing patterns in place of death in South Australia from 1910 to 1987: this was compiled for the Medical Journal of Australia in 1991 by four members of the Flinders Medical Centre. They used the records of three funeral directors who covered about half the deaths in Adelaide, permitting a broad representation of religious and ethnic groups. They extracted data on a sample of 2566 deaths from 1910 to 1987 to see how far death in institutions had increased. The authors found that the proportion of deaths at home declined from
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55.6 per cent in 1910 to 26.2 per cent in 1970, and remained at around 25 per cent thereafter. The corresponding increase in institutionalised deaths occurred mainly in public hospitals, rising from about 25 per cent in 1910, to about 36 per cent in 1940, and reaching a peak at 46.7 per cent in 1970, before declining to about 40 per cent in 1987. Public hospital deaths were supplemented by those in private hospitals, which rose from about 13 per cent in 1910, to around 20 per cent between 1920 and 1970, when they declined to about 6 per cent by 1987. The turning-point in Adelaide came in 1970 when less than 30 per cent of deaths took place at home and over 70 per cent in institutions. But after 1970 the pattern within the institutional sector altered. The proportion of home deaths stabilised at about 25 per cent, but institutional deaths were slowly transferred from hospitals to hospices and nursing homes. Thus nursing home deaths were at or below 5 per cent of all deaths to 1970, when they rose sharply to about 20 per cent by 1987. Likewise, hospice deaths increased from a base of very few in 1970 to about 6 per cent in 1987.17 The cause of death in South Australia was not a significant factor in explaining changing location of death after 1970, nor were demographic changes such as the increasing age at death. Instead, the authors considered the changes after 1970 were caused by the increased availability of nursing home beds, and the high cost and demand for acute care hospital beds, which reduced the access of terminally sick patients. Moreover, they thought the international ‘death awareness movement’ had helped to alter approaches and attitudes to terminal care after 1970, encouraging the development of hospice and palliative care services. They also found that older patients died more often in nursing homes, and single and widowed people, especially women, were three times more likely to die in nursing homes than those who were married. Most people who died in nursing homes were women, irrespective of whether they had living children. Younger patients more often died in a public hospital than a nursing home. Those who died in
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private hospitals rather than at home were more often single urban women who had a skilled occupation.18 A similar study was carried out for Victoria, analysing 7697 deaths which occurred in a three-month period in 1988. It revealed broadly similar trends to those in Adelaide, except that 14 per cent died in nursing homes and only 2 per cent in hospices.19
The reaction against over-medicalisation of death By the 1970s and 1980s, modern medicine had substantially improved its ability to prolong the terminal phase of life and to intervene in the ‘natural’ life course. The distinction between death and life was less well-defined. In 1975 Dr Maurice Sando, director of the Royal Adelaide Hospital’s intensive care department, outlined these dramatic advances: Current knowledge has evolved means of supporting a patient during a period of system failure while the initiating disease is treated or runs its course. A patient may be artificially ventilated, his heart electrically paced, his kidneys bypassed and his blood chemistry kept within normal limits by dialysis until his kidneys start to work again of their own accord. A patient, unable to take oral nutrition, may be kept adequately and indefinitely nourished with intravenous feeding. A heart can be restarted, a heart-lung machine can be used to bypass the heart during cardiac surgery and an artificial lung can be used to oxygenate the blood.20
Modern medicine and biotechnology had brought great benefits to humanity but prolonging life artificially could threaten the dignity of dying and raised new ethical, legal and philosophical questions. Moreover, the rapid improvement in the ability to cure led many doctors to perceive death as failure, and to concentrate on effective intervention. This created a narrow focus which emphasised management of disease and a neglect of symptom treatment: ‘a concern for restoring life had led to a denial of the reality and context of death’.21
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Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the famous Swiss-American psychiatrist, was the most influential critic of the medicalisation of death. In 1969 she published On Death and Dying, which became a bestseller around the world. Her interviews with 500 terminally ill patients in the United States convinced her that medical science was failing to listen to the needs of the dying, who often suffered lonely, emotionally neglected deaths in sterile hospital surroundings. She developed a controversial five-stage model of dying – traversing denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance – and argued that dying people needed to cope with these stages of anticipatory grieving. The book’s thesis was illustrated by detailed and moving stories of the experiences of dying people, which had a dramatic impact on readers unaccustomed to narratives of dying.22 KublerRoss popularised psychological ideas about death and dying through the mass media, and through international tours and workshops. She stimulated the so-called ‘death awareness’ movement in the United States, which encouraged openness about dying and more ready disclosure by doctors of cancer diagnoses. Kubler-Ross was a charismatic speaker who offered challenging critiques of the medicalisation of death during several world tours which included Australia. Her work undoubtedly stimulated a crucial seminar on ‘Death and Bereavement’ held at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, in 1971. This seminar marked an important turning-point in the history of medical approaches to death, dying and bereavement in Australia. It was attended by about 300 doctors, nurses, social workers, psychologists, therapists and clergy – mostly members of the middle-class caring professions, who were largely responsible for the ‘death-awareness’ movement from the 1970s.23 This initial meeting of the seminar questioned whether the lives of hopeless terminal patients should be prolonged by artificial respirators or massive surgery. Sir Douglas Miller, neurosurgeon at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney, stated bluntly that doctors must re-examine their ‘desperate defiance of inevitable death’. He
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was especially critical of doctors who failed to allow ‘death with dignity’ to brain-dead patients by keeping them alive in intensivecare units. Doctors in the 1970s had the advanced technology for saving useful lives, but also for ‘inflicting grave and untold misery in the place of easeful death’. Miller condemned ‘supra-radical surgery’ which tried to conquer cancer ‘at the cost of every comfort and dignity’; and resuscitative procedures which often impeded the dignity of dying. It was often more humane and it was good medicine to allow the inevitable approach of death to take its course, by giving full support to the patient until the moment of death. Dr WMC Keane observed that doctors and nurses were often absorbed in the strategies of the battle against death, prolonging the act of dying rather than renewing useful life. He recalled the case of a 98-year old patient admitted unconscious, semi-paralysed and hypotensive, who was immediately resuscitated with albumin and blood, prolonging the dying.24 In 1975 two doctors published an article in the Medical Journal of Australia entitled ‘The Nurse in a Cancer Ward’, which focused on problems experienced by many nurses – especially younger ones – in caring for dying patients. The article drew on nurses’ discussion groups and their responses to a questionnaire. Many nurses felt they had too little experience in the management of dying patients and in communication with them; their emotional preparation in training was inadequate, especially as they had little personal experience of death before their training. Many nurses were disturbed about the resuscitation of terminal patients after cardiac arrest: ‘that enthusiastic resuscitative endeavours should disturb patients dying of terminal cancer appears … indefensible’. Some nurses were critical that doctors performed their technical functions and then disappeared, leaving nurses ‘to cope with the problems of a prolonged attenuated life’. Others were stressed by the gradual decline and death of patients, and disliked imposing routine nursing procedures on dying patients who required rest. All agreed on the need for more educa-
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tion of nurses in death and dying, including regular discussion groups. The exercise underlined the marked deficiencies in care of the dying in surgical wards of this particular Sydney Hospital, and no doubt, many other large hospitals of the 1970s.25 Nancy Phelan in 1988 used a fictional short story to demonstrate the impact of the hospital death of a paralysed old woman on her family and other patients: Melancholy and despair came furtively into the ward and circled round each bed … Reality was the ceiling, the light, the locker, the helpless body in the hard bed, the fears and neuroses of the medical ward, the visitation of death behind brown screens. There was no getting away, no escape, neither was there any running to meet it bravely. Only the waiting, the tied hands and the hideous fears.
Towards morning the dying patient’s incoherent speech led other patients to become hysterical and frightened at the prospect of her imminent death so close to them. They were overwrought because her rambling kept them awake. A new patient complained that ‘“I won’t be next to her if she’s going to die … I’m frightened. I’ve never been near anyone dying before.”’ At mid-day the shabby, frightened relatives sat around the dying woman’s bed, ‘oppressed by the hospital smells and sounds … an awkward, pitiable semicircle’, hidden behind the screens. The old woman’s grey face and tightly drawn skin appeared more like a skull, ‘a universal death mask’, while her family sobbed quietly. During the long night ‘death waited patiently, stealing through the ward, filling the women with terror’. Next morning the dying woman haemorrhaged over the bed, infuriating the hardened staff nurse who was preparing for the matron’s round. Later, the daughters returned, exhausted, miserable and resigned to the death which soon followed. The kindly probationer nurse told them to return in an hour or so to say farewell.26 In Phelan’s fictional account, a volunteer nurse was unable to help with the laying out because she had never seen a dead person
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before and felt nauseous. The other patients were frightened and lay in ‘strained silence’, trying in vain to see and hear nothing, while the nurses bustled around the bed. The kind probationer tearfully protested that the pretty nurse was too rough with the old woman’s body and showed no pity. The experienced nurse responded: ‘“Don’t for God’s sake be sentimental. She can’t feel. She’s no more than a piece of meat … I’ve done so many of them I don’t feel anything.”’ And she proceeded to give orders to hold the jaw and plug the buttocks, while other patients shuddered and the new patient sobbed that it was ‘horrible to die in your bed’, given the way they were treated. When the stunned relatives returned, the staff nurse assured them, ‘“she went so peacefully … and now she’s at rest”’.27 ___ By the 1970s there was increasing recognition that a particular combination of complex forces was creating a massive challenge for society. The ageing of the population combined with the shift in the causes of mortality towards the degenerative diseases to create a long-term problem. This was powerfully reinforced by the capacity of modern medicine and biotechnology to take over the business of dying and to prolong the process. There was growing agreement with Ivan Illich’s 1976 charge that death had become an alien experience dominated by doctors and their technologies, and detached from everyday life.28
10 Kylie Tennant and the war against cancer
In the twentieth century, cancer replaced tuberculosis as the most feared cause of death, and the disease inspired a kind of cultural terror. As with tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, no cure is yet found and many have equated cancer with certain death. Whereas people began to believe from the 1930s that the power of modern medicine would conquer disease, cancer remains a challenge and a threat, highlighting the limitations of medical science. Cancer is seen as unpredictable, invasive, prolonged and terribly painful. Most adults have personal experience of relatives or friends suffering or dying from cancer, and many have attended funerals of cancer victims. The incidence and death rates from cancer have steadily increased throughout the twentieth century and beyond. In the absence of a unified medical model with a cure, horror stories and alternative theories about cause and treatment have abounded. Blame has sometimes been attached to the individual or the environment in the absence of a medical explanation. Cancer has also been depicted as a modern disease of the toxic developed industrial world, reinforcing the sense of fatalism. On the other hand, intensive statistical research since the 1950s has explained rising cancer rates largely in terms of an ageing population – reassuring to some, but creating new problems for the future. The cancer
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story has been told in various ways: in the dense technical language of medical journals, in sensational newspaper articles about rising death rates, or, since the 1980s, in heart-rending heroic narratives of individual cancer experiences. There is a need for an account which explores the historical evidence, the debates and the changing perspectives over the twentieth century. Military metaphors permeate the historical discourse on cancer throughout the twentieth century in all kinds of sources, scientific and popular – medical journals, newspapers and personal correspondence. References abound to cancer patients who have ‘lost the battle’ or the army of medical experts who are ‘waging a war’ on several fronts. Indeed, I find it difficult to avoid using the military metaphor myself. Susan Sontag criticised its negative usage in her 1978 book, Illness as Metaphor, observing that the metaphors we use affect the way we experience the illness.1 Neither tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, nor heart disease today, carry the stigma of cancer, which is frequently used symbolically to signify evil. This is partly explained by the malignant changes to the body wrought by cancer, as Michael Ashby explains: ‘The insidious pathological process of the body’s own cells turning against it, expanding and eating away at normal structures, is unpleasant and disturbing’. It involves pain and suffering, as well as profound changes in the body image.2 Patients feel the need to fight the disease which invades their disordered bodies. In a powerful recent article, Dorothy Broom condemns the ‘destructive resonance of the dominant metaphors’ of cancer, as well as the harm caused by the secrecy and shame surrounding breast cancer, which isolate and silence many women.3
Early popular fears and medical initiatives In the nineteenth century, tuberculosis and other infectious diseases were the major killers and cancer was substantially underdiagnosed. But there were enough terrible deaths from cancer to
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inspire fear in an age when surgery could do little to help. Frances Bussell in Western Australia suffered repeated bouts of ‘dreaded pain’ from cancer in 1845, despite the administration of opiates twice daily, and death came after a ‘fearful agonising night’. Henry Handel Richardson described the death of her mother, Mary, of colon cancer in 1896, with pain so intense that she shrieked and writhed in the torment of her ‘ignominious suffering’.4 Such deaths inspired great fear but there was still the consolation that other diseases were more lethal. Those who could not afford opiates or family nursing in the nineteenth century suffered far more from cancer than the comfortable classes. The poor were also victims of the popular assumption that cancer was contagious and akin to leprosy; and like leprosy it was hidden away. This is revealed in chilling glimpses from the archives of the late nineteenth-century asylums for the destitute, misnamed ‘benevolent’ asylums. It is remarkable that, even then, a powerful stigma was attached to cancer which did not apply to tuberculosis – a greater killer and also contagious. In 1873 the matron of the Liverpool Asylum in New South Wales moved the cancer cases from near the porch of the main building to a small side ward further away because they were ‘unsightly’ and generated ‘an unpleasant smell about the porch’. The matron professed sympathy for their plight, especially as they all understood they were sent to the asylum to die: ‘they lie there eight or nine months suffering, with the whole face eaten away sometimes’. She had to give the wardsman in the cancer ward a glass of rum daily to induce him to dress them. Even the relatively progressive Adelaide Destitute Asylum made cancer cases less welcome than consumptives in the 1890s, stipulating that cancerous patients ‘should [not] mingle with other inmates’. Cancer victims were strangely regarded as more contagious than those suffering from tuberculosis, and miasmic theories of infection were still encouraged by their ‘offensive smell’.5 Tuberculosis was still the largest single cause of death in
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Victoria and New South Wales from 1890 to 1900, but from 1905 to 1909 heart disease displaced it, with cancer as second in Victoria and third in New South Wales.6 Death rates from both cancer and heart disease rose between 1881 and 1911, accounting for an increasing proportion of total mortality as infectious diseases declined. However, even as medical emphasis on cancer increased, and destitute asylums became general hospitals, cancer continued to be a taboo disease that had to be hidden away within large institutions. When Liverpool Asylum became a state hospital in 1911, a special cancer ward was established in an isolated position in the grounds, separated by the railway line from the main hospital and the town.7 The Sydney-based weekly, the Bulletin, in January 1900 published a sensational account of the killer disease of the new century: ‘The death-rate from cancer is being doubled with each decade. Go to a hospital for incurables and see for yourselves.’ The death-rate from cancer was said to be advancing rapidly all over the world and was now the only disease which showed a steady increment every year. Death rates in New South Wales had allegedly doubled since 1877, while Victoria’s were even higher. The military metaphor was used to the utmost: ‘A battle is being fought out for a stake of human lives besides which the wars of man with man shrink into nothingness … The enemy must be attacked, not by single skirmishes … but by a well-equipped army of experts in touch all along the line.’ The article made much of the ‘peculiarities’ of cancer, which grew steadily at the expense of its host, eventually infecting distant parts of the body with similar growths. Meanwhile its victim was slowly poisoned: ‘The unhappy bearer of this ghastly burden, unless relieved by the knife at an early stage, wastes to a pain-stricken ghost, tortured by continual new foci, which eat into the vital organs, and praying for the means of release from his living death’. The so-called cures of the quacks, including alcohol injections, arsenics and caustics, were all futile, and only drastic early surgery could help. The
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Bulletin offered confused notions of the causes of cancer. It proclaimed cancer ‘a disease of civilisation’, while also claiming that heredity accounted for one in three cases, and that many shunned cancer cases as they might lepers.8 A decade later the Melbourne Argus was equally pessimistic, for there was ‘no glimpse of the ultimate solution’. Yet early medical research was at least eliminating some false notions, especially the widespread belief that cancer was contagious. It was also now clear that cancer attacked all human races and was not caused by a single factor such as diet, soil, occupation or climate. In 1915 the Medical Journal of Australia acknowledged that cancer was still wrapped in mystery which encouraged fanciful theories and folk myths, including the theory that cancer was hereditary. Three years later the Medical Journal of Australia emphasised the need for total removal of cancerous growths at an early stage, assuming that fear would propel people with symptoms into the doctor’s surgery.9 From 1925 the emphasis shifted away from these expressions of popular fears and folk myths towards the creation of a co-ordinated medical and public health strategy for meeting the challenge. A major initiative was the formation of the University of Sydney Cancer Research Committee, modelled on those already established in Europe. This was the largest co-ordinated effort yet made in Australia ‘to lift the veil’ on cancer in a ‘well-planned scientific assault’ – again the metaphor of war. The most hopeful research approaches in 1925 appeared to be biochemical and biophysical.10 The New South Wales Cancer Research Fund was created to provide the community fund-raising vital to support the research. At the fund’s inauguration in May 1925 at the Sydney Town Hall, speakers used the metaphor of war to terrify the community into providing ample funds. They warned that in almost every family one or more members in each generation died of ‘this gaunt enemy of mankind … Both from a sentimental and from an economical point of view the ravages of cancer create a
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dead weight impeding progress.’ The destructive nature of the disease, its increasing death rates, and medicine’s ignorance about its cause and cure, placed the onus on every individual to fight the ‘calamity’: ‘A well-planned and energetic attack’ on all fronts was required by a ‘very large army of competent workers’.11 In 1926 Sir George Syme, a prominent surgeon, attempted to limit the sensational rhetoric and promote the need for early cancer intervention, combined with well-informed medical education to contradict false ideas. He argued that medical practitioners should educate their patients during normal consultations and distribute literature in the community and in their waiting rooms. They should explain that the plight of victims was not necessarily hopeless if accessible cancers were treated early by doctors who made more effort to identify early symptoms. Syme also tried to reduce continuing popular fear that cancer was inherited by stressing that this was neither proven nor commonly accepted by medical experts. Even Syme, however, was obliged to confirm the recent statement by the Commonwealth Health Minister that Australia’s cancer death rate was higher than that in 17 other countries. Dr MJ Holmes in the journal Health for May 1926 made the pessimistic claim that statistics showed ‘a very pronounced and serious’ real increase, such that one in eight of those then living would die of cancer and one in five in 50 years time.12 Such statistics provoked medical experts and public health officials to embark on a campaign of community education while trying to restrain panic. In the Medical Journal of Australia in 1927, WR Day, a prominent actuary, regretted the ‘public scare’ about the increase in cancer deaths on the basis of limited evidence. His investigation into census statistics for 1911 and 1921 for Victoria and New South Wales demonstrated the essential point that in those years cancer deaths rose largely because the proportion of people over the age of 70 increased in relation to the total population. There was a distinct rise in cancer death rates
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from the age of 60 and a marked rise after 70, especially for males. Moreover, the recorded statistical increases might be illusory, due to the frequency of incorrect diagnoses in the past. Day concluded that he saw no cause for alarm ‘except in the exaggerated statements of the ignorant’.13 This was important as the first assertion based on statistical evidence that the rising cancer death rates were largely a reflection of an ageing population. The new emphasis on the significance of ageing was confirmed by David Welsh, professor of pathology at Sydney University, in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1930. He argued that the influence of age in determining the onset of cancer was strong, since liability to cancer increased with age as tissues became worn out: In extending life, preventive medicine has also extended the period in which cancer operates most disastrously. The risk of cancer becomes greater with advancing years and much of the increasing death rate from cancer is due to this extension of the cancer age. What medicine has given, cancer is taking away. We have not yet reached that impasse where the waste of cancer equals the gain of medicine. But we have reached a stage where cancer is proving to be the greatest obstacle to the progress of medicine and the greatest destroyer of human life at its best.14
This was a powerful early statement of the conundrum which challenged modern medicine for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond. Welsh also corrected recent expert opinion on the hereditary factor, warning that heredity did indeed play a part in the genesis of cancers. He emphasised that early cancers were often curable but the opportunity for successful cure soon passed; many cancer deaths were caused by ignorance and fear, since ‘unreasoning dread’ made victims reluctant to seek medical advice until too late. He concluded that doctors were ‘too apt to allow ourselves to become obsessed by our ignorance of cancer and by our helplessness in dealing with it’. Instead they must ‘fight to a finish’ and never give up hope.15 One ground for hope in the late 1920s was the progress made
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in radium treatment, reinforced by the Commonwealth Government’s recent grant of over £100 000 for the purchase of radium for distribution to hospitals and laboratories across Australia.16 Dr LM McKillop, a Brisbane surgeon, in 1929 recognised radium as ‘a very powerful weapon in the fight’ – again the military metaphor. Radium had already ‘won its spurs’ in the treatment of cancer of the tongue, mouth and breast, where radium treatment led to better results than surgery. The valuable work of Thomas Lumsden since 1927 had demonstrated how radium could inflict ‘a death blow’ on the nucleus of the embryonic cancer cell and damage cells at the periphery, producing antibodies ‘which inhibit the nuclear activity of the multiplying cancer cells’.17 In 1929 Dr HM Moran, honorary consultant for radium at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, explained the ‘plan of campaign against cancer’ in Australia: ‘It is based on the military conception of a headquarters staff which is the central cancer committee, [and] of base hospitals which are the centres for diagnosis and treatment’, with the medical practitioner as the frontline officer. The central cancer committee would collect funds and statistics, provide facilities for both research and treatment, direct propaganda, and co-ordinate all cancer activities. He called for a serious effort at propaganda, but the message must be one of hope ‘and great care should be taken to avoid creating a cancer scare’.18 By April 1932 Dr HG Chapman, director of cancer research at Sydney University, revealed that ‘Commonwealth radium’ had apparently cured about 45 per cent of the cancer patients treated. He claimed that mortality from cancer was reduced in 1931–32 by the largest fall in any single year since 1861.19 In 1934 the Federal minister for Health reported that of 3071 patients with operable cancer treated with radium at Australian treatment centres in the past four years, 62 per cent were known to be still alive and free of symptoms; only 4 per cent had died.20 A major development of the 1930s was the holding of annual
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national cancer conferences in Canberra to advance co-ordination of the campaign and report on progress in research, treatment and statistical analysis. The Commonwealth Health Department chose Canberra as the venue because it held no distractions or entertainments for the medical experts and would deter ‘the idly curious and the limelighters’. The conferences provided an opportunity for medical practitioners and researchers as well as physicists to consider the limits and achievements of the preceding year, discuss common problems and formulate future plans. A considerable proportion of conference time was spent reviewing the progress of radium and x-ray treatment. Indeed education of the general practitioners in the physics of radiation was considered vital, as was the joint emphasis on both the theoretical and the clinical.21 The Canberra Cancer Conferences also focused on the latest mortality statistics, which were the chief target of the press in a long series of articles on ‘Cancer’s Toll’. Irrespective of the good news about radium treatment, journalists tended to highlight the annual information that Australians’ mortality from cancer was steadily increasing. In opening the ninth conference the New South Wales Health minister, Mr Fitz-Simons, noted that 21 people had died from cancer every day in 1936: ‘to the average mind, to the average family, the term cancer connotes something in the nature of calamity’.22 But the press also recognised that the conferences devoted attention to the issues of propaganda and education which might meet the challenge of cancer, especially the vital need to persuade people to seek early diagnosis and treatment. Doctors must teach the public more about cancer without ‘driving the disease underground and creating a cancer phobia’.23 Many doctors feared by the late 1930s that press reports of rising cancer rates were alarming the public excessively and believed that reassurance and ‘an atmosphere of calm’ were vital. Accordingly in 1937 Dr Hilda Bull, assistant to the Melbourne officer of health, wrote an article in the Argus primarily opposing euthanasia, but also pointing to the progress made in cancer
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research and treatment: ‘It is a truly appalling suggestion that science is so helpless in these [cancer] cases that all it can do is admit defeat’. With careful management life could be prolonged and suffering reduced even in inoperable cases. Moreover, early diagnosis and surgery combined with use of x-rays and radium meant ‘infinitely more cures’.24
The statistical turning point and the focus on lung cancer The public was not to be reassured by such messages. The press had been emphasising the apparent rise in the death rate, without explaining that the increase was closely related to the ageing population and was largely confined to those over 65 years. Dr Day’s actuarial message of 1927 had still not reached a wider community. At last in 1941 the Sydney Morning Herald set out Day’s argument in clear and simple terms. A bold headline – ‘CANCER DEATHS. PROPORTION SMALLER THAN IT SEEMS. OLDER POPULATION’ – highlighted the annual report of SR Carver, the New South Wales government statistician. He concluded that ‘the impression that mortality from cancer is becoming relatively more severe is ill-founded’, because of the use of crude death rates which were bound to rise as the population aged. When the cancer death rate was calculated in proportion to a standard age distribution it was clear that 95 per cent of cancer deaths in New South Wales were of people past middle-age, a cohort whose numbers had substantially increased in the last 30 years.25 The growing recognition of the importance of statistical research to the cancer campaign, combined with the technical density of the subject and the ineffectiveness of existing approaches, at last led to a new national initiative. Throughout the 1930s the Cancer Conferences had urged the Commonwealth Health Department to conduct a detailed statistical investigation of cancer mortality and morbidity, involving the collection and publication of accurate statistical data.26 In the late 1940s, Dr HO
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Lancaster, lecturer in vital statistics at Sydney’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, embarked on a general review of Australian mortality. Within this ambitious project, which lasted for more than a decade, Lancaster published six substantial papers in the Medical Journal of Australia on different aspects of cancer mortality. Like Carver, he stressed the importance of using agespecific death rates which took into account changes in the age distribution of the population, instead of crude rates which were of ‘small scientific value’. Lancaster’s work finally set aside Dr Holmes’ 1926 gloomy conclusion that there was in fact ‘a real and serious’ increase in the cancer death rates, which was mistakenly based on crude rates.27 Lancaster’s research was broader and more systematic than that of Carver or Day. It was based on official publications for all Australian states across a longer period and its conclusions were more widely disseminated. Lancaster found ‘no certain rise’ in the overall mortality rates from all forms of cancer since 1908, and a decline in mortality at ages 35 to 54. Cancer was an important cause of death at all ages, except in childhood, and particularly at ages 35 to 74 years. At the rates of cancer mortality in the 1930s about 11.8 per cent of males and 12.8 per cent of females would finally die of cancer. But cancer was predominantly a disease of later life and age-specific death rates for cancer continued to rise very rapidly throughout life.28 Lancaster developed his research further with two articles in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1951 and 1952 on sex-specific mortality. In females, cancers of the breast and ovaries constituted a substantial proportion of the entire cancer mortality, especially under 45 years, and were both increasing in frequency as a cause of death. He concluded that any breast showing the slightest evidence of malignancy should be removed. Among males the mortality from prostate cancer was substantial at higher ages, while the other peculiarly male cancers occurred much less often.29 In 1955 Lancaster examined cancer mortality for the period 1946 to 1950, when the only important
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rise was in lung cancer, where death rates had steadily risen throughout life, especially in males. Lancaster predicted ‘great increases in lung cancer in the near future’.30 Lancaster’s statistical work in the 1950s made an inestimable contribution to Australia’s war against cancer. It allowed the fears of earlier years about ever-rising cancer death rates to be properly assessed and placed in perspective. It also marked a turning-point in the fundamental approach of the cancer campaign. Up to the 1950s medical science and the community had tended to focus in an inchoate manner on a war against a monolithic enemy. Lancaster’s meticulous research demonstrated trends in mortality showing which types of cancer were most threatening and enabled specific targets to be set for research and preventive medicine. Thus prostate cancer for men and breast cancer for women were two main targets for the future, but the top priority – as the worst killer – was lung cancer. The statistical work of the 1950s also demonstrated that cancer took different forms in many parts of the body, so that the blanket classification of ‘cancer’ was unhelpful. Cancer comprised numerous diseases which varied widely in behaviour and response to treatment. Medical science, public policy and national action would have to consider malignant neoplasms as a group of causes of death and use differing methods of diagnosis, treatment and public education for each. The recognition that cancer was a multifactorial disease also ended the dream that a wonder drug like penicillin would provide a miracle cure. The primary target in the cancer war from the 1960s was lung cancer, but breast cancer – the major cause of women’s deaths – also received attention. Breast cancer and lung cancer illustrate vividly how individual cancers differ markedly in behaviour and response to treatment. The medical profession had a greater practical role to play in the treatment of breast cancer than lung cancer. Early diagnosis and early treatment were more effective with breast cancer, where survival rates after early detection were
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higher than for lung cancer. Research in the 1970s concluded that regular breast screening by mammography (soft tissue radiography) and clinical examination could reduce mortality significantly over seven years. Mammography could reveal very small lesions which had a better prognosis than larger ones. And though mammography had a tiny false positive rate and was too expensive to adopt for the entire population, screening of selected higher-risk patients was found to be valuable.31 Some hope was therefore offered in the fight against breast cancer by progress in radiation therapy, chemotherapy and improved surgical methods. By contrast, the fight against lung cancer in the second half of the twentieth century seemed to offer little hope. The Australian media from the 1950s shifted their focus from the war against cancer as a whole, to a primary emphasis on just lung cancer. The Sydney Sun-Herald in 1957 announced dramatically that ten people in New South Wales had died each week during the previous year from lung cancer and other smoking-related cancers, representing a 7 per cent leap in one year.32 Lancaster was accurate in his prediction of a large rise in lung cancer in the near future, but the size and pace of the increase must have exceeded his expectations. Annual mortality from lung cancer trebled between 1946 and 1963.33 And in the 20 years that followed, its incidence increased faster than that of all other cancers combined.34 From 1966 to 1996 male death rates from all cancers rose by about 10 per cent, but most of this increase was due to cancer of the lungs, which were by far the most common site.35 There was a marked gender difference in the incidence of lung cancer after 1945, explained partly by the fact that the smoking of cigarettes became common among men in the 1890s but not among women until the 1920s. Male death rates from lung cancer rose rapidly for about 20 years after 1945, and then more slowly; from the 1970s female rates began to increase significantly. By 1994, lung cancer still accounted for 25.3 per cent of male deaths, compared with prostate cancer at 13.7 per cent. In the same year
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lung cancer killed 13.3 per cent of women, which was significant, even though still lower than breast cancer at 18.6 per cent and colorectal cancer at 14.9 per cent.36 British and American research had revealed in the 1960s that the major cause of lung cancer was smoking. The Royal College of Physicians in 1962 published an authoritative report documenting the causal relationship between smoking and ill-health. An official estimate in the United States in 1981 was that ‘80 per cent of all lung cancer would be prevented if people stopped smoking’.37 Changes in death rates from lung cancer after 1946 chiefly reflected shifts in consumption, in smoking habits and the tar content of cigarettes. Prevention of lung cancer by reduced cigarette smoking has long been recognised as more important than medical treatment in reducing death rates.38 Lung cancer was especially frustrating for the medical profession because early diagnosis was difficult and cure was possible only by major surgery in early cases. In the 1960s, only 5 per cent of patients in the United Kingdom and United States with lung cancer lived for five years after diagnosis. A study of 100 lung cancer patients admitted to a surgical unit at Prince Henry Hospital, Sydney, in 1968, showed that 50 per cent were living after one year, but only 20 per cent after three years. Ninety-five per cent of these patients were men and most were aged between 55 and 70 years.39 A decade later a similar study was made of 211 patients with lung cancer at the thoracic unit of the Austin Hospital, Melbourne, including all patients diagnosed with lung cancer in 1974–75. Only 25 per cent of these 211 patients were fit for surgical treatment on admission, despite efforts at early diagnosis, but of these, lung resection was only possible in 28 patients. Three quarters of the total were inoperable because of old age, debility or the advanced stage of their disease. The researchers found their results most discouraging, since lung cancer frequency was increasing and intense efforts had led to ‘no major breakthrough in early diagnosis’.40
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These revelations evoked two types of responses. A medical seminar on the dangers of smoking prompted a letter from an anonymous physician to the Medical Journal of Australia in 1972 titled ‘How To Die’. He observed that ‘there are worse ways of dying than from lung cancer, which is less obstreperous than most malignant tumours and often has a fairly short and predictable course’. Among those deaths he considered more terrible were strokes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, or cancer of the bladder or bowel. Three elderly eminent physicians he knew well remained sociable and civilised almost to the end of their dying from lung cancer, which he considered ‘a merciful dispensation in many ways’. The writer believed the patient must choose whether the ‘remote’ risk of lung cancer outweighed the pleasure of smoking. The problem should be placed in perspective, since tobacco was less serious than either alcohol or gambling as a national threat. Such a permissive attitude, especially in a medical man, helps to explain the increasing incidence of lung cancer.41 A more positive medical response to the huge challenge of lung cancer came in a prize-winning essay in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1973 from Dr LW Osborne on ‘Smoking and Health’. The challenge was increased by 1972 statistics showing that Australian tobacco consumption per head of population had risen by 50 per cent over the previous 15 years, compared with an 8 per cent fall in Britain and the United States, which was presumed to be caused by anti-cancer campaigns. Osborne pointed out that the need for a public health campaign to reduce cigarette smoking had been thoroughly established by numerous studies. The mortality rate for lung cancer in Australia had risen from 4.1 per 100 000 in 1931 to 25.1 in 1969. It was believed that increased risk was directly related to greater cigarette consumption. Various studies indicated that the smoking habit was ‘socially contagious’, especially among susceptible young people, encouraged by the media and peer groups. For a decade, eminent scientific organisations had recommended programs to control smoking behaviour, and
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provided guidelines for a major public health campaign, including labelling of cigarette packets and legislative controls on cigarette promotion. Dr Osborne argued that the Australian government had failed in its responsibility to take effective action to limit smoking and protect the public from this modern epidemic. The major constraint was the government’s commitment to support the Australian Tobacco Board, which included a grant in 1972 of nearly one million dollars for tobacco research, and was reinforced by the government’s additional income in excise duty. The government permitted the perpetuation of the smoking habit because of self-interest in its considerable revenue from the tobacco industry.42 This situation slowly improved in the 1980s as the anti-smoking lobby, Action on Smoking and Health, funded largely by the National Heart Foundation and state anti-cancer councils, increased the pressure on the Federal government and the tobacco industry. The pessimism caused by the lung cancer statistics was reflected in a grim article by Helen-Anne and Gerard Manion in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1980, titled ‘Bone-Pointing: A Modern Entity’. They claimed that society’s pessimistic and fearful attitude to cancer negatively influenced the outcomes of the disease, operating rather like the tribal Aboriginal custom of bone-pointing – a ‘terrifying phenomenon’ whereby death could result without any obvious physical cause. The analogy in Western society operated because of the universal ‘fearful abhorrence of the disease’, which was unpredictable and left its victims helpless. ‘Malignant’ cancer was taken to mean ‘fatal’ cancer, and the cancer patient became a social pariah, marked for death and surrounded by a conspiracy of silence.43 It seemed that Australian responses to cancer had not improved much since the alarmist press reports of the early decades of the century. Such negative attitudes were reinforced by gloomy press coverage of individual cancer stories. The Sydney Morning Herald reported in January 1986 the case of Michael Vincent, aged 28,
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who had a serious case of bowel cancer which forced him to ‘endure the anguish of being a cancer sufferer’. Following a colostomy in 1984 he felt ‘extraordinarily alone’ because of people’s negative response, since cancer created an irrational fear, even though it was not contagious. His family and close friends would not talk about his cancer; the word ‘cancer’ was taboo. Those friends who did talk to him, asked him how many months remained. He was left to battle alone with his fear and pain and his effort to develop a positive attitude towards rebuilding his life. Instead of family and friends offering support and encouragement, he had to become the strong person: he attended the Cancer Care Centre at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, established in 1985, to learn more about cancer, ‘how to live a normal life’, and how to educate his family and friends to be positive.44 Mrs Sylvia Einstein had a similar lonely experience when she had a mastectomy for breast cancer in 1976: ‘it was such a dark area. Nobody came near me. There was no-one to ask’ about her fears of death, her ignorance of the disease, and her husband’s reaction. A decade later she participated in a program which trained her and other former patients to provide emotional support and information to other women undergoing breast surgery.45 This service was part of a New South Wales network to co-ordinate and train such volunteer visitors. There were some grounds for hope in the 1970s and 1980s, and even some evidence of the rethinking of priorities and strategies. One important new strategy was the development of palliative care, not just confined to free-standing hospices, but also adapted to hospital and home treatment and care (explored in chapter 12). Secondly, in the 1970s an international emphasis was placed on the creation of efficient comprehensive ‘cancer centres’ for cancer research and education, and also for multidisciplinary treatment and management. Cancer centres were recommended by the World Health Organisation in 1966, and by President Nixon in his appeal in 1971 for ‘the same kind of concentrated effort that
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split the atom and took man to the moon, to be turned towards conquering cancer’. Vast sums were spent on such cancer centres in the United States, notably at Houston and Buffalo, while similar centres were established in Manchester, London and Milan.46 Australian funding centred mainly on research for many years, but the Melbourne Cancer Institute followed the American cancer centre model, incorporating the Peter MacCallum Hospital and clinics. Since cancer comprises many complex diseases, nobody could be expert in all, and a multidisciplinary team of specialists in a large centralised facility was needed. A cancer centre could also draw on substantial numbers of cancer patients to provide statistical significance in clinical trials.47 Melbourne’s Cancer Institute developed from a radiotherapy base, as did most international cancer centres, since it was uneconomical, inefficient and ultimately impossible to provide such highly expensive facilities in every hospital. The Peter MacCallum Hospital of the Cancer Institute was opened in the late 1970s with 300 beds in a sympathetic atmosphere, and with a large outpatients section. Fifteen special cancer clinics provided consultative services in co-operative teams composed of surgeons, radiotherapists and physicians, who adopted a team management approach to the diagnosis and treatment of their particular area of cancer, such as breast or lung or melanoma. Each clinic used a combination of methods, including surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and immunotherapy.48
Kylie Tennant’s experience of cancer 1960–88 So far this chapter has examined the story of cancer from the perspectives of the medical profession, the press and public policy. I will now explore the experiences of Kylie Tennant and her husband from 1960 to 1988 to understand the impact of cancer on an individual family. There were many accounts of deathbed scenes in the nineteenth century which included detailed narratives
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of the process of dying from particular diseases, and for the last 20 years of the twentieth century many people who suffered from cancer published emotional narratives recounting their experiences, mostly in an heroic vein. But for the 50 years after the Great War such material was almost non-existent. Kylie’s is an inspiring and unusual story, especially because it was written during the years of public silence about cancer deaths. Most of the emphasis is on the 1970s, when her family provides rare archival evidence on personal experiences of cancer before the cultural shift of the 1980s had much impact. Kylie Tennant challenged the culture of death denial still prevalent in this period and affirmed the value of life despite recurrent tragedies. The metaphor of war applied to her battle against cancer. Kylie’s account is also revealing about medical treatment and attitudes to cancer in the years before palliative care became more effective and more widely available. As Kylie herself noted: ‘There’s an epidemic of it [cancer]. So many people have got the damned thing. It’s like TB in the nineteenth century.’49 Kylie Tennant (1912–88) was a significant author and journalist, who wrote about 20 books, including Battlers and Ride on Stranger – her best known novels. In 1932 she married Lewis C Rodd (‘Roddy’), a good writer and gifted school teacher, who supported her career in writing. They lived in several country towns before moving to Sydney, and finally to the peace of Cliff View Orchard in the Blue Mountains. Though she suffered more than most in her life, Kylie Tennant was sustained in remarkable ways. She was generous, positive and resilient by nature, and absolutely determined that ‘nobody should have occasion to pity me’, despite terrible misfortunes. Her grandmother and mother were devout Christian Scientists who encouraged their family to avoid doctors, unless the condition was extreme. As Kylie admitted: ‘I am thankful to Christian Science for a training in childhood that makes me ignore pain, often unwisely’. After her marriage she adopted her husband’s High Church Anglicanism: ‘I became a
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suburban Christian out of solidarity with the human race, thousands of years of it’. And though a somewhat unorthodox Anglican, her Christian faith was important to her, and strengthened her in response to family deaths. Commitment to writing further helped to reinforce her sense of purpose and value in life, despite the setbacks.50 The death of Kylie’s mother, Katherine Tennant, in 1960, aged only 68 years, was Kylie’s first serious encounter with terminal cancer. This introduced her also to the limitations of treatment and the lack of information available to patients and family. Kylie genuinely considered it a ‘great privilege’ to nurse her mother at
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home for 12 months while she was dying of breast cancer and secondary lung cancer. Katherine Tennant was a ‘radiant’ personality and Kylie’s two children loved to spend time at her bedside, recounting the events of their days. Kylie strongly believed that death should take place at home, and was saddened when the doctor insisted her mother must be moved to hospital at the end. The doctor reinforced the prevailing view in 1960 that hospital was the appropriate place for dying. Roddy subsequently recalled that his mother-in-law suffered terribly in hospital: ‘a most Christian person – clinging to her Christian Science to the end’. Roddy was so anxious about her extreme pain that, on the day before her death, he asked the nursing sister in charge to increase the morphine dose. The sister refused, constrained by the medical view that minimal doses of morphine should be given for fear of addiction, even when dying people were suffering badly. She was also afraid the doctor would guess immediately what she had done and condemn her.51 During the next two decades, Kylie Tennant had to cope with the illnesses and deaths of both husband and son. The murder of their beloved son, Bim, in 1978, was an appalling tragedy for both parents, followed in 1979 by Roddy’s death. At university Bim became addicted to drugs, ‘hearing curious voices and becoming harder to live with’. Eventually, after several suicide attempts and admissions to psychiatric hospitals, he was diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1978, Bim was pushed out of a window by drunken drug addicts. Kylie and Roddy saw their brain-damaged son in intensive care, following an unsuccessful operation, ‘enveloped in all kinds of tubes and bandages’. Kylie was relieved that he did not linger on in a vegetative state. Roddy and Kylie were unable to talk much about Bim, though both admitted privately that ‘he remains constantly in our thoughts’: they placed his ashes in a grotto outside their house. Later that year Kylie endured the painful ordeal of sitting through the eight-day trial of her son’s killers, when she was called as a witness.52
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Kylie’s husband, Roddy, to whom she was devoted, had always suffered poor health and a propensity to accidents, but managed to hold down a responsible teaching position for many years. However, like his son, he made several serious suicide attempts, and was also diagnosed as schizophrenic. In 1959 he threw himself under a train at Circular Quay. He lost an arm and a foot, but survived after several operations, to live on despite considerable pain. Kylie became the mother figure who lovingly nursed her demanding patient for the next 20 years.53 Rudolf Brunswick, Kylie’s friend, was justified in depicting her as ‘an uncrushable battler’, dealing indomitably with a terrible ‘bundle of tragedies compounded in one family’.54 Kylie remained determined that nobody should pity her: ‘Having two negatives in the family, I had to become more positive. Roddy had always made the decisions. Now I made them. I felt that I must be responsible for the sorry state of my family.’55 The intense trauma for both parents of Bim’s murder and the trial of his killers coincided with considerable deterioration in their own health: Kylie lost a breast to cancer in 1977 and Roddy had surgery for bladder cancer, one of the most painful forms of the disease. In 1979, the year of his death, Roddy’s diary contained numerous references to his pain, treatment, and his ‘trouble with plumbing’. Roddy asked: ‘Does anyone ever realize how completely self-sacrificing Kylie is?’56 Roddy’s condition grew much worse. In February 1979 he was obliged to spend seven weeks in hospital for treatment for a ‘shadow’ on his left lung and intense pain from bladder cancer. Kylie did not know how much time he had left, and her first priority was to make him as comfortable as possible at home, ‘to soothe him and make life gentle for him’. She held strong views on the value of dying at home and firmly opposed prolonging life in hospital when quality of life deteriorated, as had happened to her mother: ‘I do not think hospitals would do as much good as sitting in the sun’. So Kylie organised the household around Roddy’s care: ‘He doesn’t eat much and can’t speak above a whisper. However we will get him strong if we can.’57
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Despite the best of home care from his wife, Roddy had to return to the hospital less than three months later for treatment for his throat cancer, though the bladder cancer was no worse. The doctors requested that he stay in hospital for an extra week to try chemotherapy. Kylie was not hopeful of its value and seems to have taken Roddy home early because the treatment made him sick and he was already far too weak: ‘he’s really starving to death in that hospital’. Roddy observed that his experience of chemotherapy was ‘pretty ghastly though I was able to put on a good face to most people’.58 By 3 July 1979, Roddy was ‘still hanging on to life, much against his will I am sure’. Kylie admitted ‘he had a grim time of it’. She spooned liquid into the mouth of her dying husband who could barely swallow; and only she could interpret his words. She confided to a friend: ‘His great vitality wars against the foreign language of death. I hope for his sake that he is well out of this soon. People ring up asking after him but what can I tell them? Mortality is unavoidable.’59 Roddy died at the age of 73 on 29 July 1979. It would have been out of character for Kylie to write an account of his dying hours, even if she had the time, health and energy. Deathbed scenes required that ‘foreign language of death’ and would have seemed to her selfindulgent. Yet her Christian faith evidently offered some consolation: she noted: ‘I trust that Roddy is out of pain, and look forward to rejoining him when that is allowed to me’.60 Throughout the later years of her husband’s illness, Kylie Tennant was herself suffering from cancer – of the breast, like her mother. In 1977 she had her left breast removed at the age of 65, and one doctor thought she had also suffered a coronary attack – not surprising if so, as her heart had troubled her for some years. As for the cancer, Kylie noted in her autobiography: ‘There was no question of my having a recurrence of this blighting disease from which all my family die – and so many others in the population. I had too many responsibilities.’61 Indeed she did. The operation was considered successful so that she did not need radiation
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therapy. ‘Roddy had to get up and do all sorts of things and I think it did him good. He had less to worry about – or less time to worry in.’ Kylie later told a friend with breast cancer that ‘the enthusiasts who attacked mine ripped out a lot of my arm muscles which is a damned nuisance’, giving her much pain in her shoulder and arm.62 However, she soon returned to her normal busy routine, and 12 months after the operation the surgeon said there were no ‘nodules’ and discussed with Kylie the latest theory that cancer might be a virus.63 Kylie Tennant’s attitude to cancer was both fatalistic and realistic. In 1980 when she learned that her friend Mavis Cribb was also to have a mastectomy, she wrote: I can now use my left arm quite adequately where they ripped away a sizeable chunk of muscle. You adjust to this. As you know I gave myself three years before the cancer showed up again somewhere else because once you’ve got the damn thing you’ve always got it. Nevertheless I am speeding about being a pest to all in full force.64
Kylie had lost a mother and husband to cancer, as well as several friends and she believed she would almost certainly die from it. But in the meantime she intended to live life to the full. She had written to a friend from hospital in 1977, after her mastectomy, that she had much to be thankful for: ‘An operation at our age – major surgery – puts us in the ranks of those who now have time as a bonus payment. We know how to spend it, we can’t leave it in our wills.’65 Eighteen months later she expressed the hope that Mavis Cribb would have no recurrences of cancer, and added: ‘It is good we are reminded of our own evanescence. It induces tranquillity to contemplate the possibility of one’s demise.’66 By contrast, Kylie had little patience with her brother-in-law, George, who was dying from bladder cancer and was making a ‘great production’ out of it. In 1980, at the age of 72, George had three blood transfusions, whereas Kylie was certain that in the same terminal situation at the same age she would not have bothered:
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she interpreted interventions at that stage as unnecessary and meddlesome medicine.67 Kylie Tennant lived more than ten years after her original operation and devoted much thought in her final decade to the ageing process: ‘I suppose old age is the price you pay life for all it has given you when you were young and we must meet the bill with what acceptance we can’.68 She believed that Australian society ‘neither respects nor likes old people. It is youth centred’, and failed to recognise the value of the elderly, especially as ‘the living memory of a people’.69 Kylie missed Roddy deeply, but during his 15 years of illness she had learned to take over his responsibilities, and she had many loving friends. Freda McDonald was one such friend who wrote: ‘My old scarred mate will always be beautiful to me. You have made a lot of difference to my life since my darling Lance died. I would have coped but you brought me along wonderful new paths.’70 Yet Kylie had no wish to live until her nineties: ‘Fancy going on being old for all that time. It is not death that is the curse but mortality and the gradual slowing down of ability and capability.’71 By 1986 Kylie was feeling her age, as she confessed to her friends, the Brunswicks, ‘I have no sight in one eye, carcinomas, dicky heart and fluid in my chest. We all need friends to pray for us and I have been blessed with friends who seem to have – shall I say, influence? – with the supernatural. I can do with it.’72 Kylie died in February 1988 at the age of 76. Her death certificate attributed death to breast cancer of ten years and ‘metastatic carcinoma of breast 15 months’.73 She had noted that ‘the cancer cells have gnawed out my rib cage and the bets on how long I can last must be called in anytime’. She had been closely touched by death for the past ten years, yet she had succeeded in completing two books – a novel and her autobiography, The Missing Heir, published in 1986.74 It is no surprise that she died in a hospital, like the vast majority of the Australian population in 1988, despite her strong preference for death at home. It was often the
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lot of caring wives and daughters to nurse dying parents and husbands at home, only to find themselves alone when they survived their husbands and their turn came to die, leaving no option but an institution. But Kylie did not complain, nor did she use her writing talent to compose the story of her own battle with cancer. She had no use for emotional death narratives; she had always made light of her own illness, and left little information on her last days. Yet Kylie Tennant used her fame and her approaching death to bring public attention to three of society’s ‘great unmentionables’, to use the words of the Sydney Morning Herald – death, cancer and euthanasia. Over the previous ten years she had discussed death from cancer with a few friends who also suffered from it, but she was well aware of society’s taboo on death in general and cancer deaths in particular: ‘My friends flinch away from any discussion of death or cancer. These words never pass their lips until they are right up against the desperate social situation of the dying.’75 Her own experience of old age had also reinforced her belief that society was prejudiced against the elderly, and since cancer was primarily a disease of older people, cancer patients suffered a double discrimination. Kylie’s Christian Science background had always inclined her against medical and technological intervention in the natural course of disease. She once wrote to her family: ‘Once anyone was moved to hospital they were good for another six months what with oxygen and intravenous feeding. Doctors love keeping hopeless cases alive and you have to be pretty bad to die.’76 She was a strong critic of the medicalisation of dying. Her public appeal for the legalisation of euthanasia, composed on her deathbed, will be explored in the next chapter. ___ It is significant that a woman as intelligent and positive in outlook as Kylie Tennant should appeal in 1988 for legalised euthanasia for cancer patients with unrelieved suffering, rather than palliative
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care. It is tempting to think she might have made the opposite choice had she died in 2005, and we might consider this as we examine the options in the next two chapters. There are now numerous heroic cancer narratives written by courageous sufferers who strive to sustain hope and positive thinking. Yet cancer remains one of the two main causes of death, along with coronary heart disease. Michael Ashby, professor of palliative care at the Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, acknowledges that cancer and death are still powerfully linked in fact and in popular folklore: ‘The word “cancer” strikes fear into the hearts of people and a cancer diagnosis is widely regarded as a death sentence, despite advances in both detection and treatment’. Even such a staunch advocate of palliative care as Ashby accepts that cancer’s ‘sombre’ reputation is still justified.77
11 Euthanasia and the doctors
Over the last ten years much has been written about euthanasia which has generated controversy and some confusion. In 1995 the Northern Territory Parliament passed the Rights of the Terminally Ill Act, making active euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide legal options. As the editor of the Medical Journal of Australia wrote in February 1997, the debate ‘shifted abruptly from abstraction to reality’ and polarised opinions on medical decisions at the end of life. The deaths of three people under the Act were accompanied by ‘an outburst of variously composed Greek choruses’, including doctors, politicians, philosophers, lawyers and religious leaders. Intensely personal events were transformed into media circuses. The Euthanasia Laws Act in the Federal Parliament in 1997 overturned the Northern Territory legislation, and the debate has continued since then, with opponents polarised and entrenched. By 1997 surveys suggested that a majority in the community supported voluntary active euthanasia or doctorassisted suicide, while the majority of doctors were opposed.1 My aim here is not to tell the story of the debate since 1996, where the arguments are well known and the literature overwhelming; nor to explore in detail the legal, political, philosophical and religious perspectives of the subject.2 Rather it is to examine euthanasia’s historical development since the 1960s, with special
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attention to the medical profession. A historical perspective helps to clarify confusion by exploring the origins and broader context of the current situation and by opening up approaches which might suggest more constructive directions for the future. Moreover, a historical study shows that the meanings attributed to the term ‘euthanasia’ have changed over time. I deliberately distinguish between ‘passive euthanasia’ (the right to cease artificial medical treatment), and ‘active euthanasia’ (suicide or assisted suicide). Passive euthanasia merely formalised existing common law, and was quite different in nature from assisted suicide. Yet ‘passive euthanasia’ met with strong opposition in the 1970s and 1980s, and attempts at legislation proved controversial in South Australia and Victoria, and failed elsewhere. A huge cultural shift in popular attitudes to death and dying was needed to permit a serious public discussion about the far more radical ‘active euthanasia’.
This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.
‘Euthanasia with Death, 1997’ by John Spooner, 1946– . Watercolour cartoon: NLA PIC R11508, loc. 3806-3808
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‘Passive euthanasia’: Withdrawing artificial medical treatment from dying patients The euthanasia debate became more animated in the 1970s and 1980s for a number of reasons. These included the ageing of the population, a shift in the causes of mortality to the degenerative diseases of the elderly, and an increased concern for the rights of the terminally ill.3 But the issue gained urgency because of the medicalisation of death: there was growing public anxiety about the newly acquired medical ability to prolong the process of dying and to sustain existence when hope of recovery was lost. In 1975 a major public debate on passive euthanasia was triggered by an overseas case – the legal battle over the fate of Karen Ann Quinlan, aged 21, in the United States. Karen’s brain was irreversibly damaged in 1975 after taking alcohol and tranquillisers together. She remained in a coma for ten years in hospital in New Jersey, kept alive initially by a respirator and artificial feeding. Her adoptive parents had requested that the New Jersey Supreme Court allow the respirator to be disconnected so that she could die naturally with dignity. The appeal was successful, and the court left the decision to the hospital’s doctors and ethics committee. Karen was disconnected from the respirator in 1976, but remarkably she remained alive and doctors continued to supply her with food and antibiotics intravenously.4 She eventually died of pneumonia in 1985 at the age of 31, still in a coma. It was estimated that in American hospital wards in 1985 there were between 500 and 1000 similar cases, hopelessly comatose with no hope of recovery. Karen Quinlan only became a cause celebre because she lived so long after the respirator was removed. The Quinlan case in America stimulated a more muted debate in Australia, which introduced the perspectives of ethics and the law to a discussion hitherto dominated by medicine and religion. The Australian debate on the Quinlan case provided the public with more information about advances in medical technology and
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the practical ways in which doctors normally responded to its challenges. The situation in Australia differed from that in the United States, where the legal system was more concerned with individual rights and medical decisions could be influenced by threats of civil legal claims. Doctors in Australia agreed that such complex decisions were not a matter for the law courts. In 1975 The Australian and the Adelaide Advertiser interviewed directors of intensive care units in hospitals in Melbourne and Adelaide about their treatment of brain-dead patients. Dr Bernard Clarke from St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne, said that a patient with severe head injuries who had suffered permanent brain damage and required a respirator might be allowed to die.5 Dr JE Gilligan of the Royal Adelaide Hospital, was also prepared to withdraw a ventilator from a brain-dead patient, but he would not give a lethal drug dose with the prime aim of inducing death. All doctors interviewed made such a distinction between active and passive measures. Several noted that Karen Quinlan would probably have been allowed death with dignity in Australia, where nature might have been allowed to take its course.6 But, as we shall see later, Voluntary Euthanasia Societies were established in several states in the 1970s, advocating the legalisation of ‘active euthanasia’ to allow, for example, a terminal patient’s death to be deliberately induced by a massive dose of morphine. This increased the pressure on the supporters of ‘passive euthanasia’ to distinguish clearly between the two. Moreover, Justice Michael Kirby, chairman of the Law Reform Commission, publicly warned doctors in 1977 that they could be committing murder by turning off life-sustaining ventilators and might be prosecuted by relatives alleging medical negligence. In order to avoid such problems and provide clear guidance for doctors, Kirby believed the law should be changed.7 These combined pressures ultimately led to the first legislation regarding medical treatment of dying or brain-dead patients in South Australia in 1983 and in Victoria in 1988. The main thrust
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of both laws was to supply formal legal procedures for exercising existing common law rights. From today’s perspective it seems surprising that such limited legislation should have caused such controversy in two states in the 1980s. Even more remarkable was the profound cultural shift in community attitudes to death and dying which allowed genuine debate on doctor-assisted suicide only a decade later. A Select Committee of the South Australian Parliament recommended legislation in 1980 allowing ‘a person with a terminal illness to direct that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong life’. But medical witnesses feared the legislation might interfere with doctor-patient trust. When the proposed Natural Death Bill was debated in the Legislative Council, a joint letter from the three teaching hospitals in Adelaide stated that it was unnecessary and likely to create problems. They did not see how the legislation would improve on the existing good record of care of acute illness in intensive care units, which were subject to clinical audit, especially as patients already had the common law right to refuse treatment.8 The opposition from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) to a South Australian Bill so moderate by later standards was largely explained by their fear of legal and ethical intervention in complex clinical situations only fully understood by doctors. Their hostility did not prevent the ultimate passage of the Natural Death Act in 1983, which provided that a terminally ill adult of sound mind could direct in advance that the process of dying should not be artificially prolonged. Such directives (sometimes known as ‘living wills’) were to take effect when the patient was in the final phase of a terminal illness, or was incapable of making decisions concerning medical treatment. The Act also defined death as the irreversible cessation of all functions of the brain or circulation of the blood, to meet Justice Kirby’s concerns.9 The debate in Victoria met the same problems and challenges, but as its scope was broader, the obstacles and delays were greater.
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It took the Victorian Parliament five years to produce legislation which satisfied most lobby groups, because of the contentious medical, legal and ethical questions under debate. The process began in 1983 with a proposal before the state government to allow terminally ill patients the legal right to refuse artificial treatment. Catholic opposition followed anticipated lines. The Catholic archdiocese of Melbourne called for the Bill’s rejection, using the ‘slippery slope’ argument that it prepared the way for active euthanasia. Its submission reminded the community that the Nazi German extermination program embraced the disabled, the infirm and the insane as well as the Jews.10 As in South Australia, the chief opposition in Victoria came from members of the medical profession. Dr George Santoro, Victorian president of the AMA, stated that no legislation could design and implement a set of rules to cover every medical situation at the end of life. Poor legislation could cause great practical problems. Decisions were best made by experienced doctors and close relatives; sometimes a decision to allow a dignified death was better than ‘to meddlesomely prolong the act of dying’.11 The Victorian Bill lapsed in 1984 largely because most doctors resented the threat of government intervention and saw the legislation as superfluous. But the exercise prepared the way for a more successful parliamentary inquiry into an Options for Dying with Dignity Bill in 1986, which became the Medical Treatment Act. The new Victorian Select Committee skillfully navigated its way through ethical, legal and medical mine-fields. It even considered the fundamental moral question of active euthanasia, including doctor-assisted suicide. The committee’s report concluded that witnesses, experts and the community were utterly divided on the definition of a fundamental ‘right to die’ and that legislation to create such a right was ‘neither desirable nor practical’. The committee interpreted the 1400 submissions to reflect the community’s wish for the right to refuse extraordinary treatment and to reject doctor-assisted euthanasia. This vital decision against active
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euthanasia secured the co-operation of most doctors and church people.12 However, the committee believed there was considerable common ground on ‘the general goal of achieving an individual right to die peacefully with human dignity’. Its report concluded that competent patients continued to have the right to refuse extraordinary or burdensome treatment, even though this might prolong their lives. Essentially the committee clarified and protected the existing common law right to refuse unnecessary treatment. Further, they approved the so-called principle of ‘double-effect’, which was distinguished from doctor-assisted suicide: it was found to be morally acceptable for doctors to administer pain-killing medication with the primary intention of relieving pain, even though it might hasten the dying process. The committee also made a significant recommendation for additional funding for improved palliative care, recognising the need to change the emphasis of terminal treatment from hopes of cure to effective pain and symptom relief.13 (I will return to this in the next chapter.) The measure of the Victorian achievement was clear from the difficulties experienced in New South Wales and Western Australia over the next few years in their futile attempts to duplicate the Victorian Medical Treatment Act. In both states, proposed legislation met the same obstacles initially encountered in Victoria and South Australia, but failed to overcome them. In September 1996 The Australian stated that Australia’s laws relating to a patient’s right to die were ‘a legal minefield’.14 By that time the Australian Capital Territory had followed Victoria with a Medical Treatment Act of 1994, allowing patients the right to refuse treatment and permitting life support to be switched off. Several active euthanasia Bills had been defeated in both the Australian Capital Territory and South Australia, and it was clear that such a Bill would also be defeated in Victoria. It was all the more remarkable therefore, that active euthanasia
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and doctor-assisted suicide were legalised in the Northern Territory in May 1995, and that the first death under the new legislation took place four months later. In view of the stormy history of the far less radical legislation to refuse medical treatment, it is no surprise that the Northern Territory’s legislation for active euthanasia was overturned by the Federal Parliament. There is no doubt, however, that the debates about refusing treatment encouraged active euthanasia supporters to believe that such legislation could be extended to meet their own demands. The ‘slippery slope’ argument had some basis.
Voluntary active euthanasia and doctor-assisted suicide The active euthanasia campaign in Australia did not seriously begin until forty years after that in Britain. This delay has several explanations. Modern medicine developed more slowly in Australia in the nineteenth century, and the Australian medical profession for many years saw itself as subordinate to the British. Dr HC Colville of Melbourne observed in 1947 that Australian doctors would not initiate a move towards euthanasia without leadership from the British Medical Association.15 Moreover, Britain’s influential intelligentsia provided powerful leadership for the British Voluntary Euthanasia Society from its inception in 1935 as the world’s first. Finally, Catholics have been among the most committed long-term opponents of euthanasia in both countries, but they are more numerous and powerful in Australia, where they constituted about 22 per cent of the Australian population between 1901 and 1954.16 The British euthanasia campaign influenced the Australian story, so its origins have some significance. In 1936 Lord Ponsonby introduced a Bill into the House of Lords to legalise voluntary active euthanasia for patients with fatal and incurable illnesses involving severe pain. The Bill was rejected by 35 votes to 14, but supplied publicity for the newly established Voluntary
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Euthanasia Legislation Society, with George Bernard Shaw as vicepresident. The chief ammunition for the British campaign after 1936 was provided by the public admissions of prominent doctors that they had practised ‘mercy killing’ by ending the suffering of elderly people in great pain from incurable cancer. Under existing law they could have been convicted of murder. Dr Roche Lynch, a government analyst, declared in 1936 that British doctors already practised euthanasia; but he opposed legislation which would defeat its own aims by its elaborate requirements: ‘Is it not better to leave undisturbed a practice which has been carried on from time immemorial’. Many doctors since then have shared this sentiment.17 In 1947 Dr EA Barton of Kensington, aged 85, admitted sparing several dying people the agonies they dreaded; he knew other medical friends had done the same, though few doctors dared say so in public. In his view ‘voluntary euthanasia’ should be legalised so the great responsibility of ending life could be shared.18 There was little public debate on any form of active euthanasia in Australia before the 1970s. The Medical Journal of Australia in 1949 used the experience of Nazi Germany from the 1930s as a powerful statement of the ‘slippery slope’ argument against active euthanasia. (This case was also used time and again in later years by the Catholic Church and the Right to Life movement.) The aim of the lengthy editorial was explicitly ‘to show to what a low level medical skill can sink when once those possessing it have taken the first downward step’. The terrible war crimes of German doctors in the Second World War, it claimed, had their origins in the elimination of accepted standards of treatment in the 1930s, before the war began. The extermination of the physically, mentally and socially unfit was openly accepted among some German doctors in the 1930s.19 The opposition to active euthanasia in Australia in the two decades after the Second World War was powerful, since the model of the Nazi doctors acted as a grim deterrent. The Sydney
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Morning Herald observed in December 1949 that most churchmen and doctors in Australia were opposed to euthanasia in any form. Dr John Hunter, lecturer in medical ethics at Sydney University, offered the official medical view that ‘in no circumstances was it the duty of a doctor to put a patient out of his misery. A doctor’s duty is to preserve life and not to take it.’20 The leaders of the Catholic Church were equally uncompromising in their statements in 1947 that euthanasia was murder and that the Bible upheld the sanctity of human life.21 It was scarcely surprising that public advocates of active euthanasia in Australia before the 1970s were rare. These included Prof AK Stout, a Sydney University philosopher who advocated voluntary euthanasia for the terminally ill in 1951.22 They gained little support from an apathetic public and their efforts had the unintended consequence of better mobilising opposition from the doctors and churches. Considerable impetus was given to the euthanasia movement in Australia by the publicity surrounding another Bill presented to the British House of Lords in 1969. This introduced a new concept, later known as a ‘living will’ – a declaration signed in advance of anticipated illness, requesting euthanasia at a future time when incurable impairment forbade rational consent. This Bill was defeated by 61 votes to 40, a substantial advance on the vote in 1936. The British Voluntary Euthanasia Society interpreted the increased support as indicating a major change in public attitudes, and encouraged the creation of similar societies in Australia. In the early 1970s the cause of euthanasia was advanced by a few courageous individual doctors who spoke out about their own experiences. Most notable was Dr Myfanwy Beadnell, a retired physician who was secretary of the Victorian Humanist Society. The Melbourne Age in 1972 reported her as saying that she had allowed more than two hundred patients to die – including elderly people with incurable illnesses. Beadnell, who trained as a medical student in England, had stated that it was morally and medically
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wrong to prolong suffering uselessly: it was more common in England for doctors to increase the dosage of drugs in incurable cases until the patient died. By contrast, she thought Australian doctors rarely practised ‘euthanasia’ so defined: ‘they seem to be awfully afraid of the law … There is also a big Catholic element which is opposed to it.’ John Masterton, professor of surgery at Monash University, supported Dr Beadnell, admitting that he had also allowed incurably ill patients to die. He preferred the practice of euthanasia by individual doctors in ‘an unofficial, haphazard way’ to specific legalisation.23 Dr Beadnell and her supporters were rapidly made to realise why most doctors remained silent about euthanasia. The medical establishment condemned her actions and the Victorian Health minister demanded an inquiry which required Dr Beadnell to correct ‘misinterpretations’. She carefully explained in a letter to The Age a week after the initial article that she did not induce the death of terminal cancer patients by deliberate drug overdoses. Instead she administered the lowest amount of painkilling drugs needed to control pain, gradually increasing the dose as required, so the patient finally died of the disease and not from the drug. This was probably the first detailed public statement of the principle of double effect, but it was not officially approved in Victoria until 1986.24 The AMA tried to control the public damage by releasing a strong statement saying that it ‘condemned mercy killing as “the thinking of the Third Reich”’. It was not the province of the doctor, it said, to ‘play God’ by deciding when to end life. The deliberate administration of a drug at the patient’s request with the direct intention of causing death was euthanasia, which was murder.25 In 1974 the pressure for active voluntary euthanasia for adults was strengthened by the formation of voluntary euthanasia societies in Victoria and New South Wales, based on the English model. They placed their primary focus on the legalisation of ‘active’ voluntary euthanasia – they usually meant by this the
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direct inducement of a terminal patient’s death at his or her own request to end intolerable suffering, often by a sufficient dose of morphine. The title of their promotional pamphlet was ‘DEATH WITH DIGNITY – A RIGHT DENIED’, which focused on society’s inability to cope with death. It emphasised that medical progress had increased the burden of old age, subjecting people to resuscitative techniques which prolonged the ‘misery of half-life’. The leaflet claimed that the medical profession drew its ethics from society and used modern technology to fight death with ‘ferocious zeal’ in hospitals. The patient had no protection against overzealous doctors, ‘but he had a moral right to choose the manner of his own dying’. The two new voluntary euthanasia societies aimed to change Australian public opinion to permit legislation to allow painless death for people suffering severe pain or distress in terminal illness. They recognised that it would take years of dedicated effort to reach these goals and would require substantial help, especially from doctors and lawyers out of step with the views of their associations.26 The Voluntary Euthanasia Society of Victoria was founded in 1974 by retired clerical workers Tim and Beryl Saclier. Though the Sacliers had not been prompted by personal trauma, many other members joined because of distress at witnessing the prolonged suffering of a loved one. More than 500 members enlisted in the first three years, including three doctors.27 Jenny and Ian Parramore established the New South Wales Voluntary Euthanasia Society, also in 1974. They were in their late sixties, and sought to help people suffering from diseases like cancer, who normally faced continual pain. They argued passionately that people should not be forced to attempt suicide, alone and desperate. The Parramores stated bluntly that their chief aims were legalising suicide and assisted suicide, since they believed strongly that terminal patients should be allowed to shorten their lives if they wished.28 The New South Wales Voluntary Euthanasia Society called itself the Australian Society and attracted members from
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other states. In 1986 a national secretariat was established to coordinate the 3500 members from the various existing societies throughout Australia. The national body helped to standardise the promotion of its cause throughout Australia and to facilitate lobbying at a federal level.29 The societies also offered ‘living wills’ free of charge, requesting that life-sustaining procedures not be used if the writer became incurably ill.
The public campaign for active euthanasia: Rodney Syme and Kylie Tennant The leaders of the voluntary euthanasia societies were remarkable publicists, who were aided in their campaign after 1974 by several developments. As Jenny Parramore noted wryly, the New South Wales Society gained excellent publicity because the media was avid for stories about mercy killing and illegal death.30 Moreover, the Karen Quinlan case in the United States in 1976 focused public attention on the issue of prolonging life artificially and revived the passive euthanasia debate. The Australian societies also had the support of the English Voluntary Euthanasia Society and the World Federation of the Right to Die Societies. As president of the latter, Jean Davies travelled the world in 1990 preaching her message and seeking greater public support. Opinion polls were taken in England, Canada, the United States and Europe, demonstrating the increase in support, while the Netherlands was ‘the society’s showcase’.31 The most effective lobbying technique of the voluntary euthanasia societies was the media publicity given to numerous individual stories of heart-rending suffering. Jean Wilson told in 1990 of her parents’ prolonged and painful deaths as they suffered slowly in a ‘cruel manner’.32 Tim Saclier, president of the Victorian society, began an interview with The Age in 1976 with a tragic story of a lonely old man aged 94 in Melbourne who slowly became blind and deaf, and was terrified of ending his life as a vegetable in an institution. After his wife died he failed in an
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attempted suicide with an overdose of drugs. Tim Saclier wanted to change the law to give medical assistance to ensure that this old man, and others like him, were able to end their suffering when they chose.33 Other such painful stories now appeared in leading newspapers, tugging at the heart-strings of potential supporters of the cause. Voluntary active euthanasia gained the support in the 1980s of some prominent and influential individual advocates, including Dr Rodney Syme and Kylie Tennant, whose stories are illuminating. Syme was a distinguished urological surgeon at the Austin Hospital in Melbourne, who became publicly involved in the voluntary euthanasia debate from 1987. In an essay published in 1994 he provided an eloquent account of his personal medical journey ‘from innocent to advocate’. Syme’s father and grandfather were prominent surgeons, and though he attended an Anglican school he was never ‘particularly religious’. His medical training in the 1950s dealt with ‘the facts’, leaving little time for discussion of issues of controversy or uncertainty, while only one lecture was devoted to medical ethics. In 1959 Syme entered a paternalistic medical world, where doctors knew best and did not seriously discuss treatment options with patients. The concept of euthanasia was never mentioned for years, but he came slowly to an understanding through certain ‘seminal’ personal experiences: ‘I was seeing patients who really were in desperate straits and in terrible suffering which was literally not possible to do anything effective about, and I knew as a doctor that if I were in their position, I’d opt out’.34 Two cases had the most powerful impact on Dr Rodney Syme. In 1972 he treated a 52-year old woman with kidney cancer which recurred in her spine causing constant excruciating pain which was extremely difficult to treat. ‘She was an example of those fortunately rare cases where relief from extreme pain can only come through death.’ Nurses were reluctant to give the large doses of opiate analgesics he ordered, in case they might be charged with
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hastening her death. The patient’s ‘agony was extreme’, leaving him on his daily visits with a ‘sense of helplessness, impotence, shame and guilt’. His own anguish ‘acted as an enormous block to developing a dialogue’. He felt helpless because the law in 1972 prevented him assisting, and shame because society obliged human beings to suffer intolerable pain which they would not allow in dogs. Two years later Syme formed a friendship with a 75-year old widower with inoperable bladder cancer who suffered agonising intermittent pain. After six months of extreme distress, the patient asked if Syme could do anything more. ‘On the spur of the moment, but urged on, no doubt by cumulative experience, I recognised his cri de coeur.’ Syme offered the old man a prescription for sedatives which he took that afternoon at home, but the dose and the drug were inadequate, and his daughter found him still alive. In hospital he was resuscitated but mercifully died of pneumonia five days later. Syme had to lie to the police about the reason for his prescription to avoid the risk of 14 years in prison for abetting suicide.35 Like other doctors, Syme learned by making mistakes. Before 1972 he had never thought about the dose of medication required for effective suicide and his first attempt ‘was far from an ideal act of medically assisted dying’. Syme’s sudden recognition of his patient’s appeal for help led him to see that ‘when a cruel law punishes innocent patients, there is to me no other option’. From 1972 he therefore devoted considerable time and effort to the promotion of effective doctor-assisted suicide: By 1976 I had arrived at the position that the patient’s autonomy, provided he or she is rational, is paramount regarding decisions of ending life in the face of extreme suffering … [My] experience told me that there was unrelieved suffering despite the best palliative care, that there were patients of sound mind who wished to voluntarily end their lives to relieve that suffering, that quality of life can be more important in terminal illness than quantity of life.
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Syme showed conviction and courage in publicly advocating doctor-assisted suicide after 1976, particularly since it was illegal and was opposed by a majority of his colleagues. He subsequently accepted that there had been remarkable advances in palliative care ‘but [they] cannot deal with all the problems of dying people’. Syme believed that the law should allow doctors to assist rational suffering patients with terminal disease with advice, information and through the prescription of appropriate drugs. In his view it was necessary to have an open system with some legal guidelines; assisting suicide remained a criminal offence in Victoria, and it was difficult for the lay person to commit suicide in an efficient, painless and reliable manner. But under existing law no dialogue was legally possible between doctor and patient on assisted suicide which would relieve fear of the dying process, so the patient could retain control of his own death.36 Kylie Tennant made her deathbed appeal to legalise active euthanasia in the Sydney Morning Herald in February 1988, asking her friends to fight for the right of the frail aged and terminally ill to choose their own time and manner of death.37 Kylie and her novels were well known and loved, and her public appeal touched a chord with many, especially as it came at a crucial stage in the community debate. It took enormous courage and commitment for Kylie to enter the fray in the last few weeks of her own struggle with cancer. On 6 February 1988 the Sydney Morning Herald published her ‘Last letter to a friend’, which issued a powerful challenge for Australian people to change their attitude and end the ‘decades of evasion, looking the other way’: If I were stronger I would be filling notebooks with statistics, facts, collections and scraps of research on the desperate social problem of the aged and terminally ill and the way our stupid laws keep such people alive and put compassion of doctors, nurses and helpers within the realm of criminal prosecution should any attempt be made to shorten the agony of sufferers … We recoil from the alarming unknown, but Death needs only a legal bridle
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and halter. Collect, advise, find out, keep a record of material for social change in this one area … Do what you can with all honour to help change the social attitude to the terminally ill tucked away in a home for Lost Pills and left to endure to their end.38
Kylie Tennant died three weeks later, but that left enough time for a stormy debate. Her letter raised a passionate response on both sides of the case, in the press and in personal letters to Kylie in her northern suburbs hospital. Her friend Hans, a composer from the Blue Mountains, congratulated her on getting the message out so powerfully. He also left a cassette for her at the hospital, recording his own experiences when he was seriously ill with cancer.39 Barbara Mummery, president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society of New South Wales, wrote to Kylie expressing admiration for her courageous appeal: ‘Your name, reputation, and talent with words will have brought the plight of the aged and ill who wish to die with dignity to a wider audience’.40 The most moving personal letter to Kylie was from Lorraine Vines of Rose Bay, whose husband had died of cancer at the age of 65 in a hospice on Christmas Day 1986. Before his hospice admission she had nursed her husband at home for months and was then responsible for administering his regular morphine doses: My daughter and my daughter-in-law (a doctor) discussed the possibility of hastening the end of the slow, grinding disintegration. I replied that the moment he asked for release I would help him. He never asked, nor did I raise the subject. Perhaps because he himself was a doctor there was some unconscious barrier – or perhaps, despite his medical knowledge, he clung to life because he had loved it so. At 60 when he learned he had cancer he bought a sail board and joined a group of young friends on the harbour … I think my failure to help my husband still haunts me. Holding his hands was so futile. 41
Several others wrote to the Sydney Morning Herald thanking Kylie Tennant for her inspiration, especially when most people would not face up to the issue. Margaret McDonald of Dubbo
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told the story of the eight years of suffering of her severely braindamaged little boy, with his wasted body deformed from spasticity and drugs. He was kept alive by ‘hundreds of thousands of dollars, all modern medicine could offer’. Fear of the law alone restrained her from ending his life out of deep motherly love, so she joined Kylie’s appeal for ‘compassion to those in need of death’.42 Only a minority of respondents to Kylie’s letter were opposed. The Right to Life Association and various Christian groups charged that advocates of euthanasia were totally selfish in expecting doctors to take their lives. And a group of Christians in the Blue Mountains (where Kylie lived for many years) stated that euthanasia was a violation of human rights to life in consigning vulnerable and frail old people to the ‘human scrap heap’.43 Opposition also came from an entirely different interest group led by Dr Brian Pollard, president of the Palliative Care Association. He argued that modern methods of palliative care provided comfort to terminal patients, ‘removing every component of suffering in order to make the lot of the dying patient as easy as possible’. Attention to inadequate medical standards which unfortunately existed would solve the problem of euthanasia. He considered Kylie Tennant ‘a giant as a person’, but he warned of the dangers of being swept away by the emotional context of the topic.44 To understand the significance of Kylie Tennant’s dying challenge on euthanasia, it must be placed in the broader context of the euthanasia campaign in Australia and the emotional debate which increasingly attended it. Kylie Tennant endorsed the campaign with the authority of her reputation. Such publicity may have increased the numbers of individual sufferers who joined the voluntary euthanasia societies seeking practical advice. Hazel Rose Jones was one such who joined the New South Wales society three years before her death in 1989 at the age of 49 years. A widow with three children, Hazel was a news librarian at Fairfax
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from 1964 to 1981, and indexed the Sydney Morning Herald. She was also an inveterate campaigner for social justice and a leading activist in the anti-Apartheid movement in Australia. Her many files in the Mitchell Library in Sydney include one pathetic but revealing file on the New South Wales Voluntary Euthanasia Society, which contained the society’s newsletters from 1987 to 1989. These included sad case studies of individuals who wanted to die, and an article on ‘Planning your own funeral’. Also in the file was Hazel Rose Jones’ own advance declaration that she did not wish to be kept alive by artificial means, and her request for drugs to keep her free from pain, even if the moment of death was hastened. There was also a printed page of information on how to ensure this memorandum was sent to the appropriate people. Most chilling was one page of handwritten notes on how to kill oneself, noting the precise dose of mogadon required, together with a paragraph on the use of plastic bags.45 A campaign dedicated to changing the law also needed the support and active involvement of lawyers. A crucial development in 1984 was another intervention by Justice Michael Kirby, chairman of the Law Reform Commission. In a speech to the Royal Australasian College of Physicians in Adelaide, he stated that voluntary active euthanasia for the seriously ill, incapacitated and dying was ‘not a notion of a few disturbed cranks’. He warned that the law needed clarifying because of the increasing number of cases coming before the courts involving terminally ill old people. Kirby explained that the law tended to protect human life as an absolute value; it ‘recoiled from condoning third-party assistance to the termination of life’ because of the danger that the patient’s decision might be influenced by others. He observed that individual cases had recently come before English and North American courts where aged terminal patients in agonising pain sought medical assistance in a quick painless death. Justice Kirby underlined the need for clear guidelines to protect medical staff who assisted competent terminally ill patients to commit suicide.46
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A lenient legal sentence in Adelaide in 1987 suggested that cultural attitudes to mercy killing were changing. James Crichton Johnstone, aged 62, killed his wife Margaret, a manic depressive with Alzheimer’s disease who had tried to commit suicide three times in 25 years of suffering. Justice Bollen handed down a lifesentence with a remarkable non-parole period of ten days, arguing that Johnstone murdered his wife out of love, not hatred or desire to be rid of a burden. David Brown, a lawyer at the University of New South Wales, believed the Johnstone case would increase public pressure to create more lenient provisions under law for such cases. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society of New South Wales welcomed the Johnstone verdict as a turning-point in its campaign. By contrast, the Right to Life Association portrayed it as the slippery slope to ‘large-scale massacre of the aged and infirm’.47 On this point both sides were wrong. The law remained opposed to active euthanasia and assisted suicide, as shown by their rejection by the Victorian Parliament in 1988. In all states, anyone aiding, assisting or inciting suicide was liable to ten years in prison. Brian Bartley, president of the Medico-Legal Society of Queensland, observed in 1996 that it remained an offence to hasten the death of another person, either by administering or providing a patient with a legal drug enabling the patient to commit suicide. He believed the law was unlikely to change, ‘largely out of judicial concern that once active euthanasia is permitted in such circumstances, it would be impossible to confine its practice within strict limits’.48 The active euthanasia cause was also strengthened after 1980 by the support of the new Monash University Centre for Bioethics, led by Prof Peter Singer and Dr Helga Kuhse. They contributed philosophical and ethical ideas on social aspects of medicine, supported by the latest research in bioethics. At the heart of their case on active euthanasia was the argument that ‘morally there may not be a difference between active and passive euthanasia’, or
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between ‘killing and letting die’, since both led to death. For Kuhse and Singer, the moral principle of individual autonomy and ‘bodily self-determination’ meant that competent patients should be allowed to die or be assisted in dying when ‘life in a distressing or seriously debilitating condition is no longer worthwhile’. They argued that advanced medical technology raised new moral issues about life and death, since it could now prolong life in the terminal phase: society must decide which such lives should be sustained and which should not.49 In 1986, however, the Victorian inquiry into ‘Options for Dying with Dignity’ rejected Kuhse’s submission for legalisation of active euthanasia, instead recommending improved palliative care. In 1987 Kuhse and Singer published in the Medical Journal of Australia the results of a survey of 2000 Victorian doctors, which they claimed showed that doctors’ support for active euthanasia was increasing: ‘The survey indicates that a clear majority of those who responded to the questionnaire support active voluntary euthanasia and that many doctors have provided active help in dying’. They stated that 107 out of 369 doctors (29 per cent) admitted to taking active steps to bring about the death of a patient who requested this. But many doctors wrote letters to the editor protesting about the survey’s conclusions on several grounds. The response rate to the questionnaire was only 46 per cent, and the authors had not considered the possibility of substantial bias on the part of those doctors who participated. Critical doctors charged that the results had been misinterpreted and misused: less than 12 per cent of doctors who responded had taken active steps to bring about death, not one-third as claimed. The survey was also allegedly flawed because the authors failed to distinguish what they actually meant by active and passive euthanasia: many doctors undoubtedly took these ‘active steps’ within the principle of ‘double effect’ – so their intention was to alleviate suffering and not to kill.50 But it has to be said that it took the AMA itself many years to appreciate this distinction.
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Brian J Pollard, a former specialist in palliative care at the Concord Repatriation Hospital, offered the most detailed and powerful response to Kuhse and Singer in two substantial articles in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1988. He emphasised that confusion resulted when the term ‘a right to die’ was also used to mean ‘a right to be killed’, since these were entirely different concepts. All attempts to change the law on active euthanasia had failed because no modification was possible which still safeguarded the rights of all parties. ‘Mercy killing’ was still legally regarded as murder, and had been rejected in both Victoria and South Australia. It was tacitly understood by those who proposed to legalise active euthanasia that doctors would perform it, perhaps because they had ‘the most certain means at their disposal’. But if doctors became legally approved killers, then dying people would lose the security, confidence and trust necessary for good medical care, especially amongst the elderly, the disabled, the poor and the vulnerable. The challenge for doctors was to eliminate the need and demand for mercy killing by the general adoption of modern palliative care, giving the best possible standard of care to all in need.51 The majority of doctors were strongly opposed to medically assisted suicide, even in the 1990s. In particular, the concept of one of them administering a lethal dose remained repugnant to many doctors, and aroused fear that its logical extreme extension was what some Nazi doctors had done. Along that path lay the possibility that frail old people in nursing homes and geriatric wards of hospitals, without the financial means or influence to obtain the best domiciliary or hospice care, might become victims of a system which permitted doctors to kill patients. There was a danger that support for individual autonomy in dying largely favoured people with means and influence, at the expense of the poor, the less educated, the senile and the severely handicapped. Moreover, euthanasia was cheaper than palliative care. (It is significant that the Dutch support for active euthanasia appeared
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to have reduced funding and support for palliative care in the Netherlands.) There was an unfortunate polarisation between doctors who looked to palliative care to assist the dying and those who turned to active euthanasia. This was indicated by the hostile response from several doctors, especially specialists in palliative care, to Rodney Syme’s statement of his case for active euthanasia in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1991.52 ___ Ian Maddocks, professor of Palliative Care at Flinders University, observes that euthanasia and palliative care are two sides of the same coin: they each aspire to the ‘good death’, but they have different approaches. They both seek compassionate death with dignity and see intensive treatment as burdensome in the face of inevitable death, but the philosophical basis of euthanasia is humanist and individualist and that of palliative care is Christian and community-focused. Palliative care emphasises beneficence and allowing nature to take its course, while euthanasia focuses on individual autonomy and often on a quicker death. Maddocks comments that it is unhelpful to present palliative care and euthanasia as antagonistic. In the ‘tough situation of clinical practice’, ethical theory could be flimsy and both approaches held validity in the real world: ‘There are no “correct” responses to the demanding crisis situations met in caring for severely-ill and dying patients’.53 Moreover, many physicians, like Maddocks and Brian Pollard, hoped that more effective and extensive palliative care would reduce the demand for mercy killing, as we shall see in the next chapter.
12 Palliative care and the hospice movement
In 1993 journalist and author, Lisa Birnie, wrote the story of a Canadian woman, Sue Rodriguez, with terminal motor neurone disease, who committed suicide with a doctor’s assistance following a protracted legal battle. Birnie was obliged to confront the rights and wrongs of euthanasia, and to recognise that society’s debate about death had been focused for some years on the rights of the terminally ill to choose doctor-assisted suicide. She believed that many baby boomers were dedicated to the idea of individual autonomy and considered doctor-assisted suicide their right, as did Sue Rodriguez, who was indifferent to the consequences of her legal fight for the wider society. Birnie was vividly aware that the issue of euthanasia created tensions between the rights and the interests of the individual and those of society. Increasingly she came to fear that legalisation of euthanasia would mean that ‘some patient who wanted to live would, without his or her knowledge or consent, be put to death’. She believed it would be impossible to formulate a public policy on euthanasia that would not be ‘legally challenged into infinity’. Moreover, if euthanasia was legalised and widely practised, then further research into palliative care might be limited, as it was in the Netherlands.1 Yet Birnie fully understood why people like Sue Rodriguez with prolonged pain might seek doctor-assisted suicide, especially
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in the context of society’s ‘denial of death’. Birnie became writerin-residence at McCulloch House in Melbourne to explore alternative ways of dealing with terminal suffering. McCulloch House is a short-term palliative care centre for patients who are suffering terminal illness with complicated pain and other symptoms unmanageable at home. Most patients had suffered uncontrollable and prolonged pain which the hospice usually soon controlled. The hospice also aimed to offer each patient the best possible quality of life, preserving an atmosphere of peace and normality, and making life worth living in the final weeks. Birnie interviewed several palliative care nurses and doctors who contrasted terminal care at McCulloch House with institutionalised acute hospital care – many more acute hospital patients suffered moderate to severe pain, due to staff shortages, tight budgets, poor communication and under-treatment with morphine.2 Yvonne Linden, a registered nurse aged 50, was a patient dying of ovarian cancer, who asked Birnie to ‘tell the world’ about the achievement of McCulloch House: I’m a nurse and I didn’t know what palliative care really was, what could be done just so people could die peacefully. This continuous offering of treatment when we know there is no hope – it’s so wrong. This is what we’ve been taught in the medical profession, that technology is our saviour, that we should save people at all costs. It leads to hopeless interventions with people near death and only adds to their suffering.
Birnie was critical of acute hospitals where a culture of silence and secrecy left patients and relatives frightened of dying. In her view, ‘death’s just part of life. Why can’t we start looking it in the face and work at making dying better’, as McCulloch House did. Maria was a registered nurse working at McCulloch House who found palliative care most rewarding ‘because it’s the alternative to the technical approach medicine takes these days’. She had seen patients dying in acute general hospital wards, with four in a room and no privacy: ‘There’s no time to die slowly, peacefully, with all
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the beepers, the machines, the vacuum cleaners, the traffic. Everyone’s busy, and it’s a case of “Go ahead, die by yourself”.’3 Lisa Birnie concluded that hospices such as McCulloch House provide ‘a magnificent answer’ for most terminally ill people fortunate enough to become patients there. But she now recognised that even the best palliative care available in 1997 could not help about 5 to 8 per cent of patients with the worst cases of complicated pain. Palliative care was not the panacea for all the ills of dying and a small minority of deaths would continue to be terrible. It was fear of such deaths that created the demand for doctor-assisted suicide. Birnie believed euthanasia posed ‘the insoluble dilemma of the tension between the individual and the state, between compassion as a private individual act and compassion as a foundation for social policy’. What was good for Sue Rodriguez and other baby boomers concerned to exercise personal autonomy might not protect the lives of those with physical and mental handicaps, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and frail aged people. There were no easy or complete answers, but Birnie reached her own compromise solution: ‘Perhaps the challenge will be to withhold social and legal approval for euthanasia so that life isn’t cheapened, while at the same time allowing enough flexibility in law to recognise euthanasia as an ethically tolerable act in strictly circumscribed situations’.4 Birnie’s book was inspired by the commitment and philosophy of the director of McCulloch House, Michael Ashby. He believed passionately that every patient had a right to the best possible pain and symptom relief and that this was a primary part of the doctor’s duty. He was an expert on pain management who was determined to correct misconceptions held by doctors as well as patients about crucial aspects of palliative care. He persistently challenged the false premise that opioids such as morphine caused addiction in dying patients and that particular high doses would inevitably cause death. Some dying patients required very high doses of narcotics to control increasing pain, and they should be given as
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much as was needed. Ashby was convinced that good palliative care usually removed any need for euthanasia. He saw the euthanasia debate in the late 1990s as circular, divisive and distracting society from its chief task of ‘promoting the comfort, dignity and autonomy of people who are dying’.5 This chapter explores the origins and development of the hospice and palliative care movements in Australia, and their responses to the euthanasia challenge.
Origins of the hospice movement The modern hospice movement started in England in 1967 as an idealist reformist reaction against the medicalisation of dying. It developed out of dissatisfaction with the limited focus of modern medicine on cure rather than care, and its consequent neglect of dying people. The term ‘hospice’ was used by the founders to differentiate it from hospitals, and to stress the medieval origins in Christian charity as well as the development of Catholic hospices for the dying since the 1890s. In time, the concept of hospice care came to be seen as a philosophy rather than a location. It was extended beyond free-standing inpatient hospices to home-based terminal care and eventually to hospital-based palliative care. The terms ‘hospice’ and palliative care are now used interchangeably in Australia, though the latter is usually preferred. Dame Cecily Saunders, now widely recognised as the founder of the modern hospice movement, established St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham near London, in 1967, providing a charismatic advocacy for care of the dying. She offered a multidisciplinary approach which addressed symptoms rather than cure, and cared for the patient rather than the disease. St Christopher’s regarded dying as a normal process, but also affirmed life by helping patients to live as actively as possible until death. Palliative care also adopted a holistic view of a dying patient’s care which ‘integrates the psychological, physical, social, and spiritual aspects’, besides providing a support system for the bereaved family.6 These fundamental principles have always been accepted
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in Australian palliative care. However, the emphasis in Australia has been less on the free-standing in-patient hospice than in England, and more on a comprehensive system drawing also on palliative care in hospitals and homes. Ian Maddocks, professor of Palliative Care at Flinders University, Adelaide, believes the ‘remarkably popular response’ to the hospices for the dying amounts to a social movement: The fervor of the response [also] suggests that something with deeper spiritual meaning is occurring; a calm strength is appreciated in hospice care, which confronts death with a confidence which somehow has been missing in Western culture … The first hospice programmes touched the conscience of medicine and called up tremendous support from the health professions and from families and community groups who recognised a message which reaches both heart and head; inspiring and compelling, sensible and necessary.7
The model established in the United Kingdom spread to Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States. The hospice and palliative care movement was largely focused on the English-speaking world and northern Europe. While the modern hospice movement only dates from 1967, Australian nurses had been caring for the destitute aged and terminally ill since 1890 in Christian institutions such as those developed by the Sisters of Charity in Sydney and Melbourne.8 The Catholic Sisters of Charity founded Australia’s first non-sectarian hospice for the dying poor, the Sacred Heart Hospice at Darlinghurst, Sydney, in 1890. During 1905, 367 patients were admitted, of whom 192 died, half of them consumptives. By 1915 it was significant that the deaths from cancer rivalled those from tuberculosis – the twentieth century killer equalled that of the previous century.9 The Catholic Sisters of Charity also founded the Caritas Christi Hospice for the terminally ill in Melbourne during the depression in 1938. The hospice had 97 beds in 1976 when over 350 people died there, only half of them Catholics. The matron, Sister Mary
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Agatha, observed: ‘You don’t see the suffering that at one time was probably very real. Here we are stressing the dignity of the human person.’10 Such religious institutions surely had some claim to be regarded as the original pioneers of Australia’s hospice movement. The modern palliative care movement in Australia commenced very slowly in the early 1980s, with a series of criticisms of the existing level of medical care for the terminally ill. These charges were accompanied by a debate about the appropriate location for palliative care of the terminally ill, with advocates for each of the acute hospital, home care and the small independent in-patient hospice. Tensions developed particularly between the traditional in-patient hospices and the newer medical specialty of palliative care. Much of that early discussion focused on the perceived inadequacy of palliative care in acute hospital wards, where most terminally ill patients died. In 1983–84 several leading doctors condemned the ‘abysmal’ standard of terminal care in Australia. Gordon Coates, vice-president of the Palliative Care Association of New South Wales, considered it ‘incredible that terminally ill patients in Australia should suffer as a result of neglect, denial and sometimes clinical incompetence. Yet they do suffer.’11 Prof Brian Pollard, a palliative care specialist at the Concord Hospital in Sydney, criticised the ‘appalling backwardness’ of palliative care in Australia, especially when compared with the progress in the United Kingdom and the United States: ‘Any system of medical education which stresses science and technology at the expense of personal humanity, as ours largely does, is promoting a profound dislocation between patients’ needs and the doctor’s ability to fulfil those needs’. A 1982 survey at Concord Hospital of attitudes of doctors and nurses to the care of dying patients revealed low levels of quality care and widespread diffidence due to weakness in education and communication skills. These poor results were undoubtedly repeated at other large teaching hospitals.12
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In August 1984, Trevor Malden, registrar in oncology at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, Sydney, published the results of a study which provided empirical evidence to substantiate the charges of poor palliative care in acute hospitals. He and his associates examined factors influencing the place of death of nearly 2000 patients in the two medical oncology units at Royal Prince Alfred and Royal North Shore Hospitals during 1979–81. Their results reinforced international trends showing that increasing proportions of patients died in acute hospitals: only 15.4 per cent of patients died at home, while 73 per cent died in these large teaching hospitals. The authors observed: ‘there are numerous economic and social reasons why a busy acute hospital ward may not be a suitable place for the management of patients with terminal care’. Substantial data indicated that the competence and care of hospital clinicians for terminal patients was ‘not always adequate’.13 In July 1984, an important conference was held at the University of New South Wales on ‘Education for Care of the Dying’, hosted by the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medical Education. Its leaders included Brian Pollard, Gordon Coates and Mal McKissock, a bereavement counsellor. The conference noted the problems of an ageing population, a rising incidence of cancer, the paucity of education and the poor practice of palliative care. Their aim was to incorporate systematic highquality palliative care into the medical curriculum at all levels. It was agreed that ‘Many doctors find it emotionally difficult to deal effectively with severely ill or dying patients, and avoid or curtail contact with them’. Many terminal patients were suffering pain and other symptoms needlessly because palliative care was inadequate and because life was being prolonged by ineffective and expensive therapeutic measures. The conference suggested that a fundamental change in attitude and perspective was needed in terminal care from the cure of acute illness to the effective relief of pain and symptoms, combined with emotional, social and spiritual support and care. Sensitive and honest communication
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required that doctors and nurses be truthful with patients, providing gentle answers when appropriate, while not destroying hope entirely. The conference reached the significant and perhaps surprising conclusion that most education in palliative care should occur in acute hospitals, since most dying patients were located there.14
‘Who owns palliative care?’: Identity and diversity Though there was general consensus by 1984 about the need to improve palliative care, strong disagreement continued about the form it should take and whether it should be focused on in-patient hospices, acute hospitals or home care. Though progress in palliative care in Sydney and Melbourne was slow, uncertain and sporadic, considerable progress was made in Western Australia – which reflected regional diversity of needs, resources and demographic structure. Models appropriate for huge state capitals were not likely to be effective across widely scattered rural populations and rural towns, where developments were often initiated by dedicated community action, sometimes linked to existing hospices or community nursing services for the dying, often with a Christian inspiration. In 1979, as many as 35 per cent of all deaths from cancer in Western Australia took place outside hospitals, and patients were cared for by general practitioners and the district nursing service. Prof David Allbrook, deputy medical director, explained that the Western Australian Hospice Palliative Care Service (HPCS) was established in Perth in 1982 to provide a 24-hour medical, nursing and support service to much of the Perth area. Fifteen doctors, employed part-time, provided the clinical care, shared with the patient’s general practitioner, and the doctors held monthly case reviews combined with palliative care education. In close association with the doctors were the Silver Chain nursing sisters, who held weekly team meetings across five regional zones to review
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patient problems, aided by instant radio contact between nurses and patients.15 In 1983 and 1984, about 70 per cent of the HPCS patients died in their own homes with HPCS medical care and nursing, while most of the remaining 30 per cent died in the three small hospice units attached to a hospital. Very few died in the acute hospital which had originally referred them to the HPCS. These figures for home deaths were quite remarkable. Allbrook believed home was the ideal place for dying, but failing this, ‘a separate small scale building in pleasant surrounds adjacent to hospital facilities is ideal’. The hospice must provide human comfort and support as well as therapeutic palliation of symptoms and meticulous nursing care. The hospice doctor needed psychiatric skills as well as the capacity to lead a multi-disciplinary support team, and bereavement counselling should be available for the families.16 Western Australia, then, provided a progressive model of the future for palliative care, with an emphasis on community and home-care, linked with small hospice units attached to hospitals. By contrast, Victoria and New South Wales had initially continued the traditional separatist model of the small independent hospice unit, but increasingly they moved towards a multi-disciplinary hospitalbased system. Most hospices were private community institutions dependent on philanthropic support and bedevilled by lack of funds. There was also growing tension between hospices like Caritas Christi, staffed by nurses with a Christian perspective, and the modern concept of a multi-disciplinary medical model dominated by medical specialists. The tensions between the advocates of different models of palliative care also reflected different views of control. The independent free-standing hospice was traditionally controlled and staffed by female nurses, often with a Christian background and a belief that women should continue to exercise their historical role in care for the dying, and take considerable responsibility for decisionmaking. By contrast, a palliative care system controlled by large hospitals would be largely run by male specialists.
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The Melbourne City Mission Hospice in North Fitzroy was established in 1980 and funded jointly by the Kellogg Foundation and the Federal Government to work with about 30 dying patients at a time. The ten-bed inpatient hospice was linked with the home-care of another 20 patients, with the aim of helping them to die with dignity. Nurses could be contacted 24 hours a day, supported by general practitioners who should be properly trained in palliative care. Katherine Kingsbury, a community nurse who was briefly the nursing director, studied with Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in America and believed passionately that most people wanted to die at home and were afraid of death alone in hospital: ‘it is tragic to hand [them] into the bewildering, soul-shattering, disorienting, distressful situation of hospital admission to die’.17 Kingsbury’s strong views and idealisation of home deaths may have influenced her early dismissal in 1981, following differences with the medical director who sought a full multi-disciplinary medical team. Kingsbury and the three female staff who resigned with her feared this would undermine traditional hospice nursing.18 However, the Melbourne City Mission Hospice developed a multi-disciplinary team and went on to offer systematic palliative care for more than 800 cancer patients between 1980 and 1985, when it had a free-standing inpatient unit of ten beds, home-care for 25 patients at a time, and a 50bed nursing home.19 A widespread alternative system of independent in-patient hospices did not develop in Victoria and New South Wales in the 1980s due to the tensions observed above, to lack of resources, and the need for regional diversity. But the absence of a hospice network gave medical specialists working from major city hospitals in Victoria the opportunity to seize the initiative. Ross Webster of the Department of Community Medicine at Melbourne University published an article in the Medical Journal of Australia in December 1985 which argued a powerful case for an integrated system based on hospitals. He opposed the slowly growing but
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sporadic movement for independent hospices for the dying: ‘there is something unhealthy about any society which feels the need to divert dying patients to separate institutions’.20 Instead, Webster believed that regional palliative care units with medical directors should be established in all large hospitals, with a multi-disciplinary approach linking the hospital, an attached hospice and home care. He argued that hospitals should be adapted physically to the needs of the terminally ill: the hospice unit would be geographically distinct from the acute wards and would be a relaxed informal area. The proper treatment of the terminally ill could no longer remain outside mainstream medical funding, dependent on charitable support, especially as the population aged and as cancer rates in the elderly increased. Surveys showed that 90 per cent of terminal patients spent most of their final year at home. Home care for terminal patients was the preferred option for many and cost the least; medical care at home could be supervised by the general practitioner in liaison with the head of the hospital unit.21 Webster’s influential statement was reinforced by an emotional feature article, published in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1987, by a father and son both named Pierce Egan, condemning the hospice treatment of their mother and grandmother, aged 78. They had watched her dying from kidney cancer for two years, in and out of hospital for radiotherapy, supported by a caring family at home while she was mobile. She ‘fought to stay at home’, but had to spend her final two months in ‘a wellregarded hospice’ in inner Melbourne. Care and support in the hospice, however, was ‘lacklustre at its best and barely existent at its worst’. Despite many family visits, little evidence was revealed of the supposed ideals of palliative care. The Egans criticised weaknesses in symptom control, the negative attitudes of nursing staff to patient care, and lack of specialist knowledge in terminal care. The poor standard of palliative care was so bad that their grandmother repeatedly asked for euthanasia.22
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Palliative care responds to the euthanasia challenge This indictment of the independent in-patient hospices, in the press and the medical literature, marked the climax of the polarised debate in Victoria between the in-patient hospice and hospital palliative care. The former was depicted as separatist, religious and medically inadequate, while the latter was represented as a modern integrated system based in an efficient hospital. The challenge from the highly effective euthanasia campaign at this point marked the turning point in the history of modern palliative care. Both movements were driven by the same forces – an ageing population, a rising cancer death rate and a disillusionment with the medicalisation of dying – but they sought different solutions. Prof Brian Pollard appealed to the medical profession in 1988 to respond effectively to the challenge of the euthanasia campaign. Pollard reminded his readers of the strong evidence presented to the 1987 Victorian Inquiry into Options for Dying with Dignity on the serious deficiencies in medical treatment of the dying. The inquiry had rejected euthanasia as a solution, instead recommending the ‘implementation of the principles and practices of modern palliative care on a universal basis’, and allocating resources for the purpose. The medical profession must therefore acknowledge that higher standards of care were essential, and make the necessary changes before the pressure for doctors to kill dying people became irresistible. Medical education in palliative care must be vastly improved, and all doctors should review their attitudes and practices in care of the dying. Modern palliative care was the ‘best option for the elimination of most of the inadequate care of dying patients, on which the call for euthanasia largely rests’.23 Pollard’s appeal and the Victorian inquiry’s recommendation had the required effect, and from 1988 the debate took a more constructive turn. Advocates of hospitals and hospices began to explore ways to work more co-operatively. Frederick Gunz,
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consultant in oncology at the Royal North Shore Hospital in Sydney, called for flexibility in the development of palliative care and the need to adapt the design to varying local needs, conditions and finances. He noted that the choice of location for death varied greatly and not all dying patients wanted or were able to remain at home until their death. Some terminal cancer patients preferred home care and some a hospice, while others maintained an attachment to the acute hospital which first treated them. In both Sydney and South Australia, more than four times as many deaths took place in major acute hospitals than in hospices, though the proportion of hospice deaths increased somewhat in the 1980s. The low proportion of home deaths was probably explained by the common lack of community support systems. The Western Australian experience showed that the proportion of home deaths increased substantially with the creation of a good home-care system.24 In 1989, Paul Komesaroff examined data from the Royal Melbourne Hospital on 243 patients admitted to in-patient hospices and to home-care programs in 1985, showing how significantly the two sets of patients differed. Clearly the two programs served distinct populations and dealt with different sets of problems. Therefore the issue was not whether one was better or more cost-effective than the other, but that both were essential and must be maintained. The typical hospice patient was a single, older uninsured working-class man, whereas home-care patients were younger and more likely to have partners and insurance and to survive for longer. Nearly all in-patients died at the hospice, whereas only 45 per cent of home-care patients died at home – the majority being admitted to the hospice or to hospital just before death. The median age of both groups was 64 years, though more than half the hospice patients were over 70, and in both groups men predominated over women by a ratio of three to two.25 These conclusions were especially important in the light of an earlier study which showed that the Melbourne City Mission in-patient
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hospice program was far more expensive, at $184 per patient per day, than hospice home care, at $69 – though both were much cheaper than the teaching hospital wards, at $263.26 The point was also clearly made that hospices were held back by inadequate resources. Although it was Health Department policy in Victoria that acute hospital funding must provide good palliative care for terminal patients, by 1988 these services were still inadequate at the Austin Hospital in Heidelberg. A significant study by Roger Woodruff and Arlene Chan examined the treatment of 110 consecutive patients with terminal cancer from 1988 to 1989, concluding that one-third received inadequate pain relief due to lack of medical expertise in the use of analgesics, even though pain was the chief clinical problem; analgesics were administered only ‘as required’, presumably from a misguided fear of addiction, whereas they should be given at regular intervals to treat chronic cancer pain. Moreover, 75 per cent of the 110 patients died in the hospital, compared with only 6 per cent at home and 19 per cent in a hospice. Yet international studies showed that about one-third of terminal cancer patients should be able to die at home, granted adequate home support, which was available in Melbourne but under-utilised.27 This study produced immediate results. A plan of co-ordinated palliative care was put into action at the Austin Hospital Palliative Care Service, and the results were analysed for 241 terminally ill patients in the first year, mostly with cancer. Satisfactory pain control was achieved for all patients with the use of appropriate analgesics administered regularly, assisted by the multi-disciplinary team. The severity and prevalence of psychological and social problems surprised the staff, giving them greater understanding of the complexity and breadth of the palliative care needs of terminal patients and their families, and indicating that such issues had earlier often been ignored. Moreover, most patients went home for varying periods and the hospital developed effective relationships
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with several local palliative home-care services. Patients spent longer at home than previously, and 24 per cent were able to die at home, compared with only 6 per cent the previous year. The proportion who died in the hospital was reduced from 75 to 45 per cent, while deaths in a hospice were increased from 19 to 31 per cent. The multi-disciplinary approach was considered vital to the success of the program, with weekly patient management meetings attended by palliative care doctors and nurses, but also by the chaplain and staff from social work, occupational therapy, psychiatry, oncology and the Royal District Nursing Service.28 By 1991, the Austin Hospital had fully accepted the new service, which included the education of all staff in the hospital, not just the specialists. They were convinced that the new service had provided remarkable improvement in quality of care for terminal patients, as well as reduced stress for home carers, and greater ‘patient and family satisfaction’, including fewer bereavement problems. Perhaps most important was the improvement in medical symptom management, and the ability for more patients to spend considerable time at home. The only limitation to this success story came with the financial cost, since in-hospital care was significantly more expensive than home care.29 The Austin Hospital study was a landmark in palliative care history in Australia, since it showed that a multi-disciplinary model within a major teaching hospital could be made to work effectively within its first year. The hospital-based model could only function well with full co-operation with several local homecare services and with support from a hospice in the patients’ final weeks. And it required a huge amount of commitment and good will across a large teaching hospital, as well as substantial additional resources.
Palliative care in the spotlight At this crucial point two leaders of the palliative care movement published timely articles in the Medical Journal of Australia,
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applauding achievements, analysing changing perspectives, and pointing the way to consolidation in the 1990s. David Allbrook had by 1990 moved from his pioneer work in Western Australia to become director of Palliative Care Services at Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Newcastle. Allbrook’s two articles of 1990 and 1991 rejoiced that palliative care at last had a high profile in Australia, and that its facilities had rapidly expanded in the 1980s. There were 130 palliative care services by 1991, and at least 400 doctors involved in palliative medicine. Home-based palliative care had expanded in all states with the Medicare Incentive Packages distributed by the Federal Government in 1988 to fund innovative projects. Allbrook emphasised that nobody ‘owned’ palliative care, but everyone contributed co-operatively to achieve excellence through teamwork. He suggested that good clinically based education programmes in palliative care must be extended to all medical schools.30 In the 1990s palliative care became fully professionalised with the creation of university chairs at Flinders, Melbourne, Monash and Newcastle. Ian Maddocks, professor of Palliative Care at the Repatriation General Hospital at Daw Park, South Australia, became president of the newly formed Society of Palliative Medicine. His searching article on ‘Changing concepts of palliative care’ in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1990 was pivotal in proposing challenges for the next decade. It was a great achievement that palliative medicine had become a discipline in its own right, but so far it had concentrated on terminal cancer. Maddocks advised his colleagues to address other illnesses such as severe lung disease, AIDS and motor neurone disease. He was delighted that palliative care continued to evolve in diverse ways across the country, establishing effective networks to link care in hospitals, homes, nursing homes and hospices with community resources. Maddocks believed it was appropriate to base palliative care programmes within major hospitals. In purely practical terms the palliative care doctor must have an established position in a teach-
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ing hospital, where initial diagnoses and treatments for cancer took place and where the expertise of other specialties could be integrated into multi-disciplinary teams.31 In response to the parallel euthanasia debate, palliative care received unexpected publicity and support from the Commonwealth Government’s reversal in 1996 of the Northern Territory’s controversial Rights of the Terminally Ill Act. As The Australian newspaper observed in February 1997: Relatively little known and understood, palliative care has been thrown blinking into the public spotlight by the euthanasia debate. Despite current ignorance, demand for this service will grow markedly in the coming decades, driven largely by the ageing of the Australian population. The fact that the opinionated world-changing baby-boom generation will be the ones facing this prospect will put the adequacy of palliative care services in sharp focus.32
The ‘spotlight’ of the late 1990s also included valuable publicity on the inspirational contribution of the hospice unit at Mount Olivet Hospital in Brisbane, with a full-page article in The Australian in July 1996 titled ‘Quality of death’. The Australian claimed that ‘our society tends to turn away from death, preferring myth and tantalising fears to facts’. To counteract this trend, in the context of the euthanasia debate, The Australian proposed to explore ‘the reality of care for the dying patient – a world which usually remained off-limits, unreported’. Its reporter, Nicolas Rothwell, spent seven days with unrestricted access to the ‘extraordinary world’ of the Mount Olivet Hospice. He found a 28-bed hospice unit on the second floor of the Mount Olivet Hospital, close to Brisbane’s Story Bridge – a model of the modern hospice within a hospital. He learned that terminal cancer patients were increasingly choosing to stay in their homes as long as possible and to die among their families, assisted by home-care nurses and general practitioners. About 100 home-care patients were attached to Mount Olivet at any time, and about thirty of these died each month. Rothwell learned that good palliative care
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enabled dying patients to ‘transcend the most extraordinary physical suffering’. The staff were sensitive to patients’ needs and their desire to die with dignity, relative comfort and some control. The first aim of the staff was to keep their patients free of distressing symptoms, using massage, pleasant music and heat packs, as well as sedatives, analgesics and other drugs.33 Rothwell met a patient given the name ‘Jean Williams’, a woman in her late 40s, who explained that she found peace at Mount Olivet, despite bowel cancer: The love and care all the staff give you is about the whole person. They look after you emotionally, mentally. I had a lot of pain and they’ve controlled it. They helped me through a really bad stretch. Normal hospitals just don’t have the time – you’re coping with death, your family’s coping with death – but here they do it with such a loving heart you never feel you’re a burden … I’m a fatalist, I believe in fate and I think my time is now. I feel I’m going to have a peaceful death. I would never hasten it.
Williams had had a ‘wonderful’ life with a loving husband and three sons, and had come to terms with her impending death. Chemotherapy had extended her life by two splendid years, when she worked and enjoyed poetry and travel, but now she was content, completing a tapestry for her husband, watching the riverside and writing special letters to her friends and family.34 Despite its invaluable work, palliative care was still badly under-funded, illustrated by the financial crisis at Mount Olivet Hospice during Rothwell’s visit: ‘Dying patients were pleading to be admitted while one-third of the hospice was empty for lack of funds to pay for public beds’. Meanwhile Brisbane’s hospitals were full of terminal patients in expensive acute wards, cared for by staff with too little time or palliative care education.35 This unfortunate ‘classic resource misallocation’ between acute hospitals on the one hand and hospices and home care on the other, had still not been corrected in many areas, despite those valuable studies several years earlier. Consequently, many dying people
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were denied access to good palliative care and so ended their lives ‘in more pain and with less dignity than necessary’. Such problems were magnified in rural Australia by the late 1990s.36 __ Palliative care in Australia has made substantial advances since 1990, and is now increasingly seen by government policy-makers as the positive and ethical alternative to doctor-assisted suicide, which remains illegal. In over-ruling the Northern Territory euthanasia legislation, the Federal Parliament acknowledged its responsibility to devote more public money to palliative care. But in practice, palliative care still had to compete with acute care needs, including the high technological demands of anti-cancer treatment. Palliative care was inevitably the loser, especially because it was labour-intensive and therefore expensive. As it has become a more specialised discipline with major bases in city hospitals, its funding has improved in large cities, but remained relatively poor in rural areas. Late in the 1990s, Alan Kellehear was appointed as foundation professor of Palliative Care at La Trobe University – the first nonclinical appointment in the field. His book, Health-Promoting Palliative Care argues: These are troubling times for palliative care. Recognition of the importance of palliative care has peaked at a time when governments are attempting to reduce their health care budgets. Today, the desire of policy-makers and practitioners to embrace the holistic ideals of hospice and palliative care comes face-to-face with an ever-diminishing financial capacity to do so. Compromise is in the air. Increasingly, the precious few resources available are being allocated to physical care. Palliative care is frequently mistaken for terminal, end-stage care.
Kellehear believes that palliative care services are concentrating on clinical care in the final stages of death from cancer – reinforced by funding criteria and bureaucratic pressures. More attention is
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now needed to the social, psychological and spiritual dimensions of palliative care, to the earlier stages of terminal illness, and to other diseases. Kellehear argues that ‘health-promoting palliative care’ has much to offer. The whole community should be involved in education about the care and the needs of the dying, developing social support groups and raising public awareness. He suggests that the perspectives and input of the social sciences and public health are vital to broaden the vision and effectiveness of palliative care for the dying.37 These are indeed important challenges for the medical profession, the community and the government, if the progress of the 1990s is to be continued into the future. If these challenges can be met, then palliative care should resolve certain problems raised by the medicalisation of death. Nevertheless, palliative care has advanced far in the last two decades. Its rapid progress is a testimony to the increasing concern in the community since 1980 about death, dying and grieving, which in part reflects criticism of the medicalisation of death. It also exemplifies a cultural climate which has recently been changing from a prolonged denial of death to a greater acceptance of public discussion about dying and loss and open expression of sorrow. This second cultural shift is explored further in my final chapter.
Part IV The funeral business , cemeteries and cremation
13 The funeral business in Australia: ‘A racket in human sorrow’?
Until the 1960s Australians showed little interest in funeral directors unless a family death required their urgent services. They were held in poor esteem in the early twentieth century, and rarely received mention in the press except for ceremonial funerals and occasional complaints about high costs. However, undertakers quietly transformed themselves into funeral directors with a professional organisation and a journal in the years after the Great War. From the 1970s they were often in the news, charged with excessive prices and aggressive American-style business practices. The entire industry was transformed after 1980 by the extraordinary initiative of an ex-policeman from New Zealand who made his fortune out of budget funerals. The last thirty years of the century saw massive changes and several searching public enquiries. Undertakers played an important role in most urban funerals after 1850, and they closely followed British funeral practices. Many started out as builders, carpenters or joiners and added undertaking as a further line which was always in demand. Charles Kinsela established the first successful family business in New South Wales at Liverpool in 1830, and fifty years later was one of 30 firms in Sydney. Several leading Melbourne undertaking firms were created in the 1850s, with a broad and fairly economical range of prices and services. Ordinary funerals cost about £4 10s (about a
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labourer’s weekly wage) for the half-century from 1850, though costs increased for a higher-quality coffin and extra mourning coaches and horses. In general, competition was too keen for undertakers to charge too much; and it was significant that funeral rates altered little in a century.1 Many new firms were established in the late nineteenth century, making competition intense. The Victorian Master Undertakers Association was established for protection against cheaper new rivals in 1890, and in 1920 the trade fixed its minimum prices at £6 10s for a cheap ordinary funeral.
This image has been removed due to copyright restrictions.
Minerva hearse, 1926. Sam Hood Collection: SLNSW DG ON 4/3652
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Modernisation of the u n d e rt a k i n g t r a d e : 1 9 00 to 1950 Testimonies from two undertakers drawn from oral history collections reveal changes in the industry between the wars. Harold Greenup was in the funeral business in Bunbury, Western Australia, for 45 years, having left school at 14 in 1917 to work for a builder, carpenter and undertaker. His initial reluctance to help with funerals was overcome as he became accustomed to making caskets, usually of jarrah and always lined with calico. In 1917 the firm used six black horses for the ornate black hearse with its silver images and different emblems for various denominations. In 1930 Greenup took over the business when his old boss died, and he built new premises on cheaper land, employing five staff including his wife and son. As the first full-time director in country areas, he was proud that he ‘changed the whole concept of funeral directing in the South-West’. Greenup eliminated the sombre pageantry, including the black ostrich plumes on the horses heads and ‘all the artistic sort of stuff’. He insisted on plain caskets and furniture, and light walls in the premises rather than black or bottle green. In 1931 he built his first motor hearse, with plain glass windows, and later added refrigeration.2 The motorised funeral was itself a significant force for change, as the traditional slow funeral processions were forced to speed up or disappear in many urban areas. The first motor hearse in Perth was built in 1913 by converting an Overland saloon car, replacing the car body with the glass-sided hearse, though most firms did not transfer to motor hearses until the 1920s.3 Another technical improvement in the industry was embalming, always regarded as an American import. It was intended to arrest the process of decay temporarily by replacing the body’s natural fluids with a preservative like formalin. It was rarely used in the early twentieth century, usually only when the funeral was delayed or the body required transportation. An American named Prof G Hartford Rivers established an Australian School of Embalming in Sydney from 1894,
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aiming to teach undertakers an art valuable in Australia’s hot climate.4 From the 1920s, refrigeration allowed bodies to be stored for longer, while embalming was required for presentation of the body for viewing. Reginald Hawkins worked for his father’s firm, Dignified Funerals, in Sydney from 1938, having worked on the railways for five years on leaving school. His father, a cabinet-maker, had been employed as a coffin-maker by George Andrews of Ashfield, who continued to purchase their top-quality coffins for special occasions. Hawkins’s father manufactured his own coffins, and bought a 1928 Packard car for conversion to a hearse. The smaller firms which were trying to break into the industry would co-operate by sharing and hiring out separately owned hearses and limousines. Reginald Hawkins explained that most funerals run by small firms during the depression years still left from the home of the deceased, where the coffin was normally delivered the night before so that relatives and friends could view the body. Next day the hearse and one or two cars arrived, with his father as funeral conductor wearing a top hat and tail-coat. They would enter, screw the lid on the coffin, and the bearers, two drivers and conductor would carry out the coffin and place it in the hearse, with wreaths on top. The conductor would then walk out onto the road, stop any traffic with a wave of his hand, and walk in a dignified manner in front of the hearse for about a hundred yards, before joining the hearse to proceed to the cemetery (a custom still common in Canberra in the 1980s and in Somerset, England, today). Afterwards the funeral cars returned to the home of the bereaved, where the women would usually stay while most men went to the nearest hotel for a wake.5
American influences on the funeral industry Australian ways of death in the early twentieth century were diverse, but they were principally based on traditional British and Irish death rituals, with adaptations drawn from the simple burial
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practices of the colonial bush. But in the twentieth century two distinct sets of American influences altered and destabilised the funeral industry: the first comprised various new features, assumed to be American, introduced from the early years of the century, including embalming, funeral parlours, viewing the body and landscaped lawn cemeteries. The extent of such American influences tended to be overstated in Australia: lawn cemeteries were inherited from nineteenth-century England and France, while body viewing had its roots in nineteenth-century domestic practice in all these countries. The second, far more threatening American intrusion, was the introduction of aggressive business practices which reached a climax in the 1990s with the attempt by the huge American conglomerate, Service Corporation International, to take over a substantial part of the funeral industry. Despite popular fears of American influences, for much of the century the Australian funeral industry remained more closely aligned with that in Britain. In fundamental respects the Australian and British industries continued to differ markedly from the American, which was still profoundly influenced by nineteenth-century Christian ideals, and remained more open and emotional in response to death. Moreover, religious opposition to cremation in America was stronger and more enduring than in Australia, so that cremation never became a majority option in the United States. In 1991, 78 per cent of Americans were still buried, 5 per cent were entombed in mausolea or vaults, and only 17 per cent cremated.6 The first press indication of American influences on the Australian funeral industry came in a long article in the Argus in 1938, complete with American euphemisms, essentially promoting AA Sleight, ‘the oldest and best known firm of funeral directors in Victoria’: The old-fashioned theory that funerals should be associated with an atmosphere of gloom, drabness, and depression has been abandoned. In its place is an ideal of good taste, quiet beauty, and peace
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… The mortuary is as completely and scientifically equipped as a modern hospital, and duties are performed with meticulous and reverent care. Slumber-rooms are provided near the chapels for the repose of the deceased before the final services.7
An early hostile reference in the Australian press to American influence on the funeral business came from an Anglican clergyman, Revd WP Hart of Maroubra, in 1953. He frequently officiated at mortuary chapel services and criticised undertakers for introducing a sentimental and artificial ‘Hollywood’ atmosphere. He blamed undertakers’ competition for the cheap theatrical effects, ‘picture theatre atmosphere’, and the background of recorded music and coloured lights. Another Anglican clergyman supported Hart, noting that many Australian undertakers had adopted some of the worst features of American morticians: ‘Everything comes according to schedule – Funeral no. 14, Parlour no. 3, Musical Background no. 10, with Minister no. 6’.8 Criticism increased after the publication in 1963 of Jessica Mitford’s influential satire, The American Way of Death, which ridiculed extravagant American funeral rites and condemned their quest for high profits. Mitford’s revelations led to reforms within the American funeral industry, including legislation to guarantee simpler and more ethical practices at lower costs.9 The American industry carried out an intense public relations campaign, including the creation of a code of good funeral practice. Mitford’s book had considerable impact on the public, the press and the funeral industry in Australia as well as in England. As Philippe Aries noted, Mitford was inspired ‘not by the religious rites of yesterday but by the English mode of today, which is the most radical version of the invisible death’.10 Four years after the publication of Mitford’s book, the Sydney Morning Herald in 1967 published two feature articles on the industry in New South Wales, triggered also by trouble among the undertakers who had split into two hostile camps. The powerful established group was by far the larger – the Associated Funeral
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Directors of NSW (AFDA) with 80 members, opposed to the newly created Independent Funeral Directors’ Association (IFDA) with 22 smaller operators. Eric Boland, president of IFDA, asked the premier for an enquiry into the industry, claiming it had been turned into ‘a high-class racket’ by the application of American sales methods, as the Sydney Morning Herald explained: [These merchandising methods] are far and away the most striking of all American influences on the Australian way of death … Our way of death is no less susceptible to American influence than our way of life. We have not yet gone all the way to the Whispering Glades, but we are heading in that direction. Embalming and viewing are becoming accepted as part of the funeral ritual … Lawn cemeteries are gaining ground with both burials and ‘inurements’; and funeral parlours are getting bigger and better every year.11
The Herald articles focused on the evils of American funeral merchandising as practised by AFDA and propounded at its annual seminars. The seminar manual presented twelve basic ‘sales clarifiers’, vital to funeral mechandising, including ‘indirection’ and appeal to pride, which were applied in the coffin showroom, where coffins were displayed on draped stands. The manual advised the funeral director to place the high-profit coffins in the ‘hot’ positions in the show room, using such phrases as ‘a fine example of the casket-maker’s art’. The customer should be steered away from the cheaper products.12
The high cost of dying Allegations of exorbitant charges by funeral directors have been common since they first established their territory. Funeral reform movements in late nineteenth-century Australia and Britain succeeded for more than half a century in reducing extravagant costs. Between 1900 and 1950, funeral costs changed remarkably little, and criticisms were only occasionally aired. In Sydney in 1929, Dr Purdy, a formidable metropolitan health officer,
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complained that there was ‘too much profiteering in undertaking … the cost of dying was excessive … Elaborate funerals belonged to the Victorian era.’13 In 1955, Rev Donald Campbell, a Congregational minister, claimed that some unscrupulous undertakers were conducting ‘a racket in human sorrow’, knowing that distressed and bereaved relatives would not protest.14 Otherwise the funeral industry received little attention in the press until the late 1960s, but from 1968 the silence gradually ended. Throughout the 1970s, triggered by the clash between the AFDA and the smaller IFDA, newspapers rang with a highly charged debate about funeral costs. The discussion dwelt for a decade on funeral costs, rather than the functions and ethics of funeral directors: costs were an easier target for a public and press accustomed to fifty years of public silence surrounding death and disposal, especially when funeral directors shrouded their activities in mystery.15 The conflict between rival organisations was highlighted in a series of feature articles on funeral directors in both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age starting in December 1967 and inspiring a press debate which continued for a decade. Charges and counter-charges concerning the high cost of dying climaxed in January 1974 with an article in Choice, the journal of the Australian Consumers Association, explaining arrangements and costs necessary for a funeral. Choice stated that most members of the public were obliged in their ignorance to accept funeral directors’ own definition of what constituted a minimum funeral service with dignity: Differences between what is wanted and what is given can occur because the buyer is distressed, because he is harassed by the need to make a prompt decision and to do what is considered to be the right thing, and because he is often naïve about the prices and pitfalls of funeral parlours.16
Choice had conducted a survey of its members and noted that two-thirds chose cremation rather than burial, since it was much
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cheaper. Several members complained about pressure from undertakers to select a more expensive coffin, which ranged from the subtle effect of piped music and ‘an atmosphere of sanctimonious hush’, to the suggestion that a cheap coffin signified a pauper funeral. In 1974 ‘very few of our respondents had viewed the body at the funeral parlour or asked for preservation’, and a funeral director had stated that most people had a psychological fear of viewing the remains. Choice concluded that the majority of its respondents were satisfied that the undertaker had been helpful and efficient in organising a dignified funeral. The quoted price was based on the type of coffin – the more expensive ensuring a more elaborate funeral. Prices in capital cities and metropolitan areas ranged from $300 to $350.17 The complaints of some respondents revealed a longsuppressed public hostility to the funeral industry, which led ultimately in 1977–78 to official inquiries in New South Wales and Victoria. Responses to Choice fuelled the claims of high funeral costs. The Anglican Bishop of Sydney, the Rt Revd Hulme-Moir, agreed in 1974 with Choice’s respondents that some funeral directors encouraged expenditure beyond the client’s means, because they were susceptible to pressure to ‘do the right thing’ in paying an unspecified ‘proper’ amount for a dignified funeral.18 The Victorian Funeral Directors’ Association was so concerned about its unfavourable image in the press that it engaged a public relations firm to protect its reputation. Most charges of high funeral costs came from Victoria and New South Wales, whereas responses from other states were more mixed, arising from a belief that their own funerals were more economical and ethical. The Canberra Times noted the ‘rising public criticism and the rising cost of funerals’, but knew of no evidence that funeral directors were making excessive profits. Moreover, the Department of the Capital Territory had found that the government could not offer funeral services at a significantly lower cost than the commercial operators.19 The West Australian
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argued in 1976 that the funeral industry in the west had little to fear, since it had an exceptionally good record and its funeral costs were lower than those in the eastern states.20 The pressure in New South Wales in 1977 led to a major inquiry by the NSW Prices Commission into the funeral industry, to hear public complaints about excessive costs and the apparent exploitation of bereaved people. The chairman of the Prices Commission, Robert Evans, announced at the outset: ‘Funeral directors have a captive market … Yet it is an industry shrouded in mystery.’21 In May 1977 more than twenty funeral directors were summoned to make their submissions and to produce witnesses to prove their prices were not excessive. A reporter from The Australian found the occasion ‘positively claustrophobic’, even Dickensian, as funeral directors sat ‘soberly suited and solemn’ in neat little rows. The ‘delicious black comedy’ was enhanced as their spokesman declared that his profession was ‘not a socially esteemed industry’. This estimate was reinforced as the solemn meeting considered the complaints: one funeral director was accused of stuffing a tall body in the boot of his car while another stored the bodies in his bedroom: ‘Euphemisms ran riot as the witnesses skirted round the delicate subject of death’.22 A submission from Revd AC Nichols on behalf of the Anglican Diocese of Sydney delivered a powerful attack on undertaking practices and ‘scandalous’ coffin prices. He condemned pressure placed on families to make the deceased available for viewing with the claim that ‘a last look at the loved one’ left an enduring pleasant memory. Bereaved people felt obliged to pay the extra expense of cosmetic work and a $15 viewing fee, even when the death was caused by cancer or a wasting disease. Many individual submissions laid particular charges. One woman protested that she paid $900 for her mother’s funeral, but her mother’s ashes were mailed to her by the funeral company in a leaky plastic bag instead of a standard air-tight container.23 The final report of the New South Wales inquiry was an anti-
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climax and a surprise after the grotesque complaints and allegations. The inquiry concluded that most basic funeral directors’ prices were not excessive and should remain the same, since they generally provided a good service, though the highest minimum prices would need to be reduced. The chief problem was lack of public knowledge about the funeral industry, so that many complaints stemmed from ignorance and people needed to be educated to remove the mystique.24 The report recommended that funeral directors be required to provide a basic funeral at a set price. It criticised a trend to more American-style funerals with expensive hearses, elaborate caskets and mourning chapels. The report noted that during 1977, at least $872 was needed on average for a cremation and $1120 for a burial, including memorials. People were advised to shop around since prices varied greatly and to insist on itemised quotations and accounts.25 The whole process of inquiry was repeated by the Victorian Ministry of Consumer Affairs in 1978, which produced an advice booklet. The Victorian branch of AFDA advised that prices had nearly doubled in the past five years and were likely to increase four-fold by the end of the century. The advice booklet warned that a minority of funeral directors might take advantage of the emotional stress of a death to sell higher-priced funerals and suggested there was nothing ‘callous or cold blooded’ in seeking several written quotations. The bereaved should check whether any extras might be added to the bill and should carefully choose an economical coffin. The booklet noted that the public was increasingly recognising that cremation was much cheaper than burial, and selecting accordingly. In Victoria, a basic cremation using a cheap coffin cost $805 compared with a basic burial at $1116. The cemetery fees were a significant component of these charges at $150 for cremation and $395 for burial. The booklet advised that scattering the ashes in the backyard was a sensible economy – but the Health Department precluded burial of bodies there.26
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Keith Russell and the transformation of the funeral industry Within a year of the Victorian and New South Wales inquiries into the funeral industry, it was transformed in an extraordinary manner from an unexpected source. It could be argued that Keith Russell revolutionised the funeral industry in Australia, acting as a catalyst here as Jessica Mitford had done in the United States. No doubt the public inquiries and the press coverage drew Russell’s attention to the high cost of funerals in 1978–79, when the former washing-machine mechanic and policeman from New Zealand was shocked to find that a modest funeral in Adelaide could cost as much as $1100. He and his wife Colleen checked out the costs and found that they could provide much cheaper funerals. In 1980 Russell placed an advertisement in an Adelaide newspaper: ‘I am dying. So are you. So is everybody, and up till now it has been a shockingly expensive business.’ He offered the alternatives of a ‘Simplicity’ (non-attended) funeral at $396 including coffin and cremation fees, or a ‘Classic’ (attended) funeral at $599.27 His uniform was the light blue safari suit and dark blue shirt that he happened to be wearing for his first Adelaide funeral. The hearse was a sky blue station wagon, which carried the cheapest coffin made of veneered particle-board at a cost of $62.80. Russell offered none of the usual frills, including funeral parlour, mortuary, embalming, viewing room and chapel. His only capital outlay was on the $14 000 Ford Fairmont stationwagons he used as hearses, and a refrigeration unit. He discussed funeral arrangements in the relatives’ home rather than a funeral parlour, and encouraged the family to help arrange and conduct the funeral, and bring flowers from their gardens.28 Russell was tough, enterprising and clever. He was direct about his lack of experience in funerals, not ashamed that he was ‘in washing machines’ previously, and keen to point out that his experience as a policeman accustomed him to corpses. His Simplicity funerals were quick, plain and unsentimental, but
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above all cheap. His sole concession to style was the single red rose placed on the coffin for the journey to the cemetery – but even that was plastic, and was re-used. If families opted for the cheapest funeral without attendance, he essentially provided a transport service and a simple coffin.29 Russell seemed to be in tune with popular demand, quickly extending his Simplicity business from Adelaide to Perth, with eight to ten funerals weekly in each city. In August 1980 he opened in Sydney, where he claimed to have received about 300 phone calls in response to his ‘I am dying’ advertisement in the Herald. By 1984 he was also operating in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and Darwin, and had a turnover of $2 million a year in the six Australian branches.30 The time was ripe for Keith Russell’s intervention in 1980 because of mounting public concern about rising funeral costs and American influences on the industry. Russell’s Simplicity business was in tune with popular demand not only because it was cheap: it also had its roots in the simple secular Australian bush funerals of the nineteenth century. It had no pretensions to style or grandeur – indeed it mocked them with its plastic rose and its Ford stationwagons. It was peculiarly Australian and came at a time of growing public concern about the increasing influence in Australia of the American way of death, with its extravagant funeral parlours, viewing rooms and caskets. It was no accident that Russell’s operation had greatest appeal in the smaller cities, country towns and rural expanses of South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland. It is also interesting that England boasted no equivalent to Russell, despite other similarities between the industries in the two countries. The press was more than willing to give Russell all the publicity he sought. In November 1981, People interviewed the man who revolutionised the Australian funeral industry: There have been slanging matches, advertising wars, TV jingles and more than one death threat as Russell’s no-frills and no-humbug operation expanded to Perth, Brisbane, Sydney and soon to
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Melbourne … As Russell puts it … ‘The 400 per cent annual growth rate of Simplicity funerals demonstrates a public rejection of the claptrap, humbug and gouging of the bereaved that has characterised the funeral business for many years.’31
Late in 1981 Russell expressed ambitious intentions to take over 51 per cent of the total Australian market. He bought press space to promote his ‘no frills funerals’ for $496, and established a delightfully irreverent company newsletter named ‘Eulogy’ which featured undertaker jokes.32
Response and reform The response from the traditional funeral industry was twopronged. Sixteen large operators imitated Russell by introducing their own budget funerals as discount branches, under names such as ‘No Frills’, ‘No Fuss Funerals’ and ‘Workers Funerals’.33 Labor Funerals in Victoria, long-established in the cheaper market, went further than most, advertising cremations at $239: nobody was allowed to attend, the body was placed in a particle-board coffin, and disposal took place when staff time allowed.34 Russell and Simplicity operated the toughest and most successful low-cost operations. Earlier budget firms usually had a short life, but for some years Russell was more enduring. Even he was eventually obliged to raise his prices to make reasonable profits, and in 1988 he sold out to the American Chase Corporation. By then, no budget funeral firm remained in New South Wales, and as part of the sale Russell was required to sign a covenant to exclude him from the industry for five years.35 The second element of the traditional industry’s response to Keith Russell was a massive public relations campaign to justify higher costs by arguing a case for broader ‘traditional’ functions for the funeral and its directors. Thus in 1981 twelve of Russell’s established competitors in Sydney, describing themselves as ‘reliable and trustworthy’, hired an agency to make a series of televi-
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sion advertisements promoting traditional funerals. The ‘sexyvoiced’ Margaret Throsby, an ABC radio presenter, exhorted her listeners to ‘remember that meaningful funerals mean much more than mere disposal’.36 In 1981 Revd Graeme M Griffin of the Uniting Church Theological Hall, Melbourne, put a case for the traditional funeral, including ritual and dignified ceremony: The simple funeral panders to people’s neurotic need to avoid death. It is the easiest way of displacing feelings about our own death … But most families would be better served with a traditional funeral. By and large people need ceremony, and although the costs are excessive public ritual is important. For those who deny themselves the chance to acknowledge death, the consequences can be horrendous.37
Russell’s critics made much of the need for funeral firms to provide a complete range of traditional services. Griffin and Tobin criticised the low-cost firms for dispensing with embalming, viewing the body and public funeral processions, and neglecting grief counselling. They pointed out that budget firms tended to concentrate on cremations and hold services in crematorium chapels which were cheaper and shorter.38 Some of this criticism was justified. Viewing of the body and public funeral processions are indeed traditional ‘services’ which are too expensive for budget operators. But the defence of traditional funerals by established firms can be seen as equally self-serving since these functions brought profits. The rhetoric tended to describe so-called ‘traditional’ services as historically enduring, even though some had a very short history. Embalming and funeral parlours are twentieth-century imports from the United States, and services such as viewing the body traditionally took place in the home at no extra cost. It can therefore be argued that, rather than pandering to the neurotic need to avoid death, Russell’s initiative opened the floodgates for a prolonged and healthy debate about alternative types of funeral.
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The Prices Surveillance Authority’s Investigation into Funeral Prices noted in 1992 that the provision of grief counselling was one of the significant extra services which had pushed funeral prices up in the previous decade. AFDA explained the rising demand for such services in terms of the breakdown of family relationships with doctors and clergy, and also within families – sources of traditional support in bereavement.39 Des Tobin, of Tobin Brothers Funeral Directors in Melbourne, was among the first to stress the significance of grief counselling as a vital component of the business, himself co-ordinating a course on bereavement counselling at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education in 1978.40 In 1982 and 1983 feature articles in the Financial Review and The Age examined recent changes in the role of the funeral director. The Financial Review noted that the growth of a therapeutic culture had seen a shift in the undertaker’s role: ‘the modern undertaker provides counselling and advice; he is the communicator’, aware of anthropologists’ concern for the importance of a ‘ritual of despair’ and a celebration of the dead.41 A year later The Age featured Revd Dr Alex Kenworthy acting as spokesman for AFDA’s change in image. Kenworthy launched a booklet called The Universal Experience published by AFDA to show that funeral directors have consciously responded to changing social patterns and attitudes. The association proposed to ‘take fear out of death’ and help survivors expiate their grief, by ‘offering a range of post-burial services that include social workers and grief counsellors’.42 It might well have been helpful for mourners to have the assistance of grief counsellors if they wished, but AFDA’s ‘Universal Experience’ raises concerns. Surely it would be more ethical for such grief counsellors to be trained professionals independent of the funeral industry with its vested commercial interest? James S Murray addressed these issues in his column on ‘Religion’ in The Australian in January 1985, arguing that ‘[undertakers] have
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increasingly sought to take over the role of both disposer and priest, and some now even offer grief counselling, with a rich selfinterest somewhat disguised by professional methods of operation’.43 The timing of the funeral industry’s sudden enthusiasm for bereavement counselling was also questionable, coming as it did in the early 1980s when Russell was shocking the industry. Russell himself was well aware of this when he attacked the sale of expensive funerals under the ‘transparent guise of grief therapy’.44 Some funeral directors, such as Des Tobin, made a genuine effort to improve the industry’s image and educate the community about the grieving process. He wrote a useful booklet, About Death and Funerals, already in its seventh edition by 1987, initially intended for his own customers but later for general readers. He noted that Australians had hesitated to face up to death for decades and did not talk about it openly. The booklet provided helpful information on funeral arrangements, observing that most cultures ‘have surrounded death with ritual and ceremony’, serving basic human needs in response to a death. It argued that viewing the deceased could contribute to grief resolution and help the bereaved to face the reality of death and separation. The booklet explained that Tobin Brothers responded to the perceived need for community education, involving a team of experts who conducted seminars for professional groups such as nurses as well as bereaved people.45 Other firms such as Donald J Chipper in Western Australia followed Tobin’s example on a smaller scale. For the first time in Western Australia in 1985 a funeral home opened its doors to ninety members of the public to ‘demystify’ its work. Donald Chipper assured the press that funeral prices ‘included a complete service to the family in its grief’, whereas a cut-price funeral could leave mourners unable to cope.46 The industry’s claims to be humanitarian and therapeutic increased with the recession in the 1980s, and again the initiative came from Adelaide. White Lady Funerals were started there in
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1987 by a former associate of Keith Russell, to cater to the women’s market with firms exclusively staffed by women. The early promotion for White Lady Funerals drew on an odd combination of ideas and sentimental arguments favouring feminine qualities in undertakers. Susanne Jones, a Melbourne grief-counsellor, observed that male repression was responsible for ‘bleak and unbeautiful’ Australian funerals, and that the funeral business was seen as cold and unfeeling because of male domination.47 Many customers preferred to have women organise their funerals, often dressed in white and using white hearses, perhaps considering women more sympathetic. White Lady gained a substantial share of the market before its takeover by the American conglomerate, Service Corporation International. Many women were already involved in the industry, sometimes in husband and wife teams, before the White Lady initiative and by 1995 around 38 per cent of Australian funerals were organised by women.48 Frances Tobin in Melbourne and Mareena Purslowe in Perth were the only two female firms to succeed on the White Lady model, but as divisions of established parent companies.
Secular ceremonies and civil celebrants As people of ‘no religion’ increased in the census categories, there was a growing need for funerals which were not conducted by clergy and catered for the needs of unbelievers. This was reinforced by the aim of crematorium chapels to appeal to mourners of all religious groups and none. James Murray complained in his column on ‘Religion’ in The Australian in 1985 that ‘the usual style of crematorium chapel is an appalling amalgam of efficiency and bad taste’.49 Griffin and Tobin commented on the problems involved in creating meaningful secular rituals: One of the difficulties with the genuinely non-religious funeral is to frame rites which say something worth saying and are not just imitations of church liturgies. The mystery of death calls for a response at depth. Secular liturgies have little to fall back upon
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when the transcendental is excluded by definition. Unfortunately it is just as easy in a non-religious funeral as in a religious one to substitute sentimentality for meaning and triteness for truth.50
Some non-religious funerals are conducted by funeral companies, or by friends of the family, but more are now directed by civil funeral celebrants, many of whom are also marriage celebrants. The Australian Federation of Funeral Celebrants had nearly one hundred members in 1995, three-quarters of which came from Victoria and twelve were linked with funeral companies.51 In Queensland in 1985, the Courier-Mail noted that church services were declining and that civil celebrants were more often presiding over death.52 In 1981 Dally Messenger, as president, reformed the Civil Celebrants Federation to increase public awareness of civil funerals, starting with eight celebrants. He had conducted about 600 funerals, in homes, gardens and beside lakes, having first visited the homes of relatives to interview the family for several hours and composed a eulogy which was read back to the bereaved for corrections.53 Messenger’s book, Ceremonies for Today, went into three editions, providing detailed models of alternative ceremonies. He emphasised that a life-centred funeral aimed primarily to celebrate the life of the deceased, which he thought traditional services often failed to do. A well-prepared funeral service should ‘help people live through their feelings, recognise the reality of death’, and assist the bereaved to move on: ‘There is a deep human need to surround important occasions in life with ritual, symbolism, expressions of belief and feeling, and festivities or gatherings’. He believed clergymen were often pressured into presiding over funerals for non-believers they scarcely knew, sometimes with inappropriate and distressing results. But a properly prepared eulogy paid tribute to a good life and alleviated the pain. Messenger believed a non-religious ceremony should include the best ritual, music and words for that particular non-religious family, whether they were chosen from Shakespeare, JH Newman, Banjo Paterson, Walt Whitman, pop music or the Bible.54
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The funeral industry as big business: Americanisation and globalisation The Australian press and public had been concerned from the 1930s about the introduction of American features such as funeral parlours and embalming. But from the 1980s, globalisation gave more reason for anxiety about the influence of aggressive American business practices. The process had two stages. The first stage in the 1980s saw amalgamations and takeovers of small family firms by the large Australian conglomerates, which aimed to dominate the market through ownership of cemeteries, crematoria and networks of funeral director firms. By 1985 Services and Investments (S&I) funeral parlours and subsidiaries controlled more than 60 per cent of Sydney’s cremations.55 By 1991 complaints of corruption, monopolies, overpricing and poor service in the funeral industry prompted the Prices Surveillance Authority to investigate. Comparisons with the mafia were even drawn in New South Wales and Queensland, where a few massive public companies like S&I monopolised the industry. The Bulletin warned that funeral firms often retained the old family names, but ‘control by conglomerates means it is like a production-line of bodies’, with economies of scale and little continuity or personal service. As in the 1970s, horror stories circulated and complaints about high prices multiplied.56 The report on the Investigation into Funeral Prices, led by Prof Alan Fels, was published by the Prices Surveillance Authority on 13 March 1992. There was some similarity between its conclusions and those in 1977–78, except that the scale and the costs involved were now so much greater. The chief conclusion was that profits were not ‘either low or excessive’. The average price of a funeral in 1990–91 was $3102, which was 10.3 per cent more than the previous year and due to increased levels of service: these included grief counselling, preparation of bodies for viewing, chapels in the funeral directors’ premises, better quality premises, and refreshments after the funeral. The costs of both cremation
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and burial had increased considerably over the previous three decades. Prices of coffins typically included 100 per cent profit, which covered other operating costs, such as grief-counselling. The report recommended that price structures be adjusted to eliminate such cross-subsidisation, and that a standardised definition of a cheap ‘essential care’ funeral be adopted.57 The authority also noted that wide variations in prices were facilitated by consumer ignorance, since people were unaware of funeral options available: ‘This lack of knowledge is due mainly to the avoidance of death related issues as topics of discussion in society’, and reluctance to shop around for funerals. Some consumers continued to believe that funeral directors overcharged, but customers often had unrealistic expectations, failing to appreciate that funeral arrangements were labour-intensive and that items such as coffins and burial plots were high costs. The authority saw no need to regulate funeral directors by licensing or registration, given existing local government, health and industry controls.58 The Prices Surveillance Authority paid little attention to the funeral industry takeovers and conglomerates in its 1992 report, probably because the second stage of the rationalisation process did not commence until afterwards. A report in the Sydney Morning Herald in August 1997 provided cause for alarm, however, with a huge headline: ‘FOREIGN BODIES: Almost one in three Australians will be laid to rest by an American-owned company’. Journalist Ben Hills claimed that in only four years since 1994, two huge multinationals had quietly gained control of a substantial minority of Australia’s funeral parlours, crematoria and cemeteries. The Australian industry was worth about $500 million annually, but would increase dramatically after 2020 with baby-boomer deaths. The real threat came from Service Corporation International (SCI), the larger of the two new entrants, a multinational funeral conglomerate from Houston, Texas. SCI owned 365 cemeteries, 156 crematoria and 3012
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funeral parlours across the world, especially in North America, Europe and Britain, valued at US$12 billion. Its interests in funeral parlours in Sydney included White Lady, Simplicity, Dignified, Labor and many others. The takeover had initially received little attention, even though in 1997 SCI owned 22 per cent of the Australian market, including 7 cemeteries, 11 crematoria and 123 funeral firms. The name of SCI was rarely mentioned in the advertising or shopfronts, which sometimes retained old family names, so clients were unaware that the firms were American-owned. In some areas SCI had already established a monopoly and was steadily expanding.59 Most of the complaints about SCI in Australia related to expensive extras, increased charges and aggressive sales tactics, rather than to fear of monopolies. SCI judged the greatest profits to lie in memorialisation rather than cremation or burial, and pressured customers to buy expensive memorial urns, plaques and memorial books. At one Queensland crematorium prices trebled after SCI took over, with wall niches increasing from $460 to $1410, including an urn of bronze instead of plastic. Commission-driven sales staff received bonuses for meeting sales targets in telephone marketing campaigns to persuade relatives to spend hundreds of dollars upgrading wall niches for ashes. There were also numerous complaints about SCI’s highly aggressive tactics in selling ‘pay now, die later’ funerals, which were seen as the most effective way to generate new revenue, though they had often been financial disasters in the past.60 Ultimately there was a backlash from the Australian funeral industry which organised aggressive ‘Australian owned’ marketing campaigns. Moreover, in 2001 the Americans sold 80 per cent of SCI Australia to an Australian consortium led by the Macquarie Bank. This allowed SCI to claim it was majority Australian-owned, its profits would remain here, and it made a virtue of operating under existing brand names. __
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This chapter has explored inherent tensions caused by secularisation and American influences, and by bereaved people’s expectation that funerals should be both cheap and respectable. It has asked whether funeral directors exploited vulnerable mourners or accurately reflected community needs for ‘traditional’ and appropriate ceremony. The traditional firms were challenged both by the low-cost operators and by a largely hostile press in the 1970s and 1980s. They were obliged to respond by recognising the ignorance of public and press about death and disposal – and so learned to use their own campaigns to educate the public and protect their reputations. The industry has been open to frequent claims of corruption and overcharging, though official enquiries have several times exonerated it. However, an official enquiry into the developments of the last decade might well be more critical, given the scale of the profits, the immense size of the conglomerates, the extent of foreign ownership, and the ‘delicate’ nature of the business.
14 Overcrowded burial grounds, modern lawn cemeteries and mausolea Burial reform in nineteenth-century England and France was a response to fears about public health caused by overcrowded city burial grounds choked with corpses. Burial grounds in city centres were closed and replaced with larger cemeteries outside towns which distanced the noxious dead from the living. This burial revolution was delayed in Australia by its later urban expansion and its abundance of space. Problems eventually developed in Australia because the pioneers never envisaged the massive growth of cities like Melbourne and Sydney. They failed to learn from the European experience and persisted in creating early burial grounds in city centres. All cemeteries eventually exhausted their space. By the late nineteenth century, Australians inevitably had to confront the crisis of overcrowded burial grounds in urban centres and the issues they posed for governments and communities. Valuable land in the city centre was usually required for the needs of the living and neglected burial grounds continued to be perceived as health hazards. Overcrowded cemeteries raised the delicate question of sanction for the disturbance of human remains, either for grave re-use or for removal to new cemeteries away from city centres. This was a highly sensitive issue which challenged the widely held view of the sanctity of the grave and of human
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remains. Public debates about the fate of overcrowded cemeteries revealed different perspectives on the appropriate treatment of the dead, drawing on Christian and humanist ideals, as well as a deeprooted belief in the right to ‘rest in peace’ in one grave for all time.
Sentiment versus progress: The closure of the old Melbourne Cemetery The campaign against the closure of the old Melbourne Cemetery provides a valuable case study of the arguments for maintaining a historic cemetery on grounds of sentiment, religion and heritage, against the claims of modernity and progress. The old Melbourne Cemetery was opened in 1837 on the current Queen Victoria Market site, bounded by Queen, Franklin and Peel Streets, and it was consecrated for the burial of Christian bodies. An article in The Age entitled ‘Melbourne Plague Spot’ offered a bleak perspective on the old cemetery in 1898: To say that Melbourne Cemetery is absolutely full now is no exaggeration. From a merely sanitary point of view it is an outrage on civilisation to go on interring bodies in the midst of a great population in a cemetery already scandalously overcrowded … Bodies have been planted there to the extent of 2000 to the acre; and in the more crowded parts every square yard of earth represents a body, as coffins have been laid on top of one another … The conditions prevailing are really so horrible, that to tell the story in all its ghastly detail would cause a public panic … Here we are in the heart of the greatest city in Australia breeding corruption and the seeds of disease.1
The Age may have exaggerated its criticisms but the old cemetery was clearly overcrowded with over 10 000 bodies buried there since 1837, and was closed from 1904. New grave plots could not be sold but existing title owners retained their rights to interment until 1917. The decline in income from new grave sales meant that the existing neglect worsened as relatives died. Two-thirds of the graves had monuments, most of which were not kept in repair by families,
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and the cemetery’s trustees maintained only those around the main pathways.2 The new Melbourne General Cemetery at Carlton was eventually to replace the old one, though only 5000 interments had taken place there by 1913. The aim was to landscape the new cemetery ‘to make the general effect essentially Australian’, and so maximise the beauty of the surroundings and avoid views over ‘heterogeneous collections of headstones and monuments’.3 Sections of the old cemetery were used for markets from the 1870s and after 1900 the Melbourne City Council increased its pressure to take over more of the valuable cemetery land for the Queen Victoria Market. The council’s case was helped by the neglected condition of the cemetery and the death of all the old cemetery trustees by 1910. Ralph Biddington has told the story of the vigorous campaign to save the cemetery, fought against the commercial interests of the Victoria Market, which had strong support from parliament and the City Council.4 In 1917 the forces of modernity and commercial enterprise succeeded in passing legislation permitting the Victoria Market to take over the cemetery. The Old Melbourne Cemetery Preservation League was established under the energetic leadership of AH Padley, but it failed in August 1918 to have the Market Act repealed. Even then the campaign to save the cemetery was enthusiastically continued by Isaac Selby who defended the heritage value of the old tombstones, whereas the Preservation League used sentimental and religious arguments. Sir John Monash also joined the cemetery’s cause on his return from the war in a doomed effort to protect the sixty Jewish graves from being moved to the Fawkner Cemetery.5 The campaign failed. In 1921–22 the City Council and its Health Department removed the remains of 914 bodies to Fawkner Cemetery. Only headstones in good condition with clearly marked inscriptions were relocated to Fawkner, in a special section for ‘Old Pioneers’. By 1923 the old Melbourne cemetery site was flattened, and headstones, monuments and trees had all disappeared.6 The arguments for and against preservation of the old
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Melbourne Cemetery illuminate the community’s diverse and sometimes contradictory views on the sanctity of human remains and appropriate disposal of the dead. The case in favour of the cemetery’s preservation was expressed forcefully by Padley, Selby, Monash and Dr John Springthorpe in letters to the press, petitions and parliamentary debates, including that on the Repeal Bill in August 1918. Padley and the Preservation League argued that since the cemetery was consecrated in 1838 the land was sacred to the burial of the dead. This contention was often extended with the claim that the human corpse was itself sacred. (Such points were advanced in the Melbourne campaign more forcefully and by more advocates than was the case thirty years later in the Sydney debate over the fate of Camperdown Cemetery, discussed below.) Agnes Thomas, a leader in the Preservation League, protested ‘emphatically’ in a letter to the Argus against the removal of bodies: ‘I have many very near relatives buried [in the old cemetery] and the thought of their being disturbed in their last restingplace is most painful … Surely their bones should be allowed to rest in peace.’7 Many letter-writers complained that the feelings of those who had close relatives buried in the Cemetery deserved to be respected, and that the proposed removal was desecration.8 The Cemetery Preservation League circulated a pamphlet in 1917 arguing that it was impossible to comply with the demand for exhumation, since the cemetery was packed tight with remains, and a fire had destroyed the records of identification. Moreover ‘a most gruesome and shocking exhibition of inhumanity’ would release billions of quiescent germs and possibly create a plague.9 Claims for the sanctity of the dead were often closely associated with public health concerns and a morbid fear of ‘gruesome’ human remains. Indeed there was some incongruity in maintaining that corpses were both sacred and macabre. This complex combination of anxieties about exhumation and re-interment was widely held in this period, especially by committed Christians. Their fears were reinforced in 1917 by a sermon from Anglican Archbishop
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Henry Lowther Clarke, who expressed the ‘widespread indignation’ about the contemplated desecration of pioneers’ bones.10 In 1921 a woman protested in a letter to the Argus against the impending transfer of the remains of her sister, her uncle and greatuncle from their family grave enclosure in the old cemetery to Fawkner. Her relatives had been buried with ‘decency and reverence’ but their remains ‘are to be dug up, carted away, and, I presume, shot down into a common fosse in some place unnamed, with, alas, how many others besides’. The writer warned of ‘the everlasting infamy attached to wanton desecration’.11 Sentimental and religious respect for the dead was often linked with regard for the property rights of grave-site owners to retain their plots in perpetuity. More often, and more importantly, it was strongly related to the heritage argument that many people buried in the old cemetery were significant pioneers or prominent leaders in Victoria’s early history. The cemetery was itself claimed as an important historical Melbourne landmark which should be retained as a pioneer memorial cemetery, containing many graves of historical interest.12 The arguments of the cemetery’s defenders were passionate and the large numbers at protest meetings and on signed petitions suggested that they were widely held. But commerce prevailed in the State Parliament and the City Council, where power, pragmatism and progress counted for much more than sentiment and heritage. The Preservation League may have gained thousands of signatures for their petitions, but the Market Bill passed its second reading in 1917 with only two votes against, while the 1918 Repeal Bill was thrown out of parliament by thirty-eight votes against only five. The August 1918 Repeal debate and letters to newspapers provide a clear view of the case for commerce and progress. Many speakers and writers contended that relatives of those buried would have a stronger claim had they maintained their graves properly, instead of allowing them to decay. Others commented that the existing old cemetery was an eyesore which
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was a greater desecration than removal of remains to a beautiful new site. George Prendergast, labour leader and secularist, pointed out in the 1918 debate that if the old cemetery was preserved it would soon disappear anyway because of disrepair. He could see no reason why the bones of the dead should remain where they were buried, especially when in time nothing would be left. Besides, those gravestones solid enough to survive were usually only those of the rich. It was necessary to remove the remains of the dead from city centres to improve conditions for the living, and he was certain that exhumation would be carried out with due reverence and respect.13 JWM Prentice, writing to the Argus in 1914, also made the point that Christian concerns for the material location of a grave-site were misplaced: ‘Surely this individuality is not in the grave, is no longer present, and the natural course of Nature’ would reduce the remains to their original elements.14 Advocates of progress took the view that change was inevitable and detailed arguments were not really needed. Edmund Cotter was one of many who merely stated briefly in parliament that sentiment should not stand in the way of the city’s progress. An editorial in the Argus in October 1917 observed that Melbourne’s expansion made it necessary to use the old cemetery for public purposes and there need be ‘nothing shocking to sentiment in the change … The demands of progress are inexorable.’15 The needs of the living must take precedence over those of the dead. By transforming the old Melbourne Cemetery into a market, the city council adopted the solution for a disused city burial ground which had been used in some ancient towns in France in earlier centuries. Giving priority to markets over human remains was nothing new.
Neglected cemeteries and the case of Camperdown Neglected cemeteries which had been closed for burials became a serious cause for concern in twentieth-century Australia. Complaints can be found in the press for all states, but a sample
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for New South Wales from 1913 to 1960 will suffice. AV Green protested in 1913 about the disgraceful condition of the Anglican cemetery at St Peter’s at Cook’s River. Following its closure for burials in 1895, the graves became lost to view under impenetrable scrub. On one occasion he saw ‘human bones protruding from the smashed wood of a coffin among bricks and water in a ruined vault’. The horrible smell from another vault alongside the path near the church pervaded the whole area, but the clergyman said the responsibility for the cemetery lay with the grave-owners.16 In 1934 a Mudgee shire councillor called the deplorable state of the Mudgee Cemetery a disgrace to civilisation, with children playing in the vaults where human bones were exposed. Many old church cemeteries were neglected since churches and local authorities had little money to keep them in good order, and relatives of the deceased lived elsewhere or stopped caring as time passed. Mrs EM Fitzgibbon of West Hoxton in 1958 considered Liverpool Cemetery ‘a revolting sight … There seems to be very little respect for the dead there.’17 An article in the Sydney Morning Herald on 15 June 1956 used St Thomas Church of England Cemetery in North Sydney to illustrate the problem. It was over 100 years old and had long ago sold most of its grave plots at prices far too low to provide for future maintenance. When sale of plots was discontinued the small capital fund was soon exhausted and the only revenue came from a few grave-holders who paid small sums for the maintenance of individual plots. In 1955 St Thomas had an income of only £289 to maintain four acres and 4000 graves against the ‘ravages of time, weather and vandalism’. The editorial writer observed that St Thomas’s suffered from a problem repeated across New South Wales – that ‘respect for the dead requires money and labour from the living’. Neglected graveyards were similar throughout the denominations, illustrated by the fallen headstones and overgrown graves in the older sections at Rookwood Cemetery in Sydney. The first generation of bereaved relatives usually looked
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after graves, the second cared less and the third not at all.18 Endemic neglect was compounded by recurring vandalism. In March 1949 vandals smashed headstones and expensive granite and marble ornaments at Rookwood Cemetery, wrecking eight Jewish and four Gypsy graves. In 1953 vandals caused more than £1000 damage at East Kempsey Cemetery, destroying headstones and plaques. Women wept when they saw the damage to relatives’ graves.19 New South Wales governments attempted to deal with the issues raised by neglected old graveyards in several ways. They looked to the future, by trying to prevent the problem recurring through encouragement of cremation and modern lawn cemeteries which sold burial plots at higher prices to cover future maintenance. They tried to convert derelict burial grounds into playgrounds or parks for ‘passive recreation’, leaving the human remains to disappear, but dismantling the headstones. But plans to convert disused cemeteries for community purposes caused considerable opposition, as was the case with the old Melbourne Cemetery. Neglected and disused cemeteries were by no means a new problem but the scale and numbers involved increased in the twentieth century as population expanded and available land contracted. The case of Camperdown Cemetery at Newtown is especially interesting because the campaign to convert the land into a park commenced as early as 1907, but was not resolved by legislation until 1948. Camperdown was an Anglican cemetery of about twelve acres – the second-oldest cemetery in Sydney, though it only lasted for 20 years as a working cemetery. It was established in 1848 on the garden cemetery lines advocated by JC Loudon, a romantic landscape architect. Whereas most cemeteries were on Crown lands dedicated for use as burial grounds, Camperdown’s was freehold property with numerous owners. By 1866 the cemetery was overcrowded with nearly 16 000 graves, and many burials were too close to the surface, causing dreadful smells. The Camperdown
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and Randwick Cemeteries Act of 1867 discontinued burials, except for exclusive rights which were exercised until 1949 and accounted for more than 2000 further interments. The Act also vested the cemetery in trustees appointed by the Church of England, who lacked the income to check neglect.20 The first attempt to convert Camperdown Cemetery into a public park took place in 1907, when the Newtown Municipal Council tried to close the cemetery, supported by a petition to the New South Wales Parliament with 400 signatures. Significantly, the Anglican Cemetery Trust obtained a massive 7000 signatures in opposition to the proposal, chiefly on the grounds that the 1867 Act preserved the exclusive rights of burial and the sanctity of human remains. The rector, Canon Robert Taylor, left no doubt that the move would be strenuously opposed by relatives of those buried there – reinforced by the evidence of the 7000 signatures. Yet the sexton had instructions and funding to keep in order fewer than a dozen of the 18 000 graves, and appeals for funds were largely unavailing. Two Sydney Morning Herald articles deplored the state of wilderness in the cemetery, and the enormous cost of compensating grave-holders and removing the masonry and the human remains.21 Subsequent attempts by the Newtown Council to close the cemetery and take control of the land were similarly defeated by the cost of compensating grave-holders with a freehold title. The issue of cost was reinforced by the argument that the sacred remains of relatives should lie undisturbed, and by the heritage claims of pioneer graves. The campaign to convert Camperdown Cemetery into a public park was revived in 1934 and again in 1938, to no avail. Revd AE Rook, the rector of St Stephen’s Church, which had been built on the cemetery land, promised in 1940 that no graves would be interfered with and the rights of grave-holders would be protected. He reminded critics that the whole cemetery area was the freehold property of the Church of England and was consecrated ground. The debate about conversion to a public park was
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deferred by the war, during which Newtown Council took the ‘high-handed’ decision to convert the cemetery into a public airraid shelter.22 The Royal Australian Historical Society entered the controversy during the war, amid fresh rumours that the cemetery would be resumed – this time for a children’s playground – and that no compensation would be paid to the Church of England which owned the freehold, worth about £250 000. Members of the Historical Society denounced these plans as ‘legalised robbery’.23 Letters to the Sydney Morning Herald on the topic presented both sides of the argument. GMA Cardew wrote two letters in his dual capacity as a cemetery grave-holder and a member of the Historical Society. He protested against the proposed desecration of the cemetery and the ‘outrageous’ suggestion that gravestones might be removed from graves, obliterating the actual sites of human remains, to the distress of relatives. GW Brown asked in 1946 that Australia’s pioneers should not lose their ‘honoured resting place’: ‘The monuments and headstones there and in other cemeteries have been erected in the belief that such spots would be held inviolate, and surely such a belief was justified in a so-called Christian land’.24 However, many more correspondents to the Herald took the contrary, utilitarian view that the cemetery should be converted for the use of the living, though individual arguments varied. Several advocated cremation as the long-term solution.25 In 1944 CEW Bean, historian of the Great War, challenged the opponents of the conversion to walk through the ‘unkempt, dishevelled wilderness’ which reminded him of the desolate Somme battlefield two years after the fighting: What right have we, in the name of history, to maintain this shocking ugliness in the heart of a suburb crying out for some touch of the beauty of trees and flowers and lawns? If there is any sacrilege, it is surely that of those who keep this ugliness as it is. There was no decent park in the drab, crowded suburb, and the historical
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headstones would be far better placed around the edge of a park, as in St David’s Park, Hobart.26
Another correspondent thought personal interest in the graves had largely disappeared with the passage of time and semi-derelict cemeteries were a menace in closely settled suburbs. He also believed ‘advanced public opinion’ would wish to concentrate all tombstones in a smaller area as historical memorials.27 Two people with relatives buried in Camperdown Cemetery joined the debate. When Dorothea Mackellar, poet and novelist, last saw the ugliness and desolation of the cemetery, she ceased subscribing to have her family graves kept in order. She wrote that the children from her family who were buried there would be nearly ninety in 1944 and would surely wish other little children to play about their graves. Another writer with an aunt buried there agreed that the cemetery was in a deplorable state and wanted its land rededicated ‘to the Master’s service’ to benefit children.28 In June 1946 an eleven-year-old girl, Joan Norma Ginn, was murdered in the Camperdown Cemetery. Her death outraged the community and ensured that the campaign for conversion to a park would at last be successful. Revd SW McKibbin, who conducted the murdered girl’s funeral, said her death would inflame the community’s resentment at ‘this huge area of old tombstones and forgotten graves’, which were a menace and reproach. They must confine the more recent graves to a small area and use the vast expanse for a park and for buildings. The mayor of Newtown, Alderman GH Smith, complained that the Cemetery Trustees placed more value on the historical importance of the 18 000 dead bodies than on the health and well-being of the live community. For 34 years the trustees had opposed the conversion of the ‘uncared for blot on our community’ to a park and children’s playground on the grounds of the sanctity of human remains, historical value and freehold rights. Minutes, meetings and conferences had led nowhere.29
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It took the murder of a little girl to resolve the prolonged dispute after 34 years. In fact negotiations between the State Government, the Church of England authorities and the Cemetery Trustees had been started in 1945 and outrage at the murder ensured agreement by July 1946. The premier, William McKell, announced that the State Government would resume about eight acres of the Cemetery to create a rest park. In return the government would pay for the reconstruction of the remaining four acres as a re-designed and smaller cemetery area, with £10 000 as a capital sum to maintain it. The new cemetery would be surrounded by a wall, and about fifty historic graves and headstones would be moved from the park area to the re-constructed cemetery, as at St David’s Cemetery, Hobart.30 The matter did not quite end there. In May 1948 the Camperdown Cemetery Act gave effect to the agreement, providing for a further £7000 for the removal of graves and the reconstruction of the new cemetery with gardens.31 PW Gledhill, chairman of the Cemetery Trust, complained in 1954 that after six years the government was failing to carry out its undertakings because of lack of funds, and the historic cemetery was again a scene of desolation. The rest park area had been partly cleared, but the tombstones which were supposed to have been carefully re-erected in the retained cemetery were carelessly stacked in heaps.32 More than a year later, tenders closed for the exhumation of the remains from 67 graves by funeral directors and for the removal and re-erection of gravestones. During this process graves had to be surrounded by screens to exclude inquisitive visitors. Police had to be present for exhumations and reburial, which were completed with reverence on the same day. It was significant, however, that no remains were found under any of the 67 exhumed graves because the soil was so acidic.33 The retained four-acre cemetery was finally redesigned, though the wrecking of graves continued: vandals chopped down twenty oak and box memorial trees and smashed headstones in 1955.34
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The cemetery became overgrown and in decay. In 1992 the Camperdown Cemetery Working Group was established and drew up a conservation plan to restore order and provide an inventory of significant monuments and features for conservation.35 The shift in emphasis over a century from the sanctity of human remains to heritage value was complete.
Modern lawn cemeteries Advocates of ‘modern’ lawn cemeteries in twentieth-century Australia tended to assume that their origin was American and often cited Forest Lawn in California as the model. In fact the lawn or garden cemetery was much older and was to be found in English and American rural cemeteries of the nineteenth century. The original American model was Mount Auburn in Massachusetts, established in 1831, while Kensal Green was the first of the great London private-enterprise cemeteries, opened in 1832. In these cemeteries the landscape dominated and the aesthetic value of the beauty of nature in a lovely park was expected to evoke appropriate emotional responses to death: it should act as a civilising influence and source of moral instruction. Tombs and headstones were intended to be eclipsed by the landscape, but this was harder to achieve once the land space was dominated by monumental masonry. The alternative model to lawn cemeteries was the built-up urban cemetery of continental Europe, like Père-Lachaise in Paris, established in 1804, where massive tombs and monuments crowded together, featuring the sculptor’s art rather than the landscape.36 A number of nineteenth-century Australian cemeteries were inspired by the English and American rural park model which encouraged the ritual of grave-visiting for remembrance and meditation. From about 1875 cemeteries such as Rookwood in Sydney gained a reputation for beauty and tranquillity. Its site had been chosen in part because of its capacity to be ‘cultured and beautified, as is frequently the case with cemeteries in other countries’.
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A photograph in the Sydney Illustrated News of 1875 depicted family picnics at weekends and promenading couples who had come by train to visit the ‘garden cemetery’. Rookwood was landscaped in the 1860s to evoke nature with shrubs and avenues of trees, ponds and fountains. It was designed in a picturesque style with radiating circles and winding avenues rather than the symmetrical grid layout of earlier New South Wales burial grounds.37 However incongruously, many exotic English plants were introduced to create an uplifting English garden cemetery in the Australian bush. Robert Nicol has explored the garden cemetery models which influenced the new Centennial Park Cemetery established in Adelaide in 1936. The two chief models were the Melbourne Cemetery at Fawkner, presented as ‘the almost idyllic burial ground of the future’, and the Forest Lawn Memorial Park at Glendale, California. However, Centennial Park did not entirely follow the American low-maintenance lawn concept with horizontal plaques set in grass. Instead it adopted the compromise of neat lawns with upright memorials subject to stringent restrictions on size. Another influence on Centennial Park’s design was the war cemeteries, with egalitarian regimented rows of simple identical stones in large lawn expanses.38 Centennial Park in its turn became the model for newer lawn and garden cemeteries of the 1950s and 1960s, though they tended to adopt the American style of small horizontal plaques set into the grass for easy mowing. The Australian perception that lawn cemeteries were American in origin and somewhat distasteful derived from the satires of Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford. In his 1948 novel, The Loved One, Waugh ridiculed ‘Whispering Glades’, the great necropolis in Hollywood based on Forest Lawn Memorial Park.39 The fears of some Australians were fuelled in 1960 when James Keuger of Detroit came to Australia for six months on a highly publicised tour to study its cemeteries. He announced his plan to build a million-dollar ‘Forest Lawn’ style cemetery with a 5000-unit
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mausoleum on the outskirts of Sydney. He was awaiting a permit from the Baulkham Hills Shire Council to buy 165 acres at Kellyville. He promised the same type of democratic neat brass plaque above every grave, set flush with the lawn. The cemetery would be completely turfed and planted with attractive trees, flowers and shrubs, landscaped by a Sydney horticultural firm. He would employ the talents of top architects, engineers and gardeners to produce one of Sydney’s best ‘showplaces’. His beautiful memorial gardens would be divided into smaller plots containing biblical scenes, named ‘the Last Supper’ or ‘the Garden of the Apostles’.40 Baulkham Hills Council rejected Keuger’s proposal following a rowdy meeting, his opponents having briefed a Queen’s Counsel.41 Keuger was finally successful in his bid for a 148-acre lawn cemetery at Leppington, five miles from Liverpool.42 Gavin Souter, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1967, described the character of Keuger’s new commercial lawn cemetery at Leppington. Souter visited a school for salesmen run by Keuger’s Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens to explore American high-pressure merchandising methods for selling landscaped lawn cemetery graves: ‘The real-estate agents of the funeral industry can more than hold their own with the coffin salesmen’. ‘Glorious’ lawn cemeteries were sold as both economical and aesthetically more pleasing than Sydney’s ugly, neglected and dilapidated old graveyards, described as ‘places of despair and desolation’. Lawn cemeteries allegedly offered perpetual care in an attractive landscape at lower prices than for traditional graves with elaborate marble headstones. Forest Lawn Memorial Gardens employed nocturnal salesmen operating on commission to sign up 20 000 families in the western suburbs of Sydney for ‘pre-need’ lawn graves.43 But the American lawn cemetery operators had not taken into account the far greater popularity of cremation in Australia than in the United States: 61 per cent of those who died in Sydney in 1967 were cremated, and only about one-third of burials were
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in lawn graves. When the American operators realised their mistake, they quickly moved into the cremation business, as well as continuing their high-pressure sales techniques for lawn graves. By contrast, Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Cemetery, Perth’s Karrakatta Cemetery and all Victoria’s cemeteries were non-profit organisations run by public boards of trustees, which did not engage in high-pressure sales and development. By 1973 Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth had land available for new burials for only another nine years. Its board started planning for Perth’s new cemetery, the Pinnaroo Valley Memorial Park at Whitford, which would eventually replace Karrakatta. The new cemetery was to be more like a national park, retaining most of the natural bush, and utilising the contoured land. It was a far cry from the English landscaping and shrubs imposed on Rookwood a century earlier. Graves would lie flat, marked only by small horizontal bronze plaques set into the lawn, in Forest Lawn manner. Winding roads and walkways would be cut through the bush, an artificial lake would be constructed and wild-life would be encouraged to remain. A housing development would eventually surround the memorial park and would have an attractive view. The new Pinnaroo was also different in that it would be secular and would not be divided into separate denominations like Karrakatta and most of the older cemeteries. Families appreciated the natural bushland and native flora as an informal recreation area and were willing to surrender conventional tombstones and memorial objects on graves, though some persisted in leaving such memorials as teddy bears and ceramic angels on childrens’ graves.44 Throughout Australia after 1950 lawn cemeteries were helping to reduce the recurring space problems which bedevilled the older cemeteries; the traditional proliferation of untidy tombstones and monuments was replaced by the uniformity of low-maintenance bronze plaques set into lawn expanses. But in the last quarter of the century, efforts were made to tackle the second major cause of
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space problems and neglected disused cemeteries – perpetual leases on grave sites. The concept of hereditary private ownership of grave sites developed in the nineteenth century initially among the middle classes, though it had no extensive history before that. It allowed people with money to develop ideas about the sanctity of bodies which would supposedly remain forever in their original graves. Plots on perpetual leases with their crowded tombstones filled cemeteries in a few decades, but in later years the cemeteries often became untidy and uncared for. Until about 1960 cemeteries had not included in their charges the costs of future maintenance, obliging grave-holders thereafter not only to pay their own maintenance costs but also to subsidise the care of older graves with unlimited tenure which had once been sold too cheaply. Thus in 1960 a lawn grave at Fawkner Memorial Park in Melbourne still sold for as little as $34, but this increased to $615 by 1985, and to $890 by 1990 (excluding the cost of interment).45 During the public inquiries into funeral and cemetery costs held from the 1970s it became clear that the costs of cemetery plots held in perpetuity were contributing substantially to the high costs of graves and to shortage of cemetery space. In 1972, Don Dunstan, premier of South Australia, appointed a planning committee to investigate Adelaide’s cemetery and cremation facilities. Recommendations included closing some older cemeteries, opening two new ones, and reviewing unused grave leases every 20 years. Centennial Park had already anticipated the need for extensive re-use of grave sites. It sold initial licenses for graves for 50 years instead of South Australia’s traditional 99 years. A Legislative Council select committee recommended in 1986 a minimum grave tenure of 25 years and maximum of 50 years, renewable twice for 25-year periods, and encouraged re-use of burial sites. Centennial Park was already responding to the space shortage by using a ‘lift and deepen’ system. This took existing remains out of an old grave and dug more deeply before replacing them at the bottom, releasing space for new burials on top. This
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method was widely practised in Europe, and in France bodies could be exhumed after only five years to create more space.46 An investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald in 1990 revealed that the price of lawn plots in Sydney had risen by 54 per cent in five years and that all available land in existing cemeteries would be used by 2020. The obvious solution was to sell graves for a limited period, with an option for repurchase at the end, before the grave was resold. In 1990 New South Wales limited burial rights to 40 years, with the option to extend the rights every 20 years for an extra fee. If the option was not exercised, the cemetery authorities could remove the headstone, and sextons would exhume old remains and rebury them in a ‘pocket’ dug at the side of the grave, a version of ‘lift and deepen’. The public was assured that after 40 years little would remain except the coffin and plaque, and another body would be buried in the plot.47 The 1992 Prices Surveillance Authority Investigation into Funeral Prices recommended that state governments introduce legislation to limit tenure on all grave sites, allowing the option of repurchase.48
Mausolea and European migrants’ burial customs Disposal in above-ground mausolea crypts was the choice of a small minority in the later twentieth century, largely confined to the Italian and Greek communities. Their preference for mausolea interment, rather than below-ground burial or cremation, illustrates the variations in death practices across different cultures and over time. Family mausolea were common in southern Europe but were only permitted in New South Wales before 1945 and not in the other Australian states. Rookwood Cemetery contains a number of above-ground mausolea dating from the late nineteenth century, such as the imposing Watson family mausoleum designed as a chapel in Gothic revival style in 1888 for the Anglican merchant who died in 1907. Other mausolea and vaults formed
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miniature streets of buildings in the old Catholic and Anglican sections. 49 But most cemeteries discouraged above-ground mausolea, accepting the nineteenth-century belief that corpses decomposed more slowly in the air than the soil and constituted serious health hazards. From the nineteenth century community mausolea were seen by some southern Europeans as the progressive way to deal with disposal of human remains. But these were only developed on a considerable scale after 1945 in Europe and the Americas, with the capacity to accommodate hundreds and occasionally thousands of bodies. Some saw massive mausolea complexes as a possible solution to the cemetery space problem, but many Australians considered the concept offensive and expressed anxiety about the long-term sanitary consequences.50 Migration from southern Europe after the Second World War placed pressure on state governments to allow migrants to build family mausolea, following the long tradition of wealthy families in their homelands. The increasing demand from Southern Europeans, especially Italians, for mausolea and elaborate monuments contradicted the general trend in Australia towards cremation and the stark simplicity of regimented lawn cemeteries. European migrants were usually hostile to cremation, and their preference for elaborate funerals and monuments delighted the stonemasons and funeral directors, but disturbed cemetery trusts anxious about declining space. The National Times ran a feature article in 1975 on the impact of Italian migrants on the Melbourne General Cemetery in Carlton. Italians visited family graves frequently and spent a lot of money on their own and their relatives’ headstones: ‘With the lavish and the gaudy and the sometimes quite monstrous stonework they insist on, there is a stark contrast with the pioneer graves’. About 200 headstones were paid for and erected while their graves remained unoccupied. Imported black marble headstones, and portraits sculpted in marble inflated prices.51 By 1991
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Melbourne was noted as the most expensive place in Australia to die because so many European migrants wanted elaborate funerals and monuments.52 In 1983 Ron Curley, a member of the Victorian Health Commission’s working party on cemeteries, visited Europe to obtain information and ideas. The Health Commission recognised that many migrants preferred family or community mausolea and were exploring the possibility of legalising them in Victoria – currently only below-ground vaults were allowed. In an interview with The Age before his international tour, Curley outlined the potential concerns: mausolea posed a greater temptation to bodysnatchers, and future maintenance of old mausolea had to be paid for and ensured. Mausolea coffins would need to be lined or sealed to prevent bodies exploding. He was also concerned about the length of time bodies should be retained in mausolea and what should happen to the remains afterwards. He noted that the Victorian Government was constrained in accommodating ethnic burial requests by health, aesthetic and financial considerations.53 Curley returned from Europe convinced that more must be done to accommodate diverse funeral customs. He had been struck by the difference between European and Australian responses to cemeteries. In Hamburg and Cairo families had picnics in ancient cemeteries which were tourist attractions: ‘We run for cover, treating cemeteries as spooky and Dracula-haunted areas’, instead of landscaped recreation parks. Because Greeks and Italians were denied their traditional funeral rites, some spent a small fortune to fly the bodies of patriarchs home in lead-lined coffins to rest in European mausolea. In 1983, eighty-six bodies were flown from Victoria back to Greece, Italy and Israel. More people would find peace of mind if their funeral rites were allowed in Australia. Curley explained that many cemeteries in Italy (especially in Rome) had rows of four-storey mausolea which looked like small apartment buildings. They were erected to deal with severe space shortage, so limited tenure was imposed on coffin
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space and maintenance was expensive.54 Above-ground mausolea were legalised in Victoria in the mid-1990s but charges were high: several thousand dollars per coffin space for the site alone, while extra ‘above-ground’ masonry work could cost from $4000 to $50 000.55 More than 3500 mausolea crypts sold rapidly in the 1990s at the Necropolis Springvale, despite the prices.
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New South Wales had long legalised mausolea but few were built until the 1980s, when the numbers erected by Italian families in the Catholic sections at Rookwood significantly increased. Huge sums of money were spent on small buildings like chapels or houses grouped in streets, demonstrating family unity and continuity as well as powerful national links to the country of origin. Many Italian families made great financial sacrifices for peace of mind. These huge, solid mausolea and the continued Italian Catholic opposition to cremation also signify enduring belief in the sanctity of the Christian body until resurrection. It is worth noting that first-generation Italians and Greeks in Victoria in 1981 significantly outnumbered those in New South Wales: 118 559 Italians and 74 228 Greeks in Victoria compared with 79 183 and 49 267 respectively in New South Wales. No other state came at all close to these figures, except Western Australia with its 30 000 Italians and South Australia with 32 000.56 Though these statistics only provide birthplaces they offer a guide to broader community size. In New South Wales in 1992 crypts in mausolea might cost between $4000 and $8000 for the coffin space alone. It was possible to buy a strata-title crypt in a mausoleum at Botany Cemetery at about $9000 per coffin space in 1992, with crypts containing six, eight or twelve coffins.57 While New South Wales and Victoria led the way with the construction of mausolea and vaults, pressure from the Italian communities also obliged Western Australia and South Australia to consider the issue. Karrakatta Cemetery faced persistent pressure from Perth’s Italian community, which demonstrated its strong support for an above-ground mausoleum by purchasing pre-paid crypts. The 504-crypt mausoleum was completed in 1995 at the cost of $1.9 million, but it was clearly a good investment in the cemetery’s future. In 1997 burial crypts ranged from $9000 for a single crypt to $30 000 for a double, according to location, while ‘family rooms’ for twelve coffins cost $150 000. A further 500 crypts were completed in 1998 and more were planned.58
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South Australia had about as many Italian migrants as Western Australia, though more Greeks. But once again South Australia took an independent line on human disposal with its Supreme Court decision in the 1980s that above-ground mausolea were illegal. This ruling was made after years of debate in which the advantages to the migrant communities were pitched against the fears and prejudices of the majority. The issues aired by Ron Curley and his Health Commission in Victoria in the early 1980s were also debated in South Australia, but led to a different outcome. The press in South Australia fuelled community prejudice against mausolea, disparaging them as yet another excess of American death practices: there were reports of a high-rise mausoleum in Rio de Janeiro with 12 storeys and a 20-storey edifice with 2183 crypts in Nashville, Tennessee. Concerns over drainage, smells and public health, and environmental consequences, helped to defeat a proposal for a mausoleum at Centennial Park, especially as the trustees were firmly committed to their policy of a combined lawn cemetery with crematorium.59 Yet even South Australia eventually changed its cemetery regulations to allow a 700-crypt mausoleum at Salisbury Memorial Park to open in 2004, with crypts costing from $15 000 to $60 000. __ In searching for solutions to the perennial problems of cemetery neglect and land shortage, lawn cemeteries proved the most popular option for many decades in Australia. They allowed for easy maintenance and had the potential for re-use, without the problems caused by masses of tombstones and monuments, but they did not provide a permanent solution. These problems are common throughout the world but Australia was able to postpone the search for solutions until the second half of the century because of the apparently abundant supply of land. No doubt the discussion was also delayed because of the general disinclination to debate issues of death and disposal in Australia before the
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1970s. In Europe and America these debates took place much earlier, so that re-use of graves and huge above-ground mausolea were adopted more readily. But where Americans developed the combination of lawn cemetery with mausolea, Australian authorities looked instead to cremation as a potential complete solution to problems of space, health and environment, permitting mausolea with reluctance.
15 Cremation in Australia since 1914
Cremation symbolises the modern way of death in Australia, accounting for 54 per cent of funerals in 1995, and up to 70 per cent in metropolitan areas. England’s cremation rate is higher, at 80 per cent in 2000, whereas the United States’ is only about 20 per cent. In the early twentieth century, the pioneers of cremation emphasised its sanitary advantages in ending the pollution of the earth, allegedly caused by putrefying corpses. A century later it appealed to environmentalists as a fast, clean and efficient form of disposal which provided a practical solution to the problems of land shortage and over-crowded, neglected cemeteries. Cremation also discouraged ceremony, with its tight schedules, industrial hardware and functional buildings, which seemed to suit a society increasingly inclined to keep death at a distance. Its simplicity was appealing in a modern age which reacted against elaborate Victorian funeral display. The practice has accompanied the advance of secularisation in Australian society. This chapter explores the period after 1920 when cremation slowly became accepted, to the point where cremations outstripped burials in the 1990s.1
The emergence of cremation in Australia Cremation has followed cultural change rather than helped to create it. It is no accident that cremation became established in
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Australia in the 1930s and 1940s, nor that the first experiment in Adelaide in 1903 failed. Timing was all-important. The significant forces for change were the impact of the Great War and the decline in Christian faith. Before 1914 religious beliefs still made cremation impossible for people who thought in terms of material resurrection and clung to a centuries-long tradition of earth burial. The Great War further weakened a Christian faith which was already under severe strain. Moreover, the horrors of trench warfare violated faith in the sanctity of the body and the grave. Many soldiers were sickened by memories of make-shift burials in the earth at the front, and of piles of unburied rotting bodies in no-man’s-land. Corpses could be buried and later uncovered again as advancing armies fought across former burial sites, no longer sacred. Indeed some former soldiers requested cremation in the inter-war years as soon as facilities existed.2 And the families in mourning for missing sons and husbands, blown to bits or killed between the lines, fate unknown, often had terrible mental images of the possible fate of their loved ones. The Great War challenged the need for a fixed gravesite as a reference point for grieving and transferred the emotional emphasis to commemoration at home in Australia. Increasingly after 1918, the focus for remembrance of the dead shifted from the cemetery to private memory. Even those bereaved families whose soldier sons were buried with marked graves usually lacked the solace and possible closure of seeing the body, attending the burial or visiting the grave. Those graves in European military cemeteries must have seemed too far away, detached and impersonal in their regimented rows in foreign fields. It was merely an extension to consider cremation as a better alternative with its purifying qualities. Cremation appealed to many people precisely because it was so different from earth burial. It was quick, sanitary and unsentimental, and carried no bitter memories of the war, though the war prepared a wider section of the population to endorse it. For mourners who preferred not to think too deeply about the
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meaning and the material consequences of death, cremation seemed less offensive than burial. It reflected the modern aversion to mortality. The practical outcomes of the Australian cremation campaign were for a long time remarkably limited. In New South Wales in the 1880s Dr John Creed, the cremation campaign leader, was twice unable to get his Cremation Bill through the hostile conservative Legislative Assembly, which delayed legislation for another 40 years. The debate on cremation in the late nineteenth century had been modelled closely on that in Britain and preached largely to the converted minority of intellectuals, medical enthusiasts, and educated secularists and theosophists. Creed, a secularist, had been clinical clerk in London to Sir Henry Thompson, president of the British Cremation Society. Like Thompson, he emphasised the public health argument that burial involved the preservation of the germs of infectious diseases: decomposition transformed decaying corpses into ‘a mass of foetid corruption, a source of danger to those left behind’. He argued that cremation was, by contrast, hygienic, safe and more economical with both land and money.3 The history of cremation followed similar paths, timing and arguments in Australia and England. Popular opposition was widespread and deep-rooted, especially among the working classes and people with deep Christian beliefs. Hostility derived from centuries of Christian burial tradition, with its doctrine that ‘our bodies shall rise again in an incorruptible state’. Many Christian clergy and educated laity saw cremation as a heathen and unnatural practice which would weaken popular belief in the resurrection of the body. Although church attendance declined steeply in the early twentieth century, a diffuse and residual religious sentiment fuelled powerful opposition to cremation at least until the 1930s. This hostility to cremation was greater in Australia than England because the proportion of Catholics in the population
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was higher. The census showed that Catholics were about 22 per cent of the population between 1901 and 1954, and about 27 per cent in 1971.4 Australian Catholics were constrained by the decree from the Holy Office in Rome in 1886 condemning cremation. This decree was effective for more than eighty years: tentative papal approval of cremation was not granted until 1965, while papal endorsement of Catholic priests officiating at cremations took another four years. Even then, many Catholics remained hostile. The depth of Catholic opposition to cremation is illuminated in a 1926 Instruction from the Holy Office to all bishops. It declared that the ‘barbarous practice, which is repugnant not merely to the Christian but also to the natural piety due to human remains’ was increasing and Catholics must be deterred.5 The opening of crematoria in South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria by 1930 provoked a tract setting out the theological case against cremation in the Australasian Catholic Record. The Catholic church’s emphatic stand against cremation was a renewed assertion of Christian principles against the return of pagan and materialist standards. The church’s reasons for opposition included the alleged biblical evidence that burial was the divinely approved method of disposing of the human body, while cremation was alien to revealed religion. Catholics ‘see in burial, by sacred symbolism, a link with bodily resurrection’, whereas the destructive and ‘inhuman savagery’ of the furnace suggested annihilation.6 The history of cremation in Australia commenced prematurely in the unlikely location of South Australia, the most pious (but least Catholic) state of all, where traditional Christian hostility to cremation was aligned with an innate conservatism. Although South Australia led the way with the first crematorium in 1903, only 386 cremations took place in the first 27 years. By 1947 it had little more than one-tenth of the cremations in New South Wales and Victoria. Robert Nicol tells this strange story well, showing the overwhelming negative impact of the inefficient and
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gloomy cremation facilities at the West Terrace Crematorium in central Adelaide. The building was small and rudimentary, the surroundings were unattractive, and the furnace mechanism was quickly obsolete. Moreover, the process was remarkably slow, taking about a day and a half to cremate a body. Despite major repairs in 1927 and 1928, Adelaide’s crematorium was regarded as ‘the first and the worst’ in Australia – crude, obsolete, dilapidated, with a ‘sliding apparatus whose creaks and groans must harrow the hearts of mourners’. But for many complex reasons, including depression, war and lack of funds, the West Terrace Crematorium continued in use until 1959. By 1953 hostile publicity had reached a crescendo, with the News describing the facility as ‘gruesome and scandalous’ and a politician observing that ‘the outmoded crematorium belches smoke over grief-stricken mourners in the cemetery grounds’. A new facility, Centennial Park Crematorium, was finally opened in 1955.7
The New South Wales success story The other states learned from the South Australian experiment when they came to build their own crematoria over twenty years later. New South Wales became the new leader with a crematorium at Rookwood in 1925, but only after a slow start.8 An interesting discussion about cremation took place in the correspondence columns of the Sydney Morning Herald following the opening of effective facilities on four acres of land within Rookwood Cemetery. This debate helped to win support, reassuring people who now had a practical choice but were still anxious about rumours of unsavoury practices in crematoria. Most correspondents favoured cremation, while the arguments against it were presented by just a few Catholics. Revd AG Clarke, a Catholic priest of Auburn, propounded the Catholic view that cremation was pagan, un-Christian, and ‘horrible’, and was condemned alike by early Christians and the contemporary Catholic Church. He warned that Catholics who chose cremation
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would receive neither the last sacraments nor Christian burial.9 The few writers who responded to the Catholic argument rebutted the theological points and briefly debated the arcane question of whether cremation fell into disuse in the fourth century. The most significant point raised was that the 1929 cremation of Dr Harrington Lees, Anglican Archbishop of Melbourne, had shown the community that cremation was not repugnant to the ideals of the Anglican church, despite the opposition of Catholics.10 Most supporters of cremation emphasised the traditional public health case, with little comment on the religious issues. Victor C Bell, a Presbyterian clergyman of Strathfield, argued in 1928 that cremation was less dangerous to the health of the community than burial. He claimed that over a million bodies were lying only six feet under the soil at Rookwood, in all stages of decomposition, spreading infection, whereas the fires of cremation eliminated all traces of disease.11 In 1934 Arthur Dent, secretary of the Cremation Society of Australia, reinforced these old sanitary arguments. Earth burial took up to a hundred years of ‘slow corrupting decay with necessary pollution of earth, air and water’ to achieve annihilation, compared with only an hour for the hygienic method of cremation. Revd Clarke rebutted these misconceptions, pointing out that earth burial did not endanger the living when properly carried out.12 He was correct: medical scientists were increasingly discrediting these old fears. Several writers, among them Peter Pickle of Neutral Bay, believed cremation essential to end the ‘abomination’ of old graveyards, which became overgrown and desecrated: far from inspiring reverence for the dead, old burying grounds were reminders of ‘disgusting decay’ and centres of pestilence.13 An editorial in the Sydney Morning Herald on cremation in 1930 also set out the numerous health and sanitary objections against older cemeteries, including the danger of disease from their drainage. Moreover, cemeteries occupied large tracts of valuable land in populated areas, so that sometimes they had to be resumed and the remains
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exhumed for transfer elsewhere, an unsavoury process better avoided. Horace Crotty, Bishop of Bathurst, used this argument when opening a new chapel at the Rookwood Crematorium in 1934. Recent history warned against vain hopes that the dead would be undisturbed in sacrosanct cemeteries. The transportation of human remains between burial grounds was a sorry business which could be avoided by the ‘chaste sacrament’ of cremation.14 Crotty’s views no doubt reflected his experience of burials in the Great War, when he had been an army chaplain. The most influential letters, however, were probably those which described recent cremation ceremonies as less harrowing and more dignified than burials. Such letters could go far to dispel fears and prejudice. In 1928, Revd Victor C Bell was called upon to officiate at the cremation of an aged member of his church. As it was his first experience of cremation, he observed it closely, mentally comparing it favorably with burial: Cremation appealed to me very strongly … It is not so harrowing to the relations as burial. When mourners stand around a grave there is the sight of the opened earth, the hearing of the clods fall upon the coffin, which it is difficult to avoid, and, not seldom, a disagreeable smell from malignant fluids which seep away from adjacent graves. It would be difficult to imagine any method more calculated to intensify grief than that of lowering the body of a loved one into a gaping hole … The cremation takes place out of sight and hearing of the mourners … all is as quiet as it possibly could be … Reverence is more easily maintained, and, to my mind, the whole service is more impressive.
Bell called for a more general adoption of cremation, and saw nothing against it except sentiment and theological prejudice.15 An anonymous AIF veteran in 1927 shared Bell’s view of the ceremony, following the funeral of a young soldier who had requested cremation, having witnessed the terrible circumstances of earth burial during the Great War. The service by a clergyman of the soldier’s faith was ‘most reverent’ and all present were
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Christians who were convinced that it was the best means of disposal. Miss C Williams of Lavender Bay, secretary of the Cremation Society of Australia, denied that cremation was pagan, having recently attended a beautiful service at Rookwood Crematorium which demonstrated the spiritual beauty and permanent comfort to be gained from cremation.16 A report in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1930 suggested that a turning point had already been reached: numbers of cremations in Rookwood’s first five years exceeded all expectations, rising from 58 in 1925 to 553 in 1929. At first, services had to be conducted either in the open or in front of a partition in the actual furnace room, but more reverence was possible once the chapel was completed in 1926. The antagonism and prejudice which obstructed the cremation pioneers for so many years were now gradually being overcome.17 The editor of the Sydney Morning Herald considered that this was the appropriate time to educate the New South Wales community about the practical realities of cremation. He explained that the coffin was placed on the catafalque in the chapel, attended by the mourners, and that after the service a door moved silently to allow the catafalque to disappear into the furnace room. The coffin was mechanically introduced into the cremating retort, but the actual flames did not come into contact with the remains. Intense heat caused the disintegration of the body in about an hour, leaving only a small portion of ‘indestructible calcine matter’ reduced to tiny particles, which were reverently placed in an urn for disposal. Niches for the ashes were provided in the chapel columbarium and in a wall around the Garden of Remembrance.18 This practical information and reassurance built on the years of education provided by the Cremation Society. It was necessary to contest the propaganda circulated by antagonists, including horror stories about mixing ashes and re-using coffins. Few such cremation scandals, true or false, were reported by the Sydney Morning Herald after 1925. The New South Wales success story was in marked contrast to
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that in South Australia, where public ignorance remained a major obstacle to the acceptance of cremation. Indeed cremation in New South Wales proceeded so rapidly that new facilities were opened at North Ryde in 1933 and at Woronora in 1934. In New South Wales private developers ran crematoria and cemeteries, and used more aggressive business practices than in Victoria where they were controlled by trustees. The new Northern Suburbs Crematorium at North Ryde was designed in elaborate neo-classical Spanish-mission style in six acres of landscaped gardens on a hill, to be seen for miles around. The building had ‘cream stucco walls, cool loggias, and red tile roofs, dominated by the towering campanile’. Its two chapels, designed to accommodate 400, each held an organ gallery, a recessed sanctuary, and a catafalque, with loggias on both sides for shelter. The chapels were finished internally with synthetic stone, marble and bronze. Four coke-fired furnaces were installed, ensuring coffins were not in contact with the flames. The grounds were landscaped with flowers, shrubs and native trees, taking full advantage of the attractive natural surroundings.19 A lavishly illustrated booklet provided for families by the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in 1934, was written in the sentimental style soon to be satirised by Evelyn Waugh and Jessica Mitford: its title was ‘Sanctuary’ and it reflected the influence of the American way of death. It recommended the niche walls of Florentine design in the Garden of Remembrance for the ultimate disposal of the ‘sacred’ ashes. Urns in wall niches would be preserved in perpetuity ‘in vivid contrast to the truly pathetic spectacle presented by so many of our neglected churchyards and cemeteries’. Further on was a photograph of a serene garden courtyard set off by six lines of Rupert Brooke’s poetry, commencing with the line ‘There’s peace and holy quiet there’. (Brooke, of course, was describing a soldier’s grave on the Western front, not a Sydney crematorium.) Another photograph showed the Spanishstyle main building with ‘all the charm of medieval architecture …
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a place of peaceful solitude where cherished memories linger’. It was rather like a holiday brochure, with abundant photographs of beautiful scenery, described variously as ‘nature’s own bush parkland’, ‘a sublime setting’ and ‘a sanctuary for the feathered songsters’. The imaginative author linked Wordworth’s poetry with texts from the Bible and with prose describing kings of England lying at peace in ancient abbeys. The Garden of Memory would ‘mellow with the years’, and the sacred ashes in their hallowed niches were ‘safe forever mid sound of prayer and praise for lives well lived’.20 This sentimental idyll was indeed a world removed from the stark ugliness of the West Terrace Crematorium in Adelaide with its chimney disguised as a belltower and its belching smoke. Perhaps the purple prose reassured families and helped counteract horror stories about cremation. The Woronora Crematorium was established in 1934 within the grounds of the Woronora General Cemetery at Sutherland, south of Sydney. Its 60-foot-high chimney was concealed within a ‘belfry-like campanile’. The two handsome chapels provided accommodation for 400 and the pleasant landscape contained a court of remembrance, and a ‘lotus pool’.21 The chairman of the trustees noted at the opening that the crematorium had been developed in ‘a spirit of brightness and sunshine, eliminating as far as possible all tendency to gloom and despondency’. He also ventured the optimistic forecast that within 15 years cremation might become as customary as earth burial.22 In New South Wales cremation numbers justified the creation of the Eastern Suburbs Crematorium in 1938, and the Beresfield Crematorium at Newcastle in 1936. Few people have left written reflections on their responses to cremation ceremonies or the meanings they attributed to them. This is not surprising since cremation was likely to appeal to those who preferred to reduce ceremony and ritual to a minimum, and deal with death quickly, without discussion or contemplation. But some writers and intellectuals did express their mixed views in the
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earlier years when cremation was still uncommon. The poet and scholar, Tom Inglis Moore, wrote to Hugh McCrae in 1937 after the cremation of playwright William Moore, about the scattering of his ashes on Gore Hill on Sydney’s north shore: Until last Sunday morning I never felt what ‘Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust’ really, starkly, irrevocably meant … The man from the crematorium shook Bill’s ashes out of a plain tin, like a small naked biscuit tin, at the foot of the sapling on the ground and the leaves. And the wind blew a little cloud of white ash, drifting like smoke … into our faces. It was queer and rather terrible to see what we knew and loved as Bill reduced into a few handfuls of pitiful dust, and scattered on the brown gum leaves, with bits of burnt-up and powdered bones of Bill blown into your eyes. It was a hot morning, the sun was hot, and the locusts were drumming in the gums, but I went cold all over and shivered … But why, why in the hell, do they have to use a bloody biscuit tin, or what looks like one, not even a full size one? … Surely they could run to a decent wooden casket or box! The scattering of the ashes was more poignant, somehow, because it made everything, all our lives, so insignificant and small and so blown-away – to nothingness, than watching the coffin slide away and the grill come down, on the day of the funeral, or watching Bill all day, the Saturday before, just ebbing out.23
Tom Inglis Moore’s moving letter evoked the radical and negative aspects of cremation in that it seemed so suddenly to annihilate both mind and body of an individual. It also captured the incongruity between the significance of the occasion and the ‘bloody biscuit tin’. Hugh McCrae may have recalled Moore’s description of the scattering of ashes six years later when his beloved wife Nancy died suddenly of a stroke in December 1943, at the age of 67. McCrae was tortured by remorse because he felt he was never able to demonstrate his love for her. ‘For a week I was like a lunatic’ he wrote later, and he left the arrangement of the funeral and cremation to his daughters, complaining to one of them that ‘the cremation people in Bligh Street have been bothering me, and
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want money, too’.24 Nancy’s ashes remained for years at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium awaiting family instructions for disposal. It was over a decade before the widower decided. In 1956, perhaps aware of his own impending death, he gave instructions at last that Nancy’s ashes be placed in a niche in the Wall of Remembrance in a uniform container with a bronze engraved memorial plate. When McCrae died in February 1958, his ashes were interred beside a specified memorial tree with a plaque at Northern Suburbs Crematorium, which did not permit the polishing of plates, nor the placing of floral tributes near memorial niches.25
Progress in other states Developments in Victoria were slower and less smooth than in New South Wales, despite an earlier start. Although a Cremation Act was passed in 1903, the first cremation in 1905 at Springvale Necropolis took place merely in a hole in the lawn, later lined with brick though still described as a ‘temporary structure’. Not surprisingly, given such inadequate facilities, only 57 bodies were cremated in Victoria between 1905 and 1920. The Argus explained in 1920 that ‘the prejudice against the destruction of human remains by fire remains strong’. A Cremation Society, once active in Melbourne, had practically ceased to exist by 1920. The Argus recommended that when public support justified it, a modern crematorium should be built at the New Melbourne General Cemetery at Fawkner. The board of management at Fawkner responded that it was strongly in favour of cremation on hygienic grounds, but first there was a need of ‘much education of the public mind’.26 Prejudice against cremation in Victoria remained high throughout the 1920s with far greater hostility than in New South Wales. This may perhaps be explained by Melbourne’s unsuccessful initial experiment at Springvale in 1905. It may also be argued that Christian faith was stronger in Victoria, and its people more
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conservative, though it is impossible to prove. The city health officer, Dr Thomas Sinclair, had been impressed on a 1924 tour of England and America to find that cremation was becoming more common in large cities. He urged its adoption in Victoria to save large tracts of land currently set aside for cemeteries which in time became neglected eyesores.27 Sinclair’s leadership encouraged the revival of the Cremation Society of Victoria which claimed that public opinion was at last moving in favour of cremation.28 A modern crematorium was established at Fawkner Cemetery in north Melbourne in 1927, but progress in the first ten years was modest. Yet demand was strong enough by 1936 to allow the development of a new crematorium at the Springvale Necropolis in the south, in competition with Fawkner in the north.29 There was a growing acceptance of cremation in Australia between 1930 and 1960. Every state had at least one crematorium by 1939. The 1930s was a significant decade of cautious change, demonstrating the increasing appreciation of the arguments favouring cremation over burial. Much effort and expense were devoted to making facilities attractive as well as cheaper than burial, and to educating the public to eradicate prejudices and fears. After the Second World War, cremation was more and more accepted by ordinary families in urban areas and religious hostility was considerably reduced, except among Catholics. Many more crematoria were built in the decades following the war, with improved facilities and technology. Helen McCrae’s letter to her brother Hugh, written in 1955 at the age of 81, suggested greater support for cremation among people in Melbourne, though her enthusiasm was perhaps unusual: Once I used to dread the thought of dying. The thought of the Q [Kew] cemetery and being put in a box and buried in the ground was so gruesome – now its quite a gay venture – turning quickly, in the twinkling of an eye, into a neat little pile of nice clean ashes and being scattered in the air to fly about with the butterflies, well, it is not frightening.30
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A full-page illustrated article in The Age in 1968 describing the crematorium at the Necropolis, Springvale, provides an illuminating perspective during the decade when cremation numbers equalled burials in Melbourne. The writer, Leonard Radic, observed that the new Australian way of death was ‘smooth, businesslike and largely undemonstrative’. Death was no longer so sombre, and mourning ritual was almost abolished. Like other cemeteries and crematoria in Victoria, and unlike those in New South Wales, Springvale was a non-profit organisation run by a board of trustees. The manager, Keith Neville, a retired army major, ran the Necropolis like a military operation, but with humane intent: We want to cut out all the mystery, the morbidity and the nastiness surrounding cemeteries and death. We’re out to soften the blow for people – to make the necropolis a soft and gentle place of solace, where people can come and meditate in pleasant, natural surroundings.31
Cremation was now at the heart of Springvale’s thriving operation – a far cry from the pit in the lawn in 1905. Springvale claimed in 1968 to operate the largest crematorium in the British Commonwealth, with 7000 cremations per year outnumbering burials four to one. Cremation accounted for only 32.6 per cent of funerals in Victoria as a whole in 1962, rising to 37 per cent in 1967. In Melbourne itself, by contrast, the figure was already about 50 per cent. Springvale had up to 47 cremations on busy days, when funerals were scheduled at ten-minute intervals to meet the high demand. To prevent congestion, Neville employed a team of grey-uniformed motorcyclists with walkie talkies who kept in touch with the three chapels and cleared the cortege off the main driveway when needed. He was anxious, however, to ‘avoid any suggestion of mass production or of a factory-line procedure’: the grave-diggers and gardening staff also wore uniforms and were expected to show due respect when a cortege passed.32 Neville’s desire to ‘soften the blow’ for mourners was ex-
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pressed in the soft carpets, air-conditioning and one-way windows overlooking a tranquil pool and courtyard. Each service was timed for thirty minutes, and compliance was secured by a light on the celebrant’s lectern. Mood music was supplied to the chapels by long-playing tapes. Six oil-fired furnaces consumed coffins as well as bodies, but not the ornate coffin fittings which were removed by the boiler-suited furnace attendants. The cremation process only took about 30 minutes, leaving a tin tray full of dust and scorched bones which were then ground down. The carefully numbered remains were stored for three months and, if unclaimed, scattered on the rose garden. The basic charge for the cremation was $30, but a plaque or memorial cost more, depending on design.33 The process in Perth, as in Sydney, illustrates the speed of acceptance once an efficient facility had been established. In 1926 the annual report of the Karrakatta Cemetery board noted that ‘apparently at the present time the public generally are not very interested in a change in the method of treating remains of deceased persons’. Yet in 1929 an Act was passed permitting trustees of existing cemeteries to establish crematoria, on the grounds that burial was ‘inefficient, unhygienic and wasted space’. A seven-year delay followed, perhaps because of economic depression, before the Karrakatta Cemetery board was granted the right to establish a crematorium. The main building was designed in a simple modern style based on classical ideas, with an imposing entrance and a garden of remembrance. It was perhaps appropriate that the first cremation service was held in 1937 for a returned soldier who had committed suicide, since many former soldiers preferred cremation following dreadful wartime experience of burials on the Western Front. There were 130 cremations in the first year of the new facility, and the steady increase in numbers in subsequent years guaranteed an extended use of land for burial at Karrakatta Cemetery. In 1968 the success of cremation in Perth was clear when numbers of cremations actually exceeded burials. Twenty years later cremations represented 73 per cent of all funerals at Karrakatta.34
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Monica Chase spoke for many when she explained why she chose cremation for her little daughter Scarlett, aged eleven months, after she drowned in a swimming pool in Perth in 1988. She was not planning to stay in Western Australia after the tragedy, so there was little point in a grave far away from her new home: Besides which my imagination painted horrific pictures of her flesh rotting and being infested and eaten away by worms and the like; and the thought of her being closed in like that, trapped in some dark place beneath the earth, disturbed me deeply. Cremation seemed so much quicker and cleaner. A concisive [sic] ending to the physical bond between us. Whereas burials and gravesides have always felt a little inconclusive to me.35
The stark impact of cremation could be softened by combining the modern method of disposal with traditional Christian rituals or with secular practices, as did Kylie Tennant and her friends. Kylie’s friend Dr Rudolf Brunswick wrote to her in 1976, sending instructions for the funeral and cremation of his wife Ella and himself. He had made a pact with Ella that neither of them would go to the crematorium in Canberra when the other died, but attend only the funeral service at St John’s Church. They both wanted the cheapest pine coffins – unpainted but planed, currently costing $150 (cardboard was not permitted because the coffin had to be strong enough to be carried with a body inside by the crematorium staff). Rudolf wanted to be cremated in his ancient blue cotton tracksuit, not his Sunday suit, which was to go to the Salvation Army. He included a selection of hymns ‘in which neither the melody, nor the theology expressed, nor the rhyming would offend me’. Three years later he updated their wills because Ella was seriously ill with pneumonia. They were both practising Christians and their rector came every ten days or so to administer Communion: ‘I have everything organised after a talk to the undertaker, cremation with no one from the family in attendance and then a funeral service with all of them at St Johns and ashes in the churchyard there’.36 This practice is now common but seems to have been unusual in the 1970s.
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After her son Bim was murdered in 1978, Kylie Tennant’s sister helped her organise ‘a full requiem mass, cremation and small party’, besides working hard at the orchard as therapy.37 As her husband Lewis C Rodd explained: The cremation was at Northern Suburbs Crematorium and so Bim’s Christian side was combined with his love of India. Kylie has placed his urn in the old concrete butter cooler behind the house which she has converted into a kind of grotto. The flowers are now in full bloom and there is a Thai dancing girl with two or three of Benison’s little crib figures.38
Two years later when Rodd himself died, he chose burial in Waverley Cemetery ‘in the sunlight with the blue water and the cliffs’, rather than cremation.39 After some complaint from her inlaws in 1980 that her husband’s grave looked neglected, Kylie Tennant commented: Personally I take no stock in what happens to remains … My friend David Hewson had the right idea. He didn’t have a funeral. He just got his solicitor and doctor to attend his cremation, his ashes were scattered around his home dam and everyone had a party the Sunday after he died.40
After dying of cancer in 1988, Kylie Tennant was cremated at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium, as her son had been. When the federal Prices Surveillance Authority investigated funeral prices in 1992, its report included interesting information on cremation trends. There was a large increase in the proportion of cremations between 1960 and 1980. In the 1980s the numbers were relatively stable at about 47 per cent of registered deaths – as might be expected the proportion was higher in capital cities than in country areas. Cremation rates varied greatly between states in 1988–89. The Australian Capital Territory had the highest rate with 73 per cent, followed by Western Australia with 57 per cent and New South Wales with 55 per cent. The rates in the Australian Capital Territory were understandable given the high
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education levels and salaries of the population, and ready access to a crematorium. Western Australia was more surprising, though possibly the large numbers of British migrants influenced disposal patterns. It is remarkable that Australia’s cremation rates should be so high given that about 25 per cent of the population was Catholic and strongly opposed to cremation until at least the 1960s. Victoria had the lowest proportion of cremations at 40 per cent, perhaps because of its large numbers of Italian and Greek migrants with strong objections to the practice. Cremations by state as a proportion of deaths: 1988–89 41 State/territory
Percentage
Australian Capital Territory
73.0
Western Australia
56.5
New South Wales
54.8
Queensland
50.2
South Australia
49.2
Tasmania
47.0
Victoria
40.1
Australia
49.4
By 1987 New South Wales had eighteen crematoria and Queensland ten, mostly controlled by private enterprise. Other states had fewer (five in Victoria, three in Western Australia, two each in Tasmania and South Australia, and one in the Australian Capital Territory) and these were nearly all operated by state or local government trustees. Costs of cremation and burial had risen far more than funeral prices over the previous 30 years, chiefly because of earlier underpricing. Cremation prices in Sydney ranged from $415 to $485, lower than in Melbourne. The price of a wall niche for ashes in Sydney, including plaque, ranged from $165 to $690, while the price for burial of ashes in a garden varied from $230 to $745.42 The Sydney Morning Herald reported in 1997 on the impact of the takeover by the huge American company, Service Corporation
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International, of five of the seven crematoria in Sydney and both in Brisbane. As with burials, many people complained about the aggressive sales tactics and expensive memorial extras – such as cremation urns, plaques and memorial books – that these crematoria representatives pressed on bereaved families. A commissiondriven sales staff directed a telephone marketing campaign to persuade relatives to ‘upgrade’ the niches which contained loved ones’ ashes. It was claimed that prices trebled at one Queensland crematorium after SCI took over. A service consultant at Northern Suburbs quoted the cheapest niche at $1540, while scattering the ashes with no memorial would cost $100. Elaborate urns to sit on the mantelpiece could cost between $2800 and $3900. Such practices were encouraging many families simply to take the ashes in plastic urns from the crematoria to store at home or scatter, leaving no memorials of any kind. This was an extreme form of annihilation of visible reminders of the dead individual.43 __ Changes in the business of the disposal of bodies have been slow, responding to cultural change rather than helping create it. The cremation business had special problems in facilitating diversity in death rituals and more open expression of sorrow. Cremation developed from the late nineteenth century in response to demands from funeral reformers to simplify the elaborate Victorian-era funeral and burial rituals. The mass deaths and terrible burial practices of the Great War reinforced the pressure for simple and secular procedures. Cremation’s stark simplicity, brief ceremonies and functional buildings were well suited to the half century of death denial after 1918. The revival from the 1980s of expressive grieving and the pressure for more comforting rituals to suit individual needs raised challenges for the cremation and funeral businesses, as for cemeteries. The profound cultural change of the last 25 years is the subject of my next chapter, and brings us to the world we live in today.
Part V The second cultural shift
16 The revival of expressive grief
The media’s increasing level of concern from the late 1970s with the ‘50-year conspiracy of unhealthy silence’1 signalled the start of a reaction against the dominant culture of death denial. The reasons for this second major shift in cultural responses and attitudes to death and grief in the twentieth century are complex. More than thirty years had elapsed since the end of the Second World War, and another generation had grown up free from the constraints on death 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. The strong reaction against the over-medicalisation of death in hospitals also played a vital part, reinforced by the heart-breaking case studies presented to the press by the euthanasia movement. From the 1980s the HIV/AIDs epidemic and the palliative care movement added to the forces demanding death with dignity, and moving cancer narratives sometimes showed how it might be achieved. Moreover, broader changes in the cultural, intellectual and social climate from the 1970s encouraged more liberal attitudes and greater freedom of emotional expression. A number of influences, sometimes inter-related, together produced a climate conducive to a cultural shift in ideas, attitudes and modes of
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behaviour. These included a new receptiveness to more permissive ideas and attitudes emanating from the United States, especially greater freedom of self-expression and a culture of protest. The dominant culture was increasingly questioned, as Australians became more affluent and more open to American and European influences through travel. New universities had opened from the 1960s to cater to the needs of the baby boom generation which was less inclined to observe society’s traditional sanctions. American influences played some part in the Women’s Liberation Movement, the gay liberation campaign and the student protests against the Vietnam War. As John Rickard notes: It was the counter-culture which provided the unifying theme for protest and liberation, deliberately setting out to subvert the conformist values of ‘the Australian way of life’. There was, therefore, as the 1970s began, a strong sense of the old certainties of family and community being questioned.2
The contribution of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and other psychologists The change in the emotional culture relating to death and grief was one important facet of this broader transition. The emotional norms of society had shifted after the Great War, as we have seen, and fifty years or so later they began to change again to a more openly expressive form. Dr Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, the eminent Swiss-American psychiatrist, made an important contribution to this cultural shift. As we saw in chapter 9, her popular 1969 book, On Death and Dying, encouraged a reaction against the medicalisation of death.3 Her moving stories about the experiences of the dying had a powerful impact on people across the world, accustomed to the silences surrounding death. Western society was evidently ready to hear 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 a normal part of a difficult process. Kubler-Ross succeeded brilliantly in popularising psycho-
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logical ideas on death and dying through the mass media. The power, clarity and emotional appeal of her work took advantage of changes in the cultural climate to alter both medical and popular responses to death and bereavement. Kubler-Ross undertook world tours to spread her gospel: she was a charismatic speaker with a mission. She made several highly successful tours around Australia from the late 1970s to the 1990s, explaining to large audiences why Western societies handled death and grief so badly and how that might be changed. She also ran influential workshops, such as the five-day residential workshop for over 100 people on ‘Life, Death and Transition’ at Menangle, New South Wales, in 1987. There she encouraged people to carry out the unfinished business of releasing ‘old grief’ that had never been expressed, especially by men who were not supposed to cry.4 She argued that dying people should be allowed to die a good death with dignity, and that death should be an opportunity for spiritual growth for the dying and their families. In 1988 the Sydney Morning Herald claimed that ‘almost single-handedly Elisabeth Kubler-Ross has made death respectable … The enthusiastic world-wide reception of her message demonstrated just how overdue it was.’5 Her crusade encouraged some cancer patients to publish narratives of their experiences. It also gave a boost to the voluntary euthanasia campaign with its heartbreaking accounts of distressing deaths. It inspired some individuals facing the death of a loved one to help them die with dignity. In 1976 Anne Summers took three months’ leave from her job at the National Times and flew to Adelaide when she knew her brother Jamie was dying. On the plane she read Kubler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, a significant indicator of the influence of this text in Australia in the 1970s. She tried to convince herself that she had reached the stage identified by Kubler-Ross as ‘acceptance’ of Jamie’s death, having also talked about it for months with her friends.6
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Kubler-Ross’s books and lectures held major appeal for the media and the public, with their combination of charismatic evangelism, simple messages and heart-breaking stories. For some medical and psychiatric experts, the five-stage model seemed overly simplistic and rigid. Psychiatrist Beverley Raphael acknowledged KublerRoss’s ‘sensitive and pioneering’ work, but stressed the variations in individual responses to death and grief: that ‘whatever stages there are will not be fixed or clear-cut’, and that the individual may fluctuate backward and forward from one stage to another.7 Kubler-Ross’s success depended on the sympathetic cultural climate and the vital preparatory work of other psychologists. The shift from the 1980s towards a more open and expressive mode of grieving was encouraged by some members of the middle-class caring professions, especially by psychologists and psychiatrists. The latter played an important role as they constructed theories about grief, provided therapy for individuals unable to cope with complex grief, and advised society how best to deal with it. Between 1918 and the 1970s psychologists had generally advised that it was helpful for bereaved people to express grief openly, but they tended to place more emphasis than they do today on the need for the bereaved to sever bonds with the deceased. The goal was ideally to cease grieving, break ties with the past, and develop new relationships. These ideas have been modified over the last 30 years to allow for greater flexibility, recognising that people naturally grieve in different ways, and that patterns of behaviour have changed over time. Significant developments had taken place in psychological research into bereavement in England in the 1960s and 1970s. John Bowlby’s three volumes on Attachment and Loss and Colin Murray Parkes’ Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life became influential classic texts.8 Bowlby and Parkes produced some of their most vital work on bereavement in the 1960s, when the culture of death avoidance was still at its height. Their concept of healthy grieving was the converse of the dominant view of the death-denying society at the time.
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A decade later, Beverley Raphael led the way with Australian research into grief and loss with her 1984 book, The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions. While she acknowledged the vital contributions of Bowlby and Parkes, she applied and developed their theories according to Australian circumstances and experiences. Raphael broadly shared the conclusions of Bowlby and Parkes about the usual ‘stages’ of the grieving process. Acute anguish at the time of death was followed by a defensive sense of numbness and shock. The next phase of grieving was often characterised by an intense yearning and ‘searching’ for the dead loved one, accompanied by waves of severe distress, and sometimes anger and guilt. The bereaved was usually intensely preoccupied with memories of the dead person and mentally reviewed and re-experienced the entire relationship, good and bad. Months later, a third stage of apathy and depression often had to be endured before the mourner was ultimately able to reorganise a life and establish a new social identity.9 During the last 15 years psychologists have modified this early theoretical ‘stage’ model, in response to the new cultural climate and to new research, emphasising its flexibility and the diversity of human responses to sorrow. In particular, they argue that the final stage of ‘acceptance’ of death had often been interpreted too rigidly to mean ‘closure’ or detachment from the dead person. Work by many psychologists, including Margaret and Wolfgang Stroebe and Henk Schut, suggests that a complex multidimensional approach is needed to grief – it is not a simple, universal process with a succession of fixed stages. Manifestations of grief vary in different cultures, between different individuals, and over time. Some bereaved people cope by clinging to memories of the deceased, whereas others need some distraction. By 1999 Margaret Stroebe and Henk Schut developed the ‘dual process model’ of coping with bereavement. They suggested that healthy adaptation required oscillation between dwelling on the loss, on the one hand, and dealing with its consequences on the other –
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such as coping with finances and making new relationships. A balance is needed. Tony Walter, a sociologist, has criticised the traditional emphasis on ‘grief work’ to achieve detachment from the dead person, and emphasised the value of continuing bonds with the deceased in the minds of survivors.10 Yet Raphael’s work was always fairly flexible, and it has to be seen now in its historical context as vital pioneering work which responded to a different cultural climate when most people found it hard to express feelings. Her 1984 book remains especially valuable on the diversity of emotional responses to grief in Australia and the varying cultural expectations of the bereaved: Sanctions for the expression of feeling and grief are most variable. Some cultures expect and demand a very open expression of grief at the loss and would view as shameful a funeral where tears were not shed and emotion was hidden. Many European cultures, such as those of the Greeks and Italians, have quite clear expectations of open and strong emotional release; whereas Anglo-Saxon society may view such public display of feeling as unseemly, praising the person who shows strong emotional control. Emotional expression is seen as more acceptable for women … Nevertheless even this release is denied to women in many societies of Anglo-Saxon origin.
Raphael also noted the potential value of the Irish wake in showing community and family support and sharing memories of the dead person – a lively wake could stimulate an early start to the vital process of psychological mourning.11
The changing face of disaster relief Beverley Raphael also played a highly significant personal role in encouraging greater public acceptance of open expressions of grief in response to natural or man-made disasters, and emphasised the value of bereavement counselling. As we have seen, press reports of earlier disasters such as the 1939 Black Friday bushfires in Victoria focused on the deaths of victims and the heroism of survivors and rescuers, rather than on the public expression of
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sorrow and the private individual grief of the families affected. The changed response to disasters can be seen clearly from the mid-1970s. The focus had still been on death and dying during the disaster of Cyclone Tracey in Darwin in 1974, with little attention to individual bereaved people. Raphael observed that press reports concentrated on the stench of death and decomposition: ‘Dead animals, the death and decay of their bodies, the death of plant matter’. Though 49 people died and 16 were missing, presumed dead, the extensive television coverage included little information about the bereaved and their private and individual grief.12 Only two years later in January 1977 at the rail disaster in Granville, New South Wales, the emphasis had changed to concerns about public expressions of sorrow and the need for grief counselling for victims and the bereaved. It marked a turningpoint in Australian responses to public disasters. Eighty-three people died when a commuter train from the Blue Mountains crashed into the upright pillar of a cement bridge, impelling a huge cement slab of the bridge to crush carriages and victims. For over two days rescue and medical teams worked to free the injured, trapped beneath the cement slab, and remove bodies from crushed carriages. Raphael was involved at several levels, including the provision of support services at the city morgue for families identifying bodies of loved ones, and counselling rescue and medical workers about stress and bereavement. She conducted valuable research into disaster, death and loss, while also organising practical psychological counselling for the bereaved and injured and helping to educate the public through media coverage.13 The 1977 Granville train disaster was a watershed in the change towards a more open expression of sorrow. The media coverage helped the public to understand that open grieving was an appropriate and normal response to multiple deaths and mass sorrow. Journalists provided extensive information about the fears and trauma of relatives waiting for news of trapped loved ones and of the stressful experiences of courageous rescue workers.
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Interviews with psychologists conveyed a powerful message that emotional release should be encouraged through crying and talking out their sorrow and their memories. The media made the public vividly aware of grieving families and the value of overt compassion during such a disaster, encouraging public offers of assistance. Raphael noted later that those who suffered during the disaster found the opportunity to talk through their stress to be useful in later recovery. Informal de-briefing sessions were held at the local pub after the disaster, while some rescue workers and mourners needed more formal individual counselling from psychologists, clergy or nurses. The follow-up study showed that the outcome was better for those bereaved people who saw the body of their loved one, had supportive networks, and received skilled bereavement counselling.14 The aftermath of the Newcastle earthquake of 28 December 1989 illustrates just how well the lessons of the Granville train disaster had been learned. The emotional response was overwhelming by contrast with the disasters of the inter-war years. The earthquake in Newcastle killed 12 people, injured 115 and caused extensive property damage, including 2000 homes. It came as a great shock because it was the first earthquake in Australia which killed people. The newspapers described a ‘stricken city’, with 12 people crushed to death and 120 victims trapped beneath tonnes of rubble. Most victims were in the Newcastle Workers Club in the city centre where two floors collapsed, but other damaged buildings included three major hospitals and the police headquarters. The press published survival stories and eye witness accounts of bodies being pulled from the shattered buildings by courageous rescuers. They also rejoiced that the community reacted to the catastrophe instantly, without panic and in a generous co-operative spirit. Early efforts were made to create meaningful rituals. Only two days after the disaster, a memorial service for the victims was held at Christ Church Cathedral and the workers’ club employees held a one-minute silence for their dead workmates.15
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The most striking change in press reports on disasters after 1977 was the extensive coverage of disaster counselling services and the emphasis on psychologists’ advice on how to deal with trauma and grief. A disaster relief centre was swiftly established in Newcastle. The first of several psychologists to be cited by the press was Dr Judy Juriansky, an American with experience in counselling disaster victims from the San Francisco earthquake. Her message was that people suffering from earthquake trauma needed some release from their emotions, sooner rather than later. She considered Australians ‘shy’ in talking openly about shock and despair, but if they were unable to discuss their emotions they should find another outlet – go for a run or clean the house. She warned of the clear correlation between the mental trauma of such violent disasters and subsequent physical illness or depression. Rescue, ambulance, police and emergency workers might also need help, because they experienced trauma most directly but were expected to be tough.16 A week after the earthquake, Raphael was called in as the leading national expert on disaster counselling to help the Newcastle community prepare for life after the disaster. The health and welfare services had already joined forces to help the public cope with trauma: a special counselling team included experts from the Mater Hospital, Newcastle University and the Hunter Medical Health Service. Raphael warned that thousands of Newcastle people could require counselling for a year or more: the aftermath of the earthquake would be tough as the shock wore off and people had to deal with dramatic changes in their lives, including bereavement, disablement, destruction of homes and loss of jobs. By 18 January 1990, Raphael was establishing a coordinated three-point counselling plan. At the first level was a network of primary counselling services based in the community. For those with more distressing long-term trauma issues, specialist counselling would be available. And stress debriefing centres would be created to enable groups of people to get together to talk
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through their experiences and help each other. A list of available services was published each day in the Newcastle Herald, telling people where and how they could obtain counselling or material aid, including the anonymity of a telephone counsellor through Lifeline or the Smith Family.17 Meanwhile, efforts continued to be made to ritualise and memorialise the Newcastle earthquake. The most significant commemoration took place on the first anniversary of the earthquake, 28 December 1990, when about a thousand citizens observed a minute’s silence at a memorial service in Civic Park to remember the dead. Later in the day hundreds gathered at Christ Church Cathedral for an ecumenical service of thanksgiving and prayer for the spiritual and material rebuilding of the city. The newspapers focused on personal stories about the bereaved, the injured and the emergency workers. Bruce Hounslow, an ambulance officer who attended the workers’ club devastation a year earlier, acknowledged that the first anniversary ceremonies allowed him to release his emotions for the first time: ‘it’s taken me twelve months to cry about it’. The Newcastle Herald editorial paid special tribute to the efforts of the counsellors at the disaster relief centre who helped to ensure there was ‘no lying down and giving into fate’. Instead, Newcastle’s ‘bonding and community of spirit’ set an example for the rest of Australia. A correspondent, Cheryl Freeman, sent a letter to the Newcastle Herald on the anniversary of the disaster on the lasting nature of sorrow: ‘We need to learn that grief doesn’t stop some time after the funeral day; that people have an ongoing need to express their pain and loss; that people need to talk about it without restrictions or time limits’.18
Bereavement counselling and self-help Changing responses to death and grief in Australia did not take place in isolation, as similar shifts were happening in other Western societies, including Britain and the United States which were a few
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years ahead in timing. The so-called ‘death awareness’ movement which started in America encouraged the creation of self-help groups for bereaved people who suffered similar family losses and recognised the value of sharing these experiences. These groups were sometimes international, and included Compassionate Friends and Solace for widowed people. In Australia, the recognition of the value of bereavement counselling and self-help networks during the Granville rail disaster led to the creation of a national umbrella group, the National Association for Loss and Grief (NALAG) in 1977–78. NALAG’s role was to link together the various self-help groups, and develop education about death and bereavement through courses and conferences in tertiary institutions and in the community.19 The change in attitudes and responses to death and loss in Australia was encouraged by a number of committed individuals and groups. The Age noted in 1979 that death as a subject had suddenly become popular, ‘even trendy’. That year Des Tobin, of Tobin Brothers funeral directors, ran a special course on death and bereavement at the Gippsland Institute of Advanced Education: ‘to give people permission to do their grieving properly’.20 Mal McKissock, president of NALAG, became a full-time bereavement counsellor in the early 1980s, running education programs for health professionals to enhance their ability to deal with dying and bereaved people. He encouraged them to be honest with patients and ‘to share facts with the dying person’.21 His book, Coping with Grief, published in 1985, gave popular expression to psychologists’ arguments about the common need to express grief openly: ‘Weeping commonly offers wholesome relief and should not be discouraged. Talking freely about the person who has died also offers relief.’ McKissock argued that few people understood the depth and processes of grief because ‘Western society has death as its last taboo’. The decline of funeral and mourning rituals made it harder to cope with grief, as the bereaved were expected to be courageous and to control their emotions.
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‘Unresolved grief’ was still a massive problem in the community, with high morbidity and mortality rates among the bereaved.22 The growing public concern about grief and bereavement led to the creation of a number of compassionate self-help groups. The most well-known was the Compassionate Friends, an international organisation of bereaved parents, offering support and understanding to other afflicted parents. The Australian branch was founded in 1978 by bereaved parents Margaret and Lyndsay Harmer. Within three years groups had been established in all states. Yvonne Heard started a group in Tasmania in 1981, having experienced the support of Compassionate Friends in Melbourne. They ‘saved her life’ after her son’s death in a car accident, when she experienced severe depression, anger and marital problems. Her desperation was not helped by visits to psychiatrists, doctors, vicars and heavy sedation. Finally, Compassionate Friends allowed her to talk about her dead son openly with other bereaved parents who understood that her extreme emotions were normal. They cried and laughed together and shared photos of their dead children, and they formed friendships and were able to phone each other to share sorrow and talk when needed. As one bereaved parent noted: ‘I was able to open up, to confess my innermost feelings without guilt or shame, to cry freely’.23 Many bereaved parents found that friends and colleagues had little idea how to offer sympathy, except to say that time would help. Friends avoided them and they were forced to struggle with isolation as well as shock and grief, especially if the dead child had been murdered or committed suicide. The Compassionate Friends’ emotional support was invaluable, especially in reassuring them that their experience of sorrow was not abnormal, for individuals grieved in different ways.24 In 1998 the Compassionate Friends published an anthology of stories and poems about ‘The Death of a Child’ to commemorate the foundation of the movement 20 years earlier, and as ‘a living memorial for the children who died’. The foreword noted:
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The world seems to be afraid of grief and we are expected to ‘get over it’ and ‘get on with life’ … With this book, we acknowledge our dead children, their continuing presence in our lives and the void their dying has left. Death is too important to be ignored and our children are too important to be mourned silently.25
A similar voluntary self-help organisation was Solace, founded in 1983 in Adelaide for widows and widowers. It soon spread to Perth, Melbourne and Sydney. Jean Almond of Adelaide was devastated when she lost her husband and both parents within nine months in 1979. Her ‘whirlwind of grief, anger and loneliness’ distressed many of her friends, who tended to avoid her, so that social invitations declined and practical support was lacking. Four years later, when she had enough strength to cope with living again, she founded Solace to provide a network of good, understanding listeners. Solace was run by volunteer widows and widowers, and it drew on an advisory panel of doctors, psychologists and bereavement counsellors. It also operated a 24-hour telephone contact for members, and held weekly meetings which gave support, understanding and encouragement to rebuild lives. Women members outnumbered men six to one in Solace, because widowed men were fewer but also because men tended to internalise emotions, finding it more difficult to discuss grief with others.26 The compassionate self-help groups were reinforced by the publication of numerous narratives about death and grief from the 1970s. As Allan Kellehear notes: ‘a new groundswell of academic, professional, and popular literature in the 1970s began to rebuild and restore the fallen, disempowered, and lonely figure of the dying person’.27 Many such narratives have been written in the last 30 years by people who have recounted their battles with cancer – or other diseases – and survived. Others, like those by Anne Summers and Bill Hayden, have described the deaths of loved ones and their own experiences of grieving. As Dorothy Broom notes, their aims are often mixed: ‘to make it better for others, and to lay the ghost
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of one’s own experience’, but also to attempt to make a shattering and confused experience coherent and meaningful.28 For the bereaved, these narratives of dying and grieving had a special value. They brought these taboo subjects out into the open and allowed people to share their varied experiences. Allan Kellehear has edited a compassionate volume of such stories under the title Grief and Remembering: 25 Australians tell it like it is. He comments ‘For too long now the subject of grief has been hidden’. Recent discussions have been too often ‘clothed in overgeneralised therapeutic ideas’. These stories were published to show that grief is normal, though complex and distressing. Moreover, ‘there are as many reactions to grief as there are people; and the reactions keep changing’. Grief usually remains, while it evolves, and each person’s experience is unique. Kellehear presented these stories in 2001 to help people understand the complexity and diversity of the grieving experience, to ‘find some meaning and sense in it’ and to ‘learn from each other’.29 One story in particular in Kellehear’s volume suggests that he has succeeded in his aim to ‘reclaim grief as a central human experience’. Carolyn Foot found her 9-month old son, Shaun, dead in his cot in 1984: ‘I acquired my ticket to hell. I was chilled to the very core of my soul … this was way past pain, this was torture, so extreme, so unforgiving and relentless.’ She could only sleep for an hour or so at a time, usually waking sobbing and screaming. Fifteen years later, at Kellehear’s request, she reflected on her nightmare while marvelling at the strength of spirit which had enabled her to survive. Well-meaning friends had attempted to stop her crying and to suppress her grief: I refused to conform to the quiet, dignified grief that others expected or wanted of me. I grieved long and loud and honestly. I know I upset many people when I cried and talked openly, candidly and frequently of Shaun and death and feelings and pain … How many others perceived my grief and what they thought I should do was a complete contradiction to the way my grief actually was.
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In the years that followed, Carolyn Foot was confused by the theories of the experts about grief, telling her about stages and what was considered normal: ‘These experts had it all totally, horribly wrong. My grief is not some series of predictable stages. My grief does not have an end!’ She would never ‘get over’ Shaun’s death, which had changed her life for ever. Her grief was confused and unpredictable, but it was normal, for her, and she had adjusted to life without him as well as she could. Reality for her now was about ‘learning to live with the loss’, not about ‘letting go or moving on’.30
The new emotional tone of ‘In Memoriam’ notices The new emotional warmth was also reflected in the ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Death’ notices in the newspapers from about 1980. They had altered little between 1919 and 1980, showing the influence of the dominant view that the proper way to grieve was in private and in silence: they were usually brief, with emphases on memory, time and silence, while verses were few, formulaic and short. From about 1980 the tone and content of many notices in, for instance, the West Australian, the Adelaide Advertiser and the Hobart Mercury, indicated a remarkable change in what was considered culturally acceptable. In these newspapers the ‘Death’ notices were sometimes extended to include personal messages of sympathy addressed to members of the bereaved family. Some such notices continued in the traditional form, with brief references to ‘treasured memories’, heavenly reunions or ‘secret tears’, but many reflected the changed cultural climate. The new emotional tone of ‘In Memoriam’ and ‘Death’ notices was clearly influenced by the model provided by southern European migrants, with their greater acceptance of a public expression of sorrow. An extraordinary ‘Death’ notice for Archie Samios from his children in the West Australian in 1981 also suggested the impact of Kubler-Ross’s advice:
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The second cultural shift
SAMIOS (Archie): (His last days) Anxiety, anger, acceptance. Realisation, refusal, rebellion Caring, coping, crying. Hoping, hurting, hurting. Indecision, insecurity, intolerable. Endurance, exhaustion. END.31
Another such notice, in the same newspaper, written by Paul Audino and addressed to his dead sister, Assunta, in 1998, combined religious faith with emotional intensity, and offered a model notice for Anglo-Celtic Australians to follow: With tears we saw you suffer And watched you fade away Our hearts were really breaking As you fought so hard to stay. We know you had to leave us But you never left alone For part of us went with you When God called you home.32
Many ‘In Memoriam’ writers were liberated from the cool constraints of half a century: they felt free to express the depth of their sorrow in public newspapers for anyone to read, and often in colloquial style. Some notices revealed raw grief like that of loving wife Daphne Worker on the first anniversary of the death of her husband, Ray, in the Hobart Mercury in December 2000: It’s one year today that you broke my heart. It’s never been the same since, my heart cries for you. I need your help in many ways, only god knows. Your pillow is so empty at night and night is so long, so keep a special place for me. I love you.
In a separate notice, Ray’s son wrote that his father would have been proud of his five great-grandchildren, ‘nearly a cricket team’.33 Many such notices were emotional messages of love
The revival of expressive grief
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spoken simply, from the heart. Dianne Westall addressed her notice in the West Australian directly to her husband, Tony, who died in July 1998: ‘365 lonely days and unbearable nights since you left us so suddenly. We miss everything about you.’ Their son Nicolas wrote, ‘Daddy, I wish you were here. I wish I could have said goodbye and I wish you could come to the footy with me.’34 In some cases a series of ‘In Memoriams’ addressed to the same deceased relative could be exceptionally moving, as was the case with 12 notices in the Adelaide Advertiser on 21 June 1980 to Alan Barnes, known as ‘Spook’, a young man evidently killed in his prime a year earlier – ‘a young life wantonly destroyed’. His mother wrote: ‘Alan, my broad shouldered fair-haired son, I was so proud of you and loved you so much. How can I say goodbye and leave you in the past?’ His sister Mandy promised to name her future son after him, ‘the most cherished gift we can give him’. His younger sister Cherie sent a detailed message, with an emphasis on their shared memories: My adored big brother and playmate has gone. From the day I was born you took me as your special charge and loved and protected me. In my sick years you loved me to health. All my childhood your scrapes were my scrapes and I followed you faithfully and we laughed and cried together. Now at the beginning of my teen years I’ve been left, lost and alone … Longed for always.
Alan’s younger brother, ‘Charlie Cheesecake’, confessed, ‘our room often resembled a battlefield, now it’s an empty shell – Spook, I miss you so much’. His older brother, Mick, wrote, ‘whoever destroyed you Alan destroyed each of us in your family as well. You won’t be forgotten.’ Alan’s fiancée, Sherie, vowed: ‘Our love and laughter will never fade. When you went Spook my heart went with you. Loved and missed for ever.’35 The depth of emotion expressed by Alan’s family in 1980 had not been seen in ‘In Memoriam’ columns since the days of the Great War. As in all ‘In Memoriams’, memory was the prime consolation
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The second cultural shift
in the notices to Alan Barnes: even this was usually expressed with greater diversity and intensity in the late twentieth century. Memory was at the core of Emmie Townsend’s simple ‘In Memoriam’ in the Mercury in 2000 addressed to her husband Bill: Treasured memories of my dearly beloved husband: Deep in my heart your memory is kept, I smile through tears I cannot hide, you have left a place no-one can fill, your hand I cannot hold but memories locked inside of me are more precious than gold, I love you Bill, until we meet again rest peacefully.36
Some writers drew on the positivist concept of memory, which held that the deceased continued to influence the people who knew them through their ‘subjective immortality’. As the poet, Bernard O’Dowd, put it, ‘all that was good in him or bad in him influences his race still’.37 Even ‘the memory of a beloved child could have such an effect. The parents of four-month-old Jaime Ellen Radciffe sent an ‘In Memoriam’ to the Mercury in June 1990 on the first anniversary of their infant daughter’s death: ‘Forever missed, but never forgotten, who lives on forever in our hearts. It’s only now that the impact of your life is being revealed to us, how your short existence affected so many people in so many different ways.’38 Some contributors to ‘In Memoriam’ columns also drew on a concept familiar from the Great War – that the dead remained close to their grieving relatives, as spirits. An uncle and aunt wrote in the Mercury in June 2000 of Sharon Godley-Cliffe and her baby Emily: ‘Those we love don’t go away. They walk beside us every day, unseen, unheard but always near. Still loved, still missed and very dear.’39 I found fragmentary evidence that individual bereaved people were sometimes consoled by the sense of nearness of their dead in the half century after the Great War, but it was not culturally acceptable to express it. The bereaved were expected instead to forget the deceased and develop new relationships. From the 1980s, however, emphasis was again placed on the
The revival of expressive grief
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continuation of the relationship with the deceased, in some manner. This is reflected in the ‘In Memoriams’, with fewer references to time healing all and many more to never-ending sorrow. A common verse ran, ‘Death leaves a heartache that no one can heal’ – with a popular variant, ‘The years go by but the heartache remains’.40 The Australian colloquial style favoured by many ‘In Memoriam’ writers in the last 25 years has also made them more accessible. The bereaved now often write from the heart in their own way, regardless of education or class. Their notices are more individual and diverse. Alice Hawkesford in 1998 ‘went to rest a real battler who did her best’. A death notice for Ern Savill signed off, ‘so-long old fishing mate and grand neighbour for 30 odd years’. Another for James Wauchope in The Age on 9 December 2000 read: ‘Au Revoir Jimbo I’ll never eat a kangaroo steak again, but I’ll toast a small whiskey. No more nude walking on the roof tiles … See Ya Bye – Matt’. The daughter of Lindsay Carroll, a wartime pilot, poet and journalist, farewelled her father in 2000: ‘Blue skies, no gremlins. Goodbye Dad’. A notice in the Advertiser in 2000 read ‘Miss you heaps, fly with the angels’.41 __ I have explored the causes and characteristics of two profound changes in the emotional culture of death and grief in the twentieth century. The first took place between 1914 and the 1970s, and was often depicted as a ‘denial of death’: thoughts and feelings about death and sorrow were often avoided, ritual was minimised and grief expressed privately. This transition was encouraged by the decline in religious faith, and the shift from infancy to old age as the likely time of death. The timing, intensity and duration of this first cultural change was powerfully affected by the two World Wars, which helped to create the new model of suppressed, privatised sorrow that deeply constrained the next two generations. Mass grief for young war heroes devalued individual sorrow
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The second cultural shift
for civilians in the inter-war years. Attitudes to death and loss were moulded not by one terrible world war, but the cumulative impact of two, with an interval of only two decades. Without the two World Wars, people might well have developed creative secular responses to death and loss much earlier. Progress in medical science transformed attitudes to death still further. Indeed, the role of medicine in the twentieth-century history of death was as powerful as that of the Christian religion in the nineteenth. The advent of the sulfonamide drugs from the 1930s led to cures for so many diseases that the death of a patient could represent failure for a doctor. Moreover, terminal illness and death increasingly moved from the care of the family at home to the control of doctors in sterile hospitals dedicated to technical efficiency. The dying patient might face pain and indignity alone and unprepared in institutions designed to save lives rather than manage death. The medicalisation and hospitalisation of death went far to reinforce the culture of death denial, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. The second cultural shift in attitudes to death and grief began in the late 1970s, after another generation had grown up free from the constraints of war. Waves of migration from southern Europe encouraged a new diversity in death rituals and the belief that open expression of emotions was helpful. Migrants contributed to broader changes in the cultural and social climate from the 1970s which challenged the dominant culture. Psychologists at last found a receptive audience in a concerned community more anxious to participate in grief counselling following disasters. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s stories about dying people’s experiences encouraged bereaved people to write their own narratives and to form self-help groups. She helped to make death ‘respectable’. Even the funeral business, slow to respond to demands for change, has endeavoured to modernise its practices. However, despite this move towards a more open expression of grief, the second cultural shift does not represent a return to the
The revival of expressive grief
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Victorian way of death, with its heavily ritualised mourning practices. Australians today are still engaged in the slow process of creating new rituals and adapting older practices to suit the needs of a diverse but largely secular society. The changing emotional culture of death can be seen in the remarkable recent enthusiasm for the commemoration of Anzac Day. It seemed in decline thirty years ago in 1975 with the deaths of most of the original Anzacs, 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 crowd of about 20 000 who remembered the courage and sacrifice of the Anzacs at the dawn service at Gallipoli on 25 April 2005, and at commemorations across Australia. This reflects new ways of thinking about war and death and more diverse ways of expressing our sorrow.
Notes
ANU AWM CUP LISWA MJA ML MUP NAA NLA OUP SLQ SLSA SLV SMH UQP
Australian National University Australian War Memorial Cambridge University Press Library and Information Services of Western Australia Medical Journal of Australia Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales Melbourne University Press National Archives of Australia National Library of Australia Oxford University Press John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland State Library of South Australia State Library of Victoria Sydney Morning Herald University of Queensland Press
1 INTRODUCTION: THE WORLD WE HAVE LOST 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
FB Smith, ‘The First Health transition in Australia, 1880–1910’ in GW Jones, RM Douglas, JC Caldwell & RM D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, p. 31. Bryan Gandevia, Tears Often Shed: Child Health and Welfare in Australia from 1788, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1978, p. 93. Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 59–60. Edmund Gerald Cooke to uncle Trevor Winter, 31 Aug. 1872, Winter Cooke Papers, SLV MS 10840, box 4/3/2. Charlotte Suttor’s diary, 11–13 July 1850, 1–3 Aug. 1850, ML MSS 1520 item 2d. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 144–48. Fanny O’Leary’s diary, 17–31 Dec. 1920, 1 Jan–24 Dec. 1921, Rowe Papers, SLV MS 12298, box 3067/8. M Evans and K Lunn (eds), War and Memory in the 20th Century, Berg, Oxford, 1997, p. xi. See Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, MUP, Melbourne, 1998; Inglis in John Lack (ed.), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of KS Inglis, The History Department, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 1998; Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1999; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, OUP, Melbourne, 1996, esp. pp. 31–73; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994; Kate Darian-Smith & Paula Hamilton (eds), Memory
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10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Notes to pages 9–29
and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 1994. See also Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War, Curtin University Books, Fremantle, 2004. Peter Cowan (ed.), A Faithful Picture: The Letters of Eliza and Thomas Brown at York in the Swan River Colony 1841–1852, 2nd edn, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1991, pp. 80, 83, 152–53. See also Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 161–62. Flora A Windeyer to Revd Blomfield, Nov. 1870, Blomfield Papers, ML MSS 2966. See e.g. Argus, 27 May 1916, 16 Oct. 1915; Advertiser, 13 Dec. 1920. See Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 129–30. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 130–33. Mary Durack, To Be Heirs Forever, Corgi, London, 1976/1995, pp. 59–64. See also Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 139–141. Ted Murray-Prior to sister Nora, 13 Feb. 1876, Murray-Prior Papers, NLA MS 7801, box 4, folder 22, no. 16/85. Jane Macartney, diary, 1–17 Aug.1863, SLV MS 10994
2 ‘DEATH DENIAL’ AND SILENT GRIEF 1
2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26
Canberra Times, 30 Apr. 1970; West Australian, 20 Apr. 1976; Age, 22 Mar. 1980; Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1983. Vera Elizabeth (Betty) Collins to Kylie Tennant, 20 March 1980, Kylie Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1,box 2, folder 10. Sigmund Freud, ‘Our attitude towards death’, in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915; in Civilisation, Society and Religion, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 12, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1985. See also Freud, ‘Mourning and melancholia’, in On Metapsychology, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, London, 1984, pp. 251–67. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, English edn, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985, pp. 1–47. Jeffrey Kauffman, ‘Denial’, in G Howarth & O Leaman (eds), Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying, Routledge, London, 2001, pp. 150–51. Kauffman, ‘Denial’, p. 151–52. Beverley Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Unwin Hyman, London, 1984, pp. 20–21. John Manifold to EW Manifold, 9 Nov. 1922, Manifold Papers, SLV. Iris Chapman Aria Papers, ML MS 7033/1/10. Iris Chapman Aria Papers. M Kathleen Deasey to William D Deasey, 2 Sept. 1942, William Denison Deasey Papers, SLV MS 12827. Kathleen Deasey to William Deasey, 2 Sept. 1942. Kathleen Deasey to William Deasey, 2 Sept. 1942. Interview with Elizabeth Backhouse, 1993, by Stuart Reid, SLWA OH 2547 Interview with Elizabeth Backhouse. Interview with Elizabeth Backhouse. See Jill Roe, ‘Miles Franklin’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 8, p. 574. I am grateful to Jill Roe for allowing me to see a draft of her account of Miles Franklin’s death drawn from her forthcoming biography; and for helpful comments on my own narrative. Susan Gardner, ‘My Brilliant Career: Portrait of the artist as a wild colonial girl’, in Carole Ferrier (ed.), Gender, Politics and Fiction: Twentieth Century Australian Women’s Novels, UQP, Brisbane, 1985, pp. 50–51. David Martin, ‘Obituary: Miles Franklin’, Overland, 1 Nov. 1954, p. 17 Miles Franklin to ‘my dear mother’, Miles Franklin Papers, ML MS 364/108. Henrietta Drake Brockman to Franklin, 17 June 1952, Miles Franklin Papers, ML MS 364/33. Jill Roe, ‘Miles Franklin’, ADB, vol. 8, pp. 574–76. Franklin to Nettie Palmer, 23 Oct. 1944, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, NLA MS 1174/1/6427. Franklin to Dymphna Cusack, n.d. [1944]; 15 Nov. 1943; 9 May 1944; 8 Dec 1945, Miles Franklin Letters, SLV MS 12166 Box 2764/5 (copies SLV, originals NLA). Franklin to JK Moir, 4 June 1952, JKMoir Collection, SLV Box 32/3. Franklin to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, 7 June 1952, Miles Franklin Papers, ML MS 364/33.
Notes to pages 29–57
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27 Franklin to JK Moir, 17 Oct 1953, JK Moir Collection, SLV Box 32/3. See also Franklin to Henrietta Drake-Brockman, 2 Oct. 1953, Miles Franklin Papers, ML MS 364/33. 28 Franklin to Nettie Palmer, 2 April 1941, Vance and Nettie Palmer Papers, NLA MS 1174/1/5959. 29 Leslie Bridle to JK Moir, 19 Sept 1955, JK Moir Collection, SLV, Box 32/4. 30 Katharine S Prichard to Ric Throssell, 26 Sept 1954, Ric Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 189. 31 Papers sent by Beverley Raphael to John Bowlby for his comments, c. 1975–76, Bowlby Papers, PP/BOW/J9/153, box 71, Wellcome Institute, London. 32 Geoffrey Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning, Cresset Press, London, 1965, pp. 110–116. 33 Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning, passim. 34 Gorer, Death, Grief and Mourning. 35 Ruth Park, Fishing in the Styx (1993) in Joy Hooton (ed.), Australian Lives: An Oxford Anthology, OUP, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 21–24. See also Ruth Park, oral testimony, ML OH 120/1. 36 Park, Fishing in the Styx. 37 Park, Fishing in the Styx. 38 Bill Hayden, Hayden: An Autobiography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1996, pp. 113–118. 39 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 113–118. 40 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 113–118. 41 Hayden, Hayden, pp. 113–118.
3 THE GREAT WAR: HEROIC DEATHS AND DISTANT GRAVES 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 91–92, 97. Inglis, Sacred Places, passim. John Baillie to girlfriend Nell, 20 July 1917, 7 Dec. 1917, AWM PR00621. Argus, 25 Apr. 1916. Argus, 28 Feb. 1919. Argus, 25 Apr. 1917. Argus, 25 Apr., 28 Feb. 1918. Argus, 28 Feb. 1918, 10 Aug. 1918, 9 Aug. 1919. Bill Gammage, The Broken Years, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974, pp. 84, 254–56, 260, 263. WE Bruce to MS Sharman, 24 Sept. 1916, Mathew S Sharman Papers, SLV MS 11240. Diary of Col WE James, 8 May 1915–16 Dec. 1919, SLV MS 9611. Cyril Lawrence to father, 6 Dec. 1915, and war diary, 2 May 1916, Cyril Lawrence Papers, SLV MS 10970. Manchester Guardian, 27 Dec. 1915. Newcastle Morning Herald, 25 Apr. 1916. See e.g. Lt Alfred Charles Jackson, AWM 1DRL/0377. Lt Alfred Youdale, AWM 1DRL/0611. Lt George H Henderson Smith, AWM 3DRL/7247. Lt Wilfred Emmott Addison, AWM 1DRL/0009 Argus, 27 May 1916 (Watson); 17 Mar. 1917 (Le Bon); 6 Oct. 1917 (Halliday). All drawn from the Argus. Argus, 25 Apr 1918. Argus, 25 Apr 1918. See e.g. Argus, 2 June 1917 (Morley; Slater); 4 Aug. 1917 (Buckle; Fitzgerald; Moody; Le Maitre). Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. Advertiser, 11 Aug. 1917. Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. Sgt John Baillie to Nell, 20 July, 30 Sept. 1917, 16 June 1918, AWM PR00621. Joe and Oliver Cumberland to sister 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. Malcolm Ferguson to father, 23 Aug., 16 Sept. 1918, AWM PR00005, folder 3; Norman Ferguson to father, 25 Aug. 1918, folders 1-2.
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Notes to pages 57–77
31 Stuart Gilkison Love, ‘Episodes and memories: A personal narrative 1884–1945’, 4 vols, 1956–1963, SLV MS 11013, box 1585-1586/1. 32 Love, ‘Episodes and memories’. 33 Love, ‘Episodes and memories’. 34 See e.g. Canberra Times, 24 April 2004. 35 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 203–205. 36 Manchester Guardian, 27 Dec. 1915. 37 Pte Albert Croft to sisters and brothers, 23 Oct. 1914, AWM PR010265. 38 Lt WE Addison, AWM 1DRL/0009. 39 L. Cpl RF McGregor, AWM PR86/289. 40 L. Cpl AJ Lance, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 1410805. 41 Cpl LG Jeffreys, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 1430513. 42 Lt JM Judd, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 1470514. 43 Pte Alfred Johnson, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 1440604. 44 L. Cpl Andrew John Forbes, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 1080804. 45 See e.g. L. Cpl Charles Stewart, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 2140702. 46 EO and HC Neaves, AWM 3DRL/3130 (A) & (B). 47 Argus, 23 Sept. 1916 (Bennetts, Farnan, Lampard, Membrey); 30 Dec. 1916 (Lingham); 2 June 1917 (Borradale). 48 Newcastle Morning Herald, 7 Oct. 1916. See also Advertiser, 16 June 1917, 11 Aug. 1917. 49 Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. 50 Advertiser, 11 Aug. 1917. 51 Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. 52 Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. 53 Elizabeth Hallam, Jenny Hockey & Glennys Howarth (eds), Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1999, p. 138.
4 THE ‘SILENT HEARTACHE’ OF THE GREAT WAR 1 2 3
4 5
6 7
E Lindemann, ‘The symptomatology and management of acute grief’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 1944, pp. 101, 141–48. Ken Inglis, in John Lack (eds), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of KS Inglis, History Department, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 117, 135. CM Parkes, ‘A historical overview of the scientific study of bereavement’, in MS Stroebe, RO Hansson, W Stroebe & H Schut (eds), Handbook of Bereavement Research: Consequences, Coping and Care, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2002, p. 35. See PC Rosenblatt, ‘A social constructionist perspective on cultural differences in grief’, in Stroebe and Schut (eds), Handbook of Bereavement Research, p. 291. Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, MUP, Melbourne, 1998; Inglis, Anzac Remembered; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994; Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 2001; Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1999; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, OUP, Melbourne, 1996. See also Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War, Curtin University Books, Fremantle, 2004. This memorable phrase is drawn from David Cannadine’s seminal article, ‘War and death, grief and mourning in modern Britain’, in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the History of Death, Europa, London, 1981, p. 230. See Inglis, Anzac Remembered. Bruce Scates is currently working on a book on interwar
Notes to pages 77–95
8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25
26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42
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pilgrimages to the Great War cemeteries. Argus, 4 Aug. 1917 (Bath); 25 Apr. 1918 (Whitaker); 25 Apr. 1918 (Stratton). Argus, 11 Dec. 1915 (Hayson); 22 Apr. 1916 (Salter); 24 Feb. 1917 (Mancy); 17 Mar. 1917 (Lucas). Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918 (Embleton); see also Advertiser, 16 June 1917 (Cotton); 12 Oct. 1918 (Dyson, Howard, Hurcombe, Johnston). Argus, 4 Aug. 1917. Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918 (Johnson, Parkinson); see also Argus, 5 June 1915 (Morris); 13 Nov. 1915 (Duffy); Advertiser, 25 Apr. 1918 (Carter), 12 Oct. 1918 (Collins, Wood). Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918 (Burke; see also Askie, Foulkes, Hughes). See Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 312–314. R Humphreys & R Ward, Religious Bodies in Australia, 2nd edn, Humphreys & Ward, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 255–62; Michael Cannon, Life in the Cities, Viking O’Neil, Ringwood, Vic., 1988, pp. 84–85. Cpl CC Patterson, AWM PR82/040. Douglas Ferguson to father, 30 Apr. 1917, AWM PR00005, folder 6. Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 273–76. The Roberts’ story has been told by several historians, working independently, because it is one of the few such detailed sources left by grieving families of the Great War: see Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 317–20; Damousi, The Labour of Loss, pp. 58–64; Luckins, The Gates of Memory, pp. 18–19, 27–28, 36–48, 134–39 et passim; John Roberts’s diary, Sept–Nov. 1918, SLV MS 8183, box 265/4. Sgt John Baillie to Nell, 30 Sept. 1917, AWM PR00621. Printed card on death of Reginald Gluyas, AWM PR83/179. Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory, pp. 116–117,119–20, 123. Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir, Geo. C Haines, London, 1931, p. 233; H. B. Higgins to Nettie Palmer, 30 Jan. 1917, HB Higgins Papers I, 1841–1929, NLA MS 1057/1/269. Higgins to Felix Frankfurter, 16 Sept., 27 Dec. 1918, 30 Sept. 1917, 21 Dec. 1920, HB Higgins Papers II, 1914–1929, NLA MS 2525. Higgins, elegies to his son, Easter, New Year, July 1917, HB Higgins Papers II, 1914–1929; 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. Inglis, Sacred Places, p. 91–92, 97. Australian, 26 Apr. 2004. David Greenhalgh (ed.), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh families from the Great War 1914–1918’, c. 400 pp, unpublished TS, AWM MS 1647. Greenhalgh (ed.), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh families’. Greenhalgh (ed.), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh families’. Greenhalgh (ed.), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh families’. Greenhalgh (ed.), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh families’. See e.g. CM Parkes, Bereavement, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1991, pp. 130–42; Beverley Raphael, Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Unwin Hyman, London, 1984, p. 60. Cpl PC Whelan, Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428, file 2910903. Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau, AWM 1DRL/0428. See also Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History, CUP, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 35-42. Lt Clarence Tunbrell Collier, AWM 1DRL/0206. Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. Advertiser, 12 Oct. 1918. Newcastle Morning Herald, 12 Oct. 1918. Adams family papers, SLQ OM 91-11/1. Adams family papers. Adams family papers.
( 378 ) 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65
Notes to pages 95–117
Adams family papers. Adams family papers, OM 91-11/1, 11/3. Anthea Hyslop is writing a book on the 1919 influenza pandemic, which killed 12 000. Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 4–5, 128–29. Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 223, 280–81. Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 130. Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 13, 94–99. Newcastle Morning Herald, 2 July 1921; see also 25 Apr. 1935, 9 Aug. 1930. See e.g., Newcastle Morning Herald, 4 July 1921, 13 June 1925, 9 Aug. 1930, 11 Aug. 1941, 8 Aug. 1942. J Knibbs to ‘Miss Lawson’ [Bertha Jago], n.d. [Sept. 1922], Lawson Family Papers, ML MS 1639/3. Letter to Lucy Denholm from Neta and Frank Lehr, 27 April 1934; Jean Denholm, 3, 26 June 1934; Edie Cornelius 13 May 1934, Denholm Papers, SLQ OM 71-15. Sydney Morning Herald, 4–6 Sept. 1923. Sydney Morning Herald, 4–6 Sept. 1923. Argus, 16–18 Jan. 1939. Argus, 16, 23 Jan. 1939; Every Week, 17 Jan. 1939. Argus, 14, 19, 23 Jan. 1939. Argus, 17–19 Jan. 1939. Tom Griffiths, ‘History as therapy’, Australian Book Review, March 2004, pp. 43–44. ABC, ‘Black Friday: aftermath’, . ; . . Oral testimony by Prof. FB Smith, 24 Jan. 2005. Griffiths, ‘History as therapy’, p. 43.
5 PRIVATE AND SECULAR GRIEF: KATHARINE SUSANNAH PRICHARD 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24
Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945, Sirius, London, 1984, pp. 6–8. KS Prichard, Child of the Hurricane: An Autobiography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963, pp. 106–107; Ric Throssell, Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1975, pp. 4–9, 11, 18–19. Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 18–19; Prichard, Child of the Hurricane, pp. 106–107. Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 25; Prichard, Child of the Hurricane, pp. 248–49. Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 25; Prichard, Child of the Hurricane, pp. 248–49. Throssell, My Father’s Son, Mandarin, Port Melbourne, 1990, pp. 36–41, 48–57. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 43–47, 59–62. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 48–57. Nettie Palmer to Frank Davison, 23 Nov. 1933, Davison Papers, NLA MS 1945/1/51-2. Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 29–35. Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 29–35; Nettie Palmer to Frank Davison, 23 Nov. 1933. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 76–79; Wild Weeds, pp. 36–40. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 96–97. Stuart Macintyre, The Oxford History of Australia: The Succeeding Age 1901–1942, OUP, Melbourne, 1993, pp. 275–78. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 97–122; Wild Weeds, pp. 61–67. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 123–41; Wild Weeds, pp. 69–70. Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 3–10. Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 71. Prichard to Throssell, 11 Aug. [1946], Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 226–30. Beverley Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Unwin Hyman, London, 1984, chapter 2. Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 72–73. Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 72–73. Prichard to Throssell, July 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 202–207. Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 73
Notes to pages 117–136
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25 Prichard to Throssell, 18 July 1946, 11 Aug. [1946], Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 192–99, 226–30. 26 Prichard to Throssell, 18 July, 3 Aug., 25 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 192–96, 202–207, 212, 239–48. 27 Throssell, My Father’s Son, p. 4; Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, p. 74. 28 Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 73–82. 29 Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 73–82. 30 Prichard to Throssell, 11 Aug. [1946], Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 226–30. 31 Prichard to Throssell, 31 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 249–58. 32 Prichard to Throssell, 17 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 232–8. 33 Prichard to Throssell, July 1946, 11 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 202–207, 226–30. 34 Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 92–137; My Father’s Son, pp. 145–217. 35 Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 210–240. 36 Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 140; My Father’s Son, p. 240. 37 Prichard to Throssell, 20 July 1969, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 203, fo. 98. 38 Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 240–41. 39 Throssell, My Father’s Son, pp. 250–51. 40 Prichard to Throssell, July 1946, 11 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 202–207, 226–30. 41 Prichard to Throssell, 11 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 226–30. 42 Prichard to Throssell, 11 Aug. 1946. 43 Prichard to Throssell, 17 Aug. 1946, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 183, fos. 232–38; Alex Borthwick to Throssell, n.d., fo. 163. 44 Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 146; My Father’s Son, pp. 248–50. 45 Prichard to Throssell, 26 Sept. 1954, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 189. 46 Prichard to Throssell, 16 March 1952, Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folder 188, fos. 31–34. 47 Throssell, Wild Weeds, pp. 212–215. 48 Prichard to Throssell, 14 Nov. 1965, n.d. [1969], Throssell Papers, NLA MS 8071, folders 203, 199. 49 Throssell, Wild Weeds, p. 251; My Father’s Son, pp. 362–63.
6 AIRMEN MISSING, PRESUMED DEAD: ‘WITHOUT EMOTION, WITHOUT WITNESS, WITHOUT FAREWELL’ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War 1939–45, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp. xx–xxii. Beaumont, Australia’s War, p. xxiii. Thanks to Hank Nelson for this information. Errol Crapp, diary, 19–20 July, 4 Sept. 1942; Crapp to father, 7 Sept. 1942: Errol Crapp file, AWM PR00144, items 3, 51. Crapp to family, 16 Sept. 1942, Errol Crapp file. Crapp diary, 20 Sept. 1942, 28 Jan., 17 Feb., 3 Mar. 1943, Errol Crapp file. Peter O’Connor, Interviewed for the Keith Murdoch Sound Archive of Australia in the War of 1939–45, AWM S00521. Arthur Doubleday, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00546. Laurie Howson, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00501. See also Alex Lochhead, S00502. ‘Jum’ Falkiner, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00508. Leo Allen, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00744; Don Watt, S00999. David Leicester, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00524. Bill Minty, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00742; Geoffrey Coombes, S00551. See also Norman Whitelaw, S00569. Arthur Hoyle, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00970. Harold Wright, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00582. Monsignor James McCosker, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00599. Monsignor James McCosker, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive.
( 380 ) 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67
Notes to pages 136–152
Canon Charles Sherlock, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00572. Arthur Doubleday, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00546. Charles Sherlock, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00572. Revd Fred McKay, Keith Murdoch Sound Archive, S00598. Emily Hooper to Chaplain Trathen, 20 Nov. 1943, Trathen file, AWM PR00218/2. Lilian Miller to Trathen, 14 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Herbert & Lill Fletcher to Trathen, 9 Nov. 1943; Ben H Drakes to Trathen, 9 Dec. 1943, Trathen file. Mrs L Harrison to Trathen, 11 July 1944, Trathen file. Hettie Tonkin to Trathen, 23 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Ruby Goodisson to Trathen, 14 July 1943, Trathen file. L Poole to Trathen, 14 July 1943, Trathen file. Fred H Pitman to Trathen, 22 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Ben Drakes to Trathen, 9 Dec. 1943, Trathen file. Fred H Pitman to Trathen, 22 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Dr TA Price to Trathen, 18 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Mimosa Sudholy to Trathen, 6 May 1944, Trathen file. E Mitchell to Trathen, 16 July 1943, Trathen file. Thelma Courtman to Trathen, 27 July 1943, Trathen file. Mrs A White to Trathen, 7 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Lilian Miller to Trathen, 14 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. E Mitchell to Trathen, 16 July 1943, 7 July 1944, Trathen file. Chaplain Trathen, diary, 31 Jan. 1943, Trathen file, AWM PR 00218/1 Diary. Mavis Davies to Trathen, 9 Nov. 1943, Trathen file, AWM, PR 00218/2. Herbert & Lill Fletcher to Trathen, 9 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Mrs A White to Trathen, 7 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Hector A Maclean to Trathen, 1 Feb. 1944, Trathen file. Ruby Goodisson to Trathen, 14 July 1943, Trathen file. Fred H Pitman to Trathen, 22 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. L Harrison to Trathen, 11 July 1944, Trathen file. Lilian Miller to Trathen, 14 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Dr KA Stephenson to Trathen, 22 Jan. 1944, Trathen file. Mimosa Sudholy to Trathen, 6 May 1944, Trathen file. E Mitchell to Trathen, 16 July 1943, Trathen file. Alice M Spooner to Trathen, 9 Dec. 1943, Trathen file. L Poole to Trathen, 16 July 1943, Trathen file. E Mitchell to Trathen, 16 July 1943, 7 July 1944, Trathen file. Marjorie Bailey to Trathen, 16 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Emily Hooper to Trathen, 20 Nov. 1943, Trathen file. Death of William E Newton VC, AWM PR83/021. Death of William E Newton VC, AWM PR83/021. Flight Sgt Freeth, John Samuel, NAA A705, 163/113/250; John S Freeth file, AWM PR00820. John S Freeth file, AWM PR00820. John S Freeth file. John S Freeth file. See also Ethel Freeth to Brian Nash, Sunday Sun, 10 Aug. 1949. JS Freeth, NAA A705, 163/113/250; Freeth file, AWM PR00820. Flight Sgt Leonard Stanley Williams file, AWM PR90/148. Capt. John HH Massie, letters dated 24 Aug. 1943, 20 Aug. 1943, 13 Sept. 1943, AWM 3DRL/3701(B). AWM 3DRL/3701(B). Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 72–80. I am grateful to Hank Nelson for this information.
7 THE ‘HORRIBLE NIGHTMARE’ OF PRISONERS OF WAR IN THE ASIA–PACIFIC 1
Gavan McCormack & Hank Nelson, The Burma–Thailand Railway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993, p. 162; Hank Nelson, Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001 (1st ed. 1985), pp. 4–5; Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War
Notes to pages 153–175
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
32 33
1939–45, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1996, pp. 48, xxii. Nelson, Prisoners of War, pp. 4–6. Beaumont, Australia’s War, p. 48. McCormack & Nelson, The Burma–Thailand Railway, pp. 144–50. Nelson, Prisoners of War, p. 54. Capt. Harry Ernest Jessup file, AWM PR00683. Roy Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, RM Mills, New Lambton, NSW, 1994, p. 15. Forty per cent of the total F Force died, including the British, but 29 per cent Australians died. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 9–20. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 47–89. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 87–105. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 124–31. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 143–76. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 69, 76. Lewis R Wynn file, AWM PR86/080. Lewis R Wynn file. Mills, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, pp. 69–71. Lewis R Wynn file, AWM PR86/080. Nelson, Prisoners of War, pp. 88–109; McCormack & Nelson, The Burma–Thailand Railway, p. 20. Smith’s Weekly, 15 Feb. 1947. Michael McKernan, This War Never Ends: The Pain of Separation and Return, Univ. of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2001, pp. 6–8, 27–30, 70–71, et passim. Typescript draft of proposed Red Cross history, 1939–45, AWM MS 1349. McKernan, This War Never Ends, p. 39. Stanley B Folkard file, AWM PR00896. Stanley B Folkard file. Stanley B Folkard file. Stanley B Folkard file. Stanley B Folkard file. Pte RL Lindsay file, AWM PR88/204. Jack Holder Leeman [‘the Happy Gravedigger’], ‘The Bodysnatchers’, typescript, 150 pp., AWM MS 0811. Sir John Nimmo, Interviewed for the Keith Murdoch Sound Archive of Australia in the War of 1939–1945, AWM S01038 Nelson, Prisoners of War, pp. 206–217; McKernan, This War Never Ends, passim. See also, Margaret Reeson, A Very Long War: The Families Who Waited, MUP, Melbourne, 2000: an excellent account of the trauma of the families of the men missing in the New Guinea Islands. Over 1000 Australian prisoners of war were in the Montevideo Maru, sunk in 1942 – the largest single disaster of the Second World War. McKernan, This War Never Ends, passim. McKernan, This War Never Ends, passim.
8 THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND THE SUPPRESSION OF SORROW 1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
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Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 320–21. René to Lois Atock, Condolence letters on death of Private Kenneth Atock, 1941, AWM 3DRL/6372. E Harrison to Jim Gordon, 1945, James William Gordon Papers, ML MS 1085. Condolence letters to Kathleen and Ted Williams on death of their son, Capt. Owen Williams, July 1945, AWM PR00057. See e.g. Irene of Vaucluse, 13 July 1945; Jean, 11 July 1945, AWM PR00057. Charlie Robbins to parents, 26 Aug. 1943; Percy & Doll, 2 Sept. 1943; condolence letters to Roy and Mena Robbins on death of son, Pte LE Robbins, Aug. 1943, SLV PA:97/36. Condolence letters and cards on death of Pte LE Robbins, Aug. 1943, SLV PA:97/36. Condolence letters and cards on death of Pilot Officer John Leslie Bairstow, Aug. 1944, AWM PR00760. Jim Grahame, Home Leave and Departing, ‘Murrumbidgee Irrigator’, Leeton, NSW, 1944.
( 382 )
Notes to pages 176–198
10 Jim Seymour to Jim Gordon, 11 June 1945, James William Gordon Papers, ML MS 1085. 11 Condolence letters on death of Pte Kenneth Atock, 1941, AWM 3DRL/6372. 12 Condolences to Roy & Mena Robbins on death of their son, Pte LE Robbins, Aug. 1943, SLV PA:97/36. 13 I am grateful to Hank Nelson for this point. 14 Condolences to Nan on the death of her brother Pte IL MacDougall, March-May 1945, AWM PR00172. 15 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams on the death of their son Capt. Owen Williams, July 1945, AWM PR00057. 16 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams. 17 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams. 18 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams. 19 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams. 20 Condolences to Kathleen and Ted Williams. 21 Newcastle Morning Herald, 1939–45, passim. 22 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie on the death of Lt George T Gill, July–Aug. 1942, AWM 3DRL/7945. 23 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie. 24 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie. 25 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie. 26 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie. 27 Letters between Mrs Gill and her daughter Marjorie. 28 Len Johnson, ‘An Australian Family’, vol. 3, ‘War Letters 1940–41’, AWM MS 1609; John Leslie Johnson file, AWM PR0066. 29 John Leslie Johnson file. 30 John Leslie Johnson file. 31 John Leslie Johnson file. 32 John Leslie Johnson file. 33 Josie Arnold, Mother Superior, Woman Inferior, Dove Communications, Blackburn, 1985, p. 10. 34 Johnson, ‘An Australian Family’, p. 142. 35 Johnson, ‘An Australian Family’, p. 146. 36 Arnold, Mother Superior, Woman Inferior, p. 89. 37 Johnson, ‘An Australian Family’, pp. 145–46. 38 Arnold, Mother Superior, Woman Inferior, passim. 39 Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia, CUP, New York, 2001.
9 THE MEDICALISATION OF DEATH 1
Betty Collins to Kylie Tennant, 20 Mar. 1980, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, box 2, folder 10. 2 See e.g. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, HarperCollins, London, 1997, pp. 690–93, 699–701. 3 See Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 88–99. 4 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death. 5 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death; TS Pensabene, The Rise of the Medical Practitioner in Victoria, ANU, Canberra, 1980, pp. 4–14. 6 FB Smith, ‘The first health transition in Australia 1880–1910’, in GW Jones, RM Douglas, JC Caldwell & RM D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, pp. 31, 42–43; Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life: the Australian Response to Death, MUP, Melbourne, 1982, pp .13–14. 7 Smith, ‘The first health transition in Australia’, p. 30. 8 Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, p. 12. 9 AH Tebbutt, ‘Some comparisons of hospital pathology, morbidity and mortality in 1910 and in 1948’, MJA, 3 June 1950, pp. 717–20. 10 Tebbutt, ‘Some comparisons’. 11 Eric G Saint, ‘Medical morbidity in a general hospital’, MJA, 15 Oct. 1960, pp. 601–608.
Notes to pages 198–218
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12 Saint, ‘Medical morbidity’. 13 Saint, ‘Medical morbidity’. 14 CJ Cummins, ‘Care of the aged and chronically ill’, MJA, 8 Oct. 1960, pp. 587–88; c.f. ‘The long-term and the chronically ill patient’, MJA, 29 Jan 1955, pp. 143–44. 15 DM Prinsley, ‘Does Australia know how to cope with growing old?’, MJA, 11 July 1981; RB Lefroy, ‘The development of geriatric medicine in Australia, MJA, 4 July 1994. 16 Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 200–201. 17 RW Hunt, MJ Bond, RK Groth and PM King, ‘Place of death in South Australia: Patterns from 1910 to 1987’, MJA, 21 Oct. 1991, pp. 549–53. 18 Hunt et al., ‘Place of death in South Australia’. 19 MJA, 7 Oct. 1991; see Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 200–203. 20 Advertiser, 15 Nov. 1975. 21 Ian Maddocks, ‘Palliative medicine in Australia’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000, p. 244; Helga Kuhse, ‘When is it ethical to end life’, Age, 8 July 1981. 22 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Macmillan, New York, 1969. 23 Age, 2 Nov. 1971; Canberra Times, 3 Nov. 1971. 24 Canberra Times, 3 Nov. 1971. 25 ML Sainsbury & GW Milton, ‘The nurse in a cancer ward’, MJA, 13 Dec. 1975. 26 Nancy Phelan, ‘The nurse’, in Connie Burns and Marygai McNamara (eds), Eclipsed: Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction, Collins, Sydney, 1988, pp. 304–315. 27 Phelan, ‘The nurse’. 28 Ivan Illich, Limits to Medicine: Medical Nemesis, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976.
10 KYLIE TENNANT AND THE WAR AGAINST CANCER 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor, Allen Lane, London, 1978. Michael Ashby, ‘Cancer’, in Glennys Howarth & Olive Leaman (eds), Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, Routledge, London and New York, 2001, pp. 72–74. Dorothy Broom, ‘Reading breast cancer: reflections on a dangerous intersection’, Health, vol. 5, no. 2, pp. 249–68. Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 98–99, 103–104. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 205–208. FB Smith, ‘The first health transition in Australia 1880–1910’ in GW Jones et al. (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997, pp. 30, 36, 41. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death, pp. 237–38, 234–35. Bulletin, 20 Jan. 1900. Argus, 12 Jan. 1911; MJA 4 Dec. 1915; MJA, 12 Jan. 1918. MJA, 28 Mar. 1925. MJA, 16 May 1925. MJA, 16 Oct. 1926. MJA, 17 Dec. 1927. MJA, 26 Apr. 1930. MJA, 26 Apr. 1930. MJA, 26 Apr. 1930. MJA, 10 Aug. 1929; MJA, 30 Oct. 1929. MJA, 21 Sept. 1929. SMH, 9 Apr. 1932. SMH, 20 Apr. 1934; 18 Apr. 1934; 14 Apr. 1937. MJA, 15 July 1933; 14 May 1932. SMH, 14 Apr. 1937; 6 Apr. 1938. SMH, 9 July 1933. Argus, 19 June 1937. SMH, 27 Feb. 1941. MJA, 15 July 1933. MJA, 30 Sept. 1950, 7 July 1951, 12 July 1952, 13 Aug. 1955, 13 Sept. 1958. HL Lancaster, ‘Cancer mortality in Australia’, MJA, 30 Sept. 1950. Lancaster, ‘Mortality in Australia from cancers peculiar to the male’, MJA, 12 July 1952; Lancaster, ‘Mortality in Australia from cancers peculiar to the female’, MJA, 7 July 1951.
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Notes to pages 219–232
30 ‘The mortality in Australia from cancer for the period 1946 to 1950’, MJA, 13 Aug. 1955. 31 MJA, 26 Feb. 1977; MJA, 24 Sept. 1977. 32 Sun-Herald, 4 Aug. 1957. 33 MJA, 12 Nov. 1966. 34 Graeme Hugo, Australia’s Changing Population: Trends and Implications, OUP, Oxford, 1986, p. 30. 35 Jake M Najman, ‘The demography of death: Patterns of Australian mortality’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Oxford, 2000, pp. 26–27. 36 Najman, ‘The demography of death’, pp. 26–28. 37 Hugo, Australia’s Changing Population, p. 31; MJA, 16 June 1973. 38 MJA, 12 Nov. 1966. 39 Rupert Elliott et al., ‘Lung cancer: a survey of 100 consecutive cases with histological confirmation’, MJA, 20 Apr. 1968. 40 PH Cole et als, ‘Carcinoma of the lung: a two-year experience at the Austin Hospital, Victoria’, MJA, 12 Nov. 1977. 41 MJA, 23 Sept. 1972. 42 LW Osborne, ‘Smoking and health constraints on the limitation of a modern epidemic’, MJA, 16 June 1973. See also MJA, 1 Apr. 1972. 43 Helen-Anne and Gerard Manion, ‘Bone-pointing: a modern entity’, MJA, 27 Dec. 1980. 44 SMH, 23 Jan. 1986. 45 SMH, 15 July 1987. See also Dorothy Broom, ‘Reading breast cancer’, pp. 249–68. 46 ‘Cancer centres’, MJA, 5 Oct. 1974. 47 ‘Cancer centres’, MJA, 5 Oct. 1974. 48 Peter Ilbery, ‘The comprehensive cancer centre’, MJA, 20 May 1978. 49 SMH, 19 July 1979. 50 Kylie Tennant, The Missing Heir, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1986, pp. 23, 52–53, 89, 160–64. 51 Tennant, The Missing Heir, p. 139; LC Rodd to Mavis Cribb, 19 May 1979, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 23. 52 Tennant, The Missing Heir, passim; LC Rodd’s diary, 1978–79, Rodd Papers, NLA MS 7575, box 3. 53 Tennant, The Missing Heir, pp. 144–45; Tennant to Rudolf Brunswick, 11 Nov. 1959, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. 54 Notes by Rudolf Brunswick, n.d, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. 55 Tennant, The Missing Heir, p. 161. 56 LC Rodd’s diary, 1978–79, Rodd Papers, NLA MS 7575, box 3. 57 Tennant to Mavis Cribb, 8 Mar. 1979, 28 Apr. 1975, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 23. 58 Tennant to Boute McLachlan, 9 June 1979, McLachlan Papers, NLA MS 8451; Tennant to Cribb, 9 June 1979; LC Rodd to Mavis Cribb, 19 May 1979, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 23; Tennant, The Missing Heir, p. 139. 59 Tennant to Cribb, 3 July 1979, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 23. 60 Tennant to R Brunswick, 16 Aug. 1979, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. 61 Tennant, The Missing Heir, p. 162. 62 Tennant to Rudolf & Ella Brunswick, 7 Oct. 1977, 30 June 1983, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. 63 Roddy to Boute & Mac McLachlan, 21 June 1978, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, box 1, folder 8. 64 Tennant to Cribb, 21 March 1980, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, box 4, folder 23. 65 Tennant to Ray Harding, 18 Aug. 1977, Harding Papers, NLA MS 7115. 66 Tennant to Cribb, 21 Sept. 1981, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 23. 67 Tennant to Ray Harding, 26 Feb. 1980, Harding Papers, NLA MS 7115; Tennant to Cribb, 14 Mar. 1980, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574. 68 Tennant to R Brunswick, 16 Aug. 1979, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. 69 Herald, 12 Oct. 1974. 70 Freda McDonald to Tennant, 1 Dec. 1977, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, folder 7.
Notes to pages 232–251 71 72 73 74 75 76 77
Tennant to B McLachlan, 29 Sept. 1980, McLachlan Papers, NLA MS 8451. Tennant to R and E Brunswick, 14 Mar. 1986, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. Death certificate, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 2, box 5, folder 35. ‘The last letter to a friend’, SMH, 6 Feb. 1988. ‘The last letter to a friend’. Tennant to family, n.d. Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 24. Ashby, ‘Cancer’, pp. 72–74.
11 EUTHANASIA AND THE DOCTORS 1 2
3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
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Martin B Van Der Weyden, ‘Death, dying and the euthanasia debate in Australia’, MJA 17 Feb. 1997. See e.g. Helga Kuhse (ed.), Willing to Listen: Wanting to Die, Penguin, Melbourne 1994, for a pro-active euthanasia emphasis; and John Morgan (ed.), An Easeful Death: Perspectives on Death, Dying and Euthanasia, Federation Press, Sydney, 1996, for a palliative care focus. Roger Hunt, ‘Palliative care: the rhetoric-reality gap’, in Kuhse, Willing to Listen, p. 130. MJA, 2 Oct. 1976. Australian, 25 Oct. 1975. Advertiser, 15 Nov. 1975. Australian, 22 Sept. 1977. See also MD Kirby, ‘The rights of the living’, MJA, 22 Mar. 1980. Advertiser, 25 Sept. 1980, 26 Nov. 1980. See Brian Bartley, ‘Euthanasia and withdrawal of treatment: legal perspectives’, in John Morgan (ed.) An Easeful Death, pp. 155–57. Herald, 1 Dec. 1983; National Times, 14–20 Oct. 1983. Herald, 27 June 1983; Australian, 9 Sept. 1983. Age, 2 Apr. 1986; Don Stewart, ‘Legislation, ethics and social policy: the case of dying with dignity’, in Morgan (ed.), An Easeful Death, pp. 160–71. Stewart, ‘Legislation, ethics and social policy’. Australian, 27 Sept. 1996. SMH, 17 Dec. 1947. Hilary M Carey, Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, NSW, 1996, pp. 198–203. The Times, passim; SMH, 6, 21 Nov. 1936; 22, 29 Apr. 1939. SMH, 23 May 1947. MJA, 20 Oct. 1949. SMH, 3 Dec. 1949, 18 Apr. 1951. SMH, 17 Dec 1947, 29 Sept. 1952. SMH, 18 Apr. 1951. Age, 12 Oct. 1972. Age, 20 Oct. 1972. Age, 12 Oct. 1972. ‘Death with Dignity’, n.d., copy in Hazel Rose Jones Papers, ML MS 6628/5/8. Age, 13 June 1977. Nation Review, 23–29 Mar. 1978; SMH, 6 Feb. 1974. Advertiser, 1 Apr. 1986; Age, 1 Apr. 1986. Nation Review, 23–29 Mar. 1978. West Australian, 10 Jan. 1990. West Australian. Age, 23 Feb. 1976. Rodney Syme, ‘From innocent to advocate: a doctor’s path to voluntary euthanasia’ in Kuhse, (ed.), Willing to Listen, pp. 155–171. See also Australian, 13–14 Mar. 1999. Syme, ‘From Innocent to Advocate’, pp. 155–62. Syme, ‘From Innocent to Advocate’, pp. 160–70. SMH, 6 Feb. 1988. SMH, 6 Feb. 1988. Hans to Kylie Tennant, n.d., Kylie Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, box 4, folder 28. Barbara Mummery to Kylie Tennant, 9 Feb. 1988, Kylie Tennant Papers. Lorraine Vines to Kylie Tennant, 14 Feb. 1988, Kylie Tennant Papers.
( 386 ) 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53
Notes to pages 252–274
SMH, 8 Feb. 1988. SMH, 8 Feb. 1988; Blue Mountains Gazette, 9 Mar. 1988. SMH, 8 Feb. 1988. Hazel Rose Jones’ Papers, 1940–1989, ML MS 6628/5/8. Canberra Times, 10 May 1984. SMH, 9 Feb. 1987. Brian Bartley, ‘Euthanasia and withdrawal of treatment, pp. 152–53. MJA, 27 May 1985; Age, 19 Nov. 1980. MJA, 20 June 1988; 5 Sept. 1988. MJA., 1 Aug., 19 Sept. 1988. MJA, 4 Feb. 1991. Ian Maddocks, ‘Hope in dying: palliative care and a good death’, in Morgan (ed.) An Easeful Death, pp. 57–70.
12 PALLIATIVE CARE AND THE HOSPICE MOVEMENT
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31
Lisa Birnie, A Good Day to Die, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1998, pp. 1–6. Birnie, A Good Day to Die, passim. Birnie, A Good Day to Die, pp. 93–101, 149–50. Birnie, A Good Day to Die, pp. 219–27. Birnie, A Good Day to Die, pp 203–207; Michael Ashby, ‘The fallacies of death causation in palliative care’, MJA, 17 Feb. 1997. See e.g. Robert Twycross, Introducing Palliative Care, 4th ed. Radcliffe Medical Press, Abingdon, 2003, pp. 2-3; C Faull & Richard Woof, Palliative Care, OUP, Oxford, 2002, pp. 3–8. Ian Maddocks, ‘Changing concepts in palliative care’, MJA, 21 May 1990. Sanchia Aranda, ‘Palliative nursing in Australia’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000, p. 255–57. Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 238–39. Age, 24 Feb. 1976. MJA, 19 Mar. 1983. MJA, 9 June 1984. MJA, 4 Aug. 1984. Education for Care of the Dying Conference, Australasian & NZ Association for Medical Education, 6–7 July 1984, Graduate School of Management, University of New South Wales. David Allbrook, ‘Doctors’ role in the Australian hospice movement’, MJA, 27 Nov. 1982; ‘Dying of Cancer: home, hospice or hospital’, MJA, 4 Aug. 1984. ‘Dying of Cancer: home, hospice or hospital’. Australian, 20–21 Dec. 1980; Age, 13 Mar. 1978. Age, 24 June 1981; Aranda, ‘Palliative nursing in Australia’, pp. 255–58. PA Komesaroff et al., ‘Patients’ socio-economic background: influence on selection of inpatient or domiciliary hospice terminal-care programmes’, MJA, 21 Aug. 1989. Ross Webster, ‘Palliative care for cancer patients’, MJA, 9-23 Dec. 1985; see also Age, 25 Mar. 1986; SMH, 7 Feb. 1986. MJA, 9–23 Dec. 1985. ‘On the road: life at the terminus’, MJA, 20 Apr. 1987. Brian J Pollard, ‘Dying: rights and responsibilities’, MJA, 1 Aug. 1988; Pollard, ‘Killing the dying: not the easy way out’, MJA, 19 Sept. 1988. FW Gunz, ‘What next in the care of the dying patient with cancer?’, MJA, 6 July 1987. See also MJA, 27 Nov. 1982. PA Komesaroff et al., ‘Patients’ socio-economic background’, MJA, 21 Aug. 1989 MJA, 20 Apr. 1987. RK Woodruff & A Chan, ‘Palliative care in a general teaching hospital’, MJA, 4, 18 Nov. 1991. Woodruff & Chan, ‘Palliative care in a general teaching hospital’. Woodruff & Chan, ‘Palliative care in a general teaching hospital’. D Allbrook, ‘Who owns palliative care ?’, MJA, 19 Feb. 1990; ‘Palliative care in the 1990s’, MJA, 2 Sept. 1991. Ian Maddocks, ‘Changing concepts of palliative care’, MJA, 21 May 1990. See also
Notes to pages 274–296
32 33 34 35 36 37
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Maddocks, ‘Palliative medicine in Australia’, in Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying, pp. 243–53. Australian, 15–16 Feb. 1997. Australian, 13–14 July 1996. Australian, 13–14 July 1996. Australian, 13–14 July 1996. Australian, 13–14 July 1996. Allan Kellehear, Health Promoting Palliative Care, OUP, Melbourne, 1999, esp. pp. xi–xiii, 4–15; Kellehear, ‘Health-promoting palliative care; developing a social model for practice’, Mortality, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 75–82.
13 THE FUNERAL BUSINESS IN AUSTRALIA: ‘A RACKET IN HUMAN SORROW’? 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
Graeme M Griffin & Des Tobin, In the Midst of Life: The Australian Response to Death, MUP, Melbourne, 1982, ch. 9. Oral testimony by Harold Greenup, 1975, LISWA OH 85. Leonie Liveris, The Dismal Trader: The Undertaker Business in Perth 1860–1939, AFDA, Perth 1991, p. 62. Don Chambers, No Funerals on Picnic Day! Victorian Funeral Industry Association 1890–1990, Australian Funeral Directors Association, Melbourne, 1990, p. 8. Oral testimony by Reginald Hawkins, 1984, NLA Oral TRC 2404/1004. MR Leming and GE Dickinson, ‘The American ways of death’, in K Charmaz, G Howarth & A Kellehear (eds), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA, Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1997, pp. 178. Argus, 20 Aug. 1938. SMH, 12 July 1953. Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963. Philippe Aries, The Hour of our Death, Penguin, Middlesex, 1983. SMH, 4 Dec. 1967. SMH, 4 Dec. 1967. Argus, 8 Aug. 1929. SMH, 4 Nov. 1955. SMH, 5 Dec. 1967. ‘Arranging a funeral’, Choice, vol. 15 no. 1, Jan. 1974. ‘Arranging a funeral’. SMH, 15 Jan. 1974. Canberra Times, 27 Mar. 1974. West Australian, 21 Apr. 1976. SMH, 14 Apr. 1977. Australian, 26 May 1977. See also SMH, 3 May 1977; Hobart Mercury, 3 May 1977. SMH, 9 Aug. 1977; Sun, 8 Feb. 1978. SMH, 22 June 1977. Daily Telegraph, 24 Nov. 1977; Sun, 8 Feb. 1978. Herald, 26 Jan. 1978. Australian, 24-25 Mar. 1984. SMH, 15 Aug 1980; Age, 22 Mar. 1980. Age, 22 Mar. 1980. SMH, 15 Aug. 1980; Australian, 24–25 Mar. 1984. People, 25 Nov. 1981. People, 25 Nov. 1981. People, 25 Nov. 1981. Age, 31 Aug. 1981. Bulletin, 26 Nov. 1991. People, 25 Nov. 1981. Age, 31 Aug. 1981. Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, pp. 227. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, PSA, Melbourne, 1992, p. 18. Herald, 2 Mar. 1978. Financial Review, 23 July 1982.
( 388 ) 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60
Notes to pages 296–315
Age, 22 Nov. 1983. Australian, 17 Jan. 1985. People, 25 Nov. 1981. Des Tobin, About Death and Funerals, 7th edn, Tobin Brothers, Melbourne, 1987. West Australian, 28 Oct. 1985. Advertiser, 31 Mar. 1987. Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, p. 198; Rosemary Pringle & Jo Alley, ‘Gender and the funeral industry’, Australia & New Zealand Jnl of Sociology, vol. 31, no. 2., Aug. 1995, p. 116. Australian, 17 Jan. 1985. Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, p. 149. Griffin & Tobin, In the Midst of Life, p. 148. Courier Mail, 16 Feb. 1985. Age, 25 Nov. 1981. Dally R Messenger, Ceremonies for Today, 3rd edn, Dally M Publishing and Research, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 95–103. SMH, 24 Oct. 1985, 1 Nov. 1985. Bulletin, 26 Nov. 1991. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices. SMH, 2 Aug. 1997. SMH, 2 Aug. 1997.
14 OVERCROWDED BURIAL GROUNDS, MODERN LAWN CEMETERIES AND MAUSOLEA 1 2 3 4
5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Age, 23 July 1898. Argus, 6 Jan. 1912. Argus, 9 Mar. 1914. Ralph Biddington, ‘Death of the Old Melbourne Cemetery’, Historical Journal, vol. 65, no. 1, June 1994, pp. 3–29. Biddington, ‘Death of the Old Melbourne Cemetery’. Biddington, ‘Death of the Old Melbourne Cemetery’. Argus, 24 Apr. 1914. See e.g. Argus, 5 Oct. 1917; 24 Apr. 1914. ‘Old Melbourne Cemetery’, pamphlet c1917, Agnes S Thomas Papers, SLV MS 10996. Argus, 5 Nov. 1917. Argus, 21 Jan. 1921. Argus, 20 Apr. 1914. Victorian Parliament, Parliamentary Debates: Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly (Hansard), Government Printer, Melbourne, 17 Aug. 1918, pp. 662–73. Argus, 22 Apr. 1914. Argus, 5 Oct. 1917. Argus, 3 Nov. 1913, citing SMH. SMH, 19 Feb. 1934, 22 Dec. 1958. SMH, 15 June 1956. SMH, 21 Mar. 1949, 11 Apr. 1953, 22 Dec. 1953. SMH, 7 May 1907; ‘Report: Camperdown Cemetery Interim Conservation Policy’, Godden Mackay Pty. Ltd & Camperdown Cemetery, 1993–1994, ML MS 6684, ADDON 2221/26. ‘Report: Camperdown Cemetery Interim Conservation Policy’. SMH, 5 Oct. 1940, 10 Mar. 1942. SMH, 29 Apr. 1944. SMH, 4 Oct. 1940, 25 June 1946. See e.g. SMH, 17 June 1946. SMH, 10 May 1944. SMH, 15 June 1946. SMH, 2 Jan. 1940. SMH, 13 June, 19 June 1946. SMH, 3, 4 July 1946.
Notes to pages 315–333 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
SMH, 1, 2 Sept. 1948. SMH, 28–29 July 1954. SMH, 4 Aug. 1956. SMH, 13 May 1955. ‘Report: Camperdown Cemetery Interim Conservation Policy’. Philippe Aries, The Hour of Our Death, Penguin, Middlesex, 1981. Mary Mackay, ‘Architectural styles and funerary symbolism’, in DA Weston (ed.), The Sleeping City. The Story of Rookwood Necropolis, Society of Australian Genealogists, Sydney, 1993 (1989), pp. 30–31. Robert Nicol, At the End of the Road: Government, Society and the Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp. 250–96. Evelyn Waugh, The Loved One, Penguin, Middlesex, 1948, p. 65. Sun-Herald, 7 Aug. 1960. Sun-Herald, 25 Sept. 1960. SMH, 10 Nov. 1960. SMH, 8 Dec. 1967. West Australian, 3 May 1977; Leonie Liveris, Memories Eternal: The First 100 Years of Karrakatta, Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, Perth, 1999, pp. 192–94, 218–20. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, PSA, Melbourne, 1992, pp. 33, 46–47. Nicol, At the End of the Road, pp. 392–93, 408–410. SMH, 18 Aug. 1990. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, p. 84. Weston (ed.), The Sleeping City, pp. 26, 34–35. Sun-Herald, 7 Aug. 1960. National Times, 4–6 Sept. 1975. Bulletin, 26 Nov. 1991. Age, 20 Aug. 1983. Australian, 29 Jan. 1984. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, p. 46. Wray Vamplew (ed.), Australians: Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Sydney, p. 16. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation, p. 48; Mercury, 31 Mar. 1977. Liveris, Memories Eternal, p. 237–38, 267–69. Nicol, The End of the Road, pp. 409–416.
15 CREMATION IN AUSTRALIA SINCE 1914 1
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I wrote this short chapter a year before reading the valuable new book by Robert Nicol, This Grave and Burning Question: A Centenary History of Cremation in Australia, Adelaide Cemeteries Authority, Adelaide, 2003. Nicol’s book offers an excellent account of the early movement and the state histories up to 1939. I have left my chapter as written for reasons of time and space, and because my focus is on the later period. 2 See e.g. letter from AIF to SMH, 28 Nov. 1927. 3 See Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 117–118; Simon Cooke, ‘Death, body and soul: the cremation debate in New South Wales 1863–1925’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 97, Oct. 1991, pp. 323–39. 4 Hilary M Carey, Believing in Australia: A Cultural History of Religions, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, NSW, 1996, pp. 198–205. 5 Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 3, no. 4, Oct. 1926, pp. 289–90. 6 Australasian Catholic Record, vol. 7, no.1, Jan 1930, pp. 45-58. 7 Robert Nicol, At the End of the Road: Government, Society and the Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1994, pp. 320–61. 8 See Simon Cooke, ‘Death, body and soul’, p. 323. 9 SMH, 26 Nov., 1 Dec. 1927 (AG Clarke). 10 SMH, 9 Feb. 1929 (‘Anglican’). 11 SMH, 22 Mar. 1928 (Victor C Bell).
( 390 ) 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43
Notes to pages 333–356
SMH, 29 Oct. 1934 (AE Dent); 26 Nov., 1 Dec. 1927 (AG Clarke). SMH, 8 Jan. 1929 (Peter Pickle). SMH, 15 Nov 1930, 5 Feb 1934. SMH, 22 Mar. 1928 (Victor C Bell). SMH, 28 Nov. 1927 (‘AIF’); 25 Nov. 1927 (C Williams). SMH, 15 Nov. 1930 (‘Cremation’). SMH, 15 Nov. 1930. SMH, 5 April 1932, 23 Oct 1933. ‘Sanctuary’, Northern Suburbs Crematorium, promotional booklet, 1934, Blackshaw Papers, ML MS 6342/1/2. SMH, 30 May 1933. SMH, 23 Apr. 1934. Tom Inglis Moore to Hugh McCrae, 21 Nov. 1937, McCrae Papers, SLV MS 12831. Hugh McCrae to [Honey] Huntly Cowper, n.d., [Dec 1943], McCrae Papers, SLV MS 12831, box 3675/13(k). CC Hewit, secretary, Cremation Society of Australia, to Hugh McCrae 17 Dec. 1956, 30 May 1958, McCrae Papers, SLV MS 12831, box 3745/2 & 4. Argus, 10, 22 Apr. 1920. Argus, 6 Dec. 1924. Argus, 21 Nov. 1924, 10 July 1935. Argus, 25 Mar. 1937. Helen McCrae to Hugh McCrae, 3 May [1955] McCrae papers, SLV MS 12831, box 3675/7(2). Age, 2 Dec. 1968. Age, 2 Dec. 1968. Age, 2 Dec. 1968. Leonie Liveris, Memories Eternal: The First 100 Years of Karrakatta, Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, Karrakatta, WA, 1999, pp. 118–30, 168. Journal of Monica Chase, 1988, SLSA D 7229(L). Rudolf Brunswick to Kylie Tennant, 9 Dec. 1976, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, folio 5. Kylie Tennant to Ray and Del Harding, 15 Mar. 1978, Harding Papers, NLA MS 7115. LC Rodd to Edna & Marge, 12 Oct. 1978, Tennant Papers, NLA MS 7574, series 1, folio 8. Kylie Tennant to Rudolf Brunswick, 16 Aug. 1979, Brunswick Papers, NLA MS 6246. Kylie Tennant to Del Harding, 15 March 1980, Harding Papers, NLA MS 7115. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, PSA, Melbourne, 1992, p. 18. Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation, pp. 17–19, 33, 46–48. Ben Hills, feature article in ‘Spectrum’, SMH, 2 Aug. 1997.
16 THE REVIVAL OF EXPRESSIVE GRIEF 1 2
Age, 20 July 1979. John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 238–47, 268–70. 3 Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying, Macmillan, New York, 1969. 4 SMH, 9 Feb. 1987. 5 SMH, 13 Feb. 1988; see also Canberra Times, 19 July 1981. 6 Anne Summers, Ducks in the Pond: An Autobiography 1945–1976, Penguin, Melbourne, 1999, pp. 390–411. 7 Beverley Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Hutchinson, London, 1984, pp. 26, 50. 8 See e.g. John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 1, Attachment; vol. 2, Separation: Anxiety and Anger; vol. 3, Loss: Sadness and Depression, Hogarth, London, 1969–80; Colin Murray Parkes, Bereavement: Studies of Grief in Adult Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1972/1991. See also Lily Pincus, Death and the Family, Faber & Faber, London, 1976/1997. 9 Parkes, Bereavement, chs 3–7; Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, vol. 3, pp. 85–100; Raphael, Anatomy of Bereavement, pp. 33–73. 10 Margaret S Stroebe, ‘Paving the way: from early attachment theory to contemporary
Notes to pages 356–369
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41
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bereavement research’, Mortality, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002, pp. 127–38; Tony Walter, On Bereavement: The Culture of Grief, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1999. Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement, pp. 37–56. Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement, pp. 324–31. Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement. Raphael, The Anatomy of Bereavement, pp. 338–44. Herald (Melbourne), 28 Dec. 1989; SMH, 29–30 Dec. 1989, 1–2 Jan 1990; Newcastle Herald, 29–30 Dec. 1989, 1 Jan. 1990. Newcastle Herald, 1–2 Jan. 1990; SMH, 2 Jan. 1990. Other experts included Trevor Waring and Mal McKissock. Newcastle Herald, 3, 4, 5, 18 Jan. 1990. Newcastle Herald, 28–29 Dec. 1990. Raphael, ‘Grief and Loss in Australian Society’ in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 121–22. Age, 20 July 1979. Daily Telegraph, 7 June 1983; SMH, 12 May 1982. SMH, 5 May 1981; Mal McKissock, Coping with Grief, ABC Books, Sydney, 1985, pp. 44–45. Mercury (Hobart), 17 June 1981; Advertiser (Adelaide), 25 Nov. 1981. Australian, 23 Oct. 1987. Eva Lager (ed.), Words of Sorrow, Words of Love: The Death of a Child, Compassionate Friends, Perth, 1998, pp. 7–9. Australian, 5 Mar. 1986; Canberra Times, 22 Feb. 1989. Allan Kellehear, Health Promoting Palliative Care, OUP, Melbourne, 1999, p.175. See Dorothy Broom’s valuable analysis of such narratives by women suffering from breast cancer; Broom, ‘Reading breast cancer: reflections on a dangerous intersection’, Health, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001, pp. 249–68. Allan Kellehear (ed.), Grief and Remembering: 25 Australians Tell It Like It Is, Rivoli, Melbourne, 2001, pp. vii–ix. Kellehear, Grief and Remembering, pp. 34–38, 148–49. West Australian, 8 July 1981. West Australian, 4 July 1998. Mercury, 9 Dec. 2000. West Australian, 4 July 1998. Note that this verse is a double acrostic in which the first and last letters of each line spell ‘Archie’. Thanks to Kirsty Douglas for this contribution. Advertiser, 21 June 1980. Mercury, 9 Dec. 2000. See Bernard O’Dowd (ed.), The Australian Secular Association: Lyceum Tutor, Tysach & Picken, Melbourne, 1888, pp. 77, 103, 106–114; Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 167–68. Mercury, 9 June 1990. Mercury, 10 June 2000. E.g. West Australian, 4 July 1998 (Edmund Blakeney); 8 July 1981 (RO Kidd). Age, 9 Dec. 2000; West Australian, 4 July 1998; Advertiser, 9 Dec. 2000.
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Manuscript sources FAMILY AND PERSONAL PAPERS Adams papers, SLQ Aria, Iris Chapman, papers, ML Blackshaw papers, ML Blomfield papers, ML Bowlby papers, Wellcome Institute, London Brunswick papers, NLA Chase, Monica, journal, SLSA Davison papers, NLA Deasey, William Denison, papers, SLV Denholm papers, SLQ Franklin, Miles, letters (copies SLV, originals NLA) Franklin, Miles, papers, ML Harding papers, NLA Higgins, HB papers, 1841-1929, NLA Higgins, HB papers1914-1929, NLA Jones, Hazel Rose, papers, ML Lawson papers, ML Macartney, Jane, diary, SLV Manifold papers, SLV McCrae papers, SLV McLachlan papers, NLA Moir, JK, collection, SLV Murray-Prior papers, NLA Palmer papers, NLA Rodd papers, NLA Rowe papers, SLV Suttor, Charlotte, diary, ML Tennant, Kylie, papers, NLA Thomas, Agnes S, papers, SLV Throssell, Ric, papers, NLA Winter Cooke papers, SLV
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Ferguson papers, AWM Gluyas, Reginald, AWM Greenhalgh, David (ed), ‘Correspondence of the Bower and Greenhalgh Families from the Great War 1914-1918’, c 400 pp, unpublished TS, AWM Henderson Smith, Lieut George H, AWM Jackson, Lieut Alfred Charles, AWM James, WE, diary SLV Lawrence, Cyril, papers, SLV Love, Stuart Gilkison, ‘Episodes and memories: A personal narrative, 1884-1945’, SLV McGregor, Lance Cpl RF, AWM Neaves, EO and HC, AWM Patterson, Cpl CC, AWM Roberts, John Garibaldi, diary, SLV Sharman, Mathew S, papers, SLV Tunbrell, Collier Clarence, AWM Youdale, Lieut Alfred, AWM
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Memoirs, biographies, and collected letters Australian Dictionary of Biography Arnold, Josie, Mother Superior, Woman Inferior, Dove Communications, Blackburn, Victoria, 1985 Cowan, Peter (ed.), A Faithful Picture: The Letters of Eliza and Thomas Brown at York in the Swan River Colony 1841-1852, 2nd edn, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 1991
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Grahame, Jim, Home Leave and Departing, printed by ‘Murrumbidgee Irrigator’, Leeton, NSW, 1944 Hayden, Bill, Hayden. An Autobiography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1996 Mills, Roy, Doctor’s Diary and Memoirs, RM Mills, New Lambton, NSW, 1994 Palmer, Nettie, Henry Bournes Higgins. A Memoir, Geo. C Haines, London, 1931 Prichard, KS, Child of the Hurricane. An Autobiography, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1963 Summers, Anne, Ducks in the Pond: An Autobiography 1945-1976, Penguin, Melbourne 1999 Tennant, Kylie, The Missing Heir, Macmillan, Melbourne, 1986 Throssell, Ric, Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1975 —— My Father’s Son, Mandarin, Port Melbourne, 1990
Select secondary sources PRINTED BOOKS Aries, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, Penguin, Middlesex, 1981 Beaumont, Joan, (ed.), Australia’s War 1939-45, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996 Birnie, Lisa, A Good Day to Die, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 1998 Bowlby, John, Attachment and Loss – Vol. 1, Attachment; Vol. 2, Separation: Anxiety and Anger; Vol. 3, Loss: Sadness and Depression – Hogarth, London, 1969-80 Cannon, Michael, Life in the Cities, Viking O’Neil, Melbourne, 1988 Carey, Hilary M, Believing in Australia. A Cultural History of Religions, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, NSW, 1996 Chambers, Don, No Funerals on Picnic Day! Victorian Funeral Industry Association 18901990, Australian Funeral Directors Association, Melbourne, 1990 Churcher, Betty, The Art of War, Miegunyah Press, Melbourne, 2004 Cochrane, Peter, The Western Front 1916-1918, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001 Damousi, Joy, The Labour of Loss. Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 1999 —— Living with the Aftermath. Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, CUP, Cambridge, 2001 Darian-Smith, Kate & Hamilton, Paula (eds), Memory and History in Twentieth-Century Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 1994 Durack, Mary, To Be Heirs Forever, Corgi, London, 1976/1995 Elias, Norbert, The Loneliness of the Dying, English ed 1985, Basil Blackwell, Oxford Evans, M and Lunn, K (eds), War and Memory in the 20th Century, Berg, Oxford, 1997 Faull, C & Woof, Richard, Palliative Care, OUP, Oxford, 2002 Gammage, Bill, The Broken Years, ANU Press, Canberra, 1974 Gandevia, Bryan, Tears Often Shed: Child Health and Welfare in Australia from 1788, Pergamon Press, Sydney, 1978 Garton, Stephen, The Cost of War. Australians Return, OUP, Melbourne, 1996 Gorer, Geoffrey, Death, Grief and Mourning in Contemporary Britain, Cresset Press, London, 1965 Griffin, Graeme M & Tobin, Des, In the Midst of Life: The Australian Response to Death, MUP, Melbourne, 1982 Hallam, Elizabeth, Hockey, Jenny & Howarth, Glennys, (eds), Beyond the Body: Death and Social Identity, Routledge, London, 1999 Hugo, Graeme, Australia’s Changing Population. Trends and Implications, OUP, Oxford, 1986 Humphreys, R & Ward, R, Religious Bodies in Australia, 2nd edn, Humphreys & Ward, Melbourne, 1988
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Illich, Ivan, Limits to Medicine. Medical Nemesis, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1976 Inglis, Ken, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, MUP, Melbourne, 1998 Jalland, Pat, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840-1918, OUP, Melbourne, 2002 —— Death in the Victorian Family, OUP, Oxford, 1996 Kellehear, Allan, Health Promoting Palliative Care, OUP, Melbourne, 1999 —— (ed.), Grief and Remembering. 25 Australians tell it like it is, Rivoli, Melbourne, 2001 —— (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000 Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth, On Death and Dying, Macmillan, New York, 1969 Kuhse, Helga, (ed.), Willing to Listen. Wanting to Die, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1994 Lack, John (ed.), Anzac Remembered. Selected Writings of KS Inglis, The History Department, Melbourne University, Melbourne, 1998 Lager, Eva, (ed.), Words of Sorrow. Words of Love. The Death of a Child, Compassionate Friends, Perth, 1998 Liveris, Leonie, The Dismal Trader. The Undertaker Business in Perth 1860-1939, AFDA, Perth 1991 —— Memories Eternal. The First 100 Years of Karrakatta, Metropolitan Cemeteries Board, Perth, 1999 Luckins, Tanja, The Gates of Memory. Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War, Curtin University Books, Fremantle, 2004 Macintyre, Stuart, The Oxford History of Australia: The Succeeding Age 1901-1942, OUP, Melbourne, 1993 McCormak, Gavan & Nelson, Hank, The Burma-Thailand Railway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1993 McKernan, Michael, This War Never Ends. The Pain of Separation and Return, UQP, Brisbane, 2001 McKissock, Mal, Coping with Grief, ABC Books, Sydney, 1985 Messenger, Dally R, Ceremonies for Today (3rd edn), Dally M Publishing and Research, Melbourne, 1992 Mitford, Jessica, The American Way of Death, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1963 Modjeska, Drusilla, Exiles at Home. Australian Women Writers. 1925-1945, Sirius, London, 1984 Morgan, John (ed.), An Easeful Death: Perspectives on Death, Dying and Euthanasia, Federation Press, Annandale, NSW, 1996 Nelson, Hank, Prisoners of War. Australians Under Nippon, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001 (1st ed. 1985) Nicol, Robert, At the End of the Road: Government, Society and the Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 1994 —— This Grave and Burning Question. A Centenary History of Cremation in Australia, Adelaide Cemeteries Authority, Adelaide, 2003 Parkes, Colin Murray, Bereavement. Studies of Grief in Adult Life, Penguin, Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1972/1991 Pensabene, TS, The Rise of the Medical Practitioner in Victoria, ANU, Canberra, 1980 Pincus, Lily, Death and the Family, Faber & Faber, London, 1976/1997 Porter, Roy, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind. A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present, Harper Collins, London, 1997 Prices Surveillance Authority, Investigation into Funeral Prices, The Authority, Melbourne, 1992 Raphael, Beverley, Anatomy of Bereavement: A Handbook for the Caring Professions, Unwin Hyman, London, 1984 Reeson, Margaret, A Very Long War. The Families Who Waited, MUP, Melbourne, 2000 Rickard, John, Australia, A Cultural History, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1988
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Seale, Clive, Constructing Death. The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement, CUP, Cambridge, 1998 Sontag, Susan, Illness as Metaphor, Allen Lane, London, 1978 Thomson, Alistair, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, OUP, Melbourne, 1994 Tobin, Des, About Death and Funerals (7th edn), Tobin Brothers, Melbourne, 1987 Twycross, Robert, Introducing Palliative Care, 4th ed. Radcliffe Medical Press, Abingdon, 2003 Vamplew, Wray (ed.), Australians, Historical Statistics, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon, Sydney Victorian Parliament, Parliamentary Debates: Legislative Council and Legislative Assembly (Hansard), Government Printer, Melbourne, 17 Aug. 1918 Walter, Tony, On Bereavement: the Culture of Grief, Open University Press, Buckingham, 1999 Waugh, Evelyn, The Loved One, Penguin, Middlesex, 1948 Wilkens, Lola, Stella Bowen. Art, Love and War, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 2002 Winter, Jay, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History, CUP, Cambridge, 1995
ARTICLES, BOOK CHAPTERS, ESSAYS AND ONLINE ABC Documentary, ‘Black Friday – Aftermath’, http://abc.net.au/black_friday/aftermath/jrigby.htm Aranda, Sanchia, ‘Palliative Nursing in Australia’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000 Ashby, Michael, ‘Cancer’, in Glennys Howarth & Olive Leaman (eds), Encyclopedia of Death and Dying, Routledge, London and New York, 2001 Bartley, Brian, ‘Euthanasia and Withdrawal of Treatment: Legal Perspectives’, in John Morgan (ed.) An Easeful Death: Perspectives on Death, Dying and Euthanasia, Federation Press, Annandale, NSW, 1996 Biddington, Ralph, ‘Death of the Old Melbourne Cemetery’, Historical Journal, vol. 65 no. 1, June 1994 Broom, Dorothy, ‘Reading breast cancer: reflections on a dangerous intersection’, Health, vol. 5, no. 2, 2001 Cannadine, David, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’ in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality. Studies in the History of Death, Europa, London, 1981 Cooke, Simon, ‘Death, Body and Soul: the Cremation Debate in New South Wales, 18631925’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 24, no. 97, Oct. 1991 Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in On Metapsychology, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 11, London, 1984 —— ‘Our Attitude Towards Death’ in Thoughts for the Times on War and Death, 1915, in Civilisation, Society and Religion, Pelican Freud Library, vol. 12, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1985 Gardner, Susan, ‘My Brilliant Career: Portrait of the Artist as a Wild Colonial Girl’, in Carole Ferrier (ed.), Gender, Politics and Fiction. Twentieth Century Australian Women’s Novels, UQP, Brisbane, 1985 Griffiths, Tom, ‘History as Therapy’, Australian Book Review, March 2004 Hunt, Roger, ‘Palliative Care – the Rhetoric – Reality Gap’, in Kuhse, Willing to Listen. Wanting to Die, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1994 Kauffman, Jeffrey, ‘Denial’ in G Howarth & O Leaman, Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying (eds), Routledge, London, 2001 Kellehear, Allan, ‘Health-promoting palliative care; developing a social model for practice’, Mortality, vol. 4, no. 1 Leming, MR and Dickinson, GE, ‘The American Ways of Death’, in K Charmaz, G
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Howarth & A Kellehear (eds), The Unknown Country: Death in Australia, Britain and the USA, Macmillan, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 1997 Lindemann, E, ‘The symptomatology and management of acute grief’, American Jnl of Psychiatry, 1944 Mackay, Mary, ‘Architectural styles and funerary symbolism’, in DA Weston (ed.), The Sleeping City. The Story of Rookwood Necropolis, Society of Australian Genealogists, Sydney, 1993 (1989) Maddocks, Ian, ‘Palliative Medicine in Australia’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000 Najman, Jake M, ‘The demography of death: Patterns of Australian mortality’, in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Oxford, 2000 Park, Ruth, Fishing in the Styx (1993) in Joy Hooton (ed.), Australian Lives. An Oxford Anthology, OUP, Melbourne, 1998 Parkes, CM, ‘A Historical Overview of the Scientific Study of Bereavement’ in MS Stroebe, RO Hansson, W Stroebe & H Schut (eds), Handbook of Bereavement Research. Consequences, Coping and Care, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2002 Phelan, Nancy, ‘The Nurse’, in Connie Burns and Marygai McNamara (eds), Eclipsed. Two Centuries of Australian Women’s Fiction, Collins, Sydney, 1988 Pringle, Rosemary & Alley, Jo, ‘Gender and the Funeral Industry’, Australia & New Zealand Jnl of Sociology, vol. 31, no. 2., Aug. 1995 Raphael, Beverley, ‘Grief and Loss in Australian Society’ in Allan Kellehear (ed.), Death and Dying in Australia, OUP, Melbourne, 2000 —— ‘Psychotherapeutic and Pharmacological Intervention for Bereaved Persons’, in MS Stroebe et als (eds), Handbook of Bereavement Research, American Psychological Association, Washington Rosenblatt, PC, ‘A Social Constructionist Perspective on Cultural Differences in Grief’, in MS Stroebe et als (eds), Handbook of Bereavement Research. Consequences, Coping and Care, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2002 Smith, FB, ‘The First Health transition in Australia, 1880-1910’ in GW Jones, RM Douglas, JC Caldwell & RM D’Souza (eds), The Continuing Demographic Transition, OUP, Oxford, 1997 Stewart, Don, ‘Legislation, Ethics and Social Policy: The Case of Dying with Dignity’, in Morgan (ed.), An Easeful Death: Perspectives on Death, Dying and Euthanasia, Federation Press, Annandale, NSW, 1996 Stroebe, Margaret S, ‘Paving the Way: from early attachment theory to contemporary bereavement research’, Mortality, vol. 7, no. 2, 2002 Syme, Rodney, ‘From Innocent to Advocate: A doctor’s Path to Voluntary Euthanasia’ in Kuhse, (ed.), Willing to Listen. Wanting to Die, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic, 1994
index
Adams family 93–95 Addison, Charles 51 Addison, Wilfred 51–52, 62–63 afterlife 79, 125–26, 135, 141, 183 heaven 142, 194 reunion in 27, 47, 142 surviving spirits 80–81, 368 see also purgatory ageing 4, 15, 160, 198, 200, 207, 208, 214, 217, 237, 246, 264, 269 AIDS 3, 273 Air, Department of 147–48 airmen 28, 128–51 deaths of 14, 128–51 families of 136–51 letters from 14, 129–30, 143 missing 129, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150 views of death 128–36 Allan, Geoff 139 Allbrook, David 265, 273 Allen, Leo 133 Almond, Jean 363 analgesics 195, 210, 228, 241, 245, 248–49, 253, 259, 260–61, 275 see also palliative care Andrews, George 284 Anglicanism 226–27 Anzac Day 8, 44, 45, 49, 58, 75–76, 80, 97, 371 Anzac legend 49, 50, 52, 59, 101, 128, 170 Aria, Iris Chapman 22 Ashbury, Michael 260–61
Askie, Charles 92 Associated Funeral Directors 286–87, 288, 289, 290, 296 Atock, Ken 176 Atock, Lois 176–77 Audino, Assunta 366 Audino, Paul 366 Austin Hospital Palliative Care Service 271–72 Backhouse, Clive 25–26 Backhouse, Elizabeth 24–26 Bailey, Marjorie 144 Baillie, Jack 42, 55, 82 Bairstow, Jack 174 Baker, Janet 180 Barling, Jack 104 Barling, Violet 104 Barnes, Alan ‘Spook’ 367 Bartley, Brian 254 Barnes family 367–68 Barton, EA 243 Bates, Bert 89 Bates, Coralie 89 Bath, Allan 77 Beadnell, Myfanwy 244–45 Bean CEW 313 Bell, Victor 333, 334 Bellbird Colliery 100–101 Bennet, Pte 65 bereavement see grief Bible 5, 43, 173, 180, 338 Birnie, Lisa 258–61 Bishop, Keith 184
( 400 )
Index
Black, G 95 Blamey, Thomas 149 bodies 306, 307–308, 323, 357 exhumation of 72–73, 167, 307–308, 312, 315, 321 exploding 334 missing 14, 53, 78, 90, 129, 136, 146 preparation of 10–11, 19, 206–207, 290, 300 sanctity of 304–305, 307, 312, 316, 320, 325, 329, 334 snatching of 323 soldiers’ 41, 66, 72–73, 74, 75, 113 unburied 50, 53, 61, 63–64, 74, 90, 329, 357 unidentified 42, 65, 138 viewing 24, 284, 284, 287, 289, 290, 295, 297, 300 see also burials Boland, Eric 287 ‘Bomber Crew’ 131 Borneo, North 153, 162, 170 Borthwick, Alex 124 Botany Cemetery 325 Bowen, Stella 131 Bower family 86–89 Bowlby, John 30, 354, 355 Bradley, Pte 65 Braithwaite, Dick 162, 169 Brereton, Lorna 180 Bridle, Leslie 29 Brown, David 254 Brown, Eliza 9 Brown, GW 313 Brown, John 100 Bruce, William 49 Brunswick, Ella 344 Brunswick, Rudolf 229, 344 Buddhism 33, 124 Bull, Hilda see Esson, Hilda Burford, Albert 86 burials 13, 45 airmen’s 135–36, 137, 140, 142 costs of 301, 302, 346 mass 62 popularity of 15–16, 285, 288–89, 318–319, 345 prisoners’ 155 reburial 72–73, 74, 307 reform 304 soldiers’ 58, 59–60, 61, 62, 64–69, 72–73, 74, 77, 88, 184 of ‘unknowns’ 65
unlocated 47 see also bodies; funerals; graves Burke family 79 Burma−Thailand railway 153–62 bushfires, Black Friday 101–104, 356–57 Bussell family 5 Bussell, Frances 210 Byers family 72 Campbell, Donald 285 Camperdown Cemetery 311–316 cancer 34, 196–97, 198, 208–25, 233, 259, 262, 264, 290, 351 bladder 222, 229–30, 231, 249 breast 209, 218, 219–20, 221, 224, 230–31, 248 colon 210, 221, 222, 275 death from 5, 15, 193, 197–225, 226, 233, 234, 251, 268, 269, 270, 274 lung 219–23 prostate 218, 219, 220 treatment of 195, 205, 214, 243, 245, 274, 276 (see also palliative care) as ‘war’ 209, 211, 212–213, 215, 226 Cardew, GMA 313 Caritas Christi Hospice 262, 266 Carroll, Lindsay 369 Carter, Elizabeth 165 Carver, SR 217 Catholics 6–8, 11, 31, 44, 47, 79, 80, 135, 240, 242, 243, 244, 245, 261, 325, 330–31, 332–33, 341, 346 Caux, Marcel 58 cemeteries 60–61, 304–27, 333–34 consecration of 307, 312, 313 heritage values of 305, 306, 307, 313, 314, 315, 316 landscaped 306, 311, 317, 318, 319 lawn 284, 287, 311, 326 maintenance of 305–306, 308–311, 320, 322, 323, 333 marketing of 318 ownership of 300, 302 and sanitation 304, 305, 310, 311, 314, 330, 333 and space 304, 319, 320–21, 322, 333–34, 341 Centennial Park Cemetery (SA) 317, 320, 326 Crematorium 326, 332 Chan, Arlene 271 chaplains 65, 103, 135–36, 140, 334 Chapman, HG 215
Index Chase, Monica 343 Chase, Scarlett 344 Chipper, Donald 297 cholera 156, 157, 160, 161 Christian Scientists 226, 228, 233 Christianity 4, 141, 180, 194, 195, 252, 257, 261, 265, 266, 285, 304, 307, 309, 325, 330, 340–41 and death 4, 5–8, 18, 23, 27, 80, 130, 134, 138, 142 decline of 18, 42, 74, 194, 195, 298, 329 see also secularisation Clack, Clare 172–73 Clark, Bernard 238 Clarke, AG 332–33 Clarke, Henry Lowther 308 Coates, Gordon 263, 264 Coe, John 162 coffins 126, 136, 282, 283, 284, 287, 289, 323 cost of 290, 292, 301 Cole, Mrs 144 Collier family 91–92 Collins, Betty 17–18, 193 Colville, HC 242 Communism 109, 112–113, 118 Communist Party of Australia 108, 112, 118 Compassionate Friends 362 Conan Doyle, Arthur 80 condolence letters 6, 12–13, 36, 45, 87, 94, 99–100, 115–116, 164–65, 172–81, 185–86 cards 100, 173–74 from chaplains 51, 136–38, 140–41 for civilian deaths 99–100 from comrades 61, 68, 87, 89, 95, 133, 149, 186 official 51, 52, 58, 64, 69, 94, 110, 136, 138, 148, 149, 181 consolation in afterlife 27, 47, 79–81, 142, 183 (see also afterlife) and alcohol 134 from fellow bereaved 144–45 (see also grief, support groups) and heroism 42, 44, 76, 79, 87, 109, 142–43, 146, 170, 176, 178, 183, 185, 357–58 and memory 46, 116–117, 122, 123, 142, 143, 150, 178, 183, 188, 329, 358, 365–68
( 401 )
and patriotism 42, 44, 45, 52–53, 69, 76, 87, 97, 142–43 religious 43, 44, 47, 79, 99, 123–24, 130, 136–37, 141–42, 148, 173, 178, 180, 183, 366 and work 11, 102, 103, 117–118, 183, 345 see also condolence letters Cook, James 177 Cooke, Edmund 5 Coombes, Geoffrey 133 Cotter, Edmund 309 Courtman, Dan 141 Courtman, Thelma 141 Cowden, Elena 177 Crapp, Errol 129–30 Crassingham, AO 92 Creed, John 330 cremation 15–16, 22, 74, 126, 311, 313, 320, 328–47 accounts of 332, 334–35, 338–40, 344, 345 costs of 291, 292, 300–301, 302, 328, 341, 342, 344, 346, 347 legalisation of 327, 330, 340 marketing of 336–38, 347 opposition to 325, 328, 330–31, 332–33, 340–41, 346 popularity of 15–16, 285, 288–89, 318–319, 328–30, 331, 335, 336–38, 342, 343–46 and sanitation 328, 329, 330, 331, 333, 341 services at 328, 331, 342 of soldiers 156, 329, 334–35, 343 crematoria 295, 298, 300, 332, 340 ownership of 302, 346–47 Cribb, Mavis 231 Croft, Albert 59–60 Crotty, Horace 334 crying 45, 48, 84, 182, 187, 353, 358, 360, 362 Cumberland, Joe 55–56 Cumberland, Oliver 55–56 Cumberland, Una 55–56 Cummins, CJ 199–200 Curley, Ron 323 Cusack, Dymphna 27 Cyclone Tracey 357 Darling, LG 164, 165 Davies, David 142 Davies, Jean 247
( 402 )
Index
Davies, Mavis 142 Day, WR 213, 217 Deasey, Denis 23–24 Deasey, Denison 23, 24 Deasey, Kathleen 23–24 Deasey, Maude 24 death: accounts of 5, 7, 21, 23, 88, 92, 94, 139–41, 195, 225, 230, 352, 353, 364, 370 (see also condolence letters) age at 4, 197, 202 of airmen 128–51 attitudes to 14, 16, 17–18, 45, 239 awareness movement 202, 204, 361 causes of 23, 196–97, 202, 207, 209–211, 234, 237 (see also mortality) of children 4, 6, 12–13, 34–35, 36, 314, 362–65, 368 of civilians 31–32, 48, 98, 100–104, 105, 370 and class 53–54, 270 denial of 13, 17–22, 32, 34, 80, 169, 171, 172, 173, 184, 193, 203, 233, 258, 288, 326–27, 351, 352, 354, 370 with dignity 193, 205, 238, 240, 241, 246, 255, 257, 263, 351, 353 in disasters 100–104, 356–60 ‘good’ 5, 126, 134, 194, 257 at home 14, 200–202, 228, 229, 264, 266 in hospital 14–15, 19, 25, 29, 31, 193, 194, 196, 200–203, 228, 232, 246, 259–60, 264, 351, 370 mass 13, 41, 43, 96 as medical failure 194, 370 medicalisation of 3, 14–15, 193–207, 233, 237, 246, 255, 269, 277, 351, 352, 370 in nineteenth century 3, 4, 21, 35, 47, 126 place of 197, 200–203, 264, 265, 270, 271, 272 presumed 45, 136 (see also missing) and psychology 204, 266, 277, 352–53 right to 240, 241, 256 rituals of 8, 15, 284–86, 295, 298–99, 351, 371 of soldiers 32, 41–42, 48, 51, 52–53, 55, 75, 88–89, 92, 94, 100 Denholm, Andrew 99–100 Denholm, Lucy 99–100 Dent, Arthur 333 disasters 16, 100–104, 356–60 disease 4, 14, 155, 194
causes of 195–96 heart 5, 21, 23, 32, 196–98, 199, 211, 234 respiratory 198, 199, 273 terminal 194 treatment 195, 196 see also cancer, tuberculosis etc. doctors 193–94, 205, 213, 214, 263 and death 13, 14, 31, 125, 207, 233 and euthanasia 235, 239–57 and palliative care 195, 257, 259, 260, 265, 273 among prisoners-of-war 156 Doubleday, Arthur 132, 136 Drake-Brockman, Henrietta 27 Drakes, Ben 139, 140 drowning 344 Dunlop, Edward ‘Weary’ 153–54, 169 Dunstan, Don 320 Egan, Pierce 268 Einstein, Sylvia 224 Elias, Norbert 19 Elliott family 53 embalming 283, 287, 295 see also bodies, preparation Embalming, Australian School of 283 Embleton, Jack 78 Esplin, Bruce 104 Esson, Hilda 111, 216–217 Esson, Louis 111 euthanasia 3, 15, 233–34, 235–57, 258, 260–61, 268, 274 active 235, 236, 238, 240–57 (see also suicide, assisted) ‘double effect’ 241, 245, 255 legislation on 235, 239–42, 253 opposition to 235, 239, 240–41, 243, 251, 252, 254, 256–57, 261 passive 236, 237, 238, 240, 241, 244–45, 247, 255 support for 238, 242–43, 244–48, 254–56, 351, 353 Euthanasia Laws Act (Commonwealth) 235, 274 Euthanasia Societies 238 Australian 246–47 British 242–43, 244, 247 NSW 245–46, 253, 254 Victorian 245–46 Evans, Robert 290 Falkiner, ‘Jum’ 133
Index Farrell, Fred 97 Fawkner Cemetery 306, 317, 320 Crematorium 340, 341 Ferguson family 56–57 Ferguson, Douglas 56, 80 Ferguson, Hector 56 Ferguson, Malcolm 56–57 Ferguson, Norman 56–57 Fitzgibbon, EM 310 Fletcher, Herbert and Lill 139, 142 Fletcher, Norm 142 Folkard, John 164 Folkard, Stan 163–67 Foot, Carolyn 364–65 Foot, Shaun 364–65 Forbes, Andrew 68 Forest Lawn Cemetery 316, 317, 318 Franklin, John 28 Franklin, Miles 26–29 death of 124 fear of death 124 Fraser, Charlie 186 Freeman, Cheryl 360 Freemasonry 24 Freeth, Ethel and Fred 146–48 Freud, Sigmund 18–19 Fry, Alan 176 Fulcher, Marjorie 183 funeral celebrants 299 funeral directors 135, 201, 281, 283, 296, 303, 322 funeral industry 15, 281–303, 370 enquiries into 281, 289, 290–91, 300–301, 320, 345 marketing by 281, 284, 287, 302 funeral parlours 285, 287 funerals 11, 13, 22, 24, 29, 104, 253, 281, 323 accounts of 140–41 of civilians 98, 101, 314 costs of 281, 287–91, 292, 297, 300 lack of 53 of prisoners of war 154–55 processions 282, 283, 284, 295 reform of 287 religious services at 5, 42, 59, 60, 136, 141, 184, 295, 299 of soldiers 41, 61, 87, 114, 184 see also burials; cremation Gale, Edwin 86 Gale, Sam 86 Gallacher, Bea 121
( 403 )
George family 54 Gill, George 180–84 Gill, Julie 181–84 Gill, Mrs 181–82 Gilligan, JE 238 Ginn, Joan 314 Gledhill, PW 315 Gluyas, Reginald 82 Godley-Cliffe, Sharon 368 Goodisson, John 143 Goodisson, Ruby 139–40, 143 Gordon, Jim 172, 174–78 Gordon, Kenneth 174–78 Gordon, Mrs 175–76 Gorer, Geoffrey 30–31 Grahame, Jim see Gordon, Jim Grant, Roy 58 Granville rail disaster 357–58, 361 Graves Registration and Enquiries Unit, Australian 167, 168 graves cost of 320 distant 41, 69–72, 74, 96, 329 marked 59, 88, 168, 329 mass 59, 63, 136 re-use of 320, 327 sanctity of 61, 304–305, 329 of soldiers 42, 59, 61, 70–71, 87, 97, 184, 336 title to 305, 308, 311, 312, 314, 320–21 unlocated 72–74, 90, 156, 168, 171 unmarked 65, 72, 156 visiting 8, 89, 316, 322, 329 see also burials; cemeteries graveyards see cemeteries Great War 13, 19, 41–105, 127, 329 deaths in 14, 41, 76–77, 85, 127 letters from 42, 45–46, 48, 49, 50, 55–56, 57, 87, 81, 93 Greeks 76, 98, 321, 323, 325, 326, 356 Green, AV 310 Greenhalgh family 86–89 Greenup, Harold 283 grief 18 anticipatory 204 chronic 14, 32, 34, 91, 97, 109, 147–48, 149, 150 and class 173–80 counselling 16, 135, 264, 295, 296–97, 300, 357, 359–65 denial of 106, 146 (see also death, denial) as disease 85
( 404 )
Index
expressive 3, 11, 13, 16, 18, 32, 33, 116, 285, 351, 354, 370–71 gendered 11–13, 36, 75–76, 89, 101, 104, 173, 178, 182–84, 298, 353, 363 mass 144–45, 171, 177, 369 medication for 30, 33 for missing 90–95, 97, 129, 139, 142, 144, 146 private 3, 4, 13, 31, 41, 43, 55, 119, 171, 172, 177, 184, 369 public 10, 42, 76, 85, 105 psychology of 16, 30, 76, 172, 354–56, 359, 365, 370 in regional communities 6, 11, 86–89, 101–104, 177 silent 12, 13, 18, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47, 75–76, 77–79, 97, 98, 101, 109, 124, 172, 173, 184 support groups 81, 361–65 suppressed 13, 16, 20, 24, 30, 34–35, 41, 55, 122, 130, 134, 171, 172–89, 356 see also mourning Griffin, Graeme 295 Griffin, Murray 158–59 Griffith, Jane 182 Gunz, Frederick 269–70 Gypsies, graves of 311 Harmer, Lyndsay and Margaret 362 Harrison, Alan 139 Harrison, E 172 Harrison, L 143 Hart, WP 286 Hartford Rivers, G 283 Harvey, Billie 86 Harvey, Edgar 86 Hawkesford, Alice 369 Hawkins, Reginald 284 Hayden, Bill 13, 34–37, 363 Hayden, Dallas 34–37 Hayden, Michaela 34 Heard, Yvonne 362 Henderson, Col 166 Henderson Smith, George 51 Higgins, Henry 84–85, 105, 171, 172 Higgins, Mary 84–85 Higgins, Mervyn 84–85 Hills, Ben 301 Hinton, W 62–63 Holmes, NJ 213 home care 200, 224, 229–30, 251, 274 Hooper, Emily 138, 144
hospices 200, 224, 261–65 Hospital Palliative Care Service 265–66 hospitals 196, 197–203 elderly in 198–99 see also death, in hospital; palliative care, in hospitals Hounslow, Bruce 360 Howson, Laurie 132 Hoyle, Arthur 133–34 Hughes family 54–55, 72, 79–80 Hughes, Muriel 179 Hulme-Moir, Rt Revd 289 Hunter, John 244 hymns 5, 43, 173, 180, 344 In Memoriam notices 365–70 for civilians 98 history of 9–10, 43 in Great War 42–47, 52–55, 69–73, 77–79, 88 for missing 92–93 in Second World War 180–81, 186 Independent Funeral Directors Association 286–87, 288 influenza 47, 96 Italians 33, 76, 98, 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 356 Jago, Bertha 99 James, William 49 Japanese 153–54, 168 Jeffreys, Leslie 65 Jennings, Brian 132 Jessup, Harry 155–56 Jews, graves of 306, 323 Johnson family 78 Johnson, Alex 185 Johnson, Alfred 66–68 Johnson, Barry 185 Johnson, John 184–88 Johnson, Josephine 184–88 Johnson, Josie 184, 186, 187, 188 Johnson, Len 185, 186–87 Johnson, Sylvia 186 Johnstone, James 254 Johnstone, Margaret 254 Jolly, Alex 126 Jones, Hazel 252–53 Jones, Ida 180 Jones, Susanne 298 Jordan, Dorothy 124 Judd, James 65–66
Index Karrakatta Cemetery 319, 325, 343 Kauffman, Jeffrey 19 Keane, WMC 205 Keiller, Catherine 95 Keith Murdoch Sound Archive 130, 132–33 Kennedy, JJ 64–65 Kensal Green Cemetery 316 Kenworthy, Alex 296 Keuger, James 317–318 Kingsbury, Katherine 267 Kingston Centre 200 Kinsela, Charles 281 Kirby, Michael 238, 253 Kirkwood, Kathleen 176 Knibbs, J 99 Knowles, George 72 Knox, GH 145–46 Komesaroff, Paul 270 Kubler-Ross, Elisabeth 204, 267, 352–54, 365, 370 Kuhse, Helga 254–56 Labor Funerals 294, 302 Lancaster, HO 217–219, 220 Lance, Jack 64–65 Law, Nell 165 Lawrence, Cyril 49 Lawson, Henry 43, 99 Leeman, Jack 167–68 Lees, Harrington 333 Lehr, Frank and Neta 99 Leicester, David 133 life expectancy 4, 196 Linden, Yvonne 259 Lindsay, Ethel 167 Lindsay, Robert 167 Lindsay, Walter 93 Liverpool Asylum 210, 211 Liverpool Cemetery 310 ‘living wills’ 239, 244, 247 Lobb, Leonard 147 Longstaff, Will 80 Loudon, JC 311 Love, Stuart Gilkison 57–58 Lumsden, Thomas 215 Lynch, Roche 243 Lyon, Ft Sgt 145 Macartney, Jane 12, 182 MacDougall, Ian 177–78 Mackellar, Dorothea 314 Mackenzie, Neil 186
( 405 )
Maclean, Hector 142 Maddocks, Ian 257, 262, 273 Maher, Frank 175 malaria 157, 167 Malden, Trevor 264 Manifold, John 21, 22 Manifold, William 21–22 Manion, Gerard 223 Manion, Helen-Anne 223 Martin, David 26 Mary Agatha, Sr 262–63 masculinity 11, 35, 48, 75 Massie, John 149–50 Massie, RJA 149–50 Master Undertakers Association, Victorian 282 Masterton, John 245 mausolea 285, 321–26, 327 cost of 324, 325 and sanitation 322, 323, 326 McCosker, James 135 McCrae, Helen 341 McCrae, Hugh 339–40, 341 McCrae, Nancy 339–40 McCulloch House 259, 260 McDonald, Freda 232 McDonald, Margaret 251–52 McGregor, Reginald 64 McInnes, Graeme 75–76 McKay, Fred 137–38 McKell, William 315 McKibbin, SW 314 McKillop, LM 215 McKissock, Mal 264, 361–62 McMillan, Marion 165 McMurria, James 150 McWilliams, William 69 Medical Treatment Act (ACT & Vic) 241 medicine 15, 193–96, 203, 207, 208 geriatric 200 see also death, medicalisation of; palliative care Melbourne City Mission Hospice 267 Melbourne General Cemetery 305, 306, 322 Mellett, Lt 183 mementoes 79–80, 81, 93, 143, 146–47, 183, 185 memorialisation 12, 31, 302 memorials, war 8, 76, 86, 90, 96–97 memory 7, 8–10, 12, 44, 75, 79, 81, 85 public 8, 31, 76, 96–97, 152 see also consolation, memory
( 406 )
Index
Menin Gate 69, 81, 90 Menin Gate at Midnight 80–81, 82–83 Messenger, Dally 299 Miller, Douglas 204–205 Miller, Lilian 138–39, 141, 143 Mills, Roy 156–62 miners 36, 43, 100–101 Minty, Bill 133 missing airmen 129, 138, 139, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150 official designation of 91, 92, 138 soldiers 45, 56, 65, 72, 78, 79, 90–95, 160, 163, 167, 171, 176 see also bodies, missing; death, presumed Mitchell, Jack 140–41, 144 Mitford, Jessica 286, 317 Monash, John 306 Monckton, Marie 177 Moore, Tom 339 Moore, William 339 Moran, HM 215 mortality 4, 196, 197, 201–203, 207, 211, 218, 221 aged 198 infant 4, 196 Mount Auburn 316 Mount Olivet Hospice 274–76 mourning 31, 150, 182 dress 11, 98, 182 gendered 10–11, 12 period 11, 124 reform 11 rituals 3, 5, 8, 12, 13, 20, 31, 42, 98 see also grief Mudgee Cemetery 310 Mummery, Barbara 251 Murphy, TP 68 Murray-Prior, Ted 12 National Association for Grief and Loss 361 Natural Death Act (SA) 239 Neaves, Erle 68 Neaves, Harry 69 Nelson, Gladys 94 Nelson, Hank 152–53, 162 Neville, Keith 341–43 Newcastle earthquake 359–60 Newton, Minnie 146 Newton, William 145–46 Nichols, AC 290 Niland, D’Arcy 32
Northern Suburbs Cemetery (NSW) 319 Crematorium 22, 29, 336–38, 340, 345 nurses 10, 26, 29, 205–207, 210, 228, 248–49, 263 palliative 259, 262, 265–66, 267, 274 O’Connor, Peter 130–32 O’Dowd, Bernard 368 O’Loughlin family 43, 44–47 O’Loughlin, Alice 47 O’Loughlin, Doris 44 O’Loughlin, George 44, 45 O’Loughlin, Harry 44, 45 O’Loughlin, Henry 44, 46 O’Loughlin, Maisie 44 O’Loughlin, Maude 44, 45–47 O’Loughlin, Sydney 45 O’Leary, Fanny 7–8 O’Meara, Tom 103 O’Neill, Brian 149 Orthodox religion 6 Osborne, JW 222–23 Padley, AH 306 palliative care 3, 194, 224, 233–34, 241, 249, 250, 255, 258–77 costs of 271 in hospices 259–60, 261, 262–63, 265–66, 267, 269–70 in hospitals 262, 262, 265, 266, 268, 269–71, 273–74 support for 15, 252, 256–57, 351 Palmer, Nettie 27, 84–85, 111, 112 Palmer, Vance 111, 113 Park, Ruth 32–34 Parkes, Colin Murray 30, 354, 355 Parramore, Ian 246 Parramore, Jenny 246, 247 Patterson, Colin 80 Père Lachaise Cemetery 316 Perkins, WR 160–62 Phelan, Nancy 206–207 Phillips, FE 54 Pickle, Peter 333 Pinnaroo Valley Memorial Park 319 Pitman, Fred 140 Pitman, Hugh 143 poetry 43, 175, 180, 185, 336, 338 polio 121 Pollard, Brian 252, 256, 257, 263, 264, 269 Pond, SAF 156 Ponsonby, Lord 242
Index Poole, L 140, 144 Prayer Book 5, 43, 173 prayers 7, 36, 79, 108, 140, 148, 156, 184, 232 Prendergast, George 309 Prentice, JWM 309 Price, Owen 140 Price, TA 140 Prichard, Alan 109, 111, 119 Prichard, Katharine Susannah 29, 32, 106–26, 171–72 death of 124–26 death of brother 109, 119 death of daughter-in-law 121–24 death of father 108–109 death of husband 110, 115–119 and politics 109, 111, 112–113, 117, 118 and writing 107, 109, 112, 113, 117, 118, 125, 126 Prichard, Tom 108–109 prisoners of war 92, 132, 138, 139, 150, 152–70, 176, 177 deaths of 14, 64, 127, 128, 153, 154, 155–57, 160–62, 177 diaries of 155 execution of 145, 166 families of 160–61, 162–70, 171 letters from 14 numbers of 152 silence of 153, 168–70 Protestantism 6–7 Purdy, Dr 287–88 purgatory 6–7 see also afterlife Purslowe, Mareena 298 Quinlan, Karen 237, 238, 247 Radcliffe, Jaime 368 Radcliffe, Ellen 368 Radic, Leonard 342 Raphael, Beverley 30, 354–57, 358, 359 Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureaux 64–69, 91–92, 163, 164, 168 Rees family 73 religion 10, 12, 36, 41 see also Christianity etc. Richardson, Henry Handel 210 Rigby, John 103 Right to Life movement 252, 254 Rights of the Terminally Ill Act (NT) 235, 242, 274
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Robbins, Charlie 173 Robbins, Laurie 173–74, 177 Robbins, Mavis 174 Robbins, Mena and Roy 173–74 Roberts, Berta and Frank 81 Roberts, John (Garry) 81 Rodd, Bim 228, 229, 345 Rodd, Lewis 193, 226, 228, 229–30, 231, 345 Rodriguez, Sue 258, 260 Rolls of Honour 43, 57 Rook, AE 312 Rookwood Cemetery 310–311, 316–317, 321, 324, 325, 333 Crematorium 332 Rothwell, Nicolas 274–76 Rowan, John 78 Rowan, Maggie 78 Russell, Colleen 292 Russell, Keith 292–94 Saclier, Beryl 246 Saclier, Tim 246, 247–48 Sacred Heart Hospice 262 Saint, Eric 198–99, 200 St Thomas’ Cemetery 310 Salisbury Memorial Park 326 Salvation Army 148, 344 Samios, Archie 365–66 Sandakan 153, 162 Santoro, George 240 Saunders, Cecily 261 Savill, Ern 369 scarlet fever 4, 6 Schut, Henk 355 secularisation 4, 6, 15, 42, 43, 80, 298, 303, 344 Selby, Isaac 306 Services and Investments 300 Service Corporation International 285, 298, 301–302, 346–47 Seymour, Jim 176 Shaw, Eliza 12 Shaw, George Bernard 243 Shaw, Will 12, 35 Sherlock, Charles 136, 137 Sinclair, Thomas 341 Singer, Peter 254–56 Singleton 86–87 Sleight, AA 285–86 Slomm, CW 180 Smith, Bobbie 54 smoking 220–21, 222–23
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Index
Solace 363 soldiers deaths of 32, 41–42, 48, 51, 52–53, 55, 75, 88–89, 92, 94, 100 families of 42–47, 61–74, 75–100, 104–105 as heroes 32, 47–55 letters from 48–49 missing 45, 56, 65, 72, 78, 79, 90–95, 160, 163, 167, 171, 176 returned 75, 188–89 views of death 50–52, 55–58, 75 see also prisoners of war Sontag, Susan 209 Souter, Gavin 318 spiritualists 80 Spooner, Alice 144 Spooner, John 236 Springthorpe, John 9 Springvale Necropolis 324 Crematorium 341, 342 Stephenson, KA 143 Stout, AK 244 Stratton, Ben 77 Stroebe, Margaret 355–56 Stroebe, Wolfgang 355–56 Sudholy, Bill 143–44 Sudholy, Mimosa 140, 143–44 suicide 82, 108, 110, 114, 122, 169, 228, 229, 248, 253, 254 assisted 240, 241, 242, 249, 250, 254, 256, 258, 260 (see also euthanasia, active) Summers, Anne 353, 363 Suttor, Charlotte 6 Syme, George 213 Syme, Rodney 248–50 Taylor, Robert 312 Tebbutt, H 197 Tennant, Kylie 193, 225–34, 344 and ageing 232 and cremation 344, 345 and death of husband 193, 225, 230, 231, 232 and death of mother 227–28, 231 and death of son 228, 229 and euthanasia 233, 248, 250–52 and literature 226, 227, 232, 233 and religion 226, 233 Thomas, Agnes 307 Thompson, Henry 330 Thompson, Murray 103
Thornton, Arthur 150 Throssell, Hugo 107, 110–111, 120–115 Throssell, Ric (jnr) 106, 114, 120–24, 172 death of father 115–117, 119, 122 death of wife 115, 119, 121–24 Throssell, Ric (snr) 110, 111 Tilley, Shirley 150 Tobin, Des 296, 297, 361 Tobin, Frances 298 Tonkin, Hettie 139 Townsend, Emmie and Bill 368 Trathen, D 138, 141, 144 tuberculosis 4, 5, 15, 25, 157, 196, 208, 209, 210–211, 262 typhoid fever 195, 196 undertakers 11, 13, 30, 136, 281–82, 286, 296, 344 see also funeral directors Uren, Tom 169 Vincent, Michael 223–24 Vines, Lorraine 251 Wall, Mary 185–86 Walter, Tom 356 War Graves Commission 74 War Graves Services, Directorate of 167 Watt, Don 133 Watt, WA 75 Wauchope, James 369 Waugh, Evelyn 317 Webster, Ross 267–68 Welsh, David 214 Wenton, E 178 West Terrace Crematorium 332, 338 Westall, Dianne 367 Westall, Nicholas 367 Westall, Tony 367 Whelan, Patrick 91 Whitaker family 77 White Lady Funerals 297–98, 302 White, A 142 Williams, C 335 Williams, Kathleen 178 Williams, Leonard 148 Williams, Owen 173, 178–80 Williams, Ted 173, 178 Windeyer, Flora 9 Woodruff, Roger 271 Worker, Daphne 366 Worker, Ray 366 World War, First see Great War
Index World War, Second 127–89 casualties in 14, 127, 152 Wright, Harold 134 Wynn, Lewis 160–62
Wynn, Mrs 160 Yacka 86 Youdale, Alfred 50–51
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CHANGING WAYS OF DEATH
I N T W E N T I ET H-CE N T U RY AUST R A L I A
Death and bereavement come to us all. This is the first book to help us explain and understand their history across twentieth-century Australia. It draws aside the veil of silence that surrounded death for fifty years after 1918 – characterised by denial, minimal ritual and private sorrow – and explores the changes since the 1980s. Emotional and compelling, awardwinning writer Pat Jalland’s important book looks at the World Wars and the impact of medicine, with many stories drawn from letters and diaries. She also discusses cancer, euthanasia,
Changing ways of
DEATH in t went iet h-centur y Aust ra lia WA R , M E D I C I N E A N D T H E FU N E R A L B US I N E SS
palliative care, the funeral business, cemeteries and cremation.
As in her previous studies of death in Britain and Australia, though with an even surer hand, Jalland here combines rigorous and ingenious scholarship with profound human understanding of grief and pain. KEN INGLIS, EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF HISTORY, AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY
UNSW PRESS
JALLAND
UNSW
PRESS
PAT J A L L A N D
