Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War

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Return to Gallipoli

Every year tens of thousands of Australians make their pilgrimages to Gallipoli, France and other killing fields of the Great War. It is a journey steeped in history. Some go in search of family memory, seeking the grave of a soldier lost a lifetime ago. For others, Anzac pilgrimage has become a rite of passage, a statement of what it means to be Australian. This book explores the memory of the Great War through the historical experience of pilgrimage. It examines the significance these ‘sacred sites’ have acquired in the hearts and minds of successive generations, and charts the complex responses of young and old, soldier and civilian, the pilgrims of the 1920s and today’s backpacker travellers. This book gives voice to history, retrieving a bitter-sweet testimony through interviews, surveys and a rich archival record. Innovative, courageous and often deeply moving, it explains why the Anzac legend still captivates Australians. ‘A personal and scholarly account from an accomplished historian. I read this book with pleasure and admiration’ – Professor Ken Inglis (Emeritus Professor, Australian National University). Bruce Scates is an Associate Professor in the School of History, University of New South Wales. He has published in leading international journals and is the author and co-author of three previous Cambridge titles, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic; Women at Work in Australia’s Cities and Towns (with Rae Frances); and Women and the Great War (also with Rae Frances). All of these books won critical acclaim and the last won the coveted New South Wales Premier’s History Award.

Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War

B ru c e S c at e s School of History University of New South Wales

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521681513 © Bruce Charles Scates 2006 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2006 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 978-0-511-33735-2 ISBN-10 0-511-33735-3 eBook (EBL) ISBN-13 ISBN-10

paperback 978-0-521-68151-3 paperback 0-521-68151-0

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

For Rae, Bill and Alex – at journey’s beginning and end.

Contents List of illustrations Note on money, measurement and terminology List of abbreviations Acknowledgments Introduction Part one: Loss, Memory, Desire 1 The unquiet grave: imaginary journeys 2 Hearts of stone: creating the cemeteries of the Great War

page viii x xii xiv xviii

3 34

Part two: Family Journeys 3 In foreign fields: the first family pilgrimages 4 ‘Sacred places’: family pilgrimage today

63 100

Part three: Soldiers’ Tales 5 ‘To see old mates again’: diggers return 6 ‘A grave that could have been my own’: service pilgrimages

125 155

Part four: Testament of Youth 7 Walking with history: learning about war 8 ‘It’s like a Mecca, like a pilgrimage’: backpacker journeys

173 188

Conclusion Epilogue Notes Survey Informants Index

210 216 220 257 266

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Illustrations

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Visit to Gallipoli: SS Duchess of Richmond, 1934. Source: Capt. E. F. Wettern papers, Liddle Collection, Leeds University. page xxiv An Anzac’s ‘grave’ at Waverley Cemetery. Photograph: Bruce Scates. 29 Detail from Mornington War Memorial. Photograph: Flt Lt E. W. Scates, with thanks. 32 Crosses at Mont St Quentin. Source: J. G. Roberts Papers, Ms 8508, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. 55 Villers-Bretonneux Memorial. Source: Memorial de Villers-Bretonneux (France), NAA A2909/2, AGS6/1/18/7 Attachment D. 57 YMCA Guide to War Graves. Source: ‘Arrangements for Cheap Travelling Facilities for Relatives Visiting Graves in France and Belgium’, PRO AIR 2/152. 75 Pilgrims en route to Chunuk Bair. Source: Marshall Family Papers, private collection. 77 The unveiling of the New Zealand Memorial at Gallipoli. Source: Marshall Family Papers, private collection. 78 Pilgrimage to Private McAdam’s grave. Source: McGrath/McAdam Family Papers, private collection. 79 Australian flag at Menin Gate. Photograph: Bruce Scates. 117 Tribute at Lone Pine. Photograph: Bruce Scates. 119 Boats landing in the 1965 Gallipoli pilgrimage. Photograph: courtesy of Gloria Huish and Martin Crotty. 132 General Monash and his daughter Bertha in France. Source: J. G. Roberts Papers, Ms 8508, La Trobe Australian Manuscripts Collection, State Library of Victoria. 137 Diggers at the Gallipoli dawn service. Photograph: courtesy of Peter Dore. 167 Australia’s oldest pilgrim with the author. Photograph: courtesy of Alex Scates Frances. 169 School student at Menin Gate. Photograph: Bruce Scates. 179

183 190 198

Illustrations

Service at No. 1 Outpost Cemetery, Gallipoli. Photograph: Bruce Scates. Backpackers at Anzac. Photograph: Bruce Scates. Young traveller with family medals, Gallipoli dawn service. Photograph: courtesy of Will Scates Frances. Indigenous and white Australian students at Gallipoli. Photograph: Bruce Scates. Grieving parents at Lone Pine Memorial. Source: Sydney Mail, 20 October 1926. Mother institutionalised for grief. Source: Mary Jane M., Yarra Bend Hospital, DHS 94/104/34.

203 211 218

ix

Note on Money, Measurement and Terminology In keeping with the period I have generally retained imperial units of measurement. To avoid anachronism, metric measures are used in any discussion of the late twentieth century.

Money Australia used pounds, shillings and pence for much of the period covered by this book. It is impossible to give a modern equivalent of a 1920 pound (£), but in the interwar period an unskilled white male worker might earn as little as £2 2s. a week while a doctor might have made as much as £500 a year. There were 12 pennies (d.) in one shilling (s.) and 20 shillings in one pound (£). A guinea was £1 1s. When Australia adopted decimal currency in 1966, $2 was equal to about £1.

Measurement The relevant metric equivalents to imperial measures are as follows: 1 inch = 25.4 mm 1 foot = 0.3048 m 1 yard = 0.914 m 1 mile = 1.61 km 1 acre = 0.405 ha 1 pound = 0.4536 kg 1 stone = 6.35 kg 1 ton = 1.016 t

x

Anzac was originally the acronym of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps but it also came to represent a place (the site where Australian and New Zealand troops landed at Gallipoli), a group of servicemen (initially those who served in the campaign) and a mythology or legend. In each case, the meaning of Anzac is contextualised by the narrative to follow. Similarly the Returned Services League (RSL) was first formed in 1916 under the title Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia, to which the word ‘Airmen’s’ was added after World War Two. To avoid confusion I have generally referred to the RSL but noted its imperial antecedents (and competing organisations for officers) in the interwar period. By the same token, the Australian War Museum is referred to by the current name of the Australian War Memorial.

N o t e o n M o n e y , M eas u r e m e n t a n d T e r m i n o l og y

Terminology

xi

Abbreviations

xii

ABC ACT ADFA AIF ANU ANZAC AOT AWM Batt Capt CMG Cpl CWGC DHS Drv DSO DVA Fl Lt Gnr HMAS HMS IWGC IWM Lt MC ML NAA NCO NHTP NLA NSW NSWSR NT

Australian Broadcasting Commission Australian Capital Territory Australian Defence Force Academy Australian Imperial Force Australian National University Australian and New Zealand Army Corps Archives Office of Tasmania Australian War Memorial Battalion Captain Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George Corporal Commonwealth War Graves Commission Department of Human Services Driver Distinguished Service Order Department of Veterans’ Affairs Flight Lieutenant Gunner His/Her Majesty’s Australian Ship His/Her Majesty’s Ship Imperial War Graves Commission Imperial War Museum Lieutenant Military Cross Mitchell Library National Archives of Australia Non-Commissioned Officer No Home Town Provided National Library of Australia New South Wales New South Wales State Records Northern Territory

Prisoner of War Public Records Office Private Questionnaire completed by Queensland Royal Australian Air Force Royal Australian Navy Royal Australian Regiment Red Cross Wounded and Missing Files Reverend Royal Flying Corps Royal Navy Returned Services League Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League of Australia South Australia Special Air Service Sergeant Tasmania Trooper University of New South Wales Victoria Cross Victoria Victorian Public Records Office Western Australia War Graves Registration Unit Young Men’s Christian Association

Abbrevi ati ons

POW PRO Pte Q Qld RAAF RAN RAR RCWMF Rev. RFC RN RSL RSSILA SA SAS Sgt Tas. Tpr UNSW VC Vic. VPRO WA WGRU YMCA

xiii

Acknowledgments

xiv

This book began ten years ago, in a corner of Northern France that swallowed up a generation. It was my first visit to Europe and my first pilgrimage to a war cemetery. Commissioned by Cambridge University Press to write a book on women’s experience of the Great War, I was gathering soldiers’ epitaphs: bitter-sweet words of farewell that promised some insight into largely hidden worlds of loss and mourning. I travelled with my partner and co-author, Rae Frances. Without even knowing it we were following a trail blazed by four generations of Australians. The cemeteries of the Somme were windswept and lonely. Yet everywhere we looked, our countrymen and women had left their messages: poppies, photographs, poetry and heartfelt dedications scratched deep in cemetery visitors’ books. One pilgrim to Adelaide Cemetery had laid a sprig of wattle by the grave of an unknown, tiny Australian flags were pinned to panels of the missing at Villers-Bretonneux. It did not take long to realise that this was a place of pilgrimage, a site of memory still revered, still honoured, still tended. I wondered how many Australians had made this long journey; how one generation of pilgrims must have differed from another. And I wondered at the thousands more who could never afford to go there, whose loved ones were never laid to rest, whose grief was long, bitter, suspended. In the ten years I have taken to write this book, I have accrued a great many debts. Recovering the history of Australian pilgrimage led me first to England, the principal destination of four generations of pilgrims. I thank Shirley Hancock, Maria Choules and the staff of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in Maidenhead, Richard Davies and his colleagues in the Leeds University Library, the ever efficient and exceedingly polite staff of the Public Records Office, the British Library and the Imperial War Museum. Through a combination of leave, conference travel and an ARC Discovery Grant, I was able to visit war graves in Turkey, France, Belgium, Egypt, Malta and England. Each yielded their rich store of visitors’ names and addresses, each provided an opportunity to gather more informants for my survey. Like pilgrims before me, I was aided by the staff of Australia House and the many dispersed offices of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The latter is charged in perpetuity with the care of Australian war graves but

Acknowledgments

they also care for the many pilgrims that make their faltering way through history. My Australian research was made possible by a host of libraries and archives. I warmly acknowledge the support of the Mitchell, La Trobe, Oxley, Battye and National Libraries and thank the UNSW library for access to fragile bound newspapers. I am equally indebted to the Victorian, NSW, South Australian and Tasmanian State Archives, various state health authorities (for the release of asylum records) and the Australian Archives offices in both Canberra and Melbourne. Many key sources for this study, including Red Cross Wounded and Missing Files and AIF Service Dossiers, had been withdrawn for digitalisation. Special thanks are due for special conditions of access, particularly to Paul Daglish of Australian Archives and Ann Marie Cond´e, Robyn van Dyke, Margaret Lewis and Kerrie Leach in the Australian War Memorial. Thanks are also due to the RSL for permission to use their invaluable collection. I have tried not to forget the New Zealand dimension of Anzac Pilgrimage, though I strongly believe only a separate history could do justice to this experience. I thank the staff of the Alexander Turnbull Library, the Auckland War Memorial and the Kippenberger Military Archive and Research Library for assisting this trans-Tasman project and Peter Dean for his assistance in accessing the same. Histories are never written alone and a host of valued colleagues have offered advice, archival tips and encouragement. I acknowledge the fellowship of Joan Beaumont, Peter Cochrane, Martin Crotty, Graeme Davison, Joy Damousi, Peter Dennis, Lynne Dore, Stephen Garton, David Horner, Ian Kelly, Kevin Fewster, Bill Gammage, Paula Hamilton, Grace Karskens, Bev Kingston, John Lack, Mandy Leverett, Megan Martin, Karma McClean, Michael McKernan, John McQuilton, Hank Nelson, Bobbie Oliver, Melanie Oppenheimer, Naomi Parry, Michael Pearson, Robin Prior, Marian Quartly, Peter Read, Jill Roe, Peter Schrijvers, Peter Stanley, Lucy Taksa, Geoff Treloar, Julie Wells, Brad West, Richard White and Bart Ziino. Ken Inglis has been an endless source of inspiration and Rae Frances a tireless source of strength and guidance. A transnational project such as this is bound to attract a number of overseas collaborators, Jay Winter (who now works on both sides of the Atlantic), Annette Becker (University of Lille), James Marten (New York University), Ana Carden Coyne (Imperial War Museum), Kenin Celik (Onsekiz Mart C¸elik Universitesi) and my Kiwi colleague Jock Philips have all proved invaluable informants. I also thank Mehmet, Karina, Tomar and Mevlana Adil (who always reminded me of the Turkish view of Gallipoli) and Yves Fohlen (historian and custodian of Australia’s war graves on the Somme).

xv

Acknowledgments

xvi

Over 700 Australians (and quite a few New Zealanders) responded to my pilgrimage survey. Their testimony was moving, thoughtful and generous beyond all my expectations. Constraints of space and, of course, issues of privacy prevent me from ‘identifying’ particular individuals. I can name (and thank) a number of my fellow travellers: Linda Boyle, Bob Shaw and Roz and Michael Goodwin (from North Mackay State High School), Ashley Ekins and Graeme Beveridge (from the Australian War Memorial); Richard Reid (Department of Veterans’ Affairs), Toby Fleming, Sharona Coutts, Troy Henderson and their remarkable young companions. A national teaching award (shared with Rae Frances) enabled us to take a party of students to Gallipoli in April 2004. I thank Scott Cummin, Peter Dean, Alana Fagan, Colline Green, Greg Holden, Kirstin Hunter, Phil Ioannou, Alexandra McCosker and James Parfitt for all the things they taught their teacher. Historians are accustomed to working in archives but creating an archive has posed an entirely different kind of challenge. I am particularly grateful to Kate Deverall, Louise Fraser, Tina Donaghy and Belinda Saunders who undertook the enormous task of cataloguing and transcription. Their labour will make the work of future historians so much easier. At the request of my respondents the Pilgrimage Archive will be lodged with the Australian War Memorial on the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice. Until then, scholars are welcome to consult these records in the School of History at the University of New South Wales. On that note, I thank my colleagues at UNSW who provided so congenial a working environment for this project and my amiable associates in the History Council of NSW. I am also indebted to my funding bodies, the Australian War Memorial, the Commemorations Branch at the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, the Army History Unit and the Australian Research Council. I was honoured to receive the New South Wales History Fellowship to research the life of Dr Mary Booth, one of the founders of Anzac pilgrimage. Some of my closest colleagues were the research assistants employed on this project. Belinda Saunders undertook important archival research in addition to (too many) hours of transcription; Andrew Lord helped with the complex processing of Insane Asylum records, Peter Dean and Tina Donaghy were always dedicated and resourceful. None of this work would have amounted to anything were it not for the support of my publisher. Special thanks are due to Kim Armitage, Sally Chick, Karen Hildebrandt, Susan Keogh and Glen Sheldon at Cambridge, two anonymous and perceptive readers of the manuscript and Lee White, an extremely able and ever patient copy editor. What this book argues is that pilgrimage is as much about family as it is about nations. My grandfather fought in both Gallipoli and France. He

Acknowledgments

never spoke of his experiences, though his diary (kept at Quinn’s) and a hacking cough I still remember seem eloquent enough testimony to war’s brutal waste. He taught me the futility of Gallipoli long before I went there. My own family, Rae, Bill and Alex, were and are the best companions any travelling historian could ask for. I thank them for bringing me safely home.

xvii

Introduction: journeys into history On the eightieth anniversary of the Anzac landing, Jenny made her way to Gallipoli. It was the first of two such ‘pilgrimages’, journeys that would take her from ‘the awfulness and beauty’ of tiny graveyards in the gullies of the Gallipoli Peninsula to the ‘huge cemeteries’ that sprawl across Flanders. Prior to leaving Australia, Jenny had often attended Anzac Day services. They were ‘small suburban events’ and try as she might she ‘did not find them very inspiring’. But Anzac Day at Anzac Cove was another matter entirely: We arrived about 4 am in the dark and the lapping of the waves sent shivers up one’s spine. The crowd was noisy until the ceremony commenced [then we were all swallowed up by the silence]. I cried when the last post sounded, as did several of my . . . friends. To be at Anzac Cove at dawn on the 25th of April is one of the most moving experiences . . . We . . . stood there looking out to sea and you could almost hear the sound of battle.1

xviii

Well into her sixties, Jenny had read and travelled widely but ‘nothing prepared [her] for the sheer awfulness of the landscape’. Nor was she prepared for ‘the terrible sacrifice’ entombed in Gallipoli’s cemeteries: ‘to walk along and read the names and inscriptions and ages of the soldier makes one feel so sad’. Jenny stood in the graveyards overlooking the bright blue Aegean and wondered how grieving mothers ‘could justify the loss of their sons in far away countries’. At Quinn’s Post, she found the grave of her own cousin; just a file from the archives before but now a real person, a relative, a loved one. ‘I heard the “ghosts that march up and down the Gullies”, [she told me]. I can still hear them’. Gallipoli, and then the Western Front, provoked a bewildering spectrum of emotion: ‘pride’ in her countrymen’s ‘bravery’ and ‘sacrifice’ and ‘anger at the waste of these soldiers’. She returned home appalled by the ‘futility’ of war, knowing thousands had died ‘for what is now a piece of farmland’. And yet she had a memory of immeasurable value: ‘no one who has stood at Gallipoli or seen the huge cemeteries in Flanders can fail to be inspired’. Jenny described her pilgrimage as a life-changing experience. Visiting the cemeteries of the Great War had ‘opened a flood gate which has not abated’, a powerful surge of

Introduction

history, memory and emotion. By journey’s end, Jenny saw herself and others differently: at Gallipoli and on the Western Front ‘no one feels ashamed at the tears’.2

Anzac pilgrimage Jenny’s experience is typical of many. At a time when it has become fashionable to forecast the demise of history, pilgrimages to the cemeteries of the Great War continue to grow in size and number. Every year thousands gather, as Jenny did, for the dawn service at Gallipoli; comparable numbers visit the Western Front annually. Such pilgrimages have been made possible by the explosion of modern tourism. Cheap airfares have shortened the distance between Europe and Australia and a visit to Australian war graves is now marketed as part of a recognised tourist itinerary. Travellers to Gallipoli drink at the Vegemite Bar at Eceabat, an Australian tour of the Somme takes luncheon at the Caf´e Canberra or the Restaurant Le Kangaroo, backpacker hostels and ‘Hotel Anzacs’ mark a well-trod pilgrimage route through Europe. Of course, the distinction between travel, tourism and pilgrimage is bound to be ‘slippery’ and scholars have long debated the difference.3 But travellers like Jenny are anxious to demarcate the time spent in ‘pilgrimage’ from other aspects of their journey. Visiting the graveyards of the Great War was not a matter of mere sightseeing. It was a journey to what many call ‘a sacred place’ and, as Jenny’s experience suggests, involved an emotional ordeal that led ultimately to personal enrichment. Indeed, the emotional structure of Jenny’s visit, charted so carefully in her response to the survey, exposes the common denominators of all pilgrimages, be they religious or secular. There is a sense of a ‘quest’, a journey ‘out of the normal parameters of life [and] entry into a different other world’, a visit to a landscape saturated with meaning, and a return home to an everyday world, exhausted but renewed by the experience.4 It is also a journey steeped in history, a reckoning with memory. Gallipoli marked for Jenny ‘the making of a nation’, in its tangled gullies and plunging ravines she sensed the stuff of legends. It was also the site where her cousin was buried, a place grieving family members had long imagined, mourned, remembered. Jenny’s personal pilgrimage intersected with this larger public narrative of war; the Peninsula became a ‘storied place’, a family’s unresolved grief enmeshed with the heroic saga of the ‘landing’. And at another and perhaps more immediate level, Jenny was also ‘walking history’. Her journey was part of a long tradition of Australian pilgrimage, a tradition curiously overlooked in all the history books she had read. From the

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Introduction

xx

moment the Great War ended, Australians had set forth to walk these foreign fields, to visit the distant lands that claimed the lives and bodies of their kinsmen.5 This book sets out to recover that forgotten history. In doing so it straddles the experience of four generations of travellers. It begins with the tragic story of the bereaved: mothers, fathers, wives, children who searched (often in vain) for the graves of their loved ones. And it ends with the modernday odyssey of backpacker journeys to Gallipoli; a pilgrimage less to do with personal loss than the wanderlust of the young and an irrepressible desire to find the ‘birthplace’ of a nation. Such a history steps beyond the comfortable confines of the archives. This book owes as much to surveys, interviews and e-mail exchanges as it does to the neatly catalogued papers of library collections. It reaches out to those the conventional historical narrative so often excludes and invites them to tell the tale of their travels. Many (like Jenny) wrote with astonishing intimacy, as if there was a need to lay a memory to rest, as if telling her story might help to understand it. In all some 700 Anzac pilgrims were surveyed, young and old, from the bush and the city, as diverse in their politics as their occupations. In each and every case, I listened carefully, mindful that history is far too important a thing to be left in the hands of historians. These travellers’ narratives were the last step of a long journey: they wound their way through the landmarks of memory. Many of my respondents ‘digressed’ from the subjects set down for them – World War Two, Korea and Vietnam veterans read the Great War through the prism of their own experience; those who’d lost loved ones projected their grief on a previous generation; a good few railed at what they called ‘politically correct questions’ ‘driven’ by historians professionally disposed to be ‘opinion makers’. These interventions have been at once disturbing and challenging: disruptive and enlarging, they made this book an act of collaboration and they stand witness to the power and poignancy of history.6 Stories as personal as these go well beyond flimsy speculation on the reason for Anzac Day’s revival. In a ponderously secular society, we find a ‘hunger for meaning’, a craving for ritual, a search for transcendence very much at odds with the materialism of our age. In this increasingly globalised world, Anzac pilgrimage suggests a resurgence of national identity; paradoxically it teaches us of the folly of empires and the human cost of war. Finally, and most importantly, these journeys into history remind us of the persistent presence of the past. Gallipoli’s shadow did not just fall on the generation who lost their loved ones. The grieving did not end with the deaths of those it most affected.7 Some ninety years after the landing, Australians still seek out the graves of their countrymen,

Introduction

travelling (for most part with friends and family) to the killing fields of Europe. I write this book with a great sense of urgency. No one recorded the testimony of the generation who raised Australia’s war memorials in the 1920s and 1930s; I have retrieved their frail voices through newspaper reports, Red Cross files and long-forgotten correspondence with the military authorities. Today we are in danger of losing just as precious a record. It is not just that the Commonwealth War Graves Commission routinely destroys most of the cemetery visitors’ books. Time is also against us. The children, nieces and nephews of men and women who were killed, those who grew up with the stories and the memory of them, are mostly now well into their seventies, eighties and nineties. Not to capture the memories of this generation is to lose part of our past, a keystone of a nation’s collective memory. And not to compare their testimony with the responses of younger Australians, or investigate differences of gender, class and ethnicity, seems equally remiss. A cultural history of Australian pilgrimages to ‘these distant hallowed places’ offers a chance to reconstruct and understand what Jay Winter has called ‘the languages of mourning’. It opens a window into a nation’s enduring grief.8

A traveller’s history A possible subtitle of this book was ‘A Traveller’s History’. This involved much more than a historian’s abstract interest in tourism and pilgrimage. It suggested a kind of guidebook. How had generations of Australians responded as they walked the cemeteries of the Great War? What routes had they followed, where had their journeys taken them? This book remains that ‘traveller’s history’. It begins with two chapters on the making of memory. As Jenny acknowledged that morning at Gallipoli, the vast majority of loved ones could never lay their sons to rest, they could never afford to make the journey. But they could imagine it. The first chapter looks at what might well be called surrogate journeys, elaborate attempts by loved ones to visualise a soldier’s death, imagine his distant grave and send some ‘final’ message. A generation of grieving families offered up their own memorials: epitaphs, obituaries, monuments of stone and prayers to a dead man’s memory. In households across Australia, fragile ‘shrines’ were fashioned from letters, photographs and the battered belongings of the dead. These became the pathway of a difficult, incomplete and ultimately imaginary journey. Retracing each faltering step, we relive the tragedy of a family’s loss. The second chapter deals with the actual making of the Great War cemeteries.

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Introduction

xxii

‘No one who has seen the huge cemeteries of Flanders can fail to be inspired’, Jenny wrote. But soldier’s graves were not always so impressive; in the barren landscape of war comrades and mates covered the dead over as best they could. How and why did these scattered graveyards grow to the ‘silent cities’ that sprawl to this day across France and Belgium? Were the men buried there honoured equally or did the old equalities of rank, class and privilege prevail even unto death? The cemeteries of the Great War have been described as ‘sites of memory’, can we, in visiting them, ‘hear’ a mother weep? It is often said that Australians discovered their nationhood on the killing fields of Gallipoli. This book takes that argument one step further, exploring the tensions between imperial loyalties and nationalist sentiments which shaped the Great War’s cemeteries and memorials. Gallipoli’s graveyards remain to this day a compelling statement of what it meant (and means) to be Australian. Here the men who followed the British into battle boldly took issue with the way the Empire would remember its dead. Journeys are as much about travellers as they are about destinations. Chapters three and four focus on family journeys, the travellers of the 1920s and 1930s, who actually lost loved ones to war, are compared to those who leave Australia today in search of a name, a memory, a family memorial. What do these journeys have in common and how do they differ? Why does one generation follow in the footsteps of another and take up the ‘unfinished business’ of grieving the long-lost dead, in what ways and for what reasons do Australians seek some ‘sense of connectedness’ to their past? It is often argued that commemoration in the postwar period served a conservative political purpose; the quiet white stone of cemeteries sanitised the sordid business of killing, forgetting (at the very moment that they remembered) the dead. We need to test these arguments through the experience and attitudes of actual pilgrims. And we must wonder what relevance they have to a more recent generation of travellers. In a world still divided by prejudice and conflict, walking the graveyards of France or Gallipoli surely demonstrates the futility of fighting; row after row of butchered youth, German, British, Turkish, Australian, cry out at war’s human cost.9 Chapters five and six view the cemeteries of the Great War through the eyes of those who have seen (or prepared for) battle: diggers retracing their former trench lines and more recent (and in many ways more problematic) journeys by current and former servicemen and women. What does a Vietnam veteran make of the silent fields of the Somme? How does a nurse who lost her closest friends in Japanese prisoner of war camps respond to this stark and unrelenting waste? Why did survivors of the carnage at Pozi`eres or Lone Pine long to return there? These ‘soldier’s stories’ are spoken with a terrible clarity; they

Introduction

remind us of the vulnerability of men and women who live to this day with the death of their mates. Chapters seven and eight voice what I’ve called a testament of youth: senior schoolchildren ‘walking with history’ on an excursion across Australian battlefields, flag-clad backpackers rambling the ridges of Gallipoli determined to touch and feel their past. Here again the project turns to themes Jenny’s survey response recounted; a sense of the sacred rediscovered in the feeble light of the dawn service, a patriotic fervour stilled by the terrible silence of Anzac’s massed graves. In each of these chapters history is set on a kind of continuum, the archival testimony of the 1920s and 1930s resonates in actual voices spoken in our own age.10 Part of the uniqueness of this project is that it is a participant history. Over the last ten years I have been privileged to travel with families and backpackers, soldiers and schoolchildren, recording, observing and (as Jenny aptly put it) sharing the experience of pilgrimage. She described her travels as ‘deeply emotional’, inspiring, humbling, and very often disturbing. I am inclined to think of my own journey across the killing fields as well as through the archives, in much the same way.

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‘bound for Gallipoli’: map of the Peninsula issued to pilgrims on the Duchess of Richmond. Under the Treaty of Lausanne, the Allies were granted ownership of the entire area known as Anzac. Its battlefields and cemeteries were seen as sacred to the people of Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Part I

Loss, Memory, Desire

1

The unquiet grave: imaginary journeys On 2 December 1915 Major G. F. Stevenson, Commanding Officer of the 6th Australian Battery at Gallipoli, wiped the grime from his hands and wrote a letter home to Australia. It began in the way so many others did, bearing the most personal of messages to a woman he would never meet. ‘It is with extreme regret that I find myself called upon to write to you giving details of the death of your son . . .’ Brian Lyall had been killed on 29 November. That day Turkish artillery swept the gullies and the ridges, pounding the Anzac position and breaking crucial communication lines with the beach. Major Stevenson detailed Gunner Lyall to find the break in the telephone wire and mend it. Though ‘fully aware of the danger’ the young soldier went on his mission ‘without hesitation or complaint’. Somewhere in the trenches Lyall was ‘struck down’ by a shell and buried alive. It took them several hours to prise Gunner Lyall from the earth, several hours more to carry his broken, bleeding body to the field hospital on the beach. And although Major Stevenson broke the news as gently as he could, it was clear that it took Mrs Lyall’s son several hours to die: I . . . was informed that the poor lad had passed away at [2 am] that morning . . . This news, I assure you, was a great shock to me, as [I thought] his wounds would soon mend and that he would in all probability be sent home. However God’s will was otherwise.

We don’t know if Mrs Lyall found much comfort in the thought that God had taken the life of a loving son. But we can conclude, from that sheet of frayed and worn paper, that she (and probably those close to her) read the Major’s letter time and time again. Somehow, knowing how her son died offered some consolation. And the Major was careful to choose words a grieving mother longed to hear. Gunner Lyall was ‘the best liked man in the Battery and though one of the youngest he was the manliest of them all . . . the way he did his duty will help to sustain you a little in your grief’. In a way, Stevenson’s letter strived to set things to order: it assured a family

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L o s s, M e m o r y , D e s i r e

far away that all that was possible had been done. Much of Lyall’s kit was ‘sold by auction to his comrades who bought them up eagerly as mementos of one they all admired’. But personal and precious things, a watch, some letters and a soiled pocket diary, were carefully set aside by the Major. ‘I am [also] sending you a silver brandy flask with his name engraved thereon’. It was dated with the week that Lyall enlisted: ‘you would value it more than anyone else [possibly] could’. Mrs Lyall also valued the description of her son’s funeral. The boy from Victoria was ‘buried in a cemetery close to Ari Burnu on the beach’. The chaplain read a service and ‘a wooden cross [was] erected’. Brian’s mates stood quietly beside the shallow, sandy grave on the edge of the Aegean: their last farewells laid the battered body to rest.1 Mrs Lyall would never visit her son’s grave. She was poor, elderly and infirm and Gallipoli, quite literally, was half a world away. But others went there for her: Brian’s comrades, his chaplain, and finally (with the war’s end) the staff of the War Graves Commission. To this day the Commission is charged with the care of that lonely cemetery by the sea. And although she could not make the journey herself she could certainly imagine it. Indeed for most of the families of some 60 000 dead, pilgrimages to war graves overseas were next to impossible; this was to be a journey of the heart, a journey of the mind.

Confronting loss, witnessing death

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Unable to tend the body of the dead, or stand beside their graveside, reconstructing the final ‘crowded moments’ of a loved one’s life seemed a necessity to the bereaved. Great stress was laid on visualising a death in battle or in hospital, an attempt, psychologists tell us, to lend finality to loss, to witness and to accept. But the actual details of these deaths were difficult to come by. Not all Australian officers were quite as forthcoming as Major Stevenson and very few as credible. Indeed letters from all ranks to families at home often lapse into a formulaic pattern: death was painless, men were brave, he led a good life and ‘played the game . . . to the end’. These comforting clich´es told a family very little: loved ones craved ‘any possible information’, while the bravest (and most sceptical) demanded ‘the real truth’.2 Terse details released by the War Office satisfied no one. The first a family heard of a casualty was usually a bluntly worded cable: a man was reported ‘wounded’ or ‘missing’, ‘sick’ or ‘killed’.3 Months could pass before any official confirmation and even then these deaths seemed problematic. The Croser family from Minalton, South Australia, waited week after week in limbo:

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We had word from one of his mates, to say that [poor Will] was missing and then . . . got word from the Military Authorities that he was killed on July 17th. And later on got word that it was the 19th July. Since then one of his mates wrote home to say he was a Prisoner of War in Germany, so [we] don’t know what to make of any of it. They have not sent any of his things back . . . so [we are] doubtful about him being killed at all.4

Percy Blakemore’s mother suffered the same uncertainty. One by one, her letters were returned: ‘marked successively “wounded”, “killed in action” and “missing” ’. Each day she waited for the dreaded cable to arrive; every moment she ‘despaired’ to hear of anything ‘definite’.5 Doubts like these were crippling as well as cruel. They prevented any lasting acceptance of loss and prolonged the period of ‘searching’ identified with the first and most difficult phase of grief.6 Private Harry Antram was one of the first to land at Gallipoli and one of the first to fall. As late as October, his father still sought ‘particulars’ from the authorities, something that could confirm and somehow justify the death of his ‘poor boy’: I have [been told he was killed] officially, but when how or where or where he was buried or what became of his belongings watch chain Ring etc . . . have heard nothing up to now and I can assure you his mother and I also the family are extremely anxious.7

Similarly, it was not simply enough for Mrs Jones to be told that the son she loved had ‘died for his country’: I would like to know how long he lived . . . did he suffer much, and was he conscious, did he ask for his parents in any way and did he send any message? I would like to know where he is buried and . . . how long he was in the firing line before he was wounded. This is a dreadful war . . . making so many sad homes and taking so many . . .8

It was in the hope of answering these questions that families turned to the Red Cross. The Red Cross Wounded and Missing Bureau was established in the early months of the war. Initially it inquired only into the fate of officers but public demand was such that searches were soon extended to other ranks. It was a monumental effort, one made all the more remarkable by the entirely voluntary status of the society. Inquiry agents visited one hospital after another interviewing survivors and carefully recording their testimony. Nurses, doctors, military authorities, all were prevailed upon for ‘more definite and conclusive information’.9 Individual case files often run to fifty closely typed pages; by the end of the fighting, 4000 reports a month were being sent back to Australia. The Bureau’s inquiries enabled

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families to confront the loss of a loved one. They could confirm a death on some distant field of battle, they could extend sympathy and understanding. Most important of all they offered the bereaved some insight into the way their soldier died, recreating the moment of death, making that imaginary journey possible. Collecting information was one part of the Bureau’s work, evaluating it another. Vera Deakin, the daughter of a former Prime Minister, became accustomed to sifting truth from hearsay, reconciling all ‘the inconclusive evidence . . . the confusion, the ambiguities, different sightings, [and] nick names wrong’.10 Her task was hardest in the case of the missing: men whose deaths were inconclusive, whose bodies have never been (truly) found. And to hear a man was missing was ‘hardest of all’ for the families who loved them: ‘the suspense’ of ‘never knowing’ described as ‘terrible’, ‘maddening’, ‘unbearable’. Like a hundred other mothers in Broken Hill, Janet Fox longed for any news at all of her ‘poor lad’: ‘He was reported missing on July 29th and I can hear nothing further you can imagine how the suspense is telling on me it seems to eat into one’s very soul . . . how helpless I am’.11 The families of the missing were denied any kind of ‘closure’. Louisa Crowe writes six times to the Red Cross, hoping against hope for some news of her ‘poor son’. In the end, the letters are not even dated. One week of grieving slides into another until even word of his death ‘would come as a relief’. I would like to know if you have heard anything further about him it is dreadful not to know where he is or what’s become of him day after day waiting anxious to hear something, I would be quite satisfied if they found him dead or alive what ever it may be I would have to make the best of it for there is plenty of mothers situated the same way as myself. I expect and do hope . . . that you have some news for me by now. Trusting . . . to hear from you soon.12

When news did come it often only added to a family’s agony. Mrs Pill’s brother had been missing for over six months when she finally wrote to the Bureau; her anguish seems no less real and no less urgent today:

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Please I am writing a few lines just to ask you please if you can give me any trace of . . . Private W. R. Blacksell . . . please can you tell me any way in which I might be able to find my dear brother, he is all the world to me, and it is driving me out of my mind, as I cant [sic] get a trace of him one of his mates wrote home and told me that he saw my brother on a stretcher wounded and said in another letter that my brother had died of wounds. I have done all I can but [can’t] find out anything, if he is a prisoner of war, how can I find out, please can you tell me . . .13

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Inquiries confirmed that Private Blacksell was killed at Fromelles. Though it was little consolation to his sister, he didn’t die alone. Blacksell was one of over 5000 casualties; the Australian Imperial Force’s initiation to fighting on the Western Front was a suicidal charge at the German front line. The only eyewitness account ruled out injury or capture. Blacksell was killed ‘instantly’ by a shell-burst; not a ‘trace’ of his body was ever recovered from the Somme. Other deaths were far less conclusive. ‘Wounded and missing’ somewhere in France, Captain W. D. Hardy was reported taken prisoner, was seen crawling back to allied trenches, was rumoured to be on a hospital ship. It took almost a year (and hundreds of hours of interviews) to ‘confirm’ Captain Hardy’s death. The battlefield at Gallipoli was just as chaotic. Men ‘are lost sight of’ within hours of the landing, ‘vanishing’ altogether in the scrub and the gullies. They reappear convalescing in Mudros, charging the second ridge, and limping back to the beaches. Private A. C. Clarke was ‘bayoneted and killed instantly’ but that didn’t stop him taking the next trench at Lone Pine, boarding a hospital ship for home or being carried off a prisoner.14 Families too sighted their loved ones. All through the war, mothers forwarded press clippings to the Bureau, claiming to recognise their own ‘missing’ sons in photographs of prisoners, front-line soldiers or even injured men. Private Barnwell went missing at Gallipoli in the third week of the fighting. From the first, his mother insisted her son had lost his memory; he had been wounded in the head, perhaps, and could not be identified. ‘I am afraid they have not searched everywhere’, she writes in 1916, not in all the hospitals in France and England. Many years later, a photograph of returning soldiers reaches Alberton, Victoria, and the same determined hope is rekindled. As late as August 1919 Barnwell’s mother begs the Red Cross to take up the search again.15 Lost soldiers like this one would die many times in the course of an inquiry. Informants variously report a missing man machine-gunned, bayoneted or blown to pieces—in the midst of fighting, one Red Cross worker mused, men saw far too much and far too little.16 Deciding which account to believe was the task of the Inquiry Bureau; so too was the burden of ‘breaking the news’ to the family. In this regard, the Red Cross played the part of ‘a fictive kin’, a surrogate family. It was not just that Red Cross workers ‘stood as proxies for parents, wives, brothers and sisters’, advocating their case to seemingly indifferent military authorities. As ‘witnesses’ to a loved one’s death they were also involved in mediating mourning, offering ‘that human sympathy’ altogether absent in ‘official reports’.17 Often the correspondence between families and the Red Cross assumes an intimate, almost loving character; far from the stiff Edwardian stoicism historians might lead us to expect. Vera Deakin’s letters in particular, read as

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if they were spoken, gently guiding the bereaved towards an acceptance of death: I am bitterly sorry we have a sad piece of news . . . A wire has come from our Rouen office stating that Sgt Adam was wounded on the 28th of July and died . . . I dare not say do not yet give up hope, these tidings may not be officially confirmed! Because then, if they prove true, the pain will be doubly cruel. It can be a very slender comfort to you to know that we sympathise with you in your sorrow and suffering, nevertheless we do. The time has come when we all begin to feel that we women would make any sacrifice if only some of these promising young lives may be saved. You may rest assured that we shall make every possible inquiry . . . I will send you every detail of his admission . . . and, if we can, his last word.

The letter’s intimacy is all the more remarkable given the time when it was written. In the aftermath of the Somme offensive, Deakin and her colleagues were required to write hundreds of letters similar to this one. And their sympathy offered more than ‘slender comfort’. ‘Ever grateful and broken hearted mothers’ thank the Society ‘for all [their] kindness’; impoverished parents send donations well beyond their means. Even Sergeant Adam’s mother summoned the courage to face the truth: I thank you very much indeed for your extremely kind letter, . . . which alas! I must take as final. It was easier to hear it as you so kindly wrote [rather] than in the usual terse official intimation and I am indeed grateful that you will get me any possible news when you can.18

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Truth in war is always a scarce commodity. In conveying the news of death, Red Cross workers had to reconcile two potentially conflicting duties. On the one hand, families were to be made to confront their loss: ‘lingering doubts’ offered ‘false hope’ and that (as Deakin put it) could only prove ‘doubly cruel’. This helps to explain a startling lack of euphemism in the way deaths are described. Men are killed, they seldom ‘fall in battle’, grieving families are told that they were shot, gassed, bayoneted or shelled. Indeed the more ‘factual’ the imagery, the more conclusive these deaths would seem.19 On the other hand, mediating grief, offering kindness and consolation, meant making these deaths somehow more presentable. In September 1917 Lady Munro Ferguson (president of the Australian Red Cross) warned against passing on ‘crude’ inquiry reports from London: ‘if the news [of a man’s death] is delivered in a callous manner, all the good we do might be lost’.20 And so the language of war was gently amended, abrupt accounts by soldiers softened for the ears of ‘heartbroken’ parents, siblings and wives. Men ‘shot though the privates’ are wounded in the abdomen; those ‘cut up’ by machine-gun

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fire or ‘blown to pieces’ are ‘killed instantly’ and ‘without pain’.21 The most disturbing details are often simply deleted. Robert Phillips’ death could be made to sound painless and heroic, the lad from Queensland had been struck down by a shell ‘holding the line at Ypres’. But the file suggests it wasn’t the shelling that killed him. With one leg ‘practically blown off’ and his body ‘twisted like a corkscrew’, Phillips ‘crawled into a . . . hole and blew his head off with a rifle’.22 Indeed at times one senses a disparity between the consolation Red Cross workers were so eagerly seeking and the grim detachment of the men they interviewed. Private Patterson was asked if he was able to bury a comrade killed in shellfire at Bullecourt: ‘There was nothing left of him to bury’ came the terse reply.23 All this careful censorship was not simply a matter of sparing feelings or observing proprieties. The Red Cross was in the business of manufacturing memory, of constituting an image of death a family could live with. Private Leahy’s family was told their son ‘was buried in the field’ close to where he was killed. The rough cross marking the place conferred a certain dignity; Fred’s parents could imagine it as ‘sacred spot’, a place of future pilgrimage. His sergeant saw the scene very differently. ‘Snowy’ and another soldier had been practically buried when a shell hit their dugout at Passchendaele. Finishing the job was a fairly simple matter: ‘We found them in the morning—with their heads sticking out [of the ground]. They were covered up [just] where they were’.24

Circles of mourning In reconstructing a man’s death the Red Cross drew on three quite distinct sources of testimony. Soldiers, nurses and chaplains could all be involved in an individual death in battle, they witnessed the wounds or tried to heal them, administered the sacraments to dying men and committed their bodies to the earth. Of course, every death was different, and as witnesses to death these informants could respond in very different ways. But each (in a sense) was implicated in the loss; their accounts were the ones families longed to hear. In the front line, soldiers were often the sole circle of informants. They nursed the bodies of the dying, heard their last messages and buried them if they could. Some, as Private Patterson’s account suggests, were hardened to the death of their comrades, their testimony reads as cold, clinical even callous. But others were deeply affected: contrary to what many historians have written the mass slaughter of modern warfare did not make the death of any given individual any easier to bear. ‘We all loved and respected [Bill Bolton]’, Private Geddes told a Red Cross visitor, ‘he was one of the finest and

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best hearted chaps that ever breathed’. Bolton had been shot in the neck on the Somme and drowned in his own blood in less than 15 minutes. Geddes gathered up his ‘things, a prayer book [and] wristlet watch and forwarded them to his mother’. Then they dragged that ‘big lump of a chap’ over the parapet and buried him just behind the trenches. No doubt there was an intimacy in Bolton’s death; sniped near his dugout he died with mates all around him. But inquirers also found moments of tenderness in even the most hurried and heartless carnage. Private Clarke was killed in an instant as Australians charged the German lines near Fleurbaix: ‘All of a sudden his helmet blew 10 yards in front of him . . . shot clear through the head he never moved or spoke again’. There was no time to bury young Nobby but a mate paused ‘to cover his dear face up’ before they pushed on.25 In the Red Cross files one hears a very different voice to the clich´ed letters of condolence drafted for distant families. Perhaps that was because these words were actually spoken. Soldiers were usually interviewed in hospital, when illness or injury had taken them from the front line. These were rare reflective moments, when men confided something of the horror, exposed their vulnerability, whispered secrets long unsaid. Private diaries offer just as intimate a testimony. It may well be true that stoicism, codes of manliness and ‘emotional repression’ sustained men through the horror of battle, but when the fighting was over, when the moment came to bury their mates, one sometimes sees a very different kind of soldier. A veteran of three years fighting, Private Langford Colley-Priest MM attended a memorial service in the closing months of the war. Corporal Crosier spoke in honour of four of his fallen comrades; neither he nor his audience kept ‘a stiff upper lip’. ‘It was indeed an impressive service’, the young private confided to his diary and ‘one I shall never forget. I have never seen men break down as they did this night’.26 Words embody emotion but so too do gestures. The marking of a grave was often a comrade’s final tribute: in the bleakness of a battlefield soldiers dignified death as best they could. ‘Rough crosses’ were fashioned from bits of broken machinery, bodies buried ‘on the parapet’ identified by ‘bayonet and scabbard’. At Gallipoli graves were decorated with stones, beaten jam tins and biscuit boxes. In the desert south of Gaza, scratching on a sheet of cardboard said all that was needed to be said.27 Families (as we’ll see) often longed to raise a monument for their loved one, to carve a memory and an epitaph in stone. Soldiers’ graves were simpler but no less poignant: a pencilled name in a blighted landscape conquered the anonymity of death.28 It was the description of a man’s grave that could most console a grieving family. More than anything else a grave signalled closure, an end to the rumours, suppositions and false sightings, it was physical incontrovertible

How grateful we are that it was you who laid our dear Willie to rest. It is nice to know that [it was] someone other than strangers. We were in hopes that news of his death was a mistake until we [heard it was] you [who] buried him and took his belongings off him. Then we knew it was too true.29

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evidence of a man’s death. Relatives were thankful when loved ones were buried by their comrades: knowing the men (or even ‘their people’) helped a family through their grief. Killed at night in a vulnerable forward outpost, Lieutenant Irving’s body was buried ‘as best it could be’ so near the enemy. The want of ceremony mattered little to his sister:

Knew and accepted. Lieutenant Irving’s boyhood companion, Edwin Inwin, could be trusted to attend to all the intimacies surrounding death, to close the eyes and fold the arms as a loving sister would. His presence ensured that Willie wasn’t just covered over with mud in the darkness, their friendship somehow transcended all the sordid details of death. Most important, Inwin’s letter opened a passage into pilgrimage. Through him, Gertie Irving stood by her brother’s grave in Decoy Wood. The way the AIF was raised, with towns and districts the building blocks of battalions, improved the chances of families ‘knowing someone’. It also meant that siblings enlisted together, that one brother could be called upon to break the news of another’s death.30 Alan Mackay’s letter to his family explains how he and Colin came to be separated; it describes the fierce fighting at Mont St Quentin and invites his ‘dearest Mother, father and sisters’ to witness the ‘poor boy’s’ fate. Most important of all, Alan engineers an imaginary journey; he takes them to the side of their ‘gallant soldier’ and helps them lay ‘dear old Colin’ to rest. I went in search of him and found the dear old chap as I have told you. I kissed him with a loving farewell for all of those who loved him and with my own hands laid him tenderly to rest. What more is there to say? I am blinded with tears as I write and my heart bleeds for you all . . . He sleeps at the foot of Mt. St. Quentin where he fell, with his rifle by his side and his ribbon on his breast. I shall have a cross made and put it up myself . . . I cannot write any more, but you know that my most loving thoughts are with you constantly.31

Soon there were no more letters from Alan; he was killed on the Somme within a month of his brother. A tattered poem in the Mackay family papers stands as a frail memorial. And again it evokes the imaginary qualities of a pilgrimage: There’s a little grave in France That mine eyes may never see

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Though that little spot in France Is the dearest thing to me . . . Midst the poplars softly waving On a grey and misty dawn There his sad eyed comrades left him Till the resurrection morn.

Religion offered surer comfort than poetry. Though Gertie Irving may well have called them ‘strangers’, clergymen (of any denomination) formed part of a fellowship of mourning. Their presence at a graveside or a sick bed offered, as Vera Deakin put it, ‘great consolation’ to a family. And families, for the most part, appear to agree with her. Though she had lost her 21-year-old son to war, Elizabeth Mackie viewed herself as fortunate: Please accept my grateful thanks for . . . in getting the particulars through as to the [place] where my son was buried, it is the only information I have had. It is indeed a great comfort to me to know that he lies in consecrated ground, also to know the name of the clergymen who buried him – there are so many others who lie in an unknown grave.32

It was not simply that a clergyman could be relied upon to observe all the formalities. The early twentieth century was an intensely religious age: assuring bereaved parents that a son had received the final sacraments was (as Father Barry put it) ‘the greatest consolation a Catholic mother could have’.33 Identification and consecration also ‘delivered death from the annihilation of the battlefield’; in the madness of war, it restored what historians have called ‘the normality of [a Christian] death’. And a padre’s duties extended well beyond the battlefield. [Many times I’ve been asked] to take down last messages for home, and to send them on with an account of how the end came. This assurance of a letter to a mother, wife or sweetheart always brought a smile of content. During my field service I wrote about 2000 [such] letters to relations and friends in Australia . . . I received . . . an enormous number of replies telling me that mine was the only word they had had of a lad’s death, beyond the bare casualty telegram.34

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A letter by Walter Bradley, chaplain for the 2nd Field Ambulance, is one of the thousands each clergyman would have written; carefully crafted to bring solace to the grieving, comfort the broken-hearted, and renew a battered faith:

Of course, not all chaplains were quite so intimate. Drawn from conservative backgrounds and educated in the ethos of Empire, they were sometimes inclined to preach patriotism to grieving families. But most offered more tangible comforts and again these usually concerned the final resting place of a loved one: ‘His grave will be marked with a cross bearing his name, and can always be easily found in future years. It will always be cared for and preserved and if you would like to send out some flowers or plants for me, I will plant them myself on his grave.’36 Visiting a grave was one act of kindness, caring for the wounded another. Nursing staff were the third group likely to inform families of the loss of their loved ones. In Casualty Clearing Stations perilously near the Front, or base hospitals well behind the lines, they struggled to keep men alive or helped them to die with some small measure of dignity. In doing so, nurses tended to far more than a man’s physical injuries. They soothed, encouraged and reassured their patients, waking them from nightmares ‘where they lived though all their awful experiences’, offering what solace they could. Sometimes, one chaplain noted, nurses came to ‘love’ their ‘frail’ charges, especially those they could not save. And not surprisingly Australian nurses became particularly attached to Australian patients. The diggers were ‘their boys’, from towns that sounded familiar, whose broad accents sounded of Australia. In the bloody retreat from Amiens, Elsie Trantor found just a few encouraging words for her diary:

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I buried Jack with my own hands and [as] a friend [as well as] a minister in the ranks . . . I would like to say he was talking to me two days before his death about the certainty of his belief in God. I noticed his face (when I took off one of his id disc) wore a peaceful smile. It was the face of a man who had died without pain I should think and with a good conscience.35

We three Australians are very glad to be here. Such numbers of the diggers have said how nice it is to have someone of their own country here. Needless to say we are all tremendously proud of our own Aussie boys. They always seem the proudest, the bravest . . . of all. But then perhaps it is just because they belong in a special way to us.37

Elsie Trantor often lost those who ‘belonged to her’. Even more so than doctors or ministers it was nurses who attended the dying, who did what they could to stem the pain and the terror, who knelt down to hear the last faltering words. And to nurses like Trantor fell the emotional labour of writing to distant loved ones: ‘I have many last letters to write now to mothers in Australia and New Zealand. Many of the boys have trusted me with very precious messages. They were game to the last.’38

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Individual nurses’ letters have survived in family papers, precious messages passed down and re-remembered from one generation to another. Again, it is through the Red Cross files that historians can reconstruct both sides of the conversation, retrieving a long-forgotten dialogue between witness and bereaved. Emily Clarke first hears of her son’s wounds in August 1916 and that same week she is informed of his death in Trantor’s hospital at Amiens. ‘I don’t know whether he was conscious [or if] he was buried by a protestant clergyman. I have not heard if he sent me any message . . . which I think he would have done had he realised he was dying. [I long for] any scrap of information . . .’ The Red Cross forwarded Emily Clarke’s inquiry to the 4th General Hos´ pital at Etaples. That same week Sister Lucy Deakin answered each of her questions in turn. Poor boy, he was very badly hit, but I don’t think he would have suffered . . . The Doctor worked hard to save him and did everything possible to try and pull him through. It must be such a hard blow to his people he was such a big, fine fellow. I was with him when he died and his end was very quiet and peaceful. He is buried in the graveyard at Etaples, a few miles from Peronne.

Unable to relate a final message, Sister Deakin knew what would next best console a grieving family. Like so many others before her she sketched a mental image of the ground where a loved one lay. Perhaps the family would like to know what the place is like. It is situated amongst sand dunes and pine woods and near to the sea. Each grave is marked with a simple wooden cross bearing the name and number on a little metal plate. The graves are beautifully kept by the French women and the whole place is like a sunny garden.39

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This closing passage of her letter is carefully constructed, beauty and nature supplant waste and desolation; sand, sea and pine are clean and restorative. A man’s individuality is retrieved amidst the carnage – that name set on a sturdy cross a testament to memory. And the cemetery itself is like a garden, bathed in sunshine, dispelling the gloom of the battlefield, warming loved ones beneath the bright distant skies of Australia. Most important of all, this letter signifies a kind of pilgrimage. Sapper Clarke may have left no last message, but here a mother is reunited with her son, the women who lovingly tend his grave are fashioned in her image, are grieving in her place.

Images of a loved one’s grave also take a much more literal dimension. Emily Clarke began her letter with a request for a photograph of ‘my dear son’s grave’, for that single tragic memento she (like thousands of others) would be ‘most grateful’. Photographs of grave sites might seem morbid to our modern minds; in the early twentieth century (and particularly during wartime) they helped to reconcile families to their loss and offered almost spiritual comfort. Unlike the contradictory reports of Red Cross inquirers, a photograph of an individual soldier’s grave was perhaps the plainest possible proof of his death. But they also confirmed that that particular man had been buried, laid to rest (one would hope) with dignity, even honour. Finally, photographs were part of a process whereby loss was transformed into memory. With the actual graves so far away a photograph (and other physical testimonies of the dead) became a focal point for grieving, part of ‘a durable biography that enable[d] the living to integrate the memory of the dead into their ongoing lives’.40 Photographs of graves could be obtained through a number of different channels. Though not technically permitted to carry cameras soldiers began an illicit traffic in photographs from the early days of the fighting; their frosted images of makeshift cemeteries soon appeared in the Australian press. On the first anniversary of the landing, the Queensland Pictorial devoted its cover pages to historic scenes from Gallipoli. Amidst pictures of ‘Australians bound for Anzac’ and ‘the hills which Australians stormed’ are images of a funeral and the graveyard in Shrapnel Valley. Photographs like these were acts of forgetting as well as remembering. Gallipoli’s graves seem ordered, peaceful even dignified. There is no sense here of the gruesome carnage of the Peninsula, where corpses bloated and blackened in the sun, where unidentifiable dead were buried en masse or hastily burned with incendiaries.41 Pictures of individual graves were also sent to grieving families, Alan Mackay, for instance, forwarded a photograph of the wooden cross he planted on his brother’s grave at Mont St Quentin. Similar services were provided by the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and Red Cross and, by the end of the war, photographing graves was also a responsibility of the War Office. Graves Registration Units retrieved, identified and buried the dead wherever ‘it was possible’. Its overworked officers were also told to take photographs. With almost a million British dead in France and Belgium, families would wait some years for these ‘precious mementoes’.42 Nearly two years ago we put in an application for the photograph of an Australian soldier friend who had been killed in action. It has only just reached

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The landscapes of loss

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us [a full year after the fighting had finished] and although it is so long in coming, we cannot complain, for it is excellently done. The photograph is postcard size and shows a white Latin cross with the inscription: ‘In loving memory of Lieutenant , 10th Batt. A.I.F., killed in action, Dec. 25, 1917’. [A card sets out the] position of the grave, and the name of the nearest railway station.43

Details of rail networks invited families to embark on a pilgrimage overseas and in the postwar period thousands of Australians (as we’ll see) did visit the graves of their loved ones. But the card itself also facilitated an imaginary journey, its image of a distant grave ending a distinctive stage in mourning: ‘To mothers in Australia, who may never have a chance of visiting the battle areas in France where their boys are sleeping, one can imagine how much such a photograph would mean . . .’44 The process whereby loss becomes memory was not always an easy one: the gathering of what anthropologists have called ‘memory objects’ could be difficult, disturbing, perplexing. In the early 1920s W. H. Zimmer, a police sergeant at Geelong, entered into a long and frustrating correspondence with the YMCA, the Australian War Memorial (sometimes called the War Museum) and several military authorities. Zimmer’s son had been killed late in the war and was buried in Ribemont Communal Cemetery. In due course Zimmer received his son’s medals, his personal effects and several treasured letters of condolence. But the picture of his son’s grave, the single most important point of memory, was a grievous disappointment. The background was ‘very dark’, gloomy and foreboding; the name on the cross was ‘not [even] readable’.45 Major McLean, the officer in charge of Base Records in Melbourne, offered explanation but certainly not an apology. The pressure of time and resources meant that war graves were photographed ‘only once’; ‘adverse weather conditions’ may have spoiled the photograph but that was hardly the fault of the military. Zimmer wrote immediately to the Director of the War Memorial: ‘The photographs I have received from the military are not what I desire . . . you [surely] understand how parents situated as we are long for something worthwhile to connect us with the last resting place of our sons. He was one of the best . . .’46 Zimmer demanded what he called ‘good photographs’ and not just of his son’s grave either.

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What I desire is some . . . photographs of the ground itself, some of the cemetery and some of Ribemont surrounding the cemetery. I am prepared to pay for these of course. I have written to the mayor of Ribemont but did not even get an answer . . . Would you please undertake to get [these photographs]? The

Zimmer was well aware that these images substituted for an actual pilgrimage: ‘I am very unlikely to ever be in a position to visit the spot personally’. He longed to visualise ‘the ground itself’, a place so far away, so alien to Australia. The War Memorial took almost a month to answer Zimmer’s correspondence. The long-grieving policeman was told it could make no such arrangements. Other families were better connected. The manager of the Metropolitan Tramways Board and a well regarded member of Melbourne society, John Garibaldi Roberts, lost his son at Mont St Quentin in September 1918. Much of his retirement was spent gathering material for ‘Frank’s book’, an elaborate and costly exercise in remembrance.48 Unlike working-class parents, Roberts could call personally on the Major at Base Records to discuss the details of his son’s death; he detailed General Monash to photograph the grave at Mont St Quentin, and quizzed both the Official War Historian (C. E. W. Bean) and an Official War Artist (C. Web Gilbert) on the nature of the fighting and terrain. Roberts republished Monash’s photographs in handsome commemorative booklets, select friends and family were invited to read correspondence from the General and well over a hundred letters of condolence (many from the very best sort of people) were proudly put on display. Historians have read the Roberts papers for an insight into ‘the rituals and etiquette of mourning’; one cannot help but feel for a father whose every waking hour was devoted to honouring a ‘cherished’ son. But one also suspects such elaborate grief was a comment on power and privilege. C. Web Gilbert was duly commissioned to raise the Australian memorial at Mont St Quentin. The face of the valiant soldier was faithfully modelled on that of Roberts’s son.49 Public lectures proved a much more democratic medium than memorials. In 1922 (the same year Zimmer petitioned the War Memorial for a photograph), Padre M. Mullineux MC toured soldiers’ clubs, Red Cross Societies, and churches with his magic lantern slides of war cemeteries in Europe. Crowded audiences were told these graveyards were ‘sacred places’, they sighed and wept as one image of ‘the beautiful places where Australians rest’ was followed by another. And Mullineux was the best possible presenter. A war chaplain who had helped bury the dead, he could reassure grieving parents that ‘everything . . . humanly possible was being done to care for the graves [of their loved ones]’. He paid particular attention to ‘the devotion of French and Belgian gardeners’, men who nurtured Australian trees and flowers in a soil nourished by the bodies of young Australians. Indeed, Mullineux insisted, it was the right of every Australian family to visit the grave of their

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better they are the better I will be pleased with them and any cost of research I will pay . . .47

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loved ones. A leading figure in the Church of St Barnabas, the proceeds of Mullineux’s lecturing tour went to subsidising pilgrimages to war graves overseas.50 Similar lectures were arranged by visiting representatives of the War Graves Commission, and in 1938 the opening of Villers-Brettoneux memorial was broadcast in Martin Place.51 On occasions like these the real and the imaginary melded seamlessly together. Audiences could claim that they too had seen ‘the ground itself’; the actual voice of a true and valued witness had taken them to Flanders and the Somme, the Middle East and Gallipoli. Pilgrimage literature served a similar purpose. From the end of one world war to the beginning of another, a steady stream of travellers’ accounts helped visualise the battlefields. Newspapers commissioned special correspondents to inspect the work of the War Graves Commission; books with titles like Ship of Remembrance, A Glance at Gallipoli, Crosses of Sacrifice and simply Pilgrimage beckoned their readers on an imaginary journey.52 Indeed, real and imaginary pilgrimages coexisted through much of the postwar period. Rose Venn Brown, from Lane Cove, Sydney, spent most of the war in France distributing Red Cross comforts to Australian soldiers. With war’s end she became the first woman to join the War Graves Commission and tour the ‘devastated area’. Miss Brown ‘collected photographs of the graves of hundreds of our men buried over there, and sent them home to Australia’. And on the graves themselves she planted roses, daisies and forget-me-nots, spreading warmth and colour across a dark and battered landscape. For much of 1919 Brown stayed on in Villers-Bretonneux. It was ‘like living in a grave-yard’, she wrote, ‘the terrible silence’ broken only by explosives ‘bursting’ deep beneath the earth. But her labours healed a grief even more desolate back in Australia. ‘There is nothing I would cherish more’ one mother wrote, ‘as the photo of my Darling boy’s grave’.53 To this day, the Brown family papers bulge with letters from the grateful and the grieving, ‘sorrowing aunts’, ‘sad lonely mothers’, those whose lives ‘can never be the same again’. A photo of the cemetery ‘brought [them] nearer to [their] loved ones’; ‘still as fresh in my mind as when he came to bid me goodbye’. ‘It is such a great comfort of us to know that someone has cared for my boy’s last resting place and . . . pleasant to think that [she] is an Australian.’54 Not long after Venn Brown’s visit, pilgrimages began from Australia. Mr W. A. Windeyer, Mayor of Hunters Hill, spent the Spring of 1922 touring cemeteries in France and Belgium. His ‘purpose’ was ‘visiting and photographing the graves of the men who enlisted from Hunter’s Hill’. And as if that was not ambitious enough, the mayor ‘systematically collected seeds of different flowers which [he found] growing freely in the cemeteries’. Both photographs and seeds were despatched to the men’s relatives, the promise

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of nature’s endless renewal softening these grim symbols of mortality. Mr Windeyer also gathered photographs of other Australian graves and (for parents of Zimmer’s disposition) ‘general views of the cemeteries’.55 And, of course, the most distinguished of Australia’s graves merited special attention. On a visit to Belgium from London, Erica and John Oxenham came across the grave of Major F. H. Tubb VC. The celebrated English novelist took it upon himself to write forthwith to the family: You do not know us, nor we you . . . but as the distance may prevent you coming yourself we have been across to Belgium, to visit the Australian graves, including your son’s, and to tell you a little about the place where he lies. We hope it may be comforting to you to think that an English girl and her father have visited it on your behalf.56

Oxenham assumed the role of fictive kin, his own pilgrimage a substitute for some much more difficult journey. Summoning all the skills of a storyteller, he transformed the massed graves of Ypres into a heaven on earth, a site of nature’s splendours: It is a place of restful beauty with green trees and a stream on one side, a hop field and rolling meadows . . . beyond. At times there is not a sound to be heard. The body of your loved one rests there in perfect peace after the hardships and trials of war. [He] . . . is infinitely happier where he is than ever he could have been [before] . . .57

The letter concluded with expressions of ‘sympathy and love’, intimacies made possible by the experience of a shared grief and shared pilgrimage. Were the descriptions of roses, marigolds and lupins not enough, the Oxenhams enclosed a photograph of that special corner of Lijssenthoek Cemetery. Not every soldier’s grave could be photographed. The bodies of over 20 000 Australian dead were never really recovered, they were buried by shellfire, swallowed up in the mud, consigned to the nameless graves of ‘unknowns’. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the War Graves Commission went about the task of commemorating the missing: in the absence of an actual grave, the name of every soldier was carved on massive memorials. The same insistence that all the dead could be acknowledged and recorded persuaded Australian authorities to prepare a special publication. Where Australians Rest described and illustrated cemeteries from all the major battlefields. Its intended audience was all of the bereaved: Not only those whose relatives or friends lie buried in known graves . . . may draw some comfort from these pages. Those, also, who have lost some dear

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relative or friend of whom there has been no trace nor word since the day he fell in battle may learn something of the place in which he rests.58

‘Beautiful scenes’ of cemeteries were set on the ridges of Gallipoli, the shores of Galilee, the fields of Belgium and France. A reader’s eye might rest a moment on the grave of some unknown soldier, and be convinced that it was their son or husband, their brother or betrothed whose remains had been recovered and reburied. Where Australians Rest was designed to quell the ‘bitterness’ of those who had no known grave, no focal point of grief. Not only did it restore a name and place to the missing, it united all those who grieved in a common sense of loss: They . . . say to themselves – ‘It is very well for those who know where their boys are buried. But we have no word of ours’ . . . They can read the book, and gather from it at any rate the sort of surroundings in which their boys lie, although over their graves is only the mark ‘To an unknown soldier’.59

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The book, C. E. W. Bean concluded, would be ‘a very real comfort’ to the families of the missing: it provided the means of an imaginary pilgrimage to a probably imaginary grave. Adorning the frontispiece of Where Australians Rest was a simple floral wreath: it signified the tribute of an unnamed mother to an unnamed soldier buried overseas.60 While comparatively few could afford to lay the wreath themselves, certain ‘arrangements’ could be made on their behalf. In the war years, chaplains and soldiers, nurses and Red Cross workers decorated the graves of the fallen. This service was entirely voluntary: a small but valued kindness that helped a family through its grief. With the end of the war, and the completion of the Empire’s cemeteries, these surrogate pilgrimages were organised en masse. St Barnabas church, the same charity that organised visits to battlefields, carried floral tributes ‘ordered’ for the graves of Australian soldiers. A basic wreath adorned with a simple message could be organised for as little as a few shillings. But as with the war itself, there was shameful profiteering. Unscrupulous firms (for which one should read ‘French’ or ‘Belgian’) failed to deliver the wreaths or they fabricated photographs.61 One war grave, after all, looked much the same as another. Australians were certainly not the sort to be cheated by such foreigners: wreaths were refrigerated and despatched in the cold rooms of modern ocean liners. Throughout the 1920s a steady traffic of frozen wattle and waratahs made its way to Europe, ‘a piece of home’ sent to those who would never be returning. 62 Through wreaths and pictures, poems and photographs, Australian families contrived (as Sergeant Zimmer put it) to make connection with their

The artist was revisiting some of the scenes of war . . . On several nights in succession he observed a lonely woman picking her way quietly over the broken battlefield, absorbed in her own thought. He finally got into conversation

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lost loved ones. Some even resorted to spiritualism. A number of British historians have noted the ‘inventiveness’ with which grief-stricken families responded to their bereavement. In the mass grief of the Great War spiritualism gained a wide popular currency; by offering a way of visualising and ‘connecting’ with the dead it ‘helped survivors cope with their loss and trauma’.63 In an Australian context, Pat Jalland has measured the growth in spiritualism through s´eances and census figures. Lecturing tours by Arthur Conan Doyle were extremely well attended in the 1920s and spiritualist literature was widely read and debated.64 But spiritualism went well beyond the bounds of formal adherence. ‘Ghost stories’ were commonplace; a feature of poems, the popular press and even religious literature. Having lived in constant fear of bereavement, parents often ‘saw’ and imagined the death of their loved ones. Nora, one of the hundreds of people who responded to my survey, told me the story of a ghost that had long haunted family memory: ‘My grandma often used to say that when the authorities called bearing news of my uncle’s death she replied, “I know, Russell stood at the foot of my bed.”’65 Russell was not laid to rest until eighty years later, when Nora and her family left roses ‘and a note’ on their uncle’s grave in Flanders. And sometimes even the ‘authorities’ were asked to mediate between one world and another. As late as 1923 Mrs Fuggle of Morisset (NSW) wrote to the Commanding Officer of the 2nd Military District asking for the wooden cross that had once marked Private Edward McGlashen’s grave. She also requested ‘any books [the Army might have] on magnetism or hypnotism’. One can only wonder what the officer replied.66 Art aided science in the lexicon of spiritualism. A single painting by William Longstaff, depicting Australian soldiers rising from the mud of Flanders, was exhibited to as many as 40 000 people in Sydney and Melbourne.67 The War Memorial’s reproduction of Menin Gate at Midnight extended this viewing audience even further. Those who saw the picture spoke of ‘sensing something’: Longstaff’s ghostlike figures suggested ‘the astral shell’ of their vanished dead. But the appeal of Menin Gate (and several similar pictures) was not just the promise of a literal resurrection; Longstaff’s war art took the form of truly monumental landscapes, they satisfied the need of the bereaved to see ‘the sacred ground’ itself, to make that imaginary pilgrimage.68 Painted in the early 1930s, The Vigil depicted a mother searching the battlefield. It was based on an actual encounter:

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with her. She was a mother [whose son’s] body was never recovered. She felt as she walked there in the quiet night [that] he was not far away. Perhaps he knew she came . . . [Longstaff had witnessed] a spiritual communion . . . she was alone yet not alone.69

The picture drew its strength from a deep reservoir of meaning. Stories of grief-stricken mothers endlessly searching the battlefields were common in the 1920s and 1930s. They represented a generation whose grief could have no resolution, whose love compelled them to search forever for the missing. Grieving families in Australia and New Zealand were further from the battlefields than any other combatant nation: this ‘universal’ mother kept her vigil for all of them.

The making of memory We don’t know how Mrs Lyall felt when Brian’s belongings finally reached her in Melbourne. Sifting through the wreckage of a young man’s life must have been deeply distressing. What we can say for certain is that all these items – letters, a prayer book, even mud-stained clothing – were valued, honoured, treasured. Collectively and individually they constituted what one grieving father called ‘memorials of my dear and gallant son’.70 Retrieving a son’s possessions preoccupied grieving parents; to be denied ‘their boy’s belongings’ (when a kit was lost at sea or never actually recovered) amplified a sense of loss.71 Few of these objects were of any great monetary value, though watches, rings and flasks could be ‘precious’ family heirlooms. Nor was it just ‘the little things he cherished’ that were so sought after by families; quite utilitarian items, an old wallet, a pipe, pen or handkerchief, were coveted just as much.72 In each case, an object became a repository of memory, these were the things a loved one had used, valued, touched. A note slipped in the wallet of a long dead soldier underscores their simple symbolism: ‘These few coins he always carried.’73 And they were virtually all that remained of him. The moment she heard the news of her son’s death Mrs Burns wrote to the military authorities:

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I have just been notified by the Victorian Defence Department that my son . . . was killed . . . somewhere in France . . . Would you be good enough to have his personal effects of whatever nature returned to me at the above address . . . He is my only son and naturally I feel a maternal longing for my son’s treasures of whatever nature if any . . . By so doing you will perform a great and lasting favour [for] his anxious mother.74

In one sense they confirmed the death and closed a life story; in another sense they ensured that memory of the dead continued in material form . . . There were many things that people felt were significant: an item of clothing which had touched a loved ones body; a watch which had been worn by a son or husband and thus had personal links with both biological time and the passing of time; pressed flowers, as a kind of organic link to the dead; . . . Without bodies these material things were eagerly sought . . . they contained the smell, touch and emotions of the dead . . .75

Relics of grief lend themselves to many meanings. What matters for this study is the way these objects were fashioned into ‘shrines’ dedicated to a soldier’s memory, ‘my little hero’s corner’ as one grieving mother put it. At the centre of every such collection stood the photograph of a grave and the letter confirming the death of a loved one.76 This ‘connection’ to a cemetery abroad was strengthened by any number of physical artefacts. Throughout the 1920s the original wooden crosses marking graves were replaced with regulation tombstones. Families asked that crosses (or even ashes of the same) be sent to them. They were what one grieving couple called ‘precious relics’, a tangible means of connecting with the final resting place of their son.77 In the Harrison collection in Adelaide a thin metal plate bearing a soldier’s name is still stored alongside memorial cards, photographs and scraps of a soldier’s uniform. It had once marked Private Harrison’s grave in Vlamertinghe Military Cemetery. Included in the collection is the Cemetery Register. It opens on the page where George Harrison’s grave is marked by row and number and a line of biography still links the dead man to his family. Filed alongside it is a copy of The King’s Pilgrimage, detailing George V’s celebrated visit to the war graves. The Harrisons might never see their son’s final resting place, but their sovereign made the journey for them. What is most interesting about this collection is the way these formal statements of commemoration have been carefully individualised. The commemorative plaque sent to the Harrisons – a gleaming brass medallion embossed with soldier’s name, a lion and Britannia – has been set in a soft honey-coloured frame of maple. The wood has been carved by the tender hands of a loved one, bordered with a pattern of Australian wildflowers. George’s presence is secured by pressing his uniform buttons deep into the wood; alongside them are two deep depressions, still bearing the red wax of what may well

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Private Burns’s treasures amounted to a safety razor and strap, a dictionary, French book and a damaged watch. Historians have speculated on what these ‘treasures’ may have meant to grieving families.

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have been candles. The plaque has become a shrine, a memorial as real and as lasting as a white tombstone in Belgium.78 Of course, not all families could afford such elaborate measures. As noted earlier, library collections privilege a certain kind of donor: the patriotic, the privileged, the powerful. But similar memorials were certainly possible in working-class households; medals, commemorative scrolls, memorial plaques and a single photograph of a soldier’s grave were issued to next-ofkin without charge. We can imagine them resting alongside a scrapbook of war clippings, inexpensively but lovingly assembled, a cable returned to its ‘dreaded pink envelope’, a few tattered letters, a disc still encased in soil.79 These ‘memory objects’ were ‘entrusted to the intimate spaces of domestic life’. They secured a continuing, everyday bond with the dead.80

‘In Memoriam’ Scrapbooks, diaries, photographs and displays were private memorials, but public statements of grief also presented opportunities for these imaginary pilgrimages. Few historians have considered wartime obituary columns as a window into grief. We have assumed that these entries would be too formalised, too clich´ed to offer any worthwhile insight into the condition of the bereaved.81 It is certainly true that many ‘In Memoriam’ notices are brief and stylised; passages of scripture are common, so too is the high diction of wartime: ‘he died for England’, ‘for Australia’, ‘For King and Country’. But amidst the cloying poetry and fumbling sentiment there is also stark evocation of the brutality of war and the suffering of Australia’s soldiers; parents, brothers, sisters, friends confront the cruel reality of their loved one’s loss. Often the entries give grisly details; men die in battle, or of wounds or are poisoned by gas. In many cases specific battles are identified, placenames like Pozi`eres, Lone Pine, Fromelles bear a heavy burden of grief. Entries like these ache with anxiety, with unresolved, unqualified loss. There was a fear that men perished without comfort, without a word of solace or the chance to say goodbye. Private Fredrick Allen Dodson was mortally wounded in the landing on Gallipoli and died at just nineteen years of age. Though over a thousand men died with him, ‘a loving sister’ knew he met his God alone: No one he loved was by his side To hear his last faint sigh Or whisper just one loving word, Before he closed his eyes.82

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And worst of all was how inconclusive so many of these deaths seemed. The missing men ‘surely known in Heaven’, the deaths some time between the end of one battle and the beginning of another, the men who simply vanished ‘somewhere in France’. In each case, grieving families bear witness to the death of a loved one; again there is an implicit need to visualise and confront that terrible moment of loss. And often there was not one tribute but many. The ‘In Memoriam’ notices to Private W. E. Veitch who died of wounds at Villers-Bretonneux took up half a column of the Sydney Morning Herald. ‘Darby’ was sorely missed by father, brothers, uncles, and mates; even so, the most loving words were those placed by women. His mother remembered the touch of a child she raised to manhood: Could I, his mother, have clasped his hand The son I loved so well Or kissed his brow when death was near, And whispered, My son, Farewell, I seem to see his dear, sweet face Through a mist of anxious tears But a mother’s part is a broken heart And a burden of lonely years.

Sister Amy and his young niece Rita clung to his letters and photographs, like Mrs Lyall they knew that this was all that was left of a life: Only a few lines from the trenches, With the hand of the writer grown cold; But his memory is written in letters of love In the hearts of those at home.

Mary Veitch imagined the grave she might ‘never see’, ‘may some kind hand/ in that far off land/ strew some flowers there for me’; and Ethel said goodbye as best she could: Farewell to our dear brother Sweet thoughts of you we’ll keep Although one year has passed away Our grief is just as deep.83

Ethel was as good as her word. Memorial notices to young Darby continued to appear year after year. Well after World War Two, families cherished the memories of dead men from the First; then the columns grew large again with a new generation of dead. 25

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Images of a soldier’s grave vary considerably from one entry to another. Some read like grim accounts of burials in the battlefield. Many a mother was troubled by the thought of bodies draped only in the clothes men died in, of ‘the cold clay’ closing ‘on the beautiful head’, of unmarked graves ‘so far from home’, untended, unknown, unloved. Others employ an almost pastoral imagery, softening, beautifying and enobling death. Graves are washed with the morning dew, cleansed with tears, bathed in starlight. The midnight stars are shining On a silent grave There sleeping without dreaming Lies the one we could not save.84

And the bodies of the men they loved are surrendered to the landscape. Gallipoli, in particular, provides a heroic setting, those ‘far-off hills, rugged and grey’ a worthy tomb for warriors. Sergeant Henderson was killed on the day of the landing, to this day he is missing, his body swallowed up by the scrub and the gullies. On the anniversary of his death, ‘his loving wife Margaret’ pens a memorial notice for the Sydney Morning Herald. Sergeant Henderson has no known grave, quite probably no grave at all, but he lies at peace with nature and at one with God. And had he not high honour The hillside for a pall, To lie in state while angels wait, With stars for tapers tall, And the dark rock pine like tossing plumes Over his bier to wave, And God’s own hand, in that lonely land To lay him in the grave.85

It is to lonely lands, far away, that all these memorial notices are addressed. Each in its own way visualises a distant landscape, each involves an imaginary journey. And not all were drafted by loved ones ‘back home’. George Challenor was on active service in France when he wrote an obituary for the Herald. Already in his fifties, he enlisted within weeks of the death of his brother:

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Far and often my thoughts do wander To a grave on Gallipoli’s shore Where my darling brother is sleeping To wake on earth no more.86

Empty graves The business of honouring the dead was not confined to columns of newspaper obituaries. Even before the war had ended, families and townships, clubs, schools and businesses set about commemorating those ‘Who had made the Supreme Sacrifice’. Honour rolls were established in workshop, school and office. Initially they were intended to stimulate recruitment, but as the conflict dragged on neat crosses or jagged stars were carved by the names of those who went away. In time, communities built their memorials – obelisk and arch, broken pillar and stern upright soldier, avenue of honour and returned soldiers’ hall – these gestures of remembrance mark Australia’s physical and cultural landscape.87 War memorials have been the subject of considerable historical scrutiny, both in Australia and overseas. As communities struggled to come to terms with the enormity of their loss, the ways they chose to remember their dead were many and various. To this day, the monuments they raised are active sites of memory, their many elusive meanings ‘open to interrogation and interpretation’.88 Less contentious perhaps, was the need for memorials in the first place.

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George signed himself an ever ‘lonely brother’. He died of illness in a German POW camp in November 1918.

They were built as places where people could mourn, and be seen to mourn. Their ritual significance has frequently been obscured by their political symbolism, which now that the moment of mourning has long passed, is all that we can see. At the time, communal commemorative art provided, first and foremost, a framework for and legitimation of individual and family grief.89

One in every five Australians who went to the Great War was killed. Their bodies were buried (if they were buried at all) on battlefields at least 15 000 kilometres from Australia. In postwar Australia, these places of mourning were desperately needed. Here, the production of war memorials became a ‘substitute’ for burying our dead.90 In fact, Australia’s very first memorials were located in cemeteries. With no body to bury they served as surrogate tombs. Monumental masons were quick to seize on this promising new market. Crosses and angels would not do for these fallen warriors; empty graves are marked with swords, rifles, bugles, and a phrase that grew to be a legend: ‘KILLED IN THE DARDANELLES’. Memorial tablets were also placed in family churches; formalised and deeply personal, they serve to remind the congregation of both a community’s and a

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nation’s loss. A slab of polished marble was raised ‘IN LOVING MEMORY’ of Lance-Corporal Edgar Armour, ‘KILLED IN ACTION HAMEL, FRANCE’ and ‘BURIED VILLERS-BRETONNEUX MILITARY CEMETERY’. Erected by his father and mother, and set by a stained-glass image of their saviour, it mourns the sacrifice of a boy of nineteen: ‘HE GAVE HIS LIFE FOR US’. The same attempt to reunite a family is seen in the common practice of adding soldiers’ names to family memorials. Leslie Reading’s body was lost in the carnage of Bullecourt. With the battlefield swept by artillery it could never be recovered. His name and date of death is carved deep into the family tomb in Ebenezer, NSW, restoring a son and a brother to those he loved. The epitaphs for absent bodies are often disarming in their intimacy, compensation perhaps for that physical sense of loss. ‘Forget You Never’, pledges a family tomb in Richmond, Tasmania, ‘You are Written on the Palm of my Hand’. All these memorials were the focus of real and imaginary pilgrimages; they were places families gathered to remember the near and the distant dead.91 The first public monuments were also sited in cemeteries. When Victor Denton died ‘A Queensland Hero’ in the Dardanelles, the residents of Nobby erected a marble column to his memory. The pillar is broken near the base, signifying a life cut short. Originally it symbolised a single grave, by war’s end it marked the passing of a generation.92 These memorials might be substitute graves but they can also confront the reality of a body’s absence. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the case of the cenotaph, the literal meaning of which is ‘empty tomb’. For some, a cenotaph is a war grave pure and uncompromised. It performs no utilitarian or ornamental function, as do so many of Australia’s war memorials. Ideally it stands alone, a pure, geometrical form, shaped in a way to mirror eternity. The origins of the cenotaph stretch right back to ancient Greece and Rome but they also draw on closer Imperial precedents. Most of Australia’s cenotaphs are modelled on Edwin Lutyens’ celebrated memorial in London. Built to mark Armistice Day, it stands at the symbolic centre of Empire, flanked by Westminster, the Houses of Parliament and Whitehall.93 It seems appropriate that the cenotaph is one of the more favoured forms of memorial architecture in Australia. Further than any other nation from the field of battle, it underscores the absence of actual soldiers’ graves. And it reminds us that Australian youth fought and died for Empire; indeed War Memorial Committees go to great lengths to replicate (invariably in miniature) Edwin Lutyens’ design. Most bear the same inscription as well. ‘Our Glorious Dead’ is a compelling instance of what’s been called ‘The Big Words’. The dead aren’t butchered, their bodies aren’t bloodied and bloated – they are simply the glorious dead, the brave, the fallen. And

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‘a phrase that grew to be a legend’: Donald Cooke’s epitaph in Sydney’s Waverley Cemetery. This is a grave without a body. Donald went missing in the first few days of the landing – his remains were never recovered from the carnage. The memorial takes the form of a broken pillar, symbolising a life cut short.

one could take the argument further: a cenotaph, more so than any other memorial, entombed the (imaginary) dead in an empty (and thus supremely sanitised) grave. Unlike France, where slain poilu (the French variant of ‘digger’) are littered across the landscape, very few of Australia’s war memorials depict the actual dead.94 Not all the memorials raised to Australia’s dead were edifices of rock and stone. Avenues of honour line the approaches to towns and suburbs throughout Australia; still marked by rusting plaques bearing the names of long-dead soldiers, tall poplars and flowering gums stand like silent sentinels to grief. On one hand, the choice of trees for a memorial evoked nature’s cycle of continuous renewal; avenues of honour were positioned at the entry to many townships, the young strong growth symbolised the ‘boys’ coming home. At the same time, planting a tree served as a substitute for interment. Unable to bury their dead, families and friends gathered together to lay these surrogate bodies to rest. Once a nature reserve, King’s Park in Perth soon took on a ‘funeral appearance’; clad in black and bearing shovels, wives, siblings, parents, uncles scratched out a space for loved ones in the soil. Caroline Gilbert planted three such memorials: for a son killed in France, another at Beersheeba and a third (also in his twenties) lost (quite literally) in Belgium.

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Side by side, these memorials served to reunite her family; they also offered a ‘grave’ so many soldiers never had. Young Albert, his mother was told, was simply ‘blown to pieces’ at Zonnebeke; his comrades ‘gathered up different parts of him’ and buried what they could in the mud. Lizzie Fisher’s boys were both killed the same day at Pozi`eres. Hit by a high explosive shell ‘there could be no burial’ but again a mother’s hand pressed home a eucalypt in the soft and yielding earth.95 Whatever form they took, utilitarian or symbolic, all of Australia’s memorials embody names.96 Often the names on a monument tell their own tale of a family’s sacrifice. The Redfern Memorial in Sydney records over thirty of ‘the Fallen’. Two are Kellys, two Hoods, two Clements, two Gerahtys, two Hydes. The Hunter, O’Brien and Sale families had three sons killed; this community (like so many others) nursed a grievous sense of loss. Naming, as scholars of commemoration have noted, served a number of important functions. It democratised the way war was remembered, acknowledging individual loss in a new collective culture of commemoration. At the same time, it recruited the war dead as symbols of national identity. The inscription of names on a landscape literally replaced the bodies of the dead. No longer slaughtered sons, brothers, husbands, names embody ‘a sort of civic pedagogy in which they stand for “heroes”, receive “tribute” and provide examples of imitable “virtue” ’. But naming also offered a much less abstract solace than patriotism. A name engraved on a memorial signified the body families could never bury or mourn; it brought men ‘out of the anonymous unreality of loss and emptiness’.97 For that reason alone the unveiling of memorials could be an intensely emotional occasion: ‘Grey-haired mothers and fathers, widows and their fatherless children, and broken-hearted sweethearts’ collapsed and wept when they first saw the names of their loved ones. This was a moment of personal recognition, when public commemoration provided a framework for individual grief, when monuments embodied memory. ‘My boy! My boy!’ an ageing mother sobbed as she recognised the letters etched in stone.98 War memorials laid the foundation of a pilgrimage, a journey which was at once real and imaginary, actual and invented. Here communities gathered to remember. Here, they paused to recall all that they had lost. Indeed one could argue that the act of remembering was itself a journey, an imaginary pilgrimage over space and time. When loved ones laid wreaths before the grim tally of names, their thoughts were far away, with bodies blending with the soil of Gallipoli and Egypt, Belgium and France. And that act of remembering could also transform the most ‘prosaic’ of places, claiming and ‘sacrilising’ space and time. Observers noted that the wharf gates at Woolloomooloo

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in Sydney were ‘subtly transmuted into a symbol’ every Anzac Day; the wooden pickets ‘hung all over with flowers’ and rosemary. Through these gates Australian troops sailed off to war and eternity, this became a surrogate grave because it was here that loved ones said goodbye.99 At its most prosaic, attending these services involved a journey, a short walk, train or tram ride to the site of a community’s commemoration. But the language used was never so clinical. People spoke, in the 1920s and 1930s, of Anzac Day ‘pilgrimages’, in Melbourne the most monumental of all Australia’s war memorials styled itself ‘the Shrine’. All this was far removed from the brazen nationalism so often associated with wartime commemoration.100 Anzac Days were days of mourning, centred around sites of personal and family grief. And they sometimes involved actual journeys to actual soldiers’ graves. From 1916 on, groups like the Anzac Fellowship of Women decorated the graves of returned servicemen on Anzac Day, making what they too called a ‘pilgrimage’ to those who died of war-related wounds. They carried with them ‘tokens of remembrance’, floral tributes to brighten ‘the graves of the brave’.101 War memorials made it possible to imagine a grave and remember a loved one. Indeed some set out to mirror the graves themselves. In March 1919, when the war had barely ended, the Mayoress of Adelaide convened a meeting in the Town Hall. Its purpose was to raise a women’s war memorial and all the principal charities and patriotic movements were involved. The committee faced the usual debates and choices. Should their memorial be utilitarian or monumental, a hospital or some ‘symbolical figure’, where was it to be sited, how was the money to be raised?102 ‘The memorial [it was decided] was to be in the nature of a shrine and the site a hallowed spot where the mothers wives sisters and friends . . . [could] place their tributes of love . . .’103 For that reason the women rejected a site on North Terrace where South Australia’s official war memorial was eventually to be raised. They chose instead a parkland, bordered by the river and the cathedral, and here they decided ‘a garden of memory’ might be made. And not just any garden either. Having lost two brothers in the war, one in Gallipoli and one in France, Dorothy Gilbert had a very clear idea in mind: ‘It is the wish of my Executive Committee [to borrow the designs of the Imperial War Graves Commission] making for the women who will never see the graves of their men, a place of quiet and repose, a “Garden of the Unforgotten” ’.104 Hedged with yew and cyprus, fragrant with rose and rosemary, it would ‘create for us in miniature, in the heart of our city, a garden which should instantly call to mind those other gardens covering many an area of Northern France and on the slopes of Gallipoli’.105

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‘whisper just one loving word’: Dora Olfsen struck this medal in 1916. It later became the centrepiece of the war memorial in Mornington, Victoria. The identity of the woman is left deliberately ambiguous; nurse, sister, lover, perhaps the symbol of a nation of grieving mothers. Representing the moment of death was rare in Australian war memorials; Olfsen strives to suggest tenderness and compassion, reuniting the dead with the families who loved them.

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For garden one should read graveyard. Internal paths were set down in the figure of a cross and flower beds of rosemary made to resemble plots of graves. Both were aligned with the two great motifs of Europe’s war cemeteries, Reginald Bloomfield’s Cross of Sacrifice and Edward Lutyens’ Stone of Remembrance: ‘[They] appeal to us tremendously’, Gilbert wrote to the Commission, ‘because most of us will never see the graves of our men [our] design [will] shadow [your own]’.106 Recreating the cemeteries of Europe in a stretch of Adelaide parkland was not to be thought ‘morbid’, the committee insisted. On the one hand, it reflected a sense of belonging to an Empire so many had died for: ‘wherever

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our men lie and wherever that cross is seen throughout the world, and throughout the centuries, it shall be known as the British Cross of the Great War. If that is to be so we should like our Memorial [to be] one link in the chain . . .’107 On the other hand, it made possible that imaginary pilgrimage, to stand in those very gardens built over the bodies of their loved ones. The families of the men who have fallen can perhaps appreciate better than others the form of the Memorial Cross and Stone. They have seen both pictured in the book sent to them by the War Graves Commission. The Women’s Memorial is in the form of a garden [featuring] an exact reproduction of those two monuments, so that anyone entering . . . will feel at once that somewhere, on some battlefront, the man they personally know is lying under the shadow of the [same] War Cross facing the [same] War Stone . . .108

In either case, the memorial would be ‘sacred [only] to the Fallen’. The committee bemoaned ‘the tendency for War Memorials [to list the names] of all who served’, a dramatic departure from commemorative practices well established in both Australia and Britain. This was to be a monument aux morts: it would honour only the dead. And having contrived to (re)create a cemetery, the loyal women of Adelaide opened their memorial with a funeral. In April 1922, in the week preceding Anzac Day, the names of the fallen were placed in an urn, taken to the cross, and buried beneath its foundation stone. ‘The graves of the front’, Gilbert observed, had been linked forever ‘with the homeland’.109 Meanwhile, across the oceans, the ‘permanent cemeteries’ of the Great War were finally being made.

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Hearts of stone: creating the cemeteries of the Great War In the winter of 1919, as the mud finally settled in Flanders, C. E. W. Bean began the long journey back to Gallipoli. A war correspondent now charged with the task of writing the Official History, Bean had many reasons to return there. For him the Peninsula was still a place of ‘riddles’. Why had the landing boats drifted so far north? How far inland had the first troops advanced? Where were the Turkish guns concealed: behind which of the gullies? On which of the ridges? As the leader of the Australian Historical Mission, Bean had prepared over a hundred such questions to put to the Turkish authorities ranging over every aspect of the campaign. But the most enduring mysteries only the landscape itself could answer. Camped at Lemnos, he gazed longingly across the water to the distant Dardanelles, ‘clustered clouds’ on the horizon smudging the hilltops of the Peninsula. ‘Do you know’, he confessed to his brother, ‘I am as homesick as can be for Anzac’.1 Bean finally arrived at Gallipoli ten days later. Leaving the main party to set up camp, he set off hurriedly for ‘the Pine’, determined to retrace the old lines of the trenches. ‘It gave a strange thrill’, he wrote, ‘to ride . . . in front of Steele’s, Courtney’s and Quinn’s where three years before men could not even crawl at night’.2 Then, despite the massing rain, Bean plunged down the muddied ravine to the beaches. I wound [my] way down . . . Shrapnel Gully, past the cemetery near its mouth . . . round the low sandy rise of Hell Spit and, suddenly out on to Anzac . . . This half mile of cove . . . had been known to all who were there as a hive of activity, scene of our Landing, site of our headquarters, stores and [hospitals]. Now nothing stirred except the waves gently lapping on the shingle . . . But there were [still] a few of the stranded barges; and two white steel lifeboats . . .3

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One of these landing craft Bean would have carted all the way back to Australia. Its blistered hull, pitted by bullets and shingle, now guards the galleries of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. The lifeboat was but one of many ‘relics’ Bean’s Historical Mission would ‘salvage’. Over

Feb 24 A little N. of [the] crest of Chunuk Bair we came on many traces of English soldiers including bodies . . . On [the] top of the hill, a little to [the] right side of it . . . were numerous traces of New Zealanders – some were buried on the crest. There was [the remains of] a cemetery [nearby] . . . All the bones in the first 3 rows had been dug up and were lying on the surface . . .7

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the next three weeks, his party scavenged some seven tons of debris from the battlefields: cartridges and kit, loopholes from Quinn’s ‘perforated with bullet holes’, shell fragments and shrapnel pellets embedded with the clay of the Peninsula. Larger ‘trophies’, like the logs that lined Lone Pine, timbers from the pier and the barrel of a 4-inch gun were left behind. ‘I need not add’, Bean explained, ‘how intensely important for our national tradition . . . the preservation of all possible Anzac relics is . . . Every article connected with [the campaign] is regarded as precious by Australians’.4 ‘Relic’, ‘mission’, ‘longing’. From the outset Bean had employed the language of a pilgrimage. Indeed, even the description of his party assumed almost Chaucerian proportions: Captain George Hubert Wilkins, photographer and ‘adventurer’, ‘an athletic figure’ with a ‘pugnacious chin’ rather like Lord Kitchener’s; Lieutenant Hedley Vickers Howe, ‘a young scallywag of an intelligence officer’, with clear blue eyes that had witnessed the carnage of the landing. Bean’s impressions of the party’s artist, George Lambert, were scribbled (almost incredulously) in his diary. ‘With his pointed beard and light horse rig out – Australian hat & spurs . . . he looks like a cavalier’. Lambert had been commissioned to paint the Charge at the Nek and the landing at Anzac, but above all else ‘he like[d] above everything to [think] himself a soldier’, as ‘eager a member of the AIF as anyone in it’. In the classic paradigm of pilgrimage, the Gallipoli Mission was insistently egalitarian in character. They were six officers and two sergeants, but ‘being Australians we travelled together, lodged together, and ate together . . . from first to last we had no batmen’.5 Their pilgrimage would take them ‘over every square foot’ of Anzac, gathering relics, retracing battles, or simply standing ‘on the hallowed shore’ of history. For almost a month Bean climbed up and down the tangled gullies, searching for traces of the men lost since the landing in April or the ill-fated August offensive. Barely a week into their mission they established the furtherest point inland any Australian had ventured. A water bottle punctured by bullets, spent cartridge cases and a few ragged shreds of uniform marked the place where Tullock’s men were routed. Nearby lay the charred remains of an Australian soldier.6 Six days later, investigating the tragic attempt to take Sari Bair, Bean’s party made a far more disturbing discovery.

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Bean stumbled back down the steepening spurs, imagining the panic as the last chance to hold the heights (and win Gallipoli) was squandered. With every step he took, he dislodged the debris of war, bullets, shell fragments and the bones of men bleached white by the elements. . . . A great part of the kit we discovered all the way back down . . . [was that of] British soldiers . . . dropped in [the] retreat and many of [the] skulls lying there must have [been] theirs. The crevices and gullies . . . for a long way down contained numbers of dead & kit – the skulls and bones of [the] dead lay in 3s, 6s (and even ten or 12 in one place) at a time . . .8

Bean did what he could to identify these remains, especially when brass buttons, boots or in one case a tattered bible suggested the bones might have belonged to an Australian. But here, as in France, the quest to name the dead was little short of hopeless.The land itself had claimed them, their bodies blending with the soft grey clay of Anzac. Lambert’s letters, written almost daily to his wife, convey the sullen indifference of the Peninsula.‘Beautiful’ it may have been, but it was a terrible beauty. Gallipoli, thought Lambert, was really one vast, brooding graveyard. This morning I was out twenty minutes to sunrise to get the effect of light for the charge at the Neck [sic]. Very cold, bleak and lonely. The jackals damn them, were chorusing their hate, the bones showed up white even in the faint dawn and I felt rotten . . . The worst feature of this after battle work is that the silent hills and valleys sit stern and unmoved . . . and busy only in growing bush and sliding earth to hide the scars . . .9

An Anzac Estate: building the cemeteries of Gallipoli

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What to do with the remains of the dead was the last but most important question Bean had set himself to answer. The state of Gallipoli’s graves had long been a source of concern for Australians. Within weeks of the Allied withdrawal fears that ‘heathen’ Turks would ‘destroy or desecrate’ Christian graves posed (as one distressed father put it) ‘a cruel and additional burden of grief’. Anxiety over Anzac plagued the press and the Prime Minister. It also attracted international attention. By 1916 a Papal envoy had been sent to the Peninsula to investigate rumours that the cemeteries had been desecrated.10 With the end of war, British ships sailed triumphant through the Dardanelles. One of the first to land was an officer with the Graves Registration Unit. His urgent cable caused little short of alarm in Whitehall: ‘Cemeteries . . . are in worst possible condition . . . all the wooden crosses

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have been removed . . . Practically all the British and French graves Cape Helles . . . have been systematically desecrated . . . Bones in many cases lying besides graves which have been opened; in other cases skeletons lying in open graves.’11 Still darker reports followed. ‘Not content with rifling the bodies, [the Turks] have apparently been playing marbles with the skulls and tip-cat with the bones’. They were ‘brutes’, an outraged British major wrote, not soldiers.12 The Australian Government responded almost immediately. Hidden in Bean’s orders, embossed ‘with the big red paper seal of the Australian Commonwealth’ lay what he liked to call his secret instructions. He was ‘to report without delay on the situation on the Peninsula as it affects Australian cemeteries’, confirm or refute claims of ‘systematic desecration’ and suggest some ‘permanent memorial [to the] Australian dead there’.13 It was a responsibility Bean took very seriously. The first full day at Anzac, long before the collection of relics or the survey of the fighting, was spent touring the cemeteries.14 His report was cabled back to Canberra within forty-eight hours of his arrival. Firm, searching and insistent, judicious, impartial and measured, one senses the many audiences for whom Bean was writing. Bean’s report would be read and reread, evaluated and underlined by military men and diplomats, politicians and historians. But Bean was most mindful of what his instructions vaguely termed ‘Australian sentiment’. First and foremost, his Gallipoli report hoped to ease the ‘cruel burden’ of anxiety that weighed so heavily on distant families. Bean began by praising the work of the War Graves Registration Unit (WGRU), a small party of Australian, New Zealand and British soldiers whose grim task it was to restore the graveyards of the Peninsula. For several weeks, he had enjoyed the hospitality of Cyril Hughes and Tasman Millington, both veterans of the Gallipoli campaign and both ‘breezy’, ‘country bred Australians’ (just the sort of men, Bean thought, to ‘sort out’ the chaos of Gallipoli): ‘working with great care and ability, [the WGRU has] located 2500 graves, of which all have been identified. It will probably locate . . . eighty per cent of those of which there is any record.’15 Locating the legions of missing was quite beyond the resources of even these ‘capable chaps’: at Gallipoli, as in every other theatre of war, thousands of bodies could never be identified or recovered. But soldiers who had been buried in the course of the campaign, in one of the dozens of tiny cemeteries scattered over Anzac, could be named, acknowledged, honoured; they would be spared what every family dreaded: the terrible oblivion of the missing. And Bean went on to refute any claims of ‘systematic desecration’. True, all the wooden crosses had been removed but ‘it is almost certain they were taken by the local garrison for firewood’. These troops had been virtually

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‘marooned’ after the Allied withdrawal, cut off from supply lines and forced to wait out the winter. The bitter cold of Gallipoli cleared the graveyards, not the fiery zeal of Islam. Claims that graves had been opened had caused the most concern and here Bean could hardly quibble with the evidence: ‘At some period after the Evacuation the graves were unprotected and local inhabitants and individual soldiers dug up a certain proportion, searching the pockets and money belts of the dead’.16 But these ‘violations’ took place without official sanction and only because ‘government control was weak’. In fact, Bean noted, Turkish and Australian graves had been rifled ‘indiscriminately’. This was the work of ‘isolated marauders’, men brutalised by war and made desperate by poverty. Bean challenged all the racist stereotypes of his time: the Turks had proved themselves an honourable opponent, they were not by nature tomb robbers. Having reckoned with the past, Bean’s report looked to the future. The task Australia faced was to make Anzac’s graves secure and ‘prevent a recurrence of [all such] depredations’. He concluded with a demand already mooted for the Peace Table: all of the Anzac area should be ceded to the War Graves Commission.17 Even by the standards of Versailles, the terms of the Peace Treaty at Lausanne are really quite extraordinary. Turkey may well have lost the war but to hand control of Gallipoli (or even part of it) to a foreign power surrendered the straits of the Dardanelles and opened up the gateway to Constantinople. That Australia should press such a claim seemed geographically ridiculous; how could a nation (a fraction the population of Turkey and 15 000 kilometres distant) hope to garrison Gallipoli? Even British diplomats, charged with negotiating the peace, described the Australians as ‘rather prickly’, inclined to ‘make heavy weather’ of the whole war dead issue. It is a measure of what Bean called the sanctity of Anzac that Prime Minister Hughes pressed the point so insistently. The cemeteries at Anzac, he wrote to Lloyd George, ‘are very dear indeed [to the Australian people]’: I therefore request . . . that the whole of the Anzac area be vested in the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . unless some more permanent guarantee of title is given to us, in view of the desecration which has occurred within the last few months, we cannot rest satisfied.18

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Nor, for that matter, could New Zealand. At around the same time Hughes wrote to Lloyd George, Prime Minister William Massey called personally on the British High Commissioner. The ground on which the Anzacs fell must be ‘preserved and consecrated as a memorial’ and that was only possible if a clause ceding ownership was ‘inserted’ in the peace treaty.19 The solution was a carefully worded compromise. Turkey would grant ownership of Gallipoli’s graves to the Imperial War Graves Commission but continue to

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assert sovereignty over the ‘general area’; the ground outside of Anzac (and a small beachhead at Helles) would remain Turkish territory, as indeed would the makeshift roads that linked one end of the Peninsula to the other. This was not quite the ‘Anzac Estate’ Bean and others had favoured. At one stage in the negotiations they had claimed a full 4000 acres and vowed to put ‘a ring fence round’ the entire Anzac battlefield. But it was an enormous concession. Like the cemeteries that dot the landscape in Belgium and France, Turkish land had been granted ‘inviolate and in perpetuity’. No such arrangement had even been made before with the government of a former enemy.20 Securing Anzac for Australia was only one of Bean’s fifteen recommendations to the government. Equally important was to make the landscape into a memorial for the men who died there. From the outset, the battlefield at Anzac had been different to that of the Somme or Flanders. In fact, it was not a field at all but a broken line of crumbling trenches carved across the gullies and the ridges. The Western Front, by contrast, was a flat largely featureless plain, a killing field where one line of artillery ceaselessly bombarded the other. At Gallipoli the fighting had been far more confined, far less anonymous. Here the trenches were separated by barely a few yards, the killing (and dying) had been close, brutal, intimate. Different warscapes, Bean argued, should lend themselves to different kinds of memorials. On the Western Front the policy had been one of concentration. Soldiers’ remains were gathered up from the isolated graves dotted across No Man’s Land and interred in vast sprawling cemeteries: Tyne Cot alone would hold the bodies of 12 000. On the Peninsula, Bean argued, the men should be left ‘where they fell . . . so that the site of their graves would mark their heroism’.21 Their bodies would blend with the ground Australia ‘held’, every trench, every outpost a symbol, a landmark, a memorial. In time, Anzac’s 5000 (known) graves would be scattered across twenty-one separate cemeteries. The smallest (Plugge’s) marked the first hill the first Anzacs scaled on the first day of the fighting. Just twelve Australians were buried there, alongside one ‘unknown’ and eight New Zealanders. At Plugge’s and everywhere else at Anzac, bodies are huddled together in a deathly companionship, carefully aligned between the shore and the ridges. Lambert had thought the brooding landscape of Gallipoli sullen and indifferent; Bean harnessed every ridge, every gully in a dramatic gesture of remembrance. The actual design of the cemeteries posed yet another challenge. Initially, Bean favoured reinstating the crosses, proposing cemeteries be ‘strongly fenced with salvaged materials’. But wire fences could not contain the shifting soil of Gallipoli and Christian symbols would be neither safe nor welcome in ‘this Mahometan country’.22 Sir John Burnett, principal architect for the War Graves Commission, visited Gallipoli within a few months of Bean’s

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departure. He proposed surrounding each graveyard with a ‘sheer wall of ashlar masonry’ a ‘large plain cross in relief’ to be cut into ‘the massive stonework’. These high rubble walls still retain the sloping ground of Anzac. Rough and irregular, they settle easily into the landscape. Equally importantly, no Christian imagery would cast a shadow over Turkey: the great Cross of Sacrifice, raised in every major cemetery on the Western Front, is conspicuously absent at Gallipoli. So too are the uniform upright tombstones that mark the cemeteries of France and Flanders, Egypt and Palestine. Instead, marble slabs are set on concrete blocks sunk deep into the earth. Sloping gently ‘on a carpet of anemones, poppies and lilies’, the ‘little marble tablets’ reminded Cyril Hughes of a soldier ‘truly at rest’. ‘Our’ cemeteries, he told Bean, would come to be the most beautiful the War Commission had made: ‘and no doubt once flying has become an everyday affair . . . Gallipoli will rank as one of the wonders of the world’.23 Much of the wonder of Gallipoli has to do with what Burnett called ‘its natural setting’. Perched on rugged windswept slopes, or nestled in the gullies, the Peninsula’s graves are very different to the turfed lawns and manicured flower beds of France and Belgium. Initially, Bean proposed the cemeteries be planted ‘with small Australian trees’: care should be taken (he insisted) not to change ‘the appearance of the battlefield’.24 But the horticultural branch of the Imperial War Graves Commission were much more enthusiastic gardeners. By 1922, 75 miles of flower borders had been sown on the Somme alone. To make a garden of Gallipoli seemed an even greater challenge. Throughout the 1920s wattle, gum and rimu were raised first at Kew or Cairo and then released along Anzac’s gullies and ridges. It was an attempt both to prettify the Peninsula and to somehow Australianise this technically Australian landscape. All but the hardy blue gum perished; then (as in 1915) Gallipoli’s winter drove back foreign intruders. Not to be discouraged, the Commission reverted to a policy of seasonal plantings. In spring, the cemeteries teem with pansies and forget-me-nots but every summer the clay bakes solid and in winter the ground is brittle and frozen. Not everyone (then or now) was entirely comfortable with this form of ‘ecological imperialism’. As early as 1926 advisers to the Commission wondered if the Peninsula mightn’t be better left to nature, its wilderness part of its tragic beauty.25 Bean returned to Australia towards the end of 1919. Though he would tour Europe (and the Western Front) on several occasions the Australian Historical Mission was his last visit back to Gallipoli. But Australia’s Official War Historian never quite lost that ‘homesickness’ for Anzac. For the rest of his career he corresponded with Hughes, Millington and the ‘small Australian colony’ left to tend the graves of the Peninsula. And on this and

‘An abiding and supreme memorial’: the ideals of the War Graves Commission The arrangements at Gallipoli were in many ways exceptional. Geography, religion, domestic politics and that persistent ‘Australian sentiment’ had all forced necessary modifications on the ‘model cemeteries’ devised by the War Graves Commission. These ‘standardised graveyards’ had gradually evolved from the earliest days of the fighting. Initially, the marking and maintenance of soldiers’ graves was quite a haphazard affair. A small mobile unit was created after the Battle of the Marne to register the position of soldiers’ graves and ‘erect durable wooden crosses . . . bearing the name, number, rank, regiment and date of death’. Divided into four detachments and equipped with barely a dozen vehicles, the unit was hopelessly under-resourced for the carnage that followed. For the first two years of fighting, soldiers’ graves were marked (if they were marked at all) by their comrades in the field, hospital staff or the Red Cross.26 Outside of Belgium and France, no formal provision was made for the commemoration of individual British (or Dominion) fallen: as late as 1916 many of the Empire’s dead were buried in simple unmarked rows (as soldiers had been for countless generations). Often mates (or the dead man’s regiment) would raise a cross of some sort, though these proved far from ‘durable’. Only the most determined families could contrive to raise a headstone. British charities in Egypt offered a simple marble cross ‘at a cost of £2 each including inscription’. Wealthy families and, of course, ‘fellow officers’ could afford to raise much grander memorials. Many stand today in Alexandria’s Chatby Cemetery, crumbling edifices of stone tilted and towering over the Commission’s regulation tombstones.27 It was this very lack of uniformity and the fact that some could afford to ‘permanently’ mark a grave and others not, that prompted the intervention of military authorities. By 1917 the Directorate of Graves Registration had been reconstituted as the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC). Endorsed by Royal Charter and presided over by the Prince of Wales, it was (His Royal Highness boasted) the first truly Imperial body. All the Dominions were represented, all would ‘have some say’ in how the fallen would be remembered. From the outset though, the Charter set down three quite unprecedented principles; each man would be individually commemorated, every grave would be uniform (with no distinction between rich and poor,

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other ‘foreign fields’, Bean watched with interest as the cemeteries of the Great War were created.

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officer and private) and men would be buried ‘as near as possible’ to where they died; the repatriation of bodies being ‘strictly prohibited’. The reasoning behind this was implicitly democratic: ‘since sacrifice had been common’, the memorial should be common also ‘and . . . whatever their military rank or position in civil life, [all] should have equal treatment in their graves’.28 Precisely what those graves should look like was a subject of some controversy. In 1917 Charles Aitkins, Director of the Tate Gallery, and the distinguished architects Herbert Baker and Edwin Lutyens were dispatched on an inspection tour of France’s temporary cemeteries. For Lutyens in particular it was a harrowing experience: The graveyards [are] haphazard from the needs of so much to do and so little time for thought. And then [there is] a ribbon of isolated graves like a milky way across miles of [shell-torn] country where men were [just] tucked in where they fell . . . [Hundreds] of little crosses each touching each other [stretch] across a cemetery, set in a wilderness of [poppies] . . . and oh so pathetic. One thinks for a moment that no other monument is needed.29

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But it was. Returning to London, the three men advanced three quite different conceptions for the Commission’s model cemetery. Aitkin opted for modesty and simplicity: much of the funding, he argued, should be devoted to a National University, a monument that would both honour the dead and serve the living. Baker was appalled by this crass utilitarianism. Every cemetery was God’s area; each grave must be marked by a cross and a Cross of Sacrifice raised around them. His favoured design towered 24-feet high: ‘a stark sword brooding on the bosom of the Cross’. Here bronze and stone (martial valour and Christian martyrdom) were welded forcefully together. Lutyens’ design reflected lingering doubt that no other memorial (but the dead themselves) was really necessary. Just ‘one great fair stone of fine proportions, twelve ft in length, lying raised upon three steps’ should stand to the east of every cemetery. An abstract perfect shape, ‘of intrinsic beauty and therefore intrinsically spiritual’, the stone embodied all his humanist ideals. It was an empty space, devoid of any specific religious reference, open but evocative in its symbolism.30 Sir Frederick Kenyon, Director of the British Museum, was called in to arbitrate. His report set out the template of all the Commission’s cemeteries, save (as we’ve seen) on Gallipoli. Each cemetery was to be laid out in ranks of uniform headstones, each was to have either the cross or the altar stone and each was designed as a place of pilgrimage. Enclosed walls would shield mourners from the wind and rain and a small building at the entrance would shelter every cemetery’s register. Kenyon had reconciled Baker’s and Lutyens’ ostensibly opposed conceptions; indeed in the larger cemeteries

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‘brooding cross’ and ‘carven stone’ would stand quite comfortably together. Eventually the Commission would inscribe Lutyens’ empty space with its own chosen words of ‘sacred dedication’. Rudyard Kipling (yet another of the IWGC’s artistic advisers) first suggested ‘Their bodies lie buried in peace but their name liveth evermore’. Lutyens was horrified. ‘Someone will add an S and it will read pieces. It is all too material.’ But material comforts were probably what most mourners wanted. ‘Their name liveth for evermore’ (a passage borrowed from Ecclesiastes) was etched ‘indelibly’ in the stone of Lutyens’ otherwise abstract memorial.31 Kipling was not just the Commission’s poet laureate. With his own son amongst the missing, he was also one of two committee members appointed to represent thousands upon thousands of grief-stricken families. In effect, the Commission had usurped the traditional role of a grieving family; the war dead would remain the property (and responsibility) of the nation. Indeed the scale and complexity of commemoration could only ever have been a state, or more precisely, an Imperial responsibility. Fabian Ware, founder of the first war graves detachments, executive vice-chairman of the Commission and a man much enamoured of statistics, boasted of ‘a chain of remembrance’ stretching from one end of the globe to the other. Numbering over a million dead, the Empire’s fallen were buried in 4000 different cemeteries in over a dozen different countries. Throughout the 1920s as many as 2000 headstones a week were freighted to war graves across the world. In France and Belgium alone the Commission raised 1000 crosses of sacrifice and 560 10-ton stones of remembrance. Never before in the history of the world had such ‘a labour of love’ been undertaken. Kipling likened it to the efforts of the Pharaohs, noting, in a characteristic aside, that the Pharaohs had ‘only worked in their own country’.32 The reference to antiquity was quite deliberate. These were to be permanent structures, the monoliths scattered across the Western Front would remain ‘an abiding and supreme memorial’ in ‘periods as remote from our own as we are from the Tudors’. Equally timeless was their symbolic frame of reference; Bloomfield’s cross imbued with both martial and Christian symbolism; Lutyens’ ‘Great Memorial Stone’, at once cenotaph, shrine and altar. Such classical allusion was carefully chosen. They evoked a timeless, universal quality, replacing the immediate, traumatic past with a memory at once contrived and consoling. In the very act of remembering, the cemeteries of the Great War nurtured a kind of ‘collective amnesia’, a ‘displacement of memory’.33 And woven between each of the stones was what contemporaries called ‘a garden of remembrance’. As seen in the case of Gallipoli, the Horticultural Branch of the IWGC laboured to bring each individual grave to flower, ‘tending each as tenderly would the dead soldier’s family’.34

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It was the state’s responsibilities to the families of the dead that the war graves of the dead ultimately symbolised. From the moment of their conception they were to be places of pilgrimage, sites where loved ones could honour both their own dead and the great fellowship in which they had fallen. But they were also built as a kind of compensation. If bodies were not to be repatriated, if private monuments were to be disallowed and wives refused permission to be one day buried with the husbands, the state had to make good ‘its pledge’ of ‘everlasting remembrance’.35 Today, the cemeteries of the Great War stretch silent and unchallenged across vast tracts of Europe. It is difficult to imagine the landscapes of Northern France or Belgium without them. And that is precisely what their creators intended. The memorials of the Great War have laid claim to our memory. But commemoration, then as today, is always problematic: the process of designing and building these cemeteries was long and fraught and difficult; opinion was divided, in the parliament, in the Commission and certainly amongst the general public. There was also disquiet from the Dominions, a clash between Imperial loyalties and national sensibilities.36 Finally, for all the ‘grand diction’ of commemoration, the great promise ‘equality of treatment’ was quietly but persistently thwarted.

An ‘equality of treatment?’ Disquiet surrounding the Commission’s work was most apparent in 1920, when proposals for these ‘model cemeteries’ were first being mooted. The insistence on uniformity, the core of the Commission’s conception, caused a good deal of anger, particularly amongst grieving families. ‘Government stones’, manufactured en masse and arranged in sweeping rows, strived for what the Commission called ‘an artistic effect’: they would transform the chaotic graveyards of the Great War into a place of order and repose, national memorials worthy of the men who lay there. But that, of course, was the problem. The state ‘had no right’ to decide how families should commemorate the bodies of their dead. Memorials to loved ones were a matter of individual family choice, not the prerogative of statesmen or architects. In this highly individualistic and stridently anti-militarist framework, a difference was drawn between ‘personal grief’ and collective commemoration:

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There [was] a terrible confusion of thought – terrible because it is causing so much anguish to the country – which underlies the conception of the Commission, the idea that you are entitled to take the dead of relatives and build them into a national state memorial.37

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Particularly offensive to many was the design chosen by the Commission. Committed to non-sectarian principles but equally adamant that acres of crosses would look (as Lutyens bluntly put it) ‘extraordinarily ugly’, the Commission had rejected proposals for cruciform stones in favour of a standard 3-foot headstone. Headstones were cheaper to produce, infinitely more durable and better able to accommodate inscription. But ugliness, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. One mother was ‘horrified by the idea that the tombstones should resemble so many milestones’; others protested that their son’s memory would be desecrated by these ‘hideous and unchristian’ memorials.38 This ‘passionate desire to erect a cross’ was just as common in Australia as it was in Britain. The next of kin were often ageing parents, men and women raised in the certainties of Victorian Christianity. For them, a cross planted on their son’s grave promised redemption and salvation. To reject it on the grounds of art or economy was the height of ‘bureaucratic tyranny’. And while uniformity offered the promise of equality to some, to others it depersonalised the whole nature of mourning. British parents protested that they did not want their sons buried ‘like a criminal in Dartmoor’ and in 1922 Mrs F. E. Comb wrote (again) to the Australian military authorities: could she not have ‘a small stone, shield, shape or any neat design put on [her son’s] grave instead of the one put up by the War people’. She would be quite prepared to pay, indeed ‘will the Authorities allow us to pay some one in Belgium to care for our boys graves and keep the grass from running wild over where they are sleeping’. Clearly Mrs Comb was not aware that the state had assumed sole responsibility for all the nation’s war dead. Her boy’s grave was no longer her responsibility.39 Mrs Comb did not request the repatriation of her son’s remains, though demands for repatriation have plagued the Commission for much of its existence. The case was probably strongest when a body was about to be exhumed anyway. The policy of concentrating small graveyards in larger ones and ‘bringing in’ isolated burials from the battlefield, meant that corpses were often re-interred. Why not, relatives asked, return the bodies home, to the families who longed to care for them?40 The logic did not apply in quite the same way to Australia. The sheer distance involved, the time, cost and gruesome difficulty, tempered the demand for repatriation. Even so there were isolated instances, particularly in the early days of the fighting, where grief-stricken parents lobbied for their loved one’s repatriation. In 1916 Horace Halloran begged J. C. Watson to allow him to bring his son’s bones home to Australia. It was the only way, he explained, that this great loss could be overcome and a close and loving family be reunited, ‘a brokenhearted mother was desirous that his remains should be brought out for reinterment in the little God’s acre where his forefathers lie’. The comparative

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weakness of the repatriation movement in Australia had two quite related consequences. The first was a shift in the focus of bereavement: ‘Rather than appropriation of the dead [as was sought in Britain] Australian mourners saw a definite state responsibility to care for the bodies of those who would remain overseas’.41 Secondly, and for this study more importantly, the failure to bring the bodies home made the act of pilgrimage imperative, be they actual journeys to the battlefield or the imaginary pilgrimages considered in the previous chapter. In the debates surrounding the model cemetery, its advocates proclaimed the virtues of uniformity. The Commission would at once secure individuality for each of the dead and insist on what Kenyon called ‘the principle of equality’. But historians must read beyond the rhetoric. For all the cherished principles of the charter, respecting the individuality of every soldier and denying differences of ‘race, [rank] colour, or creed’ proved difficult even in the most ‘democratic’ of armies.42 In late 1916 Private P. B. Smith of the 22nd Battalion died of wounds on the Somme and was duly interred in one of the cemeteries set out by the War Graves Unit. The graveyard adjoined the local one, was far from the front line and should have been managed in accordance with the Directorate’s principles. A letter from Reverend A. F. Fenn, an Anglican padre serving at the nearby Casualty Clearing Station, gives a far more accurate idea of Private Smith’s burial: [T]he grave was a trench of 6ft. deep, 7ft. 6in. wide and reaches the width of the field, the coffins are laid as close to one another as wood blocks [permit] . . . and over the dead of each is placed a cross of wood with name, date, etc. We do not have single graves save for officers.43

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One would expect to find mass graves close to the front line. Men were buried as they fell, pushed into shell craters, flung across the breast works, or simply entombed in their own trenches.44 But mass burials were also commonplace across the Channel in England. As the hospitals swelled to capacity so too it seems did British graveyards. In 1917 the London branch of the Australian Natives Association protested that their countrymen were being buried as little better than paupers, between four and twenty bodies heaped in a single grave with but a few inches of soil between them. Six years later, the Commission struggled to reconcile these mass burials with the ‘solemn promise’ of individual commemoration. In ‘a large number of cemeteries in England’ personal headstones were simply deemed ‘impossible’. The best it could do was construct ‘a kerb . . . the whole way round the plot and [have] the names inscribed on it’.45 In fact, the new ideologies of individual commemoration and ‘equality of treatment’ were also very much at odds with centuries of military practice.46 In Malta, for

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instance, the old military cemeteries operated along the lines they always had, individual plots and memorials for nurses and officers, mass graves and shared inscriptions for other ranks and private soldiers. Visiting Pieta Cemetery en route to Gallipoli, Bean was appalled to find Anzacs buried three deep in the rock and covered by stone ‘blackening’ in the damp. A man might have his own grave, he noted, but only if he purchased it. Malta put the lie to the Commission’s promise of ‘equality’. Major A. E. Cook of the 9th Australian Light Horse lies beneath a stone cherished by his family, still ‘the loved husband of Mary Frances, [and] father of Ethel, Allen and Peter’. A few feet way, Privates Woods, Cowie and Davidson share a common grave, known not so much by their names as their regiments and numbers.47 The politics of space are no less evident in the Commission’s ‘model ceme´ teries’. Not far from a training ground and hospital, Etaples in France was one of the first ‘purpose-built’ military cemeteries. Situated on the edge of sand dune and forest, its 11 000 graves sweep out along the lines of the landscape. But even in death officers and gentlemen are entitled to certain privileges. Their graves are positioned on the highest ground, shaded by Bloomfield’s cross and carefully framed by Lutyens’ massive memorials. Enlisted men are massed together in the valley beneath them.48 And while the IWGC took a firm stand in the case of personal memorials for private soldiers, officers seem to belong to another class entirely.49 The Commission ‘took no exception’ when Lady Doughty-Wylie negotiated the purchase of over a hundred square metres of land to raise a ‘memorial temple’ over her husband’s grave on Gallipoli. The mausoleum was never built, but only because negotiations broke down with Turkish (rather than Imperial) authorities. LieutenantColonel Charles Hotham Montague Doughty-Wylie VC CB CMG became the only soldier honoured by a single isolated grave at Gallipoli and his ‘lonely widow’ the first woman to visit a grave there.50 In Baghdad a mausoleum was erected over the grave of Sir Stanley Maude, the sole British commander to die whilst on active service. The Commission insists it honours all who fell ‘in the course of the Mesopotamian campaign’ but official photographs still describe it as ‘the tomb of [the] General’.51 Finally, the names that would liveth evermore were (for the most part) the names of white men. Mindful of its Imperial obligations, and keen to experiment with slightly oriental architecture, the IWGC did build memorials to the Indian battalions and honoured even Chinese labourers with their own personal tombstones. The cemeteries of the Great War are a compelling instance of what some historians have called ‘ornamentalism’. Carefully staged visual statements, they sought to incorporate colony and dominion in a grand Imperial gesture. But participation is not quite the same thing as equality.

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Noting that somewhere between 50 000 to 60 000 native African troops ‘fell during the war’ and that no real records had been kept of their graves, the Commission came upon the simple expedient of declaring the entire force ‘Missing’. There was not much point in building a memorial: ‘the Colonial Office [was] of the opinion that [it] would not be intelligible to the average East African native’. The Commission was prepared to consider ‘a statue of an askari or a carrier’ (providing it was not too expensive) recommending something ‘sculptural rather than architectural’ for the benefit of both the budget and the natives.52

A grave far away: loved ones’ inscriptions

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There was one further breach of the principle of uniformity that the Commission was prepared to tolerate: the next of kin would be allowed to suggest an epitaph for their loved one’s grave. This was a concession to what the Commission called ‘the individualist lobby’. But even inscriptions were bound by the strictures of uniformity. Sixty-six letters was the maximum space allowed and that, the Commission’s guidelines stipulated, ‘included spaces between the words’. To exercise this privilege, the next of kin were charged at the rate of three pence and one half penny per letter.53 The Commission reserved the right to veto any epitaph it deemed inappropriate: ‘free scope’ would not be given to ‘the sentimental versifier’. ‘Cranks’ and ‘scribblers of doggerel’ also proved a problem: ‘His Loving Parents Curse the Hun’ was returned to the next of kin for sensible ‘modification’. The family were unrepentant but mindful of the Commission’s artistic sensibilities they next tried their hand at poetry: ‘With every breath we draw/We curse the Germans more . . .’ The inscription was again ‘declined’.54 Warned by such excesses the Commission thought it prudent to suggest some model epitaphs. Most were passages from the Bible, it counselled stoic acceptance of God’s will, delivered butchered bodies to ‘the arms of Jesus’ and promised heavenly reward. They may seem clich´ed phrases to our modern minds but in a deeply religious age they offered genuine and abiding comfort to countless thousands of the faithful. Faith in the Empire could be just as consoling. The ‘standard inscription’ ‘For God, King and Country’ is emblazoned across hundreds of headstones; ‘their glory shall not be blotted out’ echoes insistently through the gullies of Gallipoli. For all these moral certainties, the whole inscription process embodied the inherent paradox of commemoration. On the one hand, epitaphs were a way of individualising grief and (like the headstones themselves) upheld the equality of mourners. On the other, this democracy of death was undermined and qualified by gradations of grief only the

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class-bound British Army could imagine. It was not just that every soldier’s name was coupled with his rank, regiment and age and any military decoration (Victoria Cross winners, it should be noted, were entitled to their own special engraving). The Commission also categorised its corpses, those who ‘Died of Wounds’ deemed somehow less heroic than those who were ‘Killed in Action’. In an emotional letter to his wife, Edwin Lutyens (a tireless advocate of ‘the Great Principle of Equality’) protested at this equally great absurdity. I do not want to put a worldly value over our dead. They put ‘killed in action’ or ‘died of wounds’, [or just] ‘died’. Died alone means some defalcation and shot for it. I don’t like it. The mother lost her boy and it was in the interests of the country and she had to suffer – her boy. Do you see what I mean?55

Not all mothers exercised their right to record an inscription; epitaphs appear on less than half of all (identified) headstones. While some families were no doubt discouraged by the cost an equally likely explanation for the absence of inscriptions is the time that had elapsed since a loved one’s death and burial. Men killed in 1915 were not commemorated by a formal headstone until the early 1920s. Given that the next of kin were often elderly parents and bearing in mind the high rates of mobility in working-class Australian families, many authorised to write an inscription had either moved or passed on.56 Finally, and most problematically, silence might be read as a kind of protest. Having struggled for several years to reconcile themselves to loss, grieving families may have resented this state-imposed and stateprescribed resumption of mourning. This is not to suggest that families had ceased to grieve, only that (with the passage of time) the focus of grief had shifted. Of simple necessity, memory now resided elsewhere and was far more immediate and far more personalised than distant (state-managed) graveyards. Loved ones were honoured and remembered in letters, uniforms and photographs fashioned into makeshift shrines, in plaques appended to family tombstones, in the forest of memorials raised by families, workplaces and neighbourhoods. All these artefacts and symbols represented an enormous emotional (and often financial) investment. Perhaps by the 1920s they had become more important than that (only ever to be imagined) graveside. This may well be an argument which post-modernist history (couched in the language of ‘refusal’, ‘deferment’ and resistance’) finds plausible and attractive. I believe it is essentially ahistorical. Whilst war memorials and family shrines strived to replace a son’s or brother’s or husband’s grave, they could never be an effective substitute. In fact anxiety over the state of distant graves preoccupied countless Australian families and paralleled the search for alternative modes of mourning. The epitaphs chosen for thousands of

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Australian headstones offered a chance to claim ‘a compensatory presence’ by a distant graveside.57 They were a means whereby soldier’s graves were individualised and some kind of ownership still asserted over the mortal remains of loved ones. Through the sanitised stone of remembrance they convey the unrelenting burden of bereavement. A great many of the epitaphs raised to Australian soldiers comply with the Commission’s quietly stated intention. They provide a forum through which families can publicly mourn and privately accept the loss of their loved ones. Many find comfort in formal religion; fragments of hymns or passages of scripture. Others embrace a far more naturalist imagery, through ‘setting suns’ and ‘gardens of remembrance’ the fallen ‘became part of nature’s cycle of death and resurrection’.58 Just as common as religious epitaphs are those that appeal to King and Country. Deaths are described as ‘noble’ and the dead men as ‘heroes’. Men ‘give their lives’ for ‘Australia’, ‘England’, ‘Freedom’, ‘the dear flag’ and always ‘for others’.59 In many inscriptions one senses the pride of those they left behind them, a pride usually expressed in terms of Nation, Empire and Manhood. Sergeant F. L. Partridge of the 59th Battalion died on 26 April 1918, twenty-six years of age: ‘A Soldier and a Man, One of Australia’s Best’. Private A. J. McCaffrey won the Military Medal on the Somme and died a week later: ‘A brave soldier, a loving son, a mother’s sacrifice, for duty done’. Indeed it is as if these families could find no better fate for ‘their brave soldiers’. Maurice Burbidge’s grave lies alongside thousands of others in England’s Brookfield Cemetery. He had died of influenza within a few months of the war ending. But his mother (or was it his father?) refused to see that death as tragic or pointless: ‘My son, [the epitaph proudly declares] I gave to the Empire’. And often not just one son either. Gunner O. F. Richardson rests in a row adjoining Burbidge’s. The epitaph on his grave is ‘also in memory of Reginald and Charles killed at Gallipoli’. The Richardson family had nothing left to give for Empire: ‘My All: Mother’ ends the inscription.60 While pride in such men is evident enough, an equally persistent theme is a deep abiding sorrow at their loss. Indeed the distance from home made these final messages to their loved ones all the more anguished. Many deny death: wives will ‘not say goodbye’, mothers refuse to part from sons. Buried in spring of 1918, Sergeant Miles was not dead; rather (the inscription reads) he is ‘Still living, still loving, still ours’. Private Scott ‘is not dead/for such as my noble husband/ lives forever’. ‘Boy of my heart goodnight’, reads W. R. Johnstone’s headstone, ‘never goodbye’. And in a relentlessly religious age, many inscriptions bridge the gap between one world and another. ‘Tenderly on earth we loved you’, reads Private Tatterson’s epitaph at Hooge Crater Cemetery, ‘and we dearly love you still’.61 Many of these epitaphs recall men

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to the companionship of families they had long left behind them. ‘We speak of you/and think of you/and miss you every day’; ‘My dear boy’, ‘My darling’, ‘my beloved son/my best beloved’. Driver H. G. Pam was killed at the age of twenty-four in Belgium; his death weighed heavily on an ageing father and mother. ‘He was our only darling, dearest treasure/our darling only son/our brave laddie’. More than one life was lost when R. E. McIntyre was killed on Gallipoli. ‘How much of love and light and joy/ is buried with our darling boy’.62 Often these family epitaphs suggest multiple commemorations, the tortured search of wives, siblings, parents to find the right words to say goodbye. Lieutenant J. W. Nelson’s grave straddles the grief of two generations. His wife sought solace in the brief time they’d spent together: ‘His memory [she wrote] liveth forever’. But beneath her inscription comes a grim rejoinder from the same soldier’s mother, ‘Only a Broken Heart’ is the only epitaph she could offer. A child’s hand wrote E. G. Low’s inscription, now etched in stone at Ari Burnu Cemetery on Gallipoli: ‘May God bless/My dear daddy . . .’. ‘Broken hearts’ still break the stoic silence of the War Commission Cemeteries; ‘sentimental versifiers’ find no clich´ed comforts in patriotism or religion. Private J. E. Barclay’s grave sighs with grief from the gullies of the Peninsula: ‘We’ve no darling now/ I’m weeping/ baby and I you left alone’.63 Alternatively, inscriptions transcend a loved one’s absence. Imaginary journeys in themselves, they recreate a soldier’s ‘voice’ or ‘touch’ or most commonly his grave. Like the memorial notices examined earlier, they situate families alongside their loved ones and strive to recruit others in the processes of mourning. In doing so they traverse both a physical and a psychological distance: ‘Tho’ far away you are still near’, ‘Too far away for touch or speech/but not too far/ for thoughts to reach’.64 Often these epitaphs have a tactile quality, evoking place, space, presence, creating ‘metaphors for memory’. ‘The midnight stars/are gleaming/on a grave I cannot see’, ‘Please place a flower/for his loved ones/in Australia’. Private McAllister’s inscription retrieves a fragile tenderness from all the weary years of waiting and worry: ‘Tread gently on the green grass sod a mother’s love lies here’.65 Of course, it was the mothers of these ‘boys’ who most longed to walk there. One of the most common inscriptions, recurring time and time again in all the major cemeteries, breaches the barriers of age and poverty and distance, promising an imaginary pilgrimage: ‘Too far away/ your Grave to see/ but not too far/to think of thee’. Others stridently assert Australia, as if by evoking sunshine, wattle and the Southern Cross they could carry the warmth of a ‘sunny land’ to the cold dark earth of Flanders.66 Quite a number record the names of next of kin. It was necessary, John Laffin argues, ‘to stress their family relationship and bond with the dead soldier’. A

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similar argument might well be extended to place names. In France, Belgium, Gallipoli, Egypt and Palestine, men still belong to Merimbula and Coolgardie, Euroa and Korumburra.67 And many a description of a lad could only ever have come from Australia, ‘A Dinkum Aussie’, ‘An Anzac’, ‘Our Bonzer Boy’, or simply ‘Mate-o-mine’.68 A military historian, Laffin’s fine anthology privileges the most patriotic of epitaphs. What we need to remember is that for all the talk of King and Country, there was also a deep undercurrent of doubt, confusion, even anger. Amongst the acres of dead, Private W. L. Rae’s grave questioned the necessity of such terrible sacrifice. The Labor son of a Labor family, young Billy’s grave cries out ‘evermore’ in protest: ‘Another life lost/Hearts Broken/For What?’69

The missing Throughout the Great War men were lost quite literally. The greatest challenge which faced the War Graves Commission was how to commemorate the missing. And the numbers of missing were legion. Out of some million British dead over 530 000 bodies were never recovered. The Commission’s comforting euphemism, ‘vanished without trace’, concealed a much more sordid reality: bodies that sank in the mud, withered in the sun, or were simply blown to pieces. Australia’s missing numbered over a third of fatal casualties; for almost six years after the war, special Graves Detachments searched and re-searched all the major battlefields. But only one in five of the bodies wrested from the soil would ever be identified. They were called ‘the unknowns’ and they too posed a problem in terms of commemoration. After some debate, the Commission marked each grave with a single epitaph. Kipling’s plaintive tribute ‘Known unto God’ spared these men complete oblivion.70 Attempts to find the missing assume a kind of heroic status in all the Commission’s literature, an acknowledgment both of the difficulty of the task and of its importance to grieving families. Between the Armistice and 1921 over 200 000 bodies were exhumed and reburied. Remains were sifted, examined and reassembled for ‘slight and frail clues’ to identity.

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Sometimes . . . over breadths of ground that had been . . . shelled continuously, the searchers would come on the dead of years ago with their last letters home still legible in their pockets . . . A lump of rust . . . lasted long enough . . . to reveal that it had been a compass, presented to a sergeant by some of his friends . . . A soldier of another regiment scratched his regimental number on a spoon . . . [another] cut his regimental badge on his pipe bowl.

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It was ‘a matter of honour, as well as routine, not to give up the fight against oblivion’. Details, ‘however trivial’, gave a battered body a name, a home, a history.71 Identifying Australian soldiers proved even more difficult. Unlike the British Army, the badges of all the Australian regiments were identical, swords radiating outwards in the shape of a rising sun. They shed little light on a missing man’s identity. Tell-tale colour patches, worn on each man’s sleeve, rotted and soiled beyond recognition. In the early 1920s the Australian War Graves Service was headed by Major Alfred Allen. Heralded as ‘a discoverer of missing men’ his name ‘brought the final comfort of exact knowledge to many an aching heart in Australia’. Allen, it seems, was just the sort of fellow to stay on in France and scour the battlefields. A Quaker, a non drinker, non smoker, non swearer . . . he is in every respects a big man – bodily, mentally, spiritually, and he does his grim and gruesome work in a spirit of reverence and devotion to his fellows alive and dead, which is a tonic to his own soul and the souls of all he meets . . . His parish . . . is everywhere north of a line drawn from St Valery on the French coast through Arras to the German frontier.72

The Major and his men divided this vast area into thousands of squares and coordinates. Armed with information from battalion diaries, soldiers and families, they ranged the killing fields of Flanders and the Somme. Are there any indications of bodies still below? [Major Allen’s] trained sense leads him here, there . . . He carries with him a specially made slender steel rod with an oblong slot in its sharp point, and with it he delicately probes the soil . . . And in a manner little short of magical the earth yields up its secrets to him.73

Written by the English novelist John Oxenham, this account of Allen’s work was contrived to give comfort to the families of missing men back home in Australia. The same author corresponded tirelessly with the ‘owners’ of soldiers’ graves from every part of the Dominions. In truth, there was nothing very magical about the exhumation of bodies. Most were hardly bodies at all, but sacks of grey-green slime clinging to a rotting uniform. No doubt Allen’s faith helped to sustain him. Many of his men, on the other hand, found an easier escape in alcohol and ‘immorality’. A military inquiry into the detachment found the men ‘were constantly getting drunk’ and that ‘loose women’ frequented the enclosure. The Australian Government had assumed that Australian troops were best suited to the ‘sacred work’ of recovering their dead comrades. It had overlooked the strain this ‘gruesome

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work’ entailed, the shock of reburying mates and the cost of prolonging that already long exile from Australia.74 Celebrating Allen’s (and others) detective work was one way of shoring up the public’s faith and averting a possible scandal. Arguably the real scandal was the reason for so many to be missing in the first place. It is often assumed that the large numbers of unidentified dead were a simple reflection of the conditions of modern warfare. Torn apart by shellfire and rats, few bodies endured the ravages of several months of exposure on the battlefield. Even those, as one digger put it, ‘burred (sic) quite respectable’ were just as likely to join the company of the missing. An English account speaks for the soldier of every nation: [We] could see our brother soldiers’ outstretched in the jaws of death . . . we had to leave them out in the cold as it were, and their (sic) they would have to lay for days, [even] weeks before they could have a place of rest and quietness, and then, one does not even know whether they are left in peace . . . a shell . . . [is just as likely to lift up] . . . all that had been buried . . . Oh! If only the mothers, wives and sweethearts of our brave soldiers knew what had passed, it would break many a sorrowful heart, [their boys] so battered about after life is extinct.75

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But many a battered body might still have been identified. It was not so much the conditions of modern warfare that abandoned these men to oblivion as the total lack of preparedness of the military authorities. Identification discs were issued to soldiers but these were initially made of compressed cardboard. Most expected the war to end quickly. Who could have imagined that these rough cardboard tags would have to withstand four winters on the Somme or the bleaching winds of Palestine and Gallipoli? Perishable discs were one problem, inappropriate procedures another. Initially the Australian Army only issued one disc to every soldier. It was routinely stripped from the body of the dead man along with any other item of value. Only in 1917 did two discs come to be allocated. ‘The green disc will always be buried with the body, and the red one disposed of with the personal effects.’ Sadly, the same orders still made provision for men ‘with only one identity disc’, suggesting the soldier’s name might be ‘copied onto cardboard . . . or small piece of wood, which should be buried with the man’. Placing the same in a tin or bottle might help (presuming, of course, these happen to be handy). The latter was to be pressed ‘neck downwards’ in the mud, a last desperate defiance of the elements. But all these elaborate guidelines were hopelessly misdirected. As late as September 1917 military memos confirm that soldiers continued the long-accepted practice of taking ‘all disc and effects’ from a dead comrade’s body. These men, it tersely noted, ‘will now

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‘little crosses each touching each other’: massed graves at Mont St Quentin, c. 1918. These fragile memorials were raised in the wake of the fighting; note the attempt to distinguish men from officers.

have to be buried as unknowns’.76 And here we see one of the Great War’s more pitiful ironies. Soldiers stripped bodies of discs and belongings knowing how much these were treasured by grieving families. But in doing so they also stripped men of their identity, needlessly prolonging the whole process of grieving. Lost for whatever reason, all of the missing still had a right to commemoration. Driven by the logic of its charter, the Commission proposed recording each dead man’s name in stone, either at cemeteries themselves or on some centrally located battlefield memorial. In time, each separate theatre of war would field its own monument to the missing, like Lutyens’ arching edifice at Thiepval on the Somme or the Menin Gate at Ypres. Each of these enormous structures was designed to carry its burden of names, every stone and panel groans with the details of men and regiments. But recording names for posterity was only one of their functions. Rising up above the flat plain of the Somme, strategically situated at the entrance to cities or (in the case of the Memorial to the Missing at Cape Helles) placed ‘to be seen’ by ships entering the Dardanelles, these memorials to the lost also proclaimed dominion. The last was still visible several miles out to sea, ‘a modern day Colossus’ symbolically straddling the Narrows. Architecture had achieved the purest of ironic inversions: swallowed up by the earth the missing now mastered the landscape.77

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Eventually, the Australian Government would adopt a very similar mode of commemoration. Australia’s monuments to the missing at Lone Pine and Villers-Bretonneux boast commanding views of former battlefields. Like the comparable genre of Division Memorials, they mark the site of fighting. Indeed, Australia raised more of such monuments than any other of the Dominions. It was not just the scale of loss, either. Long before the war was over, commemoration had become a means of asserting Australian identity, distinguishing Australian troops and Australian sacrifice from all the other forces of the Empire. Like the acres of headstones raised throughout Europe, most memorials bore the rising sun badge of the AIF, a clear if emblematic reference to Australia. More ambitious sculptors enlisted the iconography of Anzac; a bronzed slouched hat lies to rest at Bullecourt while a muscular, semi-naked digger, 13 feet high and two and a half tons in weight, crushed a German eagle at Mont St Quentin. Lambert’s statue of the mounted light horse was stationed to guard the entrance of the Suez. It did so until 1956 when Egyptian nationalists tore the Australian National Memorial to pieces.78 In fact, irony again was a feature of all these memorials. None were constructed with Australian stone (as was originally intended); several were designed by British rather than Australian architects and (despite the oft-made stipulation for Australian or at least British workmanship) most were built by a largely conscripted ‘foreign’ workforce. A ragged band of exiled Russians and displaced Greeks raised the monument at Lone Pine; much to the horror of many a veteran, German POWs built the First and Fourth Division’s memorials.79 A distinction should probably be drawn here between battlefield memorials, marking the exploits of the AIF, and actual memorials to the missing. More importantly we should try to distinguish between the memorials that were raised and the ones that were originally envisaged. In the case of the missing, as had been the case with the Commission’s model cemetery, commemoration was a process of debate, disagreement and compromise. And here too Australia often dissented from the dominant voice of Empire.80 To begin with, the Commonwealth was not at all keen to give up that ‘fight with oblivion’ and declare its soldiers missing. By 1921 the War Graves Detachments of the British Army had scoured areas of heavy fighting as many as sixteen times. The War Office announced that searching would cease and consideration be given to some lasting memorial. Australians were outraged. Corpses were still being uncovered at a rate of several hundred a week and many of these could still be identified. Major Allen himself criticised the War Office in the British Australasian (widely regarded as the mouthpiece of Australia’s expatriate community). Ground abandoned by the Imperial authorities had yielded twenty-two bodies, of these most could be identified

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‘a clear if emblematic reference to Australia’: the memorial at Villers-Bretonneux towers above a nameless soldier’s tomb stone. The last World War One cemetery to be completed on the Western Front, Villers-Bretonneux contains the graves of 1535 Australians. Its memorial panels name a further 10 000.

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and almost half turned out to be Australian. In Australia, the press carried allegations that the Commission was ‘slacking’ in its recovery work and in ‘too much of a hurry’ to finalise the building of its model cemeteries. The protests of relatives and former soldiers were particularly poignant: We soldiers want our dead comrades found and identified [‘Digger’ wrote to the Herald] . . . for the sake of the loved ones they left behind who today are mourning them with the only notification they have – the cold, official type-written message. Find them and bury them is the wish of every Digger pal they had.81

Loved ones certainly agreed with him. One mother had lost her son somewhere near Passchendaele in 1917. Four years on, she was no less anxious to find him: I appeal to the government not to neglect us in this last duty, but to let us have the consolation of knowing that it is doing everything in its power to find a last resting place for our sons besides their comrades in some hallowed spot, thus giving us a shrine in place of a . . . tragedy.82

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The ‘last duty’ of the government was also a ‘sacred one’. Billy Hughes, still Prime Minister and still ‘the Little Digger’, announced the Commonwealth would authorise ‘whatever expenditure may be necessary’ to resume the search for the missing.83 Other Dominions joined the protest and, eventually, the Imperial authorities conceded. For a time at least the searching continued, those persistent Australian staff were kept on and a reward was also offered to local farmers for the discovery of Allied soldiers’ remains. The last was a mixed blessing to grieving families. A reward ensured that bodies would not just be ‘ploughed in the earth as manure’ but it also gave rise to grim speculation. Rumours ran wild of ‘unscrupulous Belgians’ dissecting the bodies of British corpses to multiply their profits. Just returned from the battlefields, W. A. Windeyer reported the most ‘gruesome stories’. A man who had catalogued wildflowers on the Somme was appalled to find dead Germans could pass just as easily as dead Australians.84 This concern with finding actual bodies was rivalled by the Australians’ insistence on preserving each missing man’s individuality. The problem with the Commission’s proposal to record every name on centralised memorials was that that is all its memorial to the missing would be, a catalogue of what Sassoon bitterly called ‘intolerably nameless names’. It cheated missing men of all the individual commemoration awarded their dead comrades. Surely the missing had just as much right to an epitaph from next of kin, a headstone, a designated, individual site as their inviolate and individual memorial? It seems that many parents thought so. Mr F. S. Alford of Mile

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End, South Australia, accepted that his brother’s body was surrendered to the sea. The few hospital ships that attended the Anzac landing were quickly overwhelmed with wounded and there was neither the time nor the opportunity ‘to have bodies [removed] . . . to, say, Lemnos for interment’. But his brother felt he had a right to some memorial other than just a watery grave. And not just a name on a panel either: For sentimental reasons we would like to have a headstone erected to my late brother in the first permanent cemetery at Anzac beach. He was one of the first boatload to reach the shore and was wounded the first morning . . . I would like to cable instructions to the Graves Commission on Gallipoli. I would gladly meet the cost of such a cable, and also of the headstone. You will quite understand how much we would like a headstone erected.85

This was not a simple repetition of the old debate over family memorials. All Alford sought was the same rights other grieving families were clearly ‘entitled to’. William Lord of Ipswich suggested ‘some part of God’s acre should be set aside for [such] headstones’ including a memorial to his own son. Like Alford, all he asked was ‘to erect some little tribute to his memory and I have no doubt that there are many others similarly situated to myself’.86 Both letters were marked for the personal attention of the Prime Minister. Hughes took the whole matter very seriously. In early 1919 he made a remarkable suggestion to the IWGC. It should increase the size of every cemetery by as much as 25 per cent to accommodate just such memorials to the missing. The Prime Minister [Allan Box informed Fabian Ware] . . . has decided that Australia desires that each man shall have his place in a cemetery whether his burial has been ascertained or not, together with a temporary cross, at once and a permanent headstone at a later date . . . The idea underlying this decision is . . . the time honoured one of every soldier being entitled to his six foot of ground and it seems to me a happy solution of any difficulties.87

In fact the Commission was far from happy. It was not just the cost involved either. Fabian Ware argued that a ‘fake grave’ was a disservice to the grieving families they acted for, a breach of trust hard-earned by the Commission. ‘Whatever confidence they had received from the relatives was based on the knowledge that they had been told the truth – that the body could not be found’. Kipling added that the ‘whole idea of having graves with no bodies in them was distasteful’: ‘By all means let there be a memorial and the name, but need there be a grave space six feet by two’? After less than an hour of debate, the Commission referred consideration

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of the Prime Minister’s request to committee. It was as good a way as any of assigning it (and Australia’s missing) to oblivion.88 In the end only one of Australia’s missing received the six foot of ground every soldier ‘is entitled to’. In 1993 the remains of an unknown digger were scraped from the brittle soil of Adelaide Cemetery on the Somme and re-interred with due pomp and ceremony in the heart of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Paul Keating, the Labor Prime Minister, spoke of sacrifice and mateship, then (as today) the defining characteristics of the Anzac mythology. But many feared his fervently nationalist and ardently republican agenda. The man they reburied that day had fought and died for the British Empire, for the same Empire that had first interred an ‘unknown’ almost eighty years earlier. History does not always acknowledge precedent. ‘He is all of them’, Keating intoned, ‘and he is one of us’. The tomb of the unknown became ‘an altar’ of nationhood.89 Arguably though, ‘bringing him home’, as one of the pall bearers put it, was the culmination of almost eighty years of grieving and remembering. It also revealed again the tensions and difficulties that beset commemoration. An old woman, frail with the years, was seen to collapse by the grave. For her the unknown was neither universal nor anonymous: ‘He is my brother’, she gasped, ‘he is my brother’. And during the ceremony itself, ordinary onlookers took on the task of commemoration. Quite unprompted, thousands pinned their poppies beside the cloistered lines of names that flank the walls of the memorial. All of the war dead that day were individualised, honoured, remembered. In a sense this great nationalist gesture of returning an unknown looked back as much as it did forward. It echoed Bean’s call for an Australian aspect at Gallipoli, Hughes’s bid for an Australian voice in the deliberations of the War Graves Commission and of course the repatriation of an unknown had slipped on and off the Returned Soldiers’ League’s agenda from the 1920s to the 1960s. Bringing home a man, a relic, a memory had long been a focus of commemoration and bereavement. So too though, was a pilgrimage to the lands that had claimed them.90

Part II

Family Journeys

3

In foreign fields: the first family pilgrimages In April 1917 Matron Samson sat in her small makeshift office in the isolation hospital at Le Ville. The shift was just changing, a long day of tending the sick and the dying drawing to a close. Matron Samson would write one more letter that evening and, as always, she would choose her words carefully. Anxious families would scrutinise every sentence, squeezing the most from each tiny solace, or grieving for a lifetime over some unintended meaning. But this last letter was easier than most. Matron Samson had written before to Vera Deakin; the crisp, typed instructions of Red Cross correspondence suggested calm and order – quite unlike the desperation of dying men and the broken hearts they’d leave behind them. And Private Overson’s death was better than many. ‘Young and delicate looking’, he wasn’t the sort to linger. Meningitis could carry him them off quite quickly – a mercy really. But, of course, she couldn’t say that. What other consolation could she offer them? Matron Samson dipped pen into ink and wrote large and deliberately: I wonder if it would be comforting to his people to know that his night nurse, Miss Troller, is one of the best in every way, a first class nurse, a womanly woman, and I am quite sure he was as carefully and tenderly nursed as if he was with his own people. It is the poor parents that suffer. They imagine all kinds of things. This young boy was too ill even to miss his loved ones and the few seconds he was sensible he seemed just content. I wish there was more to tell his people – Some day, perhaps, they will visit his grave which, as you know, is carefully kept and marked with a plain wooden cross . . . part of the cemetery . . . is set apart for [our] soldiers and the graves are kept neat and nice by our own convalescent boys. I saw them at work the other day and noticed an Australian and New Zealander among the party.1

Matron Samson knew how to comfort grieving parents. Young Miss Troller took their place at James’s bedside, caring and soothing like a loving sister. And even in death this young man would be tended by his countrymen.

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Matron Samson sketched the cemetery as carefully as she could. And she also held out a new hope to those who wept a world away. Some day they too could come here and truly lay that body to rest. So long as the war lasted, loved ones could only imagine where their ‘boys’ were buried. Their visits were vicarious; padres, nurses, soldiers stood for them at the graveside, carried messages, laid flowers, whispered prayers. But with war’s end it became possible for family members to visit ‘those far off lands’ for themselves. The process of pilgrimage shifted; from the imaginary reconstruction of the place were men where buried to a longing to make the journey where loved ones actually lay.

‘Such a small favour’: subsidising pilgrimage

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The lands where Australians lay were far off indeed. In Britain, the end of the war signalled a boom in what some historians have called battlefield tourism. France and Belgium were within a day’s travel and the declining value of the franc made the crossing all the more viable. Between 1919 and 1921 Michelin produced no fewer than fifteen English-language motoring guides to the Somme, and Thomas Cook in London offered guided tours of battlefields and cemeteries for as little as 9 guineas.2 By the end of the 1920s, an official with the Imperial War Graves Commission estimated that 80 000 people visited British cemeteries annually.3 Australia, by contrast, was over 18 000 kilometres and 2 months steaming time from Europe. Transshipping, coaling stops, high seas and diplomatic difficulties could make the passage even longer. Well into the 1930s the cheapest fare to Britain was A£80.00 steerage; channel crossings were easily procured but voyages to the Near East (including such major theatres of war as Gallipoli and Palestine) were another matter entirely. With a (white, male) worker’s wage of around £2 a week, such a journey was (as even the most optimistic of travel magazines admitted) beyond the reach of the vast majority of Australians. And arguably those who most longed to make this journey had no real income to speak of. The war widow’s allowance was 42 shillings a week in 1922; at barely £1 a week, the old age pension was pegged at subsistence levels. Annie Munro’s situation typified thousands of Australian families. With three sons killed at the war she ‘want[ed] desperately to visit their graves’. However much she managed to save ‘the financial strain’ made it impossible.4 Unable to afford the journey on their own, many approached the government for assistance. In the early 1920s, with the major cemeteries of the Great War virtually completed, letters requesting concession fares became, in the words of one government memo, a regular occurrence. As the

[Does the Government] intend making a special concession in fares for the mothers of fallen soldiers so that they may visit the graves of their sons [?] – Australia was unique in the war, the distance being so great – this of course meant added anxiety during the fighting – and now expensive fares will prevent any mothers from going to France and Egypt – My own son was killed in action and so, I feel justified in asking this question.5

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Commonwealth Government prepared to launch a national shipping line, Jane McMillan decided to write directly to the Prime Minister:

The tone of these appeals varies enormously; even individual petitioners run a gamut of emotion from humble supplication to outraged insistence. Emily Luttrell first approached the Minister of Defence in June 1922. ‘Please pardon me for taking the liberty of writing,’ she began. ‘If you could see your way to help me . . . I would deem it the one of the greatest favours of my life.’ Mrs Luttrell longed to see the grave of her son Arthur. He had died within months of the war’s end and was buried in the south of England. By any criteria she must have seemed deserving. At sixty-six years of age, her husband deaf and blind, there was no way she could afford the fare on her own. Mrs Luttrell had lived in Australia forty-nine years and raised fifteen children. In October she writes again: ‘I am not asking much from you’.6 By March the following year, the letters become both more pathetic and more insistent: I . . . Beg that your Government will take into consideration my appeal and help me to visit my dear one’s resting place there was seven of our sons went to the war . . . surely I have won the right to ask such a small favour which was promised by the state government.7

There is no record of the State or federal government promising concession fares to the families of dead soldiers. But the perception of a promise having been made is all the more significant. Emily Luttrell and Jane McMillan employed the language of citizen over that of supplicant; their sacrifice had earned so ‘small a favour’ from the nation their sons died for. But the Commonwealth was keen to address any such misconception: ‘it would be rather dangerous to accede to such requests. The deaths overseas numbered 58,854 and the burials took place in many different countries. There was a danger of such privileges being abused.’8 Just how these grieving women planned to abuse this privilege was never explained by the Prime Minister’s office. Shunned by the state, prospective pilgrims turned to other agencies for assistance. They found ready sympathy amongst former soldiers. An emotional W. J. Stagg, secretary of the Returned Soldiers’ League in NSW, read

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one mother’s letter after another to the State Executive. ‘I am a mother of only one child in the world’, his faltering voice declared, ‘He is at rest in among the brave in Edinburgh cemetery’. Unlike the Commonwealth, Stagg argued such sacrifice conferred an obligation: ‘how often it has been written of the parents that they were also brave, that they made great sacrifice, and of what a grateful country owes to them. Here, then, is an opportunity to prove [that] gratitude.’9 But the Executive ‘deferred consideration’ of any definite scheme of assistance. Its first obligation was to the servicemen themselves, maimed and cheated and destitute comrades. The best the League could do was to ‘prevail upon the government’.10 Others were more ambitious. As the fifth anniversary of Armistice approached, a meeting of ‘prominent war workers’ reconvened in Melbourne’s Town Hall. Their purpose was to raise the funds for a mass pilgrimage of bereaved mothers overseas: ‘a humble tribute from the citizens of Australia’ to those who had lost their loved ones. The scheme was outlined by Mrs Susan Sellheim, secretary of the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives and the wife of an Australian general. It received influential backing. Mrs Elizabeth Deakin (wife of a former Prime Minister) was elected President and Generals Monash and Chauvel numbered amongst the office bearers. For war worker and warrior alike, the scheme had much to recommend it. At one level, it promised to revive the patriotic impulse of the war years. From 1914 to 1918 as many as half a million men, women and children had worked for the Red Cross, the War Chest or any of a dozen patriotic societies. Their tireless unpaid labour had been crucial to the prosecution of the war effort: miles of mosquito netting had been sewn together for hospitals in the tropics, millions of socks, vests, mufflers and mittens sent to the freezing trenches of Europe, an endless stream of letters, literature and comfort parcels despatched daily from town and country. Peace had signalled a sudden end to much of this activity: only a few societies remained to raise funds for sick or wounded soldiers and those orphaned or widowed. What Mrs Sellheim proposed was that this vast network of voluntary labour be immediately reactivated. With ‘willing hearts and hands’ they could raise the money to send hundreds, even thousands on a pilgrimage to Europe. There was an element of nostalgia in a scheme that involved martial display, military organisation and conspicuous loyalty to the person of His Majesty: She proposed that the photographs of the King’s pilgrimage should be shown in every village, town and city in Australia and that the formation commanders and district base commanders undertake military tournaments in every state . . . endless [other] efforts could be made by the Councils of various states for raising funds.11

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In other ways though, this project was very different to the war work which had preceded it. The point, Mrs Sellheim explained, was not to win a battle but to ‘impress [on all] the sense of war’s tragedy’: ‘This spectacle of the mothers journeying 11,000 miles of sea would be an eloquent appeal to all the nations for peace’. And, Mrs Deakin added hopefully, it might well encourage immigration. Australia had lost 60 000 of its sons to war out of a population of barely five million, new British settlers were urgently needed to replace them.12 British emigration to Australia did indeed become a focus of the Anzac Fellowship of Women, the Friendly Union of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Wives and several other such associations. But it was a one-way traffic. None of these societies succeeded in raising funds for a pilgrimage of the ‘visionary’ scale Sellheim imagined. In 1924 her scheme was quietly abandoned.13 It was not that the general public was keen to forget the war. The enormous emotional and financial investment in national, State and local memorials testifies to the enduring need for commemoration. But these memorials had, like the AIF itself, a democratic character; they stood for everyone, the returned men, those who were lost and a whole society who mourned them. Pilgrimage, by its very nature, privileged some over others; funding such schemes would cost far more than the thousands of sentinels and stone soldiers springing up across the country.

‘Bringing loving remembrance’: the first family journeys From the outset then, pilgrimage was the prerogative of the privileged: only those with time and money could afford so long and costly a passage from Australia. And then (as today) pilgrimages were a subset of the tourism industry. From the early 1920s as many as 20 000 Australians embarked each year by steamer for Britain. Their route had been rehearsed by generations of travellers: east to west along the southern coast of the continent, north-west across the Indian Ocean, then through the Red Sea and the Suez to the Mediterranean. As many as a dozen different companies plied for the custom of these travellers, each boasting steamships of unprecedented size, speed and modernity.14 Thomas Cook in Australia was amongst the first to capitalise on what might well be called ‘the pilgrimage market’. Overseas travellers were invited to ‘modify’ their itinerary, coupling the usual sightseeing in Europe with a ‘battlefield tour’ of France and Belgium. But although Thomas Cook is often credited with democratising and economising travel, pilgrimages from Australia really only catered for a select circle. Excursion fares began at just under A£200 (well in excess of most men’s

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yearly earnings). Select escorted tours where ‘the maximum of luxury is aimed at’, cost almost twice that amount. And though these journeys were often styled ‘pilgrimages’, Cook was certainly not prepared to let patriotism stand in the way of profit. If ‘a universal debt of gratitude’ was not enough ‘to impel the people of every civilised country’ to visit the Western Front, then a bit of clever marketing could make the bloodiest of battlefields seem something of an adventure: ‘Dug-outs, saps, and listening posts are still to be found and explored, and [the Australasian Traveller’s Gazette promised its souvenir-hungry readers] there are still many interesting relics of [those] fierce and exhausting struggles . . .’15 Souvenirs from other theatres of war were much harder to come by. Gallipoli, as one official from the War Graves Commission lamented, was ‘well off the beaten track’ for all but the most determined of travellers.16 Well into the 1920s, the best north-bound route was by a Turkish steamer, the Khedival Mail, which ran a weekly service from Port Said to Constantinople. Travellers transhipped at Suez and then began a staggered journey past Smyrna and Athens before finally landing at Chanak, on the Dardanelles Asiatic shore. From there an erratic ferry service carried pilgrims across the Straits to Gallipoli. The route from Britain (where most Australian pilgrims embarked) was equally circuitous. Pilgrims crossed the Channel, travelled by train to Marseilles, then sailed via Italy and Greece to Turkey. Unable to land at Chanak, cruise ships steamed direct to Constantinople. There the traveller disembarked and retraced part of the voyage, skirting the Asiatic shore of the Dardanelles in a vessel bound for the Narrows. Whatever the approach, the Peninsula offered little welcome to visitors. With virtually no accommodation available, pilgrims faced a hurried and ‘most trying journey’, travelling ‘by steamer to Chanak, by motor lorry round the Peninsula, on foot to the inland cemeteries, and back to Constantinople by these various means, all in one day’.17 Those who persevered relied on the generosity of the War Graves Commission. Its largely Australian staff fed, housed and comforted grieving parents and loved ones. Colonel Hughes remembered one old man who ‘managed’ the journey as early as 1920. ‘We did what we could for him’, he told C. E. W. Bean, though the sights of the former battlefields were still ‘unspeakably distressing’.18 Such largesse was typically Australian; it was also a breach of official policy. Hampered by the weather, the terrain and the unsettled state of Turkish politics, the work of the Commission took far longer here than anywhere else in Europe. Pilgrims were ‘prohibited with the utmost rigour’ until 1923; only then had enough of the bleaching bones been buried.19 Given these constraints, most travellers viewed Gallipoli from cruise ships plying the Mediterranean. Few contrived to land

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there. It was some seven years after the war had ended that the first of the ‘pilgrim ships’ finally anchored off Anzac: in 1925 a three-day visit by the Ormonde marked the opening of New Zealand’s Chunuk Bair memorial and at least two Australian travellers paid the A£50 fare to join it. Subsequent cruises were few and far between and many of their passengers were nostalgic returning soldiers.20 Routes to the war graves were not just opened up by major steamship companies. It was a charity rather than a business concern that carried the first Australian pilgrims to the war’s ‘Near Eastern theatres’. Believing no grave ‘could be regarded as truly consecrated until it has been visited by its rightful warder’, the St Barnabas Church in London organised some of the first pilgrimages to the Western Front and established a system of hostels there to ‘comfort the weary traveller’. In 1926 it launched an unprecedented pilgrimage through Greece, Salonika, Malta and Gallipoli. Travellers were asked to pay what they could afford and invited from all corners of the Empire. Four of the pilgrims to board the Stella d’Italia were Australians: all had lost relatives on the Peninsula.21 Two years later St Barnabas returned to Gallipoli, again on the Stella and again with a small ‘delegation’ of Australians. This time the party was permitted to land at Anzac Cove, the first (and last) such landing in the postwar period. While their reason for visiting Gallipoli varied, seeing the Peninsula was still only possible through the courtesy of the Turks and the generosity of the War Graves Commission: We were met on the shore by Millington, his wife and small son, and there were several cars [provided] . . . these had been collected [all the way] from Maidos and Chanak . . . [Many] wished to see individual graves, others wanted to see the ground and the trenches over which they fought, and some were there merely sight seeing; all [of us] were extremely [grateful for Millington’s assistance and for] permission . . . to land at Anzac. It made things much easier, besides which we felt we were all landing on a historic spot.22

Routes through the Middle East were just as historic but a good deal less complicated. The largest cemeteries in Egypt and Palestine were accessible by rail and centuries of travel to the Holy Land had built at least basic amenities. Accommodation might be uncomfortable (warned one official from the Foreign Office) and to reach remote graveyards it might be necessary ‘to ride by camel or donkey’.23 But with just a little hardship, pilgrimages were certainly possible. Visitors to Palestine, Egypt, Galilee and Syria were soon offered detours and shore excursions to battle sites and cemeteries.24 The names of Australia’s first pilgrims are scattered throughout the travel columns of the British Australasian: for three generations the paper serviced the many needs of a sizable expatriate community in London.

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Cross-referenced with Army Service Dossiers, it is possible to identify a certain kind of traveller and chart something of their itinerary. In the early 1920s, most were elderly, all well-to-do and almost all had sons ‘or other relatives’ killed in battle.25 Male travellers are mostly professionals, businessmen, civil servants or land owners: doctors, bank managers, mine directors, clergymen and graziers. Women usually ‘accompany’ their husbands: with the exception of elderly widows and younger women studying abroad, very few of the files note an independent income.26 Voyages abroad usually coincided with a male partner’s holiday or retirement. Two to six months are generally spent in Britain and (depending on taste, temperament, family obligations and the season) more or less time devoted to the continent. Often a pilgrimage to a grave or ‘tour of the battlefields’ is clearly compartmentalised in their journey. Travellers ‘visit the grave of their soldier son’, cross the Channel, and resume the Grand Tour of many a curious colonial: ‘shopping’ in London, ‘rambling’ in the Lake District, ‘touring the Highlands’.27 Sometimes the itinerary is reversed and pilgrimages are subsumed in a ceaseless round of sightseeing. One party proudly reported that they had motored 2500 miles across France, Italy and Belgium, their route skirting ‘all the battlefields’; another that they had ‘toured the Riviera, Switzerland and the Western Front’, before moving on to London. Travel notes published in the British Australasian denote status, privilege and mobility. Careful to name hotel, ship and even family associations, they evoke the conspicuous consumption long associated with modern tourism: Sir Alfred and Lady Meeks, accompanied by their daughter and her husband, Mr W. G. Cater, and their three children, who arrived by the Ulysses on July 11, motored through Scotland in August, visiting the English lakes en route. Sir Alfred and Lady Meeks who are now staying at the Hyde Park Gate Hotel, leave for Australia early in November . . . Mr and Mrs Cater are staying in Paris and visiting the battlefields.28

A superficial reading of these accounts would present these pilgrimages as a simple extension of a ‘holiday’. Indeed, the language of leisured recreation frames many of the entries: ‘Mr H. E. Garraway of Sydney, who arrived last week on a 3 months holiday, is at present staying at the Arundel Hotel, Embankment. He intends to visit his native country of Kent, and later will go to the Flanders battlefields.’29 The service records of Mr Garraway’s son suggest a very different story. Edward Garraway was killed by a high explosive shell at Passchendaele. His father hoped someone ‘buried [him] where he fell’ but of that he could never be certain. What added to Mr Garraway’s sense of loss was that ‘nothing of 70

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[Edward’s] personal belongings’ was ever returned to him. A wristwatch, a silver cigarette case, a diary, these too were ‘missing’. Edward was twenty-two years old when he died and a promising young graduate of Sydney University. Having given his life for his country, he deserved acknowledgment and recognition – at very least the authorities might spell his name correctly. The bronze memorial plaque issued for Edward Garraway misspelt the family name of Emmerson (as do the current records of the War Graves Commission). For a man of Harold Garraway’s generation, it was insult added to injury. When H. E. Garraway toured the battlefields of Flanders it was not exactly ‘sightseeing’; Harold Garraway was searching for some trace of the boy he loved, to recover a memory fate had denied him.30 Even naming the hotel involved an invitation. Pilgrims hoped the comrades of the dead might manage to somehow visit them.31 Travellers like Garraway no doubt traversed a range of very different roles; they were at once pilgrim and tourist, colonial and Australian. In the columns of the British Australasian one sometimes senses a gentle but persistent intervention. Mr and Mrs Short travelled all the way from Toowong (Queensland) to London ‘having come to Europe for the purpose of visiting their son’s grave’.32 ‘To see the grave of his son’ was the sole reason Rev. McDonald gave for his voyage from Melbourne – it was now eight years since that young life was taken from him.33 Though Mrs Hay would spend two months in Scotland and three in Virginia, she asked the column to note that a pilgrimage to her son’s grave was the ‘principal object’ of her visit. Travellers reminded readers this was their ‘only son’, their ‘only brother’.34 If we are to read these reports for their nuanced subjectivities, we should remember the context of their authorship. Born between the 1860s and 1880s, these travellers subscribed to what Pat Jalland has called a Victorian view of death and bereavement – to see and tend the grave of a loved one was ‘a vital part of the process of mourning’.35 Perhaps the greatest tragedy of these journeys is that that comfort was so often denied to them. In 1924 George Hobler ‘made a hurried visit to the continent, spending a few days at the Hague visiting relatives, a few hours at Brussels and this week [in] Albert . . . to locate, if possible, the grave of his son who was killed there early in the war’.36 But it took years rather than weeks to find Cyril Hobler’s body; what little remained of him was prised from an unforgiving earth in the autumn of 1930. By then George Hobler was too old to visit his son’s grave; for the rest of his life he cherished a tarnished gold ring reverently removed from a skeleton.37 Of course, not all the pilgrims of the 1920s and 1930s were elderly. The young, especially it seems young women, also made the journey. Studying

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art in Paris, Miss Daisy Walder and Miss M. H. Brice spent their summer vacation touring Belgium and ‘the war areas of Flanders and France’. They were typical of the new woman abroad, progressive, independent, defiantly modern in their outlook and mobility.38 Paradoxically these young women performed decidedly traditional roles – they were the bearers of a family grief, the custodians of a community’s memory. As early as the 1920s it is possible to detect generational shifts in the patterns of pilgrimage. Sapper John Greenan died of wounds within six months of leaving Australia and both his parents were dead well before the war was over. John’s two sisters, Mary and Katie, become the sole surviving family members and inherited the family home in Roma. At war’s end Mary corresponds relentlessly with the military authorities, asking what ‘arrangements the Defence Dept. have [made for] relatives visiting families graves’, reminding the Army that she is now the next of kin and should duly receive all of John’s medals. Four years after John’s death Mary and Katie stood by their only brother’s graveside on the Somme, on Mary’s breast was pinned the badge normally issued to grieving mothers.39 Many graves wait much longer for a visit (and most, of course, were never visited at all).40 Emotionally and financially crippled by the loss of her ‘boy’, Alice Tickner dies without ever seeing his memorial. But she treasured the plaque issued in his name, a ‘token of esteem from the nation [and] the only reminder I can have of my dead son’. Twenty years after John was killed, his wife Dorothy finally made a family’s journey from Marrickville to Ypres. In 1976 she claims Lieutenant Tickner’s Gallipoli medal, the last ‘token of esteem’ the nation had to offer.41 Very few of these journeys would have been possible without a supportive network of family, friends and, of course, all the complex logistics which facilitate the travel industry. Having arrived in London, a pilgrim’s first port of call was Australia House, then (and well into the twentieth century) a ‘home, a connection, a rendezvous’ for expatriate Australians. From 1919 (when the first pilgrimages to ‘the war zones’ were permitted) an ‘Australian branch’ of the War Graves Commission occupied several rooms of the building. Staffed by AIF officers and adorned by murals of battle scenes, ‘the library [was soon] converted into a memorial chamber, in which a card index . . . giving particulars of every dead Australian soldier . . . was readily available to visitors’.42 The free service located the graves of Australians buried abroad and offered maps and travel advice for those who sought to find them. In 1923 alone, 850 relatives and friends called on Major Phillips. Amid the clutter of road maps and railway timetables, they charted the final steps towards a family’s reunion.43

A kangaroo bestriding the globe adorns the glass panel of the door, inviting his countrymen to enter, and, doing so, they will find themselves in a comfortable, handsomely furnished lounge, with the long travel counter on one side of them and a great selection of Australian and New Zealand books on the other. Armchairs and settees are at the disposal of visitors . . .44

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Conveniently, Australia House also hosted a travel agency. Having found ‘their grave’ prospective pilgrims were directed to the fourth floor of the building:

With seamless efficiency and no apparent thought of contradiction, the Australian Travel Service booked tickets to the theatre, motor tours to the country and a quick and comfortable passage to the cemeteries of France and Belgium.45 The ATS had close links with several travel bureaus and the most successful of these, ‘Southern Cross’, was managed by a woman. Australian by birth and a nurse by training, Miss L. E. Armstrong had done ‘splendid voluntary war work’ in London. Throughout the hostilities she sought out Australian soldiers; now ‘one of her chief objects’ was to help ‘Dominion Travellers’ anxious to visit soldier graves in Europe. Having travelled some years on the continent, arranging cars, guides and hotels came naturally. And Miss Armstrong knew Australians preferred Australians as company. In an astute business move, she hired the services of ex-AIF and New Zealand army men as drivers, guides and companions. Formerly of the 27th Battalion, ‘Doc’ Edwards married in France, mastered the language and combined the equally agreeable occupations of publican and tour guide. Though he’d ‘adopted France’, he’d not forgotten how to speak to Australians: ‘We greeted him with the usual: “Bon jour, monsieur,” . . . his answer [followed]: “Bon jour, messieurs . . . Well, how are you Aussies?” Services such as these didn’t come cheaply. A three-day trip to Amiens cost 15 guineas (sterling) including a first-class return fare, hotel accommodation, private limousine and officer guide. Visits to the Northern Front (via Boulogne) also ran to 15 guineas, and the most expensive tour (encompassing Flanders and the Somme) almost half as much again.46 There were less expensive ways to visit the war graves and more frugal pilgrims certainly made use of them. A chain of hostels was organised by the Young Men’s Christian Association, St Barnabas, the Salvation Army and Toc H (a Christian fellowship active during the war). They offered board, lodging and a measure of companionship conducive to a pilgrimage. By using rail networks rather than private cars, sharing rooms and expenses, the cost of touring the Western Front fell from £20 to £4 (stg). By 1924 ‘pages 73

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of Australian [names]’ filled the ‘historic visitors’ books’ of Talbot House in Poperinghe, ‘many “bruised hearts comforted” by the welcome they found there’.47 The poorest of pilgrims also received financial assistance. For much of the 1920s government grants and private subscriptions subsidised needy pilgrims’ fares and expenses. For the most part, Australian travellers were ineligible (and few would have sought such assistance). But Australians killed abroad often left impoverished parents in the home country. ‘An Australian Woman in London’ chanced to meet them: One department in Australia House that really deserves a cheer is the Graves Section, under the management of Major Phillips. The way they look after the mourners, especially the very poor, is fine. The other day I happened to call there with a message, and a broken [hearted] woman was waiting to see Major Phillips. Her case was a particularly sad one, and it was good to see how it was handled. In the end, out of a little fund, she was given the means to do what she had never dared to hope for – to go to Belgium to see her son’s grave.48

As Major Phillips’ kindness suggests, guides, hotel-keepers and War Graves staff attended to the emotional as well as the physical needs of their pilgrims. A good deal of Miss Armstrong’s success probably had to do with the fact that she was a woman, and one prepared to counsel, comfort, listen. The same might be said of the many ex-padres and clergymen (Rev. P. B. Clayton MC and Rev. Molyneux amongst them) who came to the aid of the pilgrims.49 But sometimes these travellers stretched the patience of even the most charitable. A voluntary worker for St Barnabas, Dorothea Bowen, found the Welsh appreciative, the New Zealanders polite and Australians (on the whole) really ‘very odd’ and ‘rather trying’. Her letters to her mother convey the stress of managing the crowded hostel at Amiens, the unrelenting physical and emotional labour. We are going to be fearfully busy tomorrow, [and] we have some rather unpleasant people here at present, Australians, man, wife, and 7 . . . year old child. The child is spoilt and the others take everything for granted and then run down the English. They are putting the child into a convent school and may be here indefinitely! I can’t think why Mr Molyneux told them they could come, we aren’t a boarding house.50

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Dorothea Bowen much preferred people of her ‘own class’ or pilgrims who knew their place, both in the hostel and the Empire.51 Placing Australia’s pilgrims is a meticulous exercise. Their names and addresses are neatly inscribed in heavy and dusty shipping ledgers: the pages seem to break as one attempts to turn them. Recovering the actual experience

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‘bruised hearts comforted’: the YMCA’s guide to visiting graves in France and Belgium. A setting sun signifies the end of a journey, the neat rows of wooden crosses dwarfed by Bloomfield’s memorial. This overtly Christian imagery was qualified in the years to follow.

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of these early journeys is an even more painstaking enterprise. Often written records are of little value in retracing the steps of these early pilgrims; one is obliged to search beyond the formal repositories of memory, to think and look laterally. Photographs offer one such way of seeing: a rich, complex and intensely subjective visual narrative, ‘a conduit of memory’.52 The photographic record of pilgrimage is often fragmentary, damaged, elusive. One catches a glimpse here and there; the flickering newsreel of mothers draped in black drifting towards the shore at Helles, a chance report of the King conversing with ‘his loyal Australian subjects’ in a cemetery by the Somme, the blurred and pixilated image (caption: ‘Pilgrims Searching’) that heads a column of newsprint.53 But photographs preserved in private archives are perhaps the most eloquent. They still link families to their past, contextualised and sometimes contested by living memory. There are surprisingly few written records of the first major pilgrimage to Gallipoli. Reports of the Ormonde’s voyage to mark the unveiling of the New Zealand Memorial at Chunuk Bair are brief and uninformative. But a tattered album fraying at the sides helps us to retrace the journey. The photographs are left as a long-dead hand arranged them: ‘passengers landing at Kheila Bay’, the first panoramic views across the Peninsula, the speeches and ceremony that accompanied the unveiling. Unintentionally or otherwise, the camera scans the emotional spectrum of pilgrimage. Travellers offer a smile as horsedrawn carts jolt their way along the ridges; the youngest of the women are smartly dressed, a dab intrepid, perhaps enjoying the novelty of their discomfort. An old man wears a tweed suit and cloth cap, dressed more for a country shooting party than a pilgrimage. ‘On our way to Chunuk Bair’ suggests a community of travellers. Only one car could be found to carry the official party, its suspension hardly equal to the rutted tracks of the Peninsula. The photographs of the unveiling are another matter entirely. Here there is order, ceremony and a structured inequality. Officials of one sort or another dominate proceedings: the bugler who sounds the last post, the clergyman who leads the prayer, the old soldiers and even older politicians who address the assembly. Set below them are a sorry company, bareheaded men and stiff grieving women. One mother dressed in mourning has slumped to the ground, physically and emotionally exhausted. The old man dressed in the same tweed coat wipes what may well be a tear away from the prying gaze of camera.54 Alongside mass pilgrimages are family snapshots of family journeys. Jane McAdam and her daughter Margaret visited the Somme some time in the early 1930s. They stand alongside the grave of a son and a brother: Jane’s hand presses firmly on James’s headstone; Margaret’s eyes are squinting

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‘on Our Way to Chunuk Bair’: a straggling convoy of carts and donkeys winds its way across the ridges. The model-T Ford near the summit was owned by the War Graves Commission and satirically dubbed ‘our Rolls Royce’ by bruised and weary travellers.

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‘bare headed men and stiff, grieving women’: pilgrims at the unveiling of New Zealand’s Chunuk Bair Memorial. Chunuk Bair was the highest point taken on the Gallipoli Peninsula; hundreds of New Zealanders perished in the bitter fighting. The dedication reads ‘From the Uttermost Ends of the Earth’; as true of this intrepid company as it is for the men who died there.

with emotion. These women are privileged, of course; travelling from tropical Queensland they have purchased fur stoles especially for the occasion. But their grief is universal; the experience of thousands of mothers, sisters, loved ones. And it is grief still remembered by the McAdam family. Three of my Grandparents lost their brothers in the First World War . . . My daughter and I visited the grave of James in June this year. My daughter was also at Gallipoli on Anzac [D]ay . . . Every year[,] I put a memorial [notice for] the soldiers of our family that died in the war in the Mackay paper . . . [T]he photos [were] taken in Daours Cemetery in France. I am sure they will be cared for.55

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Enclosed with the photographs was a battered postcard of the wooden cross first raised to James McAdam’s memory. It is in the cemeteries themselves that one stumbles across evidence of otherwise forgotten journeys. Words carved in stone will echo a family’s grief across the ages. In 1922 the Grimwades carried a block of blackened granite from their home in Melbourne to their son’s grave at Gallipoli. Even

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‘grief still remembered’: mother and sister stand by Private McAdam’s grave in Daours Cemetery. An extended epitaph declares a family’s loss, framed by a wreath of vivid white flowers. Since Jane and Margaret’s pilgrimage in the 1930s, three generations of the McAdam family have made the same journey. The insert depicts the original cross raised by the War Graves Commission; note the private memorial still standing behind it.

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for this much-travelled family, Gallipoli was a difficult destination. It took all the Grimwades’ wealth, influence, and connections with the Royal Navy to secure a passage there. Propped up against the stark white of the regulation headstone, the dark stone’s simple message – ‘ever loving remembrance’ – moves onlookers to tears eighty years later: ‘I tried to imagine the journey of the parents – a long sea voyage in 192[2] – with this heavy rock – an attempt to bring ‘home’ to a son who could not come home. The weight of the rock seemed to represent the weight of their grief.’56 Others sought to incorporate their journey into the official process of commemoration. Lieutenant Hugh McColl was killed as the Germans retreated from Villers-Bretonneux in 1918. He was twenty-nine years old. Five years on, the family stood in silence by his graveside. The tomb remains a witness to their reunion. JAMES H. McCOLL, FATHER WITH WIFE AND DAUGHTER VISITED THIS GRAVE AUGUST 25TH 1923, BRINGING LOVING REMEMBRANCE FROM FAMILY AND FRIENDS IN AUSTRALIA57

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Neither of these memorials had any official sanction. The message on McColl’s headstone is three times the maximum length allowed by the Imperial War Graves Commission. Like the Grimwades’ stone, it breached the ‘principle of uniformity’ that governed the establishment of all such military cemeteries. All graves were to be alike, regardless of rank, regardless of religion and ‘no private memorial’ was supposed to be permissible. But as we’ve seen, there were always exceptions, especially for those with wealth, power and social standing. Then there were those who took something of the cemeteries home with them. From the early 1920s pilgrims to the cemeteries of the Great War begin the near continuous carriage of broken earth and rusting metal back home to Australia. Badges, buttons, bullets, and the ubiquitous pressed poppy, all became mementos of such journeys. Some are still proudly displayed, reverently arranged alongside photographs of weddings and grandchildren: a self-conscious continuum of family memory. Acquiring these artefacts was not a matter of simple souveniring. A cone carried from Lone Pine in the St Barnabas pilgrimage of 1926 became Mrs Cole’s ‘most treasured possession’. It was somehow sacred, a relic, nourished with the blood of loved ones who died there: ‘A wonderful sense of peace has possessed me since [then] . . . I have treasures that can never be taken from me.’58

I talked to a mother who had been to the summit of Chunuk Bair to lay a wreath on the spot where her boy was last seen. So steep was the latter part of the way that a special light car was necessary to take her to the spot, but coming back she insisted on walking. Four miles she tramped under the blazing sun, past Lone Pine and through Shrapnel Valley, and rejoiced in her weariness. ‘For,’ she said, ‘I have actually walked the way he went, and been able to share a little of the hardship.’59

Sharing the hardship was very much the object of these deeply spiritual journeys. The point, as one St Barnabas traveller after another put it, was to see what the soldiers saw, feel what they felt and thus be brought somehow closer to their loved one.60 Travel, in this context, acquires knowledge through suffering. It involves ‘a stripping away of the accommodated self’ to arrive at some higher meaning.61 And it is very much the province of the bereaved, those who nursed their grief and clung desperately to memory. Nowhere is that better illustrated than in the pilgrimage of H. B. Higgins. The journey of Justice Higgins is by far the best recorded of all these early pilgrimages. And that was exactly Higgins’s intention. From the day his son Mervyn was killed in action on the Sinai Peninsula to the moment of his own death twelve years later, Higgins was engaged in an elaborate and careful process of memorialisation. It was not just the ornate Celtic cross he had erected over the family tomb at Dromana in Victoria. Mervyn’s letters were typed and bound, his photographs framed and treasured, his officer’s kit assembled like a shrine in the family household. When one requests a dead soldier’s service record from the Australian Archives the folder is unlikely to run to a dozen pages; the bare details of postings and promotions – Mervyn’s service record swells to over a hundred. Between 1916, the year of Mervyn’s death, and 1924, when Higgins at last stood by his son’s distant grave, the High Court Judge writes one letter of inquiry, complaint or outright reprimand after another.62 For the father who loved him, Mervyn’s loss was inconsolable. The letters of condolence, the caress of family and friends, even the sympathy of his King, all that counted for nothing. ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life’ he wrote and that servitude of sorrow lessened little as one year folded into another.63 Reading Mervyn’s letters (as Higgins must have read and reread them) it is not hard to see why this boy was so treasured. The correspondence from Gallipoli, where Mervyn watched one mate die after another, conveys courage, compassion and dignity. Though Mervyn made light of the hardship and danger, there was a haunting tenderness in the loss

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Far less tangible but certainly as precious was the actual experience of the journey:

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of those he loved and a brave acceptance that he would probably join them.64 Lieutenant Higgins survived the suicidal charge at the Nek, one of the few officers to do so; posted next to a bitter desert war in Palestine, his bravery earned him the admiration of his men and a mention in despatches.65 The correspondence ends abruptly in 1916; his last letter consoling a friend ‘cut up’ over the death of his brother. Then the voice of that ‘ever loving son’ was covered over by ‘the heavy sands’ of the Eastern desert.66 The death of a son is always tragic but it was the waste of this war which most outraged Higgins. Mervyn was killed in a brief but savage action against the Turks at El Magdabha. The battle had little strategic significance and Mervyn was shot whilst taking prisoners. It should have been a consolation that the young soldier died almost instantly. He felt ‘absolutely no pain’, a comrade wrote, and the body was guarded by his men until the time came for burial. They lowered their young captain into the earth on Christmas Eve, burying him ‘right where he fell’. A rough wooden cross was raised and the padre read a service.67 But for the family back at home this swift death and hasty burial meant no last message, no final farewell, no chance of closure. What the correspondence also suggests is that everything done in the wake of Mervyn’s death, from epitaph chosen for the makeshift cross to the return of his dusty belongings to wet, windswept Dromana, served to prolong and sharpen the grief of his father. The whole process of public memorialisation went seriously wrong in the case of Mervyn Bournes Higgins. The first failings were easy to forgive. A lawyer schooled in procedure, Higgins accepted that weeks would often elapse between the first cable confirming death and some ‘greater detail’ from the chaplain and fellow officers. But the wait was torturous and in the meantime Higgins began the almost obsessive task of extracting every detail of his son’s service from the authorities in Melbourne.68 Mervyn might not be coming home but the kit was daily expected. When the four boxes finally arrived in Melbourne, two were railed and carted all the way to distant Dromana (a holiday residence, closed out of season) and two mislaid in the railway station at Mornington (the line stopped well short of Dromana). Higgins’s distress still howls from his hastily scribbled handwriting: first his son and then these ‘precious things’ had been lost in a kind of limbo. And all the authorities seemed capable of was ‘wooden inaction’: The records people say that Dromana is my ‘registered address’; but it is not . . . By a very little care, the officials could have found that my proper address is Malvern. I learn that two of the four cases have reached my home in Dromana; but what of the other two? And why should I have the painful duty of carting about any of the boxes!69

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But a little care seemed too much to ask of the authorities. Mervyn’s body was exhumed and re-interred on two different occasions; the cross that came to mark his grave denied him a soldier’s death (‘died of wounds’ was not quite the same as ‘killed in action’), absurd and ‘rigid’ rules prevented sending Mervyn’s photograph to friends and family in England, and even the War Memorial incorrectly recorded the action in which his life was taken. And when finally, seven years after his son’s death, Higgins found the strength to visit the grave, no memorial was there to greet him. Set on a lonely stretch of the Sinai Peninsula, the cemetery at El Magdhaba was still a wasteland; water could not be had, the plots were eroded by wind and all the plants had perished. The marble for his son’s tombstone had still not arrived, Mervyn lay buried in the ever-shifting sands amidst the nameless graves of ‘unknown soldiers’.70 One might well see all the protest as a product of Higgins’s pedantry: the picking, nagging, relentless correspondence, the weighing of evidence, all this could be expected from a lifetime in the courtroom. But that would belie its true significance. The Higgins correspondence reminds us of an unfathomable loss – the separation of an only son from a father who will always love him. And Higgins is as unforgiving of himself as he is those overworked and ill-resourced authorities, the clerks and officers who had to deal with anger and disbelief, who tried (however hopelessly) to offer comfort to the grieving. More than that, it bears witness to a terrible contradiction, the anguish of a sorrowing father sharpened by the taunt of bungled ritual, the gap between rhetoric and reality, private grief and public commemoration. But Henry Higgins did find some comfort in his pilgrimage. The correspondence draws to a close in 1924 and a softer kind of grief seeks solace in poetry. ‘The Grave at El Magdabha’, penned to the memory of a boy buried a world away, enables us to stand alongside not just one broken father but all those of his generation who made that first faltering journey: Ah, there he lies – moveless, in desert drear; His broad breast weighted with the sullen sand; The sword of the crusader marks him here, A parting tribute from that gallant band . . . He lies, in plenitude of rest, serene, He rooks not now of welter, horrors, grime; To him all was as if it had not been, For us – his death divides the course of time.

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. . . This, at the least, we know – in coming years Nothing shall do his honour stain; The test is over and the world with tears Will cherish those for whom the world were slain.71

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The world did indeed come to cherish the memory of the fallen. A decade after the end of the Great War, the cause of a great Australian pilgrimage was taken up in earnest. Gradually, but ineluctably, the focus of commemoration shifted, from small, private journeys of the bereaved to a mass pilgrimage of ‘truly’ national significance. In part, this was a response to imperial initiatives. It was not just that the St Barnabas tours had descended on Europe’s war graves72 or that a series of publications (with titles like Gallipoli Today or Ship of Remembrance) had excited new interest in these ‘distant sacred places’.73 In 1922 the King himself embarked on a pilgrimage along the Western Front. Though he travelled ‘with no trappings of state’ and dressed as a mourner rather than a sovereign, his presence conferred dignity and legitimacy ‘to an office of private devotion’. In predominantly Protestant Britain, pilgrimage was thus shorn of its catholic connotations.74 A few years later, the British Empire Service League planned the largest pilgrimage ever to be undertaken. Six thousand veterans would return to France to mark the anniversary of Armistice; a truly Empire event, 500 participants were invited from Australia. The failure of Australia’s Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League (RSSILA; forerunner of the Returned Services League) to join the 1928 tour has previously been explained in terms of nationalist sentiment. At stormy meetings of the League executive, veterans boycotted this British project in preference for a pilgrimage ‘planned and undertaken from Australia’.75 But that was not the only issue. The inability of the League to mount any tour of its own, let alone join one organised in Britain, reflected far deeper divisions within such associations of returned servicemen. Some saw the pilgrimage as an exclusive right of former soldiers. Outlining a scheme for a five-month tour of the Middle East, Gallipoli and Europe, J. H. Martin (State President of the Victorian branch) proposed chartering a troop ship (referred to as the RSSILA scheme).On the boat, ‘the old army discipline would be observed’, the men dressed, fed and quartered as soldiers. Partly it was a matter of ‘recalling the old times’, partly an attempt at warlike economies. Whatever the reason, women and children ‘would not be considered’. Martin’s proposals sparked a fierce controversy in several major

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papers and at meetings of the League throughout the country. The cause of ‘mothers, widows, and orphans’ was ‘pleaded by various speakers at the [Victorian] state executive’.76 Excluding non-combatants undermined one of the principal purposes of pilgrimage, namely to ‘keep before the rising generations the great war effort made by the British Empire’. And women, some argued, were a valued part of that effort. George Mitchell’s response echoes Bill Stagg’s concerns four years earlier: The great majority of soldiers will agree that the greatest part played in the war was that of mothers and wives, some of whom have experienced the anguish of losing a loved one. For that . . . reason the womenfolk should be given the chance of visiting the graves of those they lost, providing, of course, they are escorted.77

Mitchell’s chivalry aside, his remarks qualify the commonly held view of the RSL as a solid bastion of male privilege. As British studies have shown, veterans craved a return to their domestic lives as much as, if not more than, the old camaraderie of soldiering. And they acknowledged the suffering of women, sometimes seeing it as more bitter and enduring than their own. In any event, these two styles of pilgrimage, one a nostalgic rite of male comradeship, the other a shared ritual of remembrance, were (as a candid secretary admitted) ‘impossible to reconcile’. Rather than embark on ‘a series of small disconnected pilgrimages’ the scheme was abandoned altogether.78 The same month the Prime Minister’s Office was advised of the failure of the RSSILA scheme, a new pilgrimage project was brought forcibly to its attention. On stationery boasting ‘the approval of the Imperial, Commonwealth and Turkish Governments’ and lavishly decorated with Australian military insignia, Frank Redfearn offered Stanley Melbourne Bruce a double cabin on ‘our proposed pilgrimage to the battlefields of Palestine, Gallipoli and France’: ‘We would like, sir, the presence of the Prime Minister and Mrs Bruce; but if that is impossible, a Minister and his wife. Failing that, would it be possible for your Government to appoint a representative from the ranks of the party?’79 The letter went on to remind the Prime Minister that this would be ‘the first pilgrimage attempted from Australia’ and that he really should ‘take the opportunity of unveiling the Lone Pine Memorial on Gallipoli’. And if none of his ministers could be spared, the High Commissioner in London should be instructed to ‘meet the pilgrimage on Gallipoli and accompany it to London’.80 So brazen a breach of protocol prompted a firm censure from the Bruce Government. The Imperial Ex-Service Association was informed that the

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government had yet to be advised of details of the scheme, let alone grant its ‘approval’.81 Initial inquiries were not at all promising. Far from being an original Anzac, Redfearn had had no active service abroad and was discharged from the AIF after falling from his horse. He had been found employment as a junior clerk with the War Graves Commission on Gallipoli but was soon dismissed ‘for personal reasons’. In a series of savage letters, Redfearn had then accused the Commission of falsifying burial records: ‘outrageous’ allegations duly investigated and ‘found false in every detail’.82 Lieutenant Colonel C. E. Hughes, the officer who had supervised Redfearn on the Peninsula, decided to write to him directly: ‘surprised is no name, to seeing you are Secretary, and an organiser of the first Australian Pilgrimage to the War Graves. From my experience of you I doubt if you could run a wheelbarrow parade, let alone a Pilgrimage, still it is wonderful what Australia can do for some people.’83 A wheelbarrow parade would certainly have been a good deal safer. Redfearn’s daring plan to land the pilgrims on boats at Anzac Cove ‘as in 1915’ made no allowance for ‘the bad weather conditions’ that plagued the Peninsula.84 It was also an affront to Turkish sensibilities. ‘Without in any way being personal or vindictive’, Hughes informed the government that Redfearn would ‘make a horrible mess’ of it. Anxious not to ‘endanger the success of the Pilgrimage’, Redfearn stood down as secretary a few weeks later.85 The loss of their founding secretary was only the first of the scheme’s setbacks. The Association’s relationship with ex-servicemen soon proved as fraught as their dealings with the government. At one level, the Association was keen to escape the aura of exclusiveness that had surrounded previous veterans’ initiatives. The pilgrimage, organisers insisted, would be ‘open to all’: former soldiers, grieving parents, even young people ‘keen to see the foundation stones of Australian nationhood’. But so warm an invitation did not fool everybody. The moment detailed costings were announced, G. de Tournouer, an ‘ex digger’ from Indooroopilly, took to the trenches: Major Lowther Clarke, president of the Officers’ Association of Australia (this is significant), announces that 250 ‘Aussies’ only will be allowed to participate in a war pilgrimage de luxe . . . at £230 (sic!!) only. Few of the ex rank-and-file or relatives of dead diggers are likely to avail themselves of this expensive privilege . . . On the face of it, this pilgrimage stunt looks very much like a repetition of one of the good old army’s most cherished shibboleths, that is: ‘Officers only: out of bounds to other ranks’.86

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What de Tournouer had in mind was more ‘democratic’ and (as such) much more ‘Australian’. One-class boats could be secured at A£80 return

I should like to know that while mothers, fathers and sisters who go are paying homage to their own who fell that they would be doing the same to my own boy. I feel sure that the Prime Minister has only to realise this point of view for him to act.91

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and travellers ‘pick their accommodation on shore as suits their purses’. And for democratic precedents, where better to look than America? ‘The Yankee pilgrimage’ (which had toured the Western Front in 1928), ‘was not limited to a few well to do participants’, troop deck accommodation cut even the lowest steerage rate and that, de Tournouer explained, was all a single bloke required. Women and children could muck in together in the cabins.87 Major Clarke’s ‘Wonderful Specially Conducted Inclusive Tour’ serviced a very different class of traveller, those who sought to see the world in ‘tolerable comfort’ and take in the sights from Cairo to Constantinople. And that, in de Tournouer’s eyes, made it something other than a pilgrimage: ‘I [hold] the view shared by most soldiers who did not win the war behind the front, that the term “War Pilgrimage” d[oes] not apply to Mr. Clarke’s sightseeing trip . . . it is not, in any sense [a pilgrimage], but merely a tourist stunt.’88 De Tournouer’s views were no doubt shared by many former soldiers. They echo abiding divisions in Australian society, between digger and officer, the poor and the privileged, those who went to war and those who ‘shirked’ it. The view of the civilian population is much harder to categorise. Many must have felt resentment as they read of an itinerary encompassing ‘attractive Mediterranean ports’ and well-appointed hotels. How could the death of loved ones justify such flagrant indulgence? But others viewed the venture far more favourably. Unlike earlier schemes, Redfearn’s made no claim on the public purse. Nor did it rely on charity, or ask the public to choose between pilgrimages for the few and memorials for the many. And though some of the destinations were undoubtedly ‘a tourist stunt’ there was no denying the attraction of history. Promotional literature by Burns Philp & Co. (the agents chosen to administer the tour) made much of the fact that this was the first pilgrimage to be organised from Australia.89 As such, it answered a longing the finest of war memorials had never entirely satisfied – ‘to see where [our] sons fought and died’, and actual places ‘made famous by the diggers’. The ‘mother of a boy who gave his life on Gallipoli’ urged the government to participate: ‘there should be convened some [sort of] ceremony when the Australian pilgrims . . . reach the Peninsula. I am not in a position to join the tour, but I and many others will follow it with great interest.’90 An official ceremony would transform this private tour into a truly national occasion, the grieving at Gallipoli could come to signify every family’s loss, not just who could afford to be there:

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But the Prime Minister faced a dilemma. From the outset the government had distanced itself from this most unlikely undertaking. As the date of departure drew closer, the project gained a legitimacy no one could have anticipated. ‘Sorrowing’ fathers joined a host of grieving mothers demanding some sort of recognition: ‘What will other nations, what will our own people think, if our pilgrims are allowed to pass by in silence?’92 The government also faced questions in both Houses of Parliament. The fact that the Australian Memorial at Lone Pine had never been unveiled strengthened (as Redfearn hoped) the case for some kind of ‘official presence’.93 Finally, the tour promoters themselves proved surprisingly astute at manipulating differences between State, local and federal governments. Redfearn may have been shunned by the Commonwealth but he was welcomed by city mayors, State premiers and even vice-regal representatives. That welcome was warmest in the southern-most State of Tasmania. Always in danger of being ignored by the mainland, Tasmanians were not to be denied their moment of glory. Proportionately, they had lost as many men on Gallipoli as any other State of the Commonwealth. The Premier pledged a wreath, as did the mayors of Launceston and Hobart. And, much to Redfearn’s delight, the Imperial Ex-Service Association now found royal patronage. Sir James O’Grady, Governor of the State and himself a war veteran, drafted an address to be read at Lone Pine. Independent of the authority of the Commonwealth, and even without reference to his own Governor-General, the King’s man in Hobart granted vice-regal sanction to the ‘opening’ of the Australian memorial.94 Commemoration, as we’ve seen, can be a complex business. In this case too, there was no one official response to Redfearn’s proposal, and a survey of the daily and weekly press suggests that public opinion was even more divided. But what makes the first ‘truly Australian’ pilgrimage all the more significant is the way it forged ‘a community of grief’ across a wide crosssection of Australian society, bridging the gap between ‘private loss’ and ‘publicly sanctioned memory’.95 Nowhere is that process more clearly seen than in the Wattle Tribute.

The Wattle Tribute In May 1929, just a few weeks before the first party of pilgrims was due to leave Australia, a scheme was announced to ‘decorate’ the graves of Australian soldiers. ‘Those Who Cannot Go With Pilgrimage Can Send a Thought’, newspaper headlines promised, ‘Tokens of Wattle Sprigs . . . to Reach Graves 88

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in any Country’. The scheme was managed by major dailies in Tasmania, Victoria and South Australia. Sprays of artificial wattle, ‘artistically’ arranged and ‘packed in a gold-coloured box’, could be ordered through newspaper offices or purchased at several major department stores. Priced at 1s 6d per spray they were within the modest means of most Australian families. Purchasers filled out the name, rank, unit and number of their soldier, noting the cemetery and country in which their loved one was buried. On the back of the card was a space to add one’s own name ‘and any verse or lines’ the sender felt appropriate. This was at once private and a public gesture; the individual and personal set within a framework of collective mourning. Aided by the War Graves Commission, each token would be placed with ‘much care’ on that ‘distant final resting place’.96 They came to be called ‘symbols of remembrance’ and were welcomed by all who had felt the loss of war: grieving parents, widowed wives, orphaned children and, of course, returned servicemen. Sir John Monash, unchallenged leader of the Victorian RSSILA, thought the scheme ‘thoughtful and commendable’: [It] answered a longing in the hearts of the bereaved to bring the graves of their dear ones nearer. ‘If I could only see my boy’s grave just once I should be content’ is an oft-repeated statement . . . Few, very few can afford the expense of [such] a long journey . . . and the health of many would [simply] not permit [it]. To forward some token of remembrance and to know for certain that that token will be placed on the grave will be a solace to many a sad heart.97

The clear inference here is that the wattle achieved some kind of reunion, between men dead a decade and the families who still loved them. Though these boys ‘will never come back’ they were ‘linked’ nonetheless ‘in the chain [of remembrance] that binds them’ to distant loved ones. The fact that the bereaved addressed the tribute, carefully inscribing the name of the dead, and usually adding some private message, also fostered a sense of personal connection. ‘Pathetic little incidents’ were a daily occurrence in Melbourne’s Myer Emporium. Grieving mothers gathered in the Florist Department and fumbled for the words of a last farewell.98 The message itself was thought to have efficacious properties. Even when a grave could not be located, when a man had been buried at sea or was simply ‘missing’, the token would be laid at the base of a dedicated memorial. In this way ‘the words would reach them’. And like the words, the symbol of remembrance had been carefully chosen. In postwar Australia, wattle triggered powerful emotional associations. Mrs Snowden Hay, President of the Mothers’ Association in Tasmania, described the choice of that particular flower as ‘splendid’: ‘Wattle is a happy thought, 89

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for in wartime it was often sent in letters from home, and the thought of a spray of wattle on a far and loved one’s grave will bring them nearer home’.99 Home is the operative word here. To many, the wattle was a ‘symbol of Australia’ embodying what historians called ‘a sense of place and shared significance’ and bearing a heavy symbolic burden: Wattle means much to every Australian, chief glory of the spring, it is remembered by the absent with longing . . . and half a world away one sprig of it can hold the very sunshine of Australia. To no other Australians did it mean so much as to the soldiers abroad . . . they knew they might never see again the beauty of [their country].100

At its height, the Wattle Movement commanded newspaper headlines in three States of the Commonwealth; many hoped a grateful nation would lay a tribute at the grave of every soldier. But it never came to that. Managed by related newspaper concerns in Melbourne, Hobart, Launceston and Adelaide, the Wattle Movement was both an urban and a southern phenomenon.101 Nor could it claim to be genuinely Australian. Rumours broke out that the sprigs of artificial wattle were manufactured en masse in Germany and despite the insistence that this was a ‘non-profit concern’ there was also a sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere would make money out of it. To profit from the grief of others revived bitter memories of wartime profiteering. In all some 3000 tokens were dispatched, hardly enough to cover more than 30 000 known graves and some 20 000 memorials to the missing.102 The real significance of the movement is not to be measured in how many tokens were purchased. Much more important is the fact that the Wattle Movement helped to rehabilitate the public image of Redfearn’s pilgrimage. While the question of government patronage had always been problematic, the War Graves Commission was now committed to distributing the tokens. It gave immeasurable prestige to a pilgrimage officials had first likened to a wheelbarrow race. And it changed the role of the pilgrims themselves. No longer were they simply the officer class, touring Australian battlefields to retrieve a sense of their own importance. Styling themselves the ‘United Services Association Tour’ (ex-Imperial dropped discreetly from their title) they bore the messages of loved ones from Australia: their journey would represent the grief of a nation.103 Within days of the Baradine sailing from Sydney, Major Clarke firmly refuted the allegation that they were no more than ‘ordinary tourists’. The tokens they carried (and the burden of their private grief) loaned their journey a higher purpose.104 90

The P&O liner Baradine departed Princes Pier, Melbourne, on 5 June 1929. Though quickly dubbed the Gallipoli Ship by the press, her real destination was Egypt. There some eighty-seven pilgrims would disembark for a tour of the Holy Land, transhipment to Turkey and the remainder of their passage. In all, the expedition would traverse thirteen countries and visit twice as many major cemeteries. A ‘journey of remembrance’ required an exacting itinerary.105 The farewell for this first Australian pilgrimage was a ‘sight to stir the imagination’, particularly if the imagination happened to belong to a journalist:

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‘A journey of remembrance’

[The pilgrims] sailed to the Mecca of their memories, to the ‘Peninsula’ with its lonely graves and to the war scarred fields of France. They were mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, friends. Most of them had never met until they leant over the rail today, but they had some common bond in that some of their kindred were resting in foreign soil. They laughed, shouted. . . . gestured, and sang . . . to the hundreds of friends on the pier . . . Only here and there was seen a small figure in black, already thinking lonely thoughts of Lone Pine and Flanders.106

Sponsored by the United Services Association, it is hardly surprising that so many of the party were ‘former soldiers’. There was also a padre, a medical officer and two former nursing sisters. The civilian contingent included ‘several war widows’ and a number of parents determined ‘to see the last resting place of their boys’. It was, as de Tournouer had predicted, a deluxe pilgrimage. A survey of the passenger lists identified the wealthier streets and suburbs of all Australian capital cities; service dossiers suggest that the family graves these pilgrims visited were almost always those of non-commissioned officers or officers.107 De Tournouer had also wondered if the trip would have more to do with sightseeing than pilgrimage. The tension between a tourist’s pursuit of pleasure and the solemn task of commemoration was evident from the very outset. Arriving in Egypt, the company climbed the pyramids, sailed the Nile and paid their respects at Australian cemeteries in Cairo and Alexandria. They then motored through the Holy Land, retracing both the bible stories they had ‘read in childhood’ and the path the Anzacs had followed ‘when they swept the Turk out of Palestine’. Like every good holiday package, the pilgrimage catered for the varied moods, tastes, age and stamina of 91

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the party: some ‘bathed in the Jordan River’; others continued their study of ‘famous sites’ and buildings.108 But all climbed Mount Scopus and visited the cemetery there for British and Australian soldiers. Here (in the classic paradigm of pilgrimage) they sensed the presence of God and felt the world and themselves transfigured, here the tourist took on the guise of the pilgrim: Father Mangen, on behalf of the pilgrims, placed wreaths on the shrine, and spoke of the great . . . sacrifice made by Australia’s sons, who were buried on . . . ground sanctified by Christ. All joined in the Lord’s prayer. Then, as they ascended to the town, they watched the rays of the setting sun striking the rows of crosses. Turning their gaze, they could see in the distance the garden of Gethsemane, a symbol of supreme sacrifice.109

From the Holy Land, the pilgrims journeyed on to Gallipoli. There an equally powerful landscape awaited them. Most accounts that survive belong to the genre of eye-witness journalism. The Herald sent its ‘Special Representative’, J. C. Walters, on the tour. He wrote with a certain audience in mind – those who, as that bereaved mother put it, ‘would follow the journey with great interest’. The detailed reconstruction of specific situations allowed that audience to share vicariously in the experience of pilgrimage. But this was anything but disinterested observation. All the newspaper reports of the journey conform to a certain narrative pattern, they move (in a majestic and tightly organised sweep) from the general to the particular and back again. And they carefully exploit the emotional investment of their readership. The Herald’s first report of the Gallipoli pilgrimage headlines the success of the movement it helped to organise: ‘WATTLE FROM AUSTRALIA PLACED ON GALLIPOLI GRAVES’. Then follows the predictable appeal to patriotism: ‘Pilgrims Visit Scenes of Anzac Heroism’ contrasted, in swift succession, by the human ordeal of such a journey: ‘RELATIVES KNEEL AND WEEP/ WHERE LOVED ONES FELL’. The report that follows invites the reader to partake in the pilgrims’ journey; we move across not just the physical terrain of the Peninsula but also the emotional landscape that frames it. And it was a journey as much in history as the present.

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We approached the Dardanelles entrance before 4 a.m. in just such blackness and a calm sea as on the memorable morning of April 25, 1915. Dawn broke beside the Helles lighthouse and immortal V beach, lighting Achi Baba, the un-won goal of the British forces. Away on the left stood out the heights on which Australians and New Zealanders forged our nationhood.

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As the party lands on the Peninsula the journey slows considerably, names seem landmarks in themselves – Gaba Tepe, Shrapnel Valley, Quinns and Courtneys. The party follows ‘the old Turkish line’; eighteen years on, trenches and wire still divided ridges and gullies. And from this epic setting, we step quietly on to the hallowed ground of Lone Pine Cemetery. The focus suddenly shifts, from the landscape itself to those who visit it: There, on the spot that marked some of the most stubborn fighting of the whole campaign, we held a little service . . . Mothers, sisters and fathers sought the graves they had travelled so far to see. They knelt and wept . . . Most pathetic of all were those whose only keystones of memory were the names engraved among the 5,000 other missing on the granite tablets. They placed little wreaths below those names and, like the others, wept.

Gallipoli soon proved no less miraculous than the Holy Land. Private Vincent O’Shea was one of hundreds who ‘vanished’ in the August offensive: shot in the head, the bank clerk turned soldier was last seen staggering towards the Turkish trenches. Throughout the war, his mother was ‘tormented by what might have happened to him’. Like so many others, she had heard ‘the story of a mother whose son had been found with his mind unhinged after he had been posted as missing’. Mrs O’Shea wrote relentlessly to the authorities; there were rumours he’d been seen on a hospital ship, questions surrounding the identification of the body. When at last the death was ‘confirmed’ she resolved to one day visit his memorial: just a single name on a ‘massive screen wall’ dedicated to the missing.110 As she scanned the panels at Lone Pine, an official from the War Graves Commission approached and offered to help her. The name seemed strangely familiar: wasn’t this the same dead soldier he’d recovered from a ‘scrub tangled’ battlefield?111 Mrs O’Shea was led down a long line of stones to one that ‘marked [her son’s] resting place’: ‘She knelt, seeking to hide her emotion, and, on the neatly trimmed green she placed a little sprig of golden wattle. What had been meant for a name symbolising a memory was laid over a body.’112 Vincent O’Shea, lost for nineteen years, had finally been laid to rest, the ‘abstraction of a name’ exchanged for an actual body. It was a ‘happier mother’ who returned home to Australia, full of the news of this ‘wonderful discovery’.113 The wonders of Gallipoli were short-lived. The first Australian pilgrimage spent less time on the Peninsula than most modern-day backpackers. A single morning was devoted to Lone Pine and the ‘renowned’ ridges that surround it. There was no re-enactment of the landing at Anzac Cove, and though a few rambled up Monash Gully the terrain once again defeated these adventurous Australians. Instead much time was given over to

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public (and the organisers hoped) newsworthy commemoration: the distribution of wattle sprigs on family graves, diplomatic exchanges with the Turks and the reading of messages from General Birdwood, Prime Minister Bruce and the Australian Governor-General. The last was a compromise adopted by a greatly embarrassed Commonwealth Government: to this day there has been no official unveiling of the Lone Pine Memorial. Within forty-eight hours of their arrival, the pilgrims were steaming up the Dardanelles: three days of ‘rest and sightseeing’ in Constantinople awaited them.114 Over a week elapsed before the pilgrimage resumed in France. Having crossed the Mediterranean to Marseilles, a special train carried the party to Paris. There, on the anniversary of her husband’s death, Hazel Tench placed a wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier: ten years ago to the day, George Tench had bled to death when a German shell blew both his legs to pieces.115 From Paris, the party caught the train to Amiens and motored to the Australian cemetery at Villers-Bretonneux. Over the next seven days, they would follow the front line through the Somme and Flanders, traversing mile upon mile of near continuous cemetery. The battlefields of the Western Front bore little resemblance to the killing fields of Gallipoli. It was not just the physical nature of the terrain. At Gallipoli, the refuse of war lay all round them, the overgrown trench lines, discarded equipment, even skulls still entangled in wild thyme and rhododendron. There the memory of war had been ‘left to nature’.116 In France and Belgium, by contrast, a concerted effort was made to obliterate memory altogether. Ten years after the last shots had been fired, industrious farmers had reclaimed the fields and new townships had been raised from the ruins. All Flanders, one pilgrim wrote, ‘is like a vast toyshop’, the ‘newness’ of the farmhouses and villages at odds with centuries of human occupation. Only the cemeteries themselves provided evidence of the war but they too were the product of concerted human labour.117 The phrase most used was ‘garden’, a landscape both natural and contrived, a place, as one ‘weeping widow’ put it, ‘of Peace and beauty’. Elsie Brickhill called them ‘Gardens of Remembrance’ and ‘beckoned’ her readers ‘to follow her down a long path with lawns on either side [to] a beautiful cross . . . surrounded by hundreds of white headstones’. With ‘roses growing on [every] grave’ each ‘tended so carefully’ by a British soldier, the cemeteries were not so much places of death as ‘little gardens of England planted in France’.118 Row ‘upon row’ of flowers ‘fashioned a pretty quilt to warm the coldness of death’. In the breeze ‘they brushed their petals softly against the headstones, as though in a caress’. Here mothers found something other than a graveyard: ‘it was not the simple headstone and equally simple inscription

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that I saw but the laughing eyes and mouth of the boy resting so far from the sunshine he loved’.119 Finally, these were ‘sacred places’. Stones of remembrance, crosses of sacrifice, ‘pillared walls that give the impression of a Greek temple’ enshrined history, ennobled memory. The architecture of the Great War laid the butchered legions to rest even (it seemed) when there was no body left to bury. Memorials like Menin Gate and Thiepval served as surrogate tombs. A writer for St Barnabas noted the great comfort they gave to those ‘wrinkled and bent’ with grieving: At last, their eyes saw the high white arch of the Menin Gates, cool and noble and soothing. Their eyes found, among the 55,000 names, that one name which burned like a flame, and rang out like a trumpet call, and suddenly they became beautiful . . . their faces shone with satisfied mother love as an ache which had hurt them for years was, in one glorious moment, swept away leaving an absolute calm . . . ‘I felt I wanted to kiss my son’s name when I saw it’, confessed one quiet little grey haired woman to me afterwards, ‘I feel so happy to have seen that name. He was killed in 1914 – 13 years ago – and ever since I wanted to tread where he trod. I am happy.120

The politics of pilgrimage This quest to transcend grief and death also served a political purpose for the living. The ‘cult of remembrance’ (as one historian has called it) sought to ‘sanitise’ the grim experience of death (and killing): it fostered a ‘nostalgia’ for past Imperial glories and prevented a ‘political critique’ of both the war and postwar society.121 At one level, the experience of Australian pilgrimage serves to confirm this analysis. Drawn from a privileged social stratum and imbued with deeply conservative values, several pilgrims expressed a sense of pride in their country’s sacrifice for Empire. With the Great War still the war to end all wars, the deaths of loved ones had both a dignity and a purpose. Reports of the pilgrimage emphasise its romantic quality: the landscapes of Gallipoli and the Holy Land are described (as we have seen) as ‘picturesque’ and alluring. And more often than not, the dead themselves are addressed as ‘resting’, ‘sleeping’, ‘fallen’.122 The way that carnage and brutality are neutralised by the language of commemoration is nowhere better illustrated than in J. C. Waters’ reminiscences of his journey. Replete with biblical metaphor, patriotic clich´e and a school-boyish sense of adventure, his Crosses of Sacrifice was inclined (Bean complained), ‘to over do it’:

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Never shall I forget the beauty of these ‘Parade Grounds’ that dominate the line of the Western Front – for that is how I like to picture them, with their inmates shoulder to shoulder, rifles at their sides, bayonets fixed, where the headstones stand so straight. Occasionally, in my wanderings over the battlefields of France and Belgium, I came across a solitary Digger with the Rising Sun badge on clean white stone, quietly sleeping in some little village cemetery or churchyard. At other times[,] I found as many as 600 in a field of 12,000, all soldiers. But wherever they lay . . . the War Graves Commission have fashioned for them a noble home. Here, pink and white petals from fruit trees drop softly upon them; there irises, roses, daffodils, snowdrops, heath, bloom above them.123

One should be wary of reading such accounts too literally. Personal, idiosyncratic and highly unpredictable, grief is not an emotion easily politicised. Remembrance, as David Lloyd’s study of British pilgrimage suggests, can deepen rather than sanitise grief, it can prompt despair, regret and (as Justice Higgins’s frustrating journey suggests) even anger. Reading between the lines of these patriotic accounts one senses an anguish even the most beautiful of gardens and memorial could never pacify. Amidst the ceremony on the Somme, many of the pilgrims ‘slipped off quietly to kneel at the graves of brothers and husbands’; an old woman wept for all the young men buried around her ‘Only fiends could favour war’ she cried out angrily.124 Even the Menin Gate, that ‘masterpiece of art and beauty’ seemed to some akin to an obscenity: ‘I had visited a dozen or so cemeteries before going to Ypres, but it took the shock of those 55,000 names filling its long and broad sides to drive home the human ravages of war.’125 The ravages of the peace also took a toll on our pilgrims. Having saved Europe from the Hun, Australians expected nothing less than the warmest of welcomes. Instead these self-proclaimed ambassadors faced indifference, discourtesy and even outright hostility. A former Mayor of Albany, Mr W. J. Day, knew something of the niceties of civic reception but ‘at not one town’, he complained, ‘did we receive an official welcome’: ‘The moment we reached France our troubles started. The Customs officers at Marseilles were intolerably rude. At Paris, we placed a wreath on the tomb of the Unknown Warrior, but there were no officials present [and the] Parisian shopkeepers fleeced us unmercifully.’126 The countryside was not much better. In Flanders, ‘where Australian graves lay thickest’, the ‘rudeness and coldness’ of the people was much resented. ‘[It was] as though we belonged to a nation that had fought against them’, one pilgrim complained, ‘not as though we had given the best of our manhood to save them’.127 And that rejection was particularly hurtful at

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the site of Australia’s greatest sacrifices on the Western Front: at VillersBretonneux on the Somme and by the Menin Gate in Ypres. Menin Gate was the war memorial most familiar to Australians. Straddling the roadway to the Ypres salient it commemorated all ‘the armies of the British Empire’ including our own. Some sixty Australian battalions had fought around Ypres, the names of 6000 Australian missing are cut into the cold white stone of the memorial. Opened by the King, the Great Arch was as much a landmark of the pilgrimage movement as the Cenotaph in Whitehall or the Tomb of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster. And, in a sense, many of the pilgrims had already seen it. Will Longstaff’s haunting picture Menin Gate at Midnight had been exhibited in Australian towns and cities in the months preceding the pilgrims’ departure. They, like tens of thousands of others, had ‘search[ed] the spaces between the shadowy helmeted figures’, figures that blend eerily with a field of ripening corn and blooming poppies.128 In 1929 one could not gaze at Menin Gate without re-visualising the ghosts of Longstaff’s picture. For that reason alone, the pilgrims’ reception in Ypres was particularly disturbing. The indignities began with a search through their belongings by French officials at the border with Belgium: ‘For an hour and a half they were kept waiting in the rain, the whole time craving to see the tiny graves where lay those who had been dear to them. And as they waited mobs of workers leaving the factories assembled to gloat and to jeer.’129 They were called ‘money-making foreigners’, profiteers who ‘prospered as a result of French sacrifices’. Most of the pilgrims were ‘too overcome to respond’ but one old soldier spoke for them all: ‘“Then it is a pity we ever fought”, he replied, thinking of the 59,000 Diggers who died that France might survive’.130 France had survived because the German Army had been turned back at Villers-Bretonneux. There Australian troops had held the line. Over 2000 hold it still in a cemetery where some 90 per cent of the burials are Australian. In 1929 there was still no Australian memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. A decade would pass before Lutyens’ distinctive tower (the last memorial to the missing raised on the Western Front) crowned the ridge overlooking Amiens.131 But the town had already become Australia’s ‘adopted city’. Donations from Victoria had rebuilt the school at Villers-Bretonneux, possums, lyre birds and wallabies are carved in its wood work, and the phrase ‘N’OUBLIONS JAMAIS L’AUSTRALIE’ emblazoned on the playground wall. For their part, the pilgrims would never forget their treatment at ‘Villers Bret’. It began with a simple discourtesy. The Mayor ‘hung up the receiver’ when attempts were made to present him with a wreath from the Lord Mayor of Melbourne. Not the sort to be easily discouraged, the pilgrims

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commandeered a motorcar, collected several officials from the War Graves Commission, and drove to the Mayor’s house. They were ‘coldly received’, and left ‘unrefreshed’ as one thirsty pilgrim put it.132 Though the French Consul would claim poor French or poorer English had caused some ‘misunderstanding’, the Mayor’s action was seen as ‘unpardonable’. Reluctantly accepting the wreath, he had told them money for the town would have been more welcome and more ‘practical’. Such blunt utilitarianism was at odds with the very purpose of pilgrimage.133

Journey’s end

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The first Australian pilgrimage crossed the Channel tired and disappointed. For a time there was talk of ‘some official protest’; but the diplomacy of Australia House and many a hearty English breakfast dulled the bitter taste of the Continent. Originally, this pilgrimage was to be the first of many. Not long after his return to Australia, the indefatigable Redfearn began negotiations with a number of travel agents. For A£276, a fourteen-week tour would retrace the original route through Palestine, Asia Minor and on to the battlefields of France, Flanders and Belgium. The accommodation would be first-class and the itinerary include a passion play in Venice, a climb in the Swiss Alps, as well as ‘visits to historical and beauty spots of England and Scotland’.134 It all sounded grand enough, but that was its very failing: the onset of economic depression ended this era of extravagant tourism. With overseas travel curtailed by as much as 40 per cent, and profits further cut by foreign competition, Burns Philp withdrew its interest in the venture. Indeed, the firm was forced to rationalise its services, largely confining operations to the Pacific. In an era of doubt and austerity, cheap sunshine cruises to the South Seas proved far more attractive to consumers than a long and costly voyage to the ever-uncertain lands of Europe.135 Of course, many people still made the journey. Throughout the 1930s there are scattered accounts of Australians seeking out the distant graves of their countrymen, mostly (as we have noted) widows, siblings and children. Two Australian Prime Ministers, Scullin and Lyons, combined diplomatic missions to Europe with a tour of Commonwealth war graves; the Western Front was on the itinerary of diverse cultural exchanges: cricket teams and rifle clubs, the Australian Welsh Society and the Primary Producers Association. But the vast majority of private travellers left not from Australia but from London and the plummeting value of the pound shortened these brief excursions to the continent.136 In 1935 Mrs J. Jeffries (an ‘Australian mother and voyageur’) reported that prospects were bleak for travellers; the

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hotels were dirty, the staff rude and a simple ‘cup of tea and roll’ cost the equivalent of 4 shillings.137 And as if the hotel tariff was not discouraging enough, the international situation was really quite intolerable. In 1926 an Italian vessel had carried St Barnabas pilgrims to Gallipoli and a fascist salute was offered over the graves of the Empire’s soldiers. By the 1930s the world was again dividing: the lands where Australians were buried soon became the object of bitter contention. Indeed, the most significant pilgrimage of this period took place as the memory of one war was about to be overtaken by the outbreak of another. In 1938 a ‘contingent’ of Australian soldiers, veterans, wives and officials left Australia to attend the opening of the new memorial at Villers-Bretonneux. This time the Mayor was very pleased to see them.138 In the years that followed World War Two, the cemeteries of World War One became largely forgotten places. It was not just that the immediate families of the dead had joined them; once the Great War had been steeped in history, it was the war to end all wars, the making of Empire and nations. In the 1950s, the Great War became World War One, one more war among others and perhaps just the prelude to a truly global conflagration. It was not until the 1960s, and the fiftieth anniversary of the Gallipoli landing, that pilgrimages really resumed, led by ageing diggers determined to make one last journey to the battlefields. By then, it was the children of the dead, their nieces and nephews, who sought out the graves of relatives, relatives they had never really known. And in an age of air travel, pilgrimage involved a very different kind of journey.

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‘Sacred places’: family pilgrimage today At the age of eleven, Alex accompanied her family on a War Memorial tour of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Daily she observed her mother quietly weeping, her father grim and silent, her brother strangely distant. And day after day, Alex walked across a landscape charged with grief and stories. ‘It was such a beautiful place’, she told me, ‘but we all got so upset there’. The full effect Gallipoli had on Alex was only really apparent on her return to Australia. Invited by her school to write a story of her travels, she focused on an old man’s pilgrimage to find where his father fought. All his life, James knew he needed to make a journey. It was a journey that would take him far from home and use up his life’s savings. Now, at the age of 65, he has made a decision to retrace his father’s footsteps – to walk the battlefields where his father [also named James] had fought as a boy of 17. Shortly before Anzac Day he set off with the diary which his father kept throughout the First World War . . .1

Alex was retracing James’s steps across the Peninsula as surely as James retraced his father’s. With a child’s attention to detail, she recorded the colours and sensations of ‘the journey’: . . . The clouds hung low as the bus approached the road to Hill 60. The showers had cleared by the time the bus reached the turn-off but the road was still too muddy . . . James strode forth . . . mud [clinging] to his boots. He was surrounded by fields of ripening wheat [and] the . . . red of wild poppies. In the distance, a shepherd and his dog herded goats in an olive grove . . . The road opened into a clearing with a small cemetery containing the graves of . . . soldiers and a memorial to those whose bodies could not be identified. James took out his father’s diary and imagined the scene which this boy soldier [saw] 85 years ago.2

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The lyricism of the passage captures, through a child’s eyes, the sullen beauty of the Peninsula. Here the landscape of war merges imperceptibly with the quiet industry of shepherds and farmers, the grey sky ‘and low

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hanging clouds’ sad, expectant, foreboding. Alex watched the old man heavy with grief, gazing restlessly at the graves all around him. What had happened eighty-five years ago seemed suddenly very real and immediate. A light breeze rustled around them as one of James’s companions read out a passage from the diary. Yesterday we marched from Anzac Cove to Suvla Bay ready for an assault on the little hill they call Hill 60. We hadn’t got very far towards our objective before the Turks opened fire. Jack’s brother was hit through the head almost immediately and blood and brains splattered all over us. Jack was kneeling next to me with his brother’s head on his knees. ‘My poor old brother’s dead, Joe’, he said. It nearly broke my heart to see those tears streaking down his face and trickling onto his brother’s lifeless body.3

As the passage was read out, Alex noticed that James too was crying. The sadness of the story was ‘overwhelming’; its brutality (then as today) etched on a young girl’s memory. It was only then that Alex understood why this old man had undertaken so long and so hard a journey. ‘He felt closer to his father now’, she wrote, closer than he had ever thought ‘possible’. The ghosts of those eighty-five years had finally been laid to rest at Gallipoli.4 Alex was a witness that day to something much more personal and much more intimate than history. She had taken part in what might well be called a ‘family journey’. Men like James personify three generations of pilgrims, the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of men who fought (and often died) in those battles over eighty years ago. Their visits to the cemeteries of the Great War are at once ‘a personal quest’ and ‘a family obligation’, a chance, as one respondent put it, to address ‘the terrible unresolved grieving process of [that whole generation] who could never afford to go there’. Their journeys, like James’s journey, have all the classic elements of pilgrimage: a quest to recover a part of oneself, an ordeal that traverses time and landscape, catharsis at the grave and/or site and a bonding with fellow pilgrims. But they are also, as Alex found, a reckoning with the past, an encounter with history. Stories like James’s offer us a vivid insight into what scholars have called ‘historical sensibility’.5 The specific motivation behind each of these journeys varied considerably. At one level the sudden popularity of pilgrimage has much to do with the flourishing of family history in Australia. The same urge that leads distant descendants to scour shipping lists in search of convict ancestors now takes hundreds every year to the Western Front and Gallipoli. Indeed, it is possible to chart changing fashions in desirable family lineage. With the wounds of Vietnam gradually healing, Australians seem intent on recovering their military heritage. The passing of the last Gallipoli veterans, the

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return home of the ‘unknown soldier’, the revival of the Anzac mythology by politicians of all political persuasions, all have added kudos to that long lost ‘digger relative’. ‘Finding him’ links these families to events that shaped the modern world and engages national discussions of what it means to be Australian. Most of these ‘family pilgrims’ were in the fifty-plus age bracket, many had retired or planned their pilgrimage around a lengthy holiday, many (like James) committed a large part of their savings to this journey of a lifetime. Very few were independent travellers. Couples were the most common, though several family groups extended to adult children. In one case three generations of a family gathered at Gallipoli, marking the eightieth birthday of father/grandfather who survived World War Two. In recent years a number of travel companies have catered to this (growing) pilgrimage market. Kontiki, Compass and Allsun offer bus tours and cruises of the greater Mediterranean, an optional Gallipoli segment ending the usual round of beauty spots and antiquities. ‘Anzac Season’ generally lasts from early April to the end of May, a host of local operators (based for the most part in Istanbul) ferrying young and old alike to the Peninsula.6 The Western Front is ‘serviced’ by any number of battlefield specialists (most of whom operate out of Britain) but many respondents arranged their own ‘weekend bus tour’ and quite a few drove themselves through France and Belgium. By contrast, only the bravest of pilgrims considered a hire car in Turkey.7 All these tours vary in price and professionalism; though probably the most highly regarded are run in association with the Australian War Memorial. Complete with impromptu lectures on every site, ‘readings from relatives’ diaries’ and the Memorial’s portable archive of ‘maps, charts and tapes [from] men that fought’ they are serious reckoning with history. The standards of some other tour operators do not seem quite as exacting. The tour we left on went from the town of Gallipoli (sic). There was a tape on the mini bus which had a Kiwi lady commentating. Except the bus driver started the tape on the wrong side and we sat for 20 minutes thinking we were looking at Anzac Cove but we weren’t. But we didn’t let it worry us.8

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The number, diversity and cost of these tours contrasts sharply with the experience of previous generations. It is not just that travel is more affordable and that tourism has opened up previously remote and inaccessible locations. There has also been a major shift of emphasis; more family pilgrims visit Gallipoli today rather than the Somme or Flanders and most depart from Australia rather than London. In some respects though, the experience of pilgrimage is largely unchanged. Signing on with any of these tours introduces the pilgrim to a diverse company of travellers. ‘Mac’ went with an

Our group included Hansonites [a nationalist group active in the 1990s] desperate to claim an Anglo heritage (and condemn ‘socialist governments’ south of the Queensland border), a member of the RAF who had been shot down over France . . ., retired folk looking up their relatives buried ‘over there’, two mother and son combinations, three farmers, three lawyers, one academic and a retired Army man in his late eighties who was very unhappy when he was told that he could not clamber up [and] down the gullies at Gallipoli. And there was one member of the tour who insisted that someone take his photograph at every memorial and every cemetery.9

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Australian Battlefields Tour, led by Dr Michael McKernan (one time director of the Australian War Memorial) and Rear Admiral Neil Ralph (retired).

More than half of these travellers had some family association with the sites they visited. They went to find family buried ‘over there’ or retrace the steps of relatives who somehow returned to Australia. And in many cases those who responded to my pilgrimage survey claimed to have ‘adopted’ a soldier. Aged in her early forties, none of Angela’s relatives joined the AIF: my great grandfather was an ardent Irishman and a Catholic as well. There was no question of his sons – of which there were a few, fighting an English war. I grew up . . . believing no Irish Catholic Australians went to war – a great disservice to those who did go.10

Angela’s pilgrimage began when she typed her own (Irish) surname into the data bank of the Red Cross Wounded and Missing Files. Albert Edward S. had disappeared on the heights of Hill 971, one of thousands simply lost in the August offensive at Gallipoli. She spent the better part of a day scouring the windswept ridges, picking her way through the thorny gorse and stumbling upon human remains that could well have been Albert’s. It was very strange the amount of emotion seeing his name on the panel at Lone Pine created. I really felt connected to him and even now when I think of it tears well up in my eyes. I remember thinking about his poor body left out with the other hundreds who were never identified and Albert not receiving any commemoration other than his name on the panel . . . the most affecting thing to me was the thought of all the mothers of all those men who knew the[ir] once little boys would never come home and never have proper burials.11

Though the vast majority of my respondents went to ‘honour [actual] ancestors’, responses like Angela’s are best understood through the prism of a family pilgrimage.

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For all these individuals family history is much more than a hobby. As Graeme Davison explains, it often ‘answer[s] a widely felt need to reaffirm the importance of family relations in a society where mobility, divorce and internal conflict tend to erode them’. In a few cases one suspects that a ‘digger relative’ was a link to an ‘older’, ‘simpler’ and less ‘multicultural’ Australia. Reclaiming this family history was invariably a studious undertaking. Many related what they called ‘serious footslogging in the library’, charting the life (and death) of an uncle, cousin or grandparent through unit histories and military archives.12 These official records were really only a confirmation of a family’s story. The real history of pilgrimage takes place on a personal plane, pieced together with the fragments of fading diaries or letters, half-remembered tales and descriptions ‘related by (now long-deceased) relatives’. Pilgrims recalled what they called the relics of a young man’s life, the photographs ‘hung above the telephone’ of an endlessly grieving grandmother, the medals prized by children each Anzac Day, the grim collection of personal effects (‘one pipe, one belt . . . one damaged wristwatch’), the final letters (beginning always with ‘I regret to inform you’) folded carefully in a family bible. In one case a respondent in his seventies insisted that his uncle had never really left them: every Sunday the uniform that came home without him was tenderly set out on the hallway table. ‘My mother’s brothers . . . were lovingly remembered’ another wrote, ‘and every time a family photograph was taken, large photographs of two boys were included in the picture, held by one or other of the family’.13 All these items, these material links to the past, are treasured and revered by pilgrims’ families. They can be touched, handled, fashioned into what one man called a ‘collage’ of memory. And like the stories of the men themselves, these artefacts are passed on, from father to son, generation to generation. I have my father’s medals from both world wars, uniform badges and battalion colour patches . . . My children and grandchildren all know about the Anzacs and the fact that their grandfather and great-grandfather was an Anzac. My son will eventually take possession of all these items and will eventually leave them to his son.14

Family stories

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It is the stories of these ‘boys’ that still breathes life into such belongings. Now in his seventies, John grew up in the country outside of Orange, NSW. A cadet in the air training corps from 1944–45, he never went to war, peace

As a child, I was always fascinated by the portrait of ‘Harold’ which occupied pride of place in my grandparents’ house. He was always ‘there’ somehow and when I asked my grandmother about him, she spoke of him as a living person. I somehow expected that one day I would turn up and there would

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coming just a few days ‘before I turned eighteen’. His uncles were not so lucky. All his long life John has lived with the story of Wesley and George, one ‘dynamic, outgoing, self-confident’, ‘a bushman who joined with the first recruits’ and ‘a deadly shot with a rifle’; the other ‘a pale thin young man, . . . [whose] ambition was to become a parson’. Their father allowed George to enlist ‘on the condition Wesley would look after him’ but on Gallipoli the two brothers were quickly separated. Sent as a sniper on an advanced sap at Steel’s Bluff, a single shell blew Wesley’s body to pieces. George helped dig out poor Wes’s remains ‘and after that did not seem to care much what happened to him’. George was killed the following morning, in the Turkish counterattack of May 1915. The final moments of his life are still recorded in a letter read and re-read by his mother: ‘The Turks made another big attack on us, and [George] was very reckless, exposing half his body above the trench, and he got a bullet through the head. I saw his body later on with a number of others . . . and unlike the others there was a smile . . . on his face.’15 There were no smiles when John and Pamela finally found these two men ‘both buried in the one grave . . . in Shrapnel Valley Cemetery’.16 John’s survey is instructive as to how family memory is preserved and perpetuated. His response is a collage of written and oral sources, official, personal and even anecdotal memory. It is prompted not just by archival research but also by the artefacts that even to this day are treasured. And it shows the intersection between what scholars have called private and collective memory. With diary in hand, John has charted his uncle’s journey across the ‘storied landscape’ of the Peninsula.17 Anzac Cove, Shrapnel Gully, Quinn’s Post were not abstract or empty place names – they resonate with meaning, with the saga of ‘the landing’. And John’s response reminds us that however private pilgrimage might seem it is also a collective undertaking. The details of the survey itself and the generosity of its author, suggest that these are memories that must be passed on, they are to be held in trust (rather like those medals), carried carefully from one generation to another. Nor was this unique to the oldest of my respondents. Though twenty years younger, Mac’s journey to Gallipoli took place within a very similar paradigm. At one level, this was (as Mac insisted) ‘a personal [even private] quest’, born out of his own ‘curiosity’ and a ‘need’ to find a man he had only ever imagined:

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be Harold sitting at the table. [But] I also knew that he was dead . . . killed on the Gallipoli Peninsula barely two weeks after he arrived . . .

Mac spent years researching Harold: ‘he was a good rover for the Dederang Football Club, . . . an insufferable teaser, [a bit of a lad] who enlisted without his mother’s consent’. And he finally ‘found’ Harold listed alongside the missing at Lone Pine: I was not prepared for the sense of loss that came with seeing his name chiselled into stone. I was surprised by an instinctive reaction to reach out and touch the letters. We were on the Peninsula for three days. Every day, I was drawn to Lone Pine and every day I placed at the foot of the panel a scarlet poppy plucked from the fields of the Peninsula.18

But the poppies were not placed there for Harold alone. Having embarked on a personal quest, Mac ended his journey in a very different way – not so much as an individual but as a family member, as Harold’s nephew, even as a distant descendant of that small community in Dederang, Victoria. When it came to writing his name in the visitors’ book at Lone Pine, Mac added ‘Ivy always missed you’. It was the message (and the memory) of Harold’s long-dead sister.19 Mike made a similar journey, a pilgrimage, as he put it, across time, space and memory. Like Mac’s account, Mike’s begins by grappling with history, both the formalised history of the archive and a less certain but equally evocative store of family memory: My grandmother was only about 6 years of age when Uncle Bill and Uncle Jack left for France and I can remember her telling me many times how she had a very vivid vision of them on the front porch of the house and how they were all hugging and kissing each other and very upset . . . She was a very religious person and from a strong catholic family. I know for a fact that a day never passed without her saying a ‘Hail Mary’ for her brothers, right up to her death.

As a child, Mike honoured his dead uncles, ‘proudly wearing [their] medals to school on Anzac Day . . . and explaining to the class about my uncle’s involvement in the war’. Now the same medals are ‘mounted in a frame . . . in pride of place in my study’, a study where his uncles’ story is remade and revisited.

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With the advent of . . . the Internet, I have researched the history of my Uncles and obtained their service records . . . To actually read documents which contain signatures, information and description of my uncles was an . . . emotionally draining experience. It makes you realise that they really were

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living people and not some ghostly or legendary thing of the past. I was particularly interested to see . . . the telegrams . . . regarding the death[s] of Uncle Bill and Uncle Jack . . . What must have gone through the minds of my Great Grandparents at the time? [Uncle Jack] was buried in a temporary grave . . . but it was obliterated during the course of the battle. [All that’s left of him now are] two small bibles, which I still have in my possession.

In search of his uncles, Mike set off to the Somme, did the usual ‘tourist things’ in Paris and Amiens and whiled away the hours (as his uncles no doubt did) drinking beer in the local estaminet. Then came a physical and imaginary journey across the sodden fields that claimed them. While I was driving around the peaceful countryside [near] Pozi`eres . . . I was trying to conjure up in my mind what it must have been like at that very spot 80 or so years ago. The area was basically rolling slopes . . . with brown soil in mostly fallowed paddocks . . . I tried to remember the trench lines and the noise and clamour of thousands of men in action . . . I was thinking to myself . . . ‘I wonder if Uncle Jack walked along this road’ or ‘I must be pretty close to the spot where Uncle Bill was killed’. To . . . look across the fields sent shivers up my spine trying to imagine what horror that particular nondescript piece of land held for many thousands of Australians and let’s not forget the Germans. I was thinking ‘Uncle Jack could be buried right here . . .’. It’s hard to explain but I think there’s a part of me there.

There’s a part of Mike’s grandmother there as well. First he found the memorial to Uncle Jack, one name amongst 10 000 others etched in stone at Villers-Bretonneux. I had a number of thoughts going through my mind but the main one [was] about my grandmother . . . I had tears streaming down my cheeks. It’s hard to describe, I wasn’t crying but tears welled up in my eyes. I am not particularly religious but I felt the need to say three silent ‘Hail Marys’ then, one for Uncle Jack, one for my grandmother and the last one for all the other men on the wall. I wish she could have been with me . . . I tried to touch his name . . .

Then on to Adelaide Cemetery, where the ‘brown fallowed paddocks’ again gave way to long rows of graves: To actually see his grave and read his name with the inscription . . . ‘A mother is silently grieving. Holy Mother of God Have Mercy on Him’ made me well up with tears again. I just stood transfixed and felt sorry for him. I am the first person in the family to visit his grave and I thought it was a shame that he had died a terrible death alone in a foreign country away from his family and that he had been there alone for 85 years. I said three silent Hail

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Marys again . . . [and] started to feel better. It was a bit of closure for me in some regards. I started to realise that although he died a horrible death under terrible circumstances, he wasn’t really alone. On either side of his grave were other members of his battalion who were killed on the same day, so he was amongst his mates.

Like Mac, Mike made a point ‘to touch his name on the headstone’. And he too left a message in the visitors’ book, a message left as much for a grieving grandmother as himself: ‘Uncle Bill we finally meet! You have never been forgotten . . .’20 John, Mac and Mike’s narratives have a number of features in common, not the least of which is that they were all written by men. A recent study of how Australians see the past suggests that the creation and care of a family archive usually falls to women. Unofficial ‘keepers’ of times past and recent, wives, mothers and aunts are generally the custodians of generational memory.21 Of course, war records may well be the exception; medals and military memorabilia are (as we’ve noted) usually the honoured inheritance of men. But the history these accounts convey goes well beyond so limited a material culture. Stories, rituals and memories come to the fore in these narratives, family business, ‘unfinished business’ taken up (with great care and reverence) by both women and men. Neither gender has a monopoly on grief or pilgrimage or history and no one kind of artefact was privileged: tattered bibles and loved ones’ letters are as cherished a record in these accounts as military dossiers and commemorative scrolls. Nor did John, Mac or Mike have very much to say about patriotism. The motivation behind these journeys was much more complex and far more personal. It was ‘a family situation’, many surveys declared, ‘not a glory thing’.22 That is not to say that family pilgrims did not express a sense of pride in being Australian (Australians travelling abroad usually do). Mike was pleased that his countrymen lay at last together and ‘looked at every Australian Soldier’s grave in the cemetery . . . to ensure that they had all been visited’. But this had more to do with a sense of shared community (and a powerful nostalgia for home) than the furious flag-waving encouraged every Anzac Day. Indeed, the cost of nationalism is made abundantly clear by the graves that line any of the Great War’s cemeteries.

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The ordinary soldier was so expendable [one mother wrote] no matter what nationality . . . I was overwhelmed by the futility of it all. All those fine young men dead, for what? What a waste! I felt equally sad for the loss of Turkish lives and German lives. I kept thinking of the phrase ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ . . . Reading my diary I come across the words: impossible, futility, stupidity, waste of young lives, mud, mud and more mud, sad, angry.23

A profound sadness is the best way I can describe my feelings. The beautifully tended gardens and flower beds somehow sanitise the unspeakable horror of what occurred in France and Belgium. Every gravestone or name on a memorial had a story of loss and grief for a family. As a father travelling with my thirteen-year-old son this often weighed heavily on my thoughts. What waste. How many young lives unlived [?] How many broken hearted mothers and grieving fathers . . . I found many of the inscriptions [there] the most deeply moving things I have read. ‘Darling Jack, how I miss you. Nobody knows but me. Mother’ . . . 24

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Fathers did not respond any differently:

Perhaps Mac’s ‘Hansonite’ conservatives read these sites differently, ‘desperately’ retrieving that male ‘Anglo heritage’ from acre after acre of unremitting loss. But the vast majority of the surveys I’ve received went in quite the opposite direction and many specifically derided the ‘jingoism’, ‘chauvinism’ and ‘rampant misplaced nationalism’ that often drive a country to war.25 Gender and nationhood are themes that bear revisiting. For the moment, let’s consider the fabric of these accounts and attempt a ‘thick description’ of the passage of family pilgrimage.

Reckoning with memory All these journeys involved a reckoning with memory, an attempt, as one respondent put it, to finish what was barely started. Many wanted to know why their grandfather had always been ‘so sad and so silent’; others regretted they could ‘never ask the right question’; one struggled all her life ‘to make a pen sketch’ of a father who was killed near Ypres.26 The men they remembered were broken by war, a father-in-law ‘with shrapnel in the lung . . . who carried his scars to the grave’, a grandfather who choked to death from mustard gas ‘twenty years after his return to Australia’, a father who ‘came back a different person’ and died in his early fifties.27 The oldest pilgrims belonged to what one called a wartorn generation: I was a child of the thirties [RTG wrote] when the impact of WWI was almost overwhelming . . . The loss of about 60 000 men from a population of three million had left lots of maiden aunts and ‘old maids’ in Australia. Many men we knew had suffered wounds and gas, [many] were disabled . . . Anzac and Armistice were quite solemn . . . [my uncle] . . . had been killed in Northern France . . . So from childhood, through school and family, we knew a great

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deal about [war] . . . the sanitised, romantic heroic version and also the . . . awful harsh reality.28

He would visit Flanders and the Somme to redress the wrong of a generation, ‘our generation that had been manipulated into looking at World War I as a time of glory for Australia and Empire rather than a great disaster’.29 Though thirty years younger, war had proved no less costly for Pauline. She had seen the damage it had done across three generations: I chose to visit Gallipoli because my husband is a Vietnam Veteran (TPI) and he will not return there. He has very strong views on the ‘waste of war’ . . . I felt I needed to go to experience maybe a release/prayer for all the trauma I have felt over Vietnam, what have we learned, war loss still goes on, etc. Say a prayer for all the lost lives on foreign soil and all the lives destroyed by psychological damage . . . My aunt was killed by her husband, a World War I Veteran, plus two or three policemen when they came to arrest him – he died in a mental asylum . . . I stood on the beach at Anzac Cove and my heart broke . . .30

Many of my survey responses read as if they were conversations, intimate, affectionate, full of an unanswered longing. The daughter of an Australian officer who survived Gallipoli and France, Winsome retraced her father’s steps across the Peninsula: We stood at Ari Burnu where the landing took place, and at Anzac Cove and at Shrapnel Valley Cemetery . . . It was moving to read the names and ages and the inscriptions on the gravestones, expressing the sorrow, love, pride, hurt, puzzlement, despair, hope and faith of the families. As I read the names of the 13th Battalion men I wondered if they were Dad’s friends, if he were with them when they died, or were buried. I wondered at his survival and of what his memories were over the years.31

Come Anzac Day, the wonder turned to reunion. Tears came to my eyes as the Last Post sounded . . . I found myself saying ‘I’m here for you today, Dad, and I’m here for all the family. There is so much I would like to talk about with Dad now – but it’s too late for that.32

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What one senses here is a need for completion, a desire to lay to rest a body lost to the homes they once belonged to. Many pilgrims (like Mike himself) were conscious that they were the only members of their family ever to make such a journey. ‘First to visit in eighty-one years’ is one of the most common messages etched in cemetery visitors’ books. It is as if these pilgrimages bring a kind of comfort (or closure as Mike put it) to

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a generation that lived in grief and pain and uncertainty. Mary visited the Somme in 1972 but ‘the waste of young lives . . . the sheer volume of death . . . lives in me still’. Her next pilgrimage will be to Gallipoli, where her great uncle went missing in 1915 and to Mary’s family is missing still: ‘His wife and children didn’t know what happened to him until 1923 (he was “blown up” and there is no grave). By this stage, they were doing it tough [deprived of a husband, a breadwinner and a father].’33 Finding her great uncle’s name ‘listed on [a] wall]’ will offer Mary a kind of completion, redressing the wrongs of ‘all those wasted lives’ and all those wasted years.34 Indeed, many respondents take up the grieving process denied a past generation. Lorraine’s great uncle was killed at Pozi`eres in 1916: ‘mum believed he lay in a trench and for years was tormented by the [fear] his body [still] remained [there]’. Families, including her own, ‘didn’t have a chance to experience a natural death’, there was ‘no service’, ‘no burial’ no chance of saying ‘farewell’. But Lorraine said all that needed saying when she found Uncle Alex in a cemetery on the Somme: [We] systematically walked up and down each row. ‘Row R’ saw anguish, sorrow, a sense of disbelief . . . we had ‘found’ him. Love for my mum [and] her . . . family . . .; wondering how they and others coped with the dreaded telegram . . . Tears welled as I contemplated this man, my uncle, whom I’d never known, this man who had given his life . . . such a short life and had died in such horrendous circumstances so far from home . . . Never will [I] forget the row upon row of tombstones.35

And others still make their promises to long-dead family members: I want to visit the grave of my great aunt’s fianc´e [another woman wrote to me]. He [too] was killed at Pozi`eres. No one in my family has ever been able to visit him, so I will one day. I have his photo, wallet, seventy of his letters and service record. My great aunt (who died at ninety-two) never married, always wore her engagement ring and had a lovely photo of him always in her bedroom. She kept his letters and now I have them. She epitomised the experiences of many young women at the time – never marrying. It’s very sad – and he was a real dasher.36

For some, those promises are finally fulfilled, one generation consciously honouring the memory of another. Audrey visited Uncle Jas’s grave with her strong and caring son beside her. They carried with them dark dual-coloured carnations, ‘an instinctive choice for someone who had been a strong and brave young man’. Mother and son set the flowers down together:

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I still find it incredible that I have actually knelt and lain our flowers near that headstone as I had so often visualised. I felt too full of emotion to speak. And even now, the memory of this privilege, in that peaceful little cemetery on the outskirts of Vignacourt brings back all that I felt that day and I think always will. It was a special time for my son Danny and me.

It was a memory she carried with her back to Australia and to the bedside of Jas’s sister. [My aunt] is the only remaining member of Jas’s [immediate] family. She is now ninety-two but her mind is fairly sharp. She was delighted with the photos of her brother’s last resting place and [so pleased] that we had been interested enough to seek it out. No one in the entire family had ever visited there. It was a special event that he, Jas, was back with his family. [Jas] had left home when she was a young girl . . . all her brothers were adventurous and three of them, including my father, enlisted and fought, one at Gallipoli and all three in France.37

Common history: shared experience Audrey’s survey response suggests that memory and loss can be transmitted from one generation to another, from aunt to niece to son. But it also evokes three enduring features of a pilgrimage, a journey across a ‘sacred’ landscape, a moment of catharsis as that ‘instinctive tribute’ is made by the graveside and a great sense of fellowship with all who make (or ‘share’) the journey. In his celebrated study, Turner coined the term ‘communitas’. The pilgrimage, he argues, is a liminal state; it transports all who join it beyond the constraints and distinctions of everyday life, uniting all in a common purpose. What was striking about these survey responses is how frequently pilgrims referred to that sense of shared experience. Very few embarked on this journey alone. Parents and children travelled together, one generation ‘keep[ing] the tradition alive’ for another. Three sisters in their sixties followed their father’s footsteps across Gallipoli, France and Belgium: ‘It was an amazing experience for us all to share, particularly as we were [family]. Our father died when I was eighteen . . . He was gassed at Ypres . . .’ Charles remembered a winter visit to Flanders as one of the most ‘moving’ moments he had experienced:

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[My wife and I] walked down that long white row of tombstones. I can still feel the crisp, cold air on my face. We began (I don’t know why) reading the inscriptions out aloud, the one after the other. I was all right until I came

The fellowship of pilgrimage extends well beyond close friends and family. Participants in tours run by the Australian War Memorial spoke of a growing sense of camaraderie. ‘We started as strangers’ one noted, ‘but developed strong friendships that have continued’. Groups like the Family and Friends of the First AIF, RSL tour groups or the Australian Light Horse Association nourish this sense of companionship long after the journey is over. Like the generation that went to war, those who have made a pilgrimage speak of a ‘special sort’ of bonding.39 Pilgrimage ‘communities’ are strengthened and consolidated by former networks of association: bible study groups, brass bands, even golf clubs embark on tours of the Western Front or Gallipoli. And in that classic paradigm of pilgrimage, moments of communitas are invariably heightened by ritual. Charles recalled standing beside a man he had never met as the Last Post was sounded at the Menin Gate in Ypres.

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across some lad, an only son like ours killed so far from home and ‘missed so very much’ it said. I could feel my voice breaking. We stood there in that cold place, holding one another.38

A small crowd had gathered, most had pinned poppies on the names that looked down on us. It was so dark and the notes cut right through you. As the buglers finished this big bloke, with an even bigger Australian accent, shook my hand and wished me luck. I could see tears welling in his eyes, I guess he saw them in mine . . . I had never met him before but he felt like a brother.40

What the sounding of the Last Post is to Menin Gate, the dawn service is to Gallipoli. Despite ‘the distraction of ten thousand people and 350 tourist buses’, Lyn remembered a fragile sense of union with strangers less than half her age on a stony beach 15 000 km from Australia. In that ‘stark but beautiful place’, Mac felt a strange sense of belonging: The crowd was huge, apparently 8000 crowded into that small cemetery at Anzac Cove . . . It was bloody cold and latecomers like myself (arriving at 3.30am) had to stand while the younger folk in their sleeping bags and blankets stretched out on the grass, some using the headstone as a pillow. That was, of course, somewhat unsettling . . . [One thing] really distilled the meaning of the day for me. A lone voice began to sing ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. It was not a tutored voice: it was rough and ready but powerful. A silence fell across the crowd as that unknown singer sang all the verses . . . It moved many to tears (including myself) and was greeted with a storm of applause. 41

The sense of communitas also extends to those involved in other ways in the journey. Respondents thanked gardeners who showed them some little

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kindness; they wrote in almost loving terms of schoolchildren who ‘carried flowers, . . . sang songs and read poetry about “Les Australians”’. Damien remembered the friendship and the fellowship he found in that little school museum in Villers-Bretonneux: ‘Never Forget Australia’ . . . the sign above the door states . . . When I went to pay my couple of francs to get in the lady said, ‘Go in, your fare was paid long ago’. Makes the hair on the back of the neck stand up. What do you say? I looked around the school and all over the walls are postcards of Australia. They have not forgotten . . .42

And that ‘feeling of togetherness’ extended even to the long-dead families of their long-dead countrymen. Matthew ‘constantly thought about the grief their family would have felt until the day they too died . . . the inscriptions [were so] . . . sad [and] moving . . . I kept picturing the next of kin sitting there with the form to fill in. . . . the overwhelming grief and sadness . . .43 Again these sentiments cross gender lines, blurring any simple distinctions between male and female sensibilities. Like Matthew, Dianna’s pilgrimage transcended the immediate and temporal, to share the grief of every mother who has ever lost a son: As I get older I feel for the mothers of these soldiers – how did they cope when the telegrams arrived? All the love, care and guidance that went into these boys – all the years of teaching them, looking after them, worrying about them – all over so suddenly. What words on a headstone could ever be adequate? How many ‘unacceptable’ epitaphs did the War Graves Commission receive? Epitaphs that reflected the anger and dismay of these women . . . the immense [and terrible] loss . . . The one that still stands out to me . . . ‘I’ve no darling now – I’m weeping – baby and I you left alone [sic]’.44

Motherhood knows no nationality. It says much for the strength of communitas that it can reach beyond divisions of race, religion and nationhood, embracing all who share a common sense of loss. Joan grew up in a fiercely patriotic family, has marched in Anzac Day parades since primary school, and revered the memory of many an ex-serviceman in Stockton, NSW. But touring the Western Front where so many friends and family had fought it all just seemed ‘such a dreadful waste’:

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We visited Langemark German Cemetery. This was a tremendously evocative experience. The thought of all those young students buried there, with my own young son next to me – those mass graves – beautifully kept – the brooding figures of German parents looming over the cemetery – the young Jewish teacher who sought out a Jewish grave to place stones there to show the grave

Fellowship was one recurrent theme in the vast majority of these survey responses, this ‘reconciliation’ with those ‘who had once been the enemy’ was another. When John was a child the issues were simple: ‘Those horrible cruel Turks – Fancy killing my nice Uncles’. But visiting Gallipoli he realised George and Wes were ‘the victim of emotive jingoism’ – ‘in a way [,] it served them right – what did they expect the Turks to do, invading their country’. Linda’s grandmother never recovered from the loss of her young brother but she found comfort in the words of the Turkish leader Ataturk etched in stone by the sea: ‘ . . . Weep no longer . . . having lost your sons in our land they have become our sons as well . . .’ On leaving Lone Pine Linda told the young tour guide she would leave her uncle in his care, ‘to which he replied “with two of my great uncles”.’ Jackie too had lost family on the Peninsula, two of her great uncles were in the 10th Light Horse and perished at the Nek. Standing there made her ‘howl’, ‘it was so much like Charles Lambert’s painting’. But again Jackie found comfort from the people who had fought her family.

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had been visited – it remains vividly in my memory. I feel for all mothers who lost sons, no matter their nationality.45

The Turks are a wonderful people and love Australians . . . They have a wonderful expression when they refer to Gallipoli – whether the dead are English, Australian, German or Turkish they say ‘the martyrs sleep peacefully . . .’ Women clutch your hand and ask if you have an Australian martyr buried there.46

Even on the Western Front, where war has scarred two generations, the experience of pilgrimage can also be one of reconciliation. Raelene gathered wildflowers to lay on a German grave in Belgium. It bore the same name as her grandfather, a German immigrant to Victoria in the late nineteenth century. Melanie retraced the old front line in Flanders, conscious that her family had fought on both sides of the trenches: ‘so weird to think that one grandfather could have fired on the other’. Michael knew of no German ancestry but Langemark was the only cemetery where he left a message in the visitors’ book: ‘I wrote only one dedication . . . “You lie in the soil of a united Europe – be at peace”. It seemed odd then, and it still does, for an Australian to have written this.’47 If today’s Australians still have an enemy, it is probably the Empire the men of the First AIF died for. One of the most striking differences between family pilgrims today and those who preceded them is an emphatic hostility to the ‘old ties to England’. Aged in his late sixties, Fred responded to most of the survey questions with simple Yes/No answers. But Fred’s father fought at

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Gallipoli and on the conduct of that campaign he was really quite expansive: ‘English officers were out of touch with the war . . . and should have been court-martialled and shot’. Not all respondents were quite so belligerent but complaints that ‘the youth of Australia was bled by their English masters’, ‘sacrificed as cannon fodder’ and ‘butchered’ by British commanders who ‘couldn’t give a shit . . . about Australia’ were common.48 Very few situated the war historically, or acknowledged the close affinity the men of the AIF had to the ‘motherland’. A good number condemned the whole ugly tragedy as ‘a trade war’ Australia should never have been part of: ‘The waste of human life for the redivision of the world for the imperialists of the time angers me and the fact that so many men, many class conscious, enlisted to be cannon fodder I find quite bewildering’.49 Indeed, viewing the cemeteries of the Great War persuaded many of the cost of Empire. ‘I was a monarchist before going to Gallipoli’, one old man wrote, ‘but I have become a republican’.50

Symbols of significance: landscapes, ghosts and offerings

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If pilgrimage is a journey that changes the way you see yourself, it also changes the way you see the world around you. Approaching the graves of the dead, these travellers found themselves ‘in tune with some presence’: the symbols of significance (as Turner puts it), ‘became denser, richer more involved’.51 Gallipoli’s warscape is charged with meanings. As pilgrims placed poppies on Simpson’s grave (a medic martyred in the first few weeks of the landing), they saw dolphins playing in the sea off Ari Burnu; many record the passage of clouds across the sky or note ‘the awful hush’ that settled on the ridges and gullies of the Peninsula. A teenager of sixteen, Christine could still shudder at the silence: ‘The Lone Pine . . . grave site is the one that still stands out in my mind. It was so quiet up there. Not a bird seemed to sing. Nothing moved. On the memorial it said “Their name liveth for evermore”.’ Betty remembered ‘a beautiful Judas tree’ blazing colour through the rain at Walkers Ridge Cemetery.52 And the passage to the Western Front is marked ‘by the same kind of symbolism’. Cherry blossom cloaked the grave of Fay’s great uncle in Daours Cemetery. As she stood there quietly weeping ‘pink petals . . . float[ed] down on the breeze’. Cemeteries drift into view over ‘every slight rise’ in Flanders, tombstones rise out of the mist of the Somme reminding my pilgrims of the death of a generation. In a long and moving

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‘pinned to the walls of the missing’: an Australian flag stretched tight in the wind at Menin Gate. Pilgrims have lodged poppies high in the wall, reminding onlookers that these ‘nameless names’ still belong to the families that continue to mourn them.

letter, Myra described her progress across the rolling fields of Picardy: ‘I opened the gate, [I] walked the carefully tended stepping stones, [I] reached the modest bronze plaque set into the ground on the edge of Pozi`eres Ridge. I kissed my fingers and touched the plaque.’53 This view of the landscape is never naive, never innocent; it is mediated through the pilgrim’s own experience. As Myra approached Pozi`eres she walked with the memories of the maimed and broken men she grew up with, as Christine walked on to the Nek, she remembered scenes from Gallipoli (at the height of the Anzac season, Peter Weir’s blockbuster is screened every night in C¸annakale).54 And in places where ‘death hangs in the air’, pilgrims confront ‘the metaphysical’. Many described Gallipoli as ‘haunted’, young and old alike spoke of the ‘chill’ all around, of the sense that they were ‘being watched’, that ‘the ghosts of the soldiers were busy’. In the grey light of the dawn service it seemed ‘even God was weeping’:55 There was a constant surge of murmuring that came and went in the crowd and sometimes it was difficult to differentiate this from the sounds of waves washing ashore at the cove, I . . . wait[ed] for the lines of the off shore islands to take shape. It was difficult not to hear the soft splash of oars as the men arrived at the wrong place so many years ago . . . I looked eastward and there sketched on the skyline were the silhouettes of backpackers who had chosen

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that first ridge above the beach as their vantage point, [they became] an image of the men landing, complete with their own backpacks, on that morning in April.56

Mac’s impressions are easily explained away, he was tired and emotional, these ghosts of Gallipoli seem a trick of the imagination. Myra’s story is rather more problematic. And it is set ‘where ghosts (if they exist) are most likely to be found’ – on the sullen fields of Flanders: Myra: It happened years ago now when I was still living in England. I was visiting France and a friend of mine asked me to visit her father’s grave . . . It was in a little graveyard not one of the large cemeteries. I arrived there and it was ever so cold . . .Well, there were not that many graves but I knew it would take a time to find him and just as I was searching a man came up to me. He said, ‘Are you looking for Captain Dove?’ I said, ‘Well, yes, I am’ and he said he would take me to him and he led me straight to the grave. He was very helpful. I asked him how he knew Captain Dove and he said he had served as his batman during the war and of course he was still in uniform. I didn’t think anything of that. Scates: In uniform? Myra: Yes, in uniform. Well, it was only when I returned home that I thought anything of that. I went to see my friend to let her know I had found her father’s grave. I described it for her and I told her about my meeting up with his batman. She stopped then and looked me straight in the eye. ‘But Myra’, she said, ‘My father and his batman were both killed together’.57

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Not all the dead rest peacefully. At the Nek and Chunuk Bair, ‘Alice’ complained of something ‘eerie’, the ‘smell, the adrenalin, sweat, blood, tears’ seemed to seep through the landscape, ‘sent goose bumps up my spine’. Several pilgrims stumbled across skulls and skeletons, gathered up the bones and fragments as best they could, placed them ‘with a prayer’ in ‘the soft brown earth’. Others relived the trauma of those long-dead soldiers. ‘I believe I was there in another life’, one man told me, ‘I felt naked and vulnerable [on the battlefields]. I found myself cringing, trembling. It was horrible . . .’58 It is for the ghosts of the Great War that our pilgrims leave their offerings. Private H. W. Ray was killed near Ypres in September 1917. He was twentyfour years old. The inscription on his grave still echoes a mother’s grief eighty years later: ‘My First Pride, My First Joy’. In 1997 someone placed a wreath of flowers on his grave: the card read simply ‘For Mum’. Lone roses are left on the tombs of unknown soldiers, cardboard crosses mark the final resting place of ‘only loving sons’, Australian flags are pinned to the walls

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‘from loved ones a world away’: tribute left at Australia’s Memorial to the Missing on Lone Pine. Tom Coates was killed in August 1915 in that ‘fool’s charge’ on the Nek. He was twenty-six years of age. Tom’s family has ‘not forgotten’.

of the missing. In 1990 Marianne accompanied fifty-eight surviving diggers on a pilgrimage to World War I and II cemeteries. They left ‘rosemary and poppies and pieces of our hearts’ in the graveyards of France, Belgium, Gallipoli, Egypt, Thailand, Burma and Borneo.59 Visit the cemeteries of the Western Front in any year and in any season and you will find paper poppies scattered seemingly at random; even in the bleakest winter the snow is splashed red with tiny tokens of remembrance. And somehow the most moving tributes are also the most spontaneous. Margaret’s cousin has been missing since the day of the landing. On the eve of Anzac Day 1995 she and her two sisters ‘gathered wild poppies and bound them with grass and laid them at the base of the column where . . . [his] name was inscribed’. They were still there on the day of the ceremony, dwarfed by the elaborate wreaths laid by politicians and dignitaries.60 Flowers and crosses were not the only tributes. Alongside them were what Peter Read has called ‘the memorabilia of loved places’ and people, ‘items of intimate significance’. Pilgrims plant ‘personal messages’ from loved ones a world away, prayers, poetry even photographs. Articles of clothing are buried in the soil of Lone Pine, a stone from ‘back home’ thrown to the sea off Anzac. Others contrive quite elaborate arrangements. Line after line of jolting verse was carved into a slab of Australian hardwood. Set by the names

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of the missing at Lone Pine, it tells the story of Tom and of the family that still loves him: From the hills of Victoria’s Baw-Baws The land where you where raised To the beach of far off Gallipoli Where brother Bert buried you and prayed . . .61

Visitors’ books ache with no less moving messages. Six months after returning home, Alan could still recite his dedication, a message left for a man he could never meet and would only ever know as a memory: In loving memory of our dear Thomas So far from home and those who love you You are in our hearts and always will be Your loving and grateful family.62

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It is the evocation of home, that ‘special sense of belonging’ that imbued the simplest offerings with significance. Respondents wrote of the need they felt ‘to sprinkle some Australian soil’ on the graves of their countrymen; they mourned for men ‘who will never smell the bush again’, they longed to leave ‘a dusty sprig of wattle’. Ross’s Uncle Albert once worked the coal of Newcastle. His epitaph stands testimony to a close-knit family and community: ‘Ever remembered by loving parents, brothers and sisters – Cessnock’. ‘Though he died thirty-seven years before I was born I felt I knew him . . . [Nana] always talked about him’. And Ross knew exactly what to carry to that cold grave in Flanders. ‘I took a piece of Greta seam coal and buried it into the soil in front of Albert’s headstone’.63 Many of these offerings are attempts at reunion, ‘materialising memory’ in a much older tradition of pilgrimage. John buried photographs of two ‘missing’ brothers on Fred Adam’s grave at Gallipoli. And he left ‘a small posy of weeds gathered from the grave of the father in Buninyong’. Julie carried soil from the dreaming trails of the Ngarrindjeri and scattered it over the graves of Aboriginal soldiers. Pilgrims carried tiny pine-cones back to Gallipoli, returning them to the land from which their parent trees were taken. And Peter (an old man from Wagga Wagga, NSW) twisted leaves from a grand old eucalypt back home into a wreath of rosemary and laid it in a little graveyard by the sea at Anzac.64 The inventiveness and poignancy of these gestures belies the common claim that we live in an age bereft of ritual. Here are the ‘incorporating practices of commemoration’, actions, both individual and collective, that foster a sense of ‘meaning’ and ‘belonging’. But these symbols also suggest that the process of memorialisation is both complex and contested: in the

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graveyards of the Great War one sometimes sees ‘a struggle’ over the meaning of remembrance.65 Private W. L. Rae’s grave lies in a corner of a vast Australian cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux. Many of the inscriptions there express pride in the men who ‘turned back’ the Germans in the offensive of 1918. But the message on Private Rae’s grave is very different: ‘Another Life Lost / Hearts Broken / For What?’ The men of the 24th Air Training Corps would brook no such ambiguity. On a small white cross planted beside the grave, they took up the argument with his family. ‘He died the most proudest and honourable death a man can possibly die’. The argument echoes endlessly in every cemetery visitors’ book. Some write of ‘pride’, ‘Australia’ and ‘duty’, others of ‘waste’, ‘murder’ and ‘insanity’.66 And a few seized on the survey itself as a last opportunity for confession: ‘The war was a wicked, unnecessary waste of life [Valerie wrote] brought about [by] . . . vanity and pride and stubbornness. [In the visitors’ book I should have written] “Their lives were thrown away” – [but I] couldn’t write that, could I?’67 Whatever the politics or purpose of the individual pilgrim, their journey brought them, almost without exception, to a kind of ‘emotional catharsis’. It is a measure of the experience that so many could write so openly of the ‘torrent of tears’ that overtook them. Some confessed that they ‘were always inclined to be emotional’, others (by their close association with the dead) might well be considered ‘vulnerable’.68 But even the strongest of men (and women) were visibly shaken. Russel has travelled the world since his twenties. There isn’t much he hasn’t seen and now, in his sixties, it takes quite a bit to surprise him. Initially, he didn’t expect much at all from his pilgrimage: ‘I neither knew my uncle, or much about him. My father spoke [of him] only rarely . . .’ Although he’d read widely it wasn’t until he saw the Western Front that he ‘really understood’ the ‘sheer magnitude’ of ‘suffering’. ‘Viewing the ground’ filled him with ‘a deep reverence’. Finding his uncle’s grave was simply ‘overwhelming’. In that ‘liminal space’ of pilgrimage, time and place seemed suddenly suspended: At my uncle’s grave I ‘went missing’ for quite a while. I had no idea that I had spent the amount of time with him as I had. I was in another place, quite divorced from the presence of others – [even from my own son who stood beside me]. [I felt] totally at peace. I bonded with [my dead uncle] like I have never bonded [with] anyone before or since.69

Russel couldn’t quite remember what he wrote in the visitors’ book: ‘Something like: “So far from home for so long, but still loved and not forgotten. It took me 58 years to get here. Sorry . . .”’70 Veterans of the Great War were just as determined to remember the war dead and they would travel just as far to find them.

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Part III Soldiers’ Tales

5

‘To see old mates again’: diggers return Fifty years to the day after the first Anzac landing, a party of old diggers braced themselves again for the beaches. To some, it must have seemed that history was repeating itself. The waters off Gallipoli were dark and smooth, the sky was clear and a soft breeze whispered shoreward. There was the same ‘staggering’ and ‘stumbling’ on the deck, the same quick farewells as men lumbered into the landing craft, the same unspoken sense of nervous excitement.1 As the boats swung out to the shore, a crescent moon cast its last light across the beaches. For a moment its gleam was frozen in the still deep waters, for a moment the men fell silent. Then conversation erupted and (like C. E. W. Bean fifty years earlier) a quick and keen historian rushed to record them: ‘“This is the thrill of my life”, said one man. Another sent a kookaburra call towards the cliffs . . . One man was saying to himself: “A big feller was lyin’ on the beach, dead . . .”’2 There were seventy-one old diggers in the boats. All but one claimed to be ‘first dayers’, men who scaled the cliffs in 1915 and seized the shore for Australia. Left behind on their cruise ship were 230 other pilgrims; eighty of the 300-strong contingent were from New Zealand. Together, they constituted the largest party of World War One veterans ever to leave Australia and the first to enjoy any kind of subsidy for their journey. As with previous pilgrimages, the full cost of the trip was prohibitive; A£800, one disappointed digger declared, it was ‘an extortion fare for sixteen days’ and well beyond the means of those living on ‘the burnt out pension’.3 The Commonwealth pledged A£20,000, and the takings from RSL pokie machines sponsored the fares of the luckiest and most deserving. Despite ill health, age and infirmity, hundreds made a case for assistance, determined to end their days with one last view of the Peninsula.4 Ken Inglis had accompanied the party from the moment they’d left Australia and cabled regular dispatches home. Brimming with yarns and anecdotes, his ‘Letters from a Pilgrimage’ still make absorbing reading. In Greece, the first port of call, men who’d survived the hills of Gallipoli climbed

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to the summit of the Acropolis. ‘Like all tourists’, Inglis remarked, ‘they responded to the relics of antiquity with a range of feeling from boredom to awe’.5 But in this case the tourists were also pilgrims. An ambitious itinerary took them to Tobruk, Beirut and El Alamein, the veterans of one world war visiting the graves of another.6 In the process, they rediscovered sites of a frailer but more immediate memory. Old men wandered the streets of Cairo’s Wazza, imagining the faces and figures that had beckoned from brothel windows, they sheltered one last time in the shadow of the pyramids and searched for names they’d carved a lifetime ago – their own modest bid for immortality. Some things had remained the same: an old digger reached for a riding crop to drive off the hawkers and the beggars; few could bear the food, – ‘goat’s butter and breakfasts of the continental type’ – though the beer (with practice) soon became acceptable.7 And the language these men mastered in 1915 very quickly came back to them. Inglis recalled a taxi driver (arguably amongst the most worldly of Cairo’s citizens), blushing in embarrassment as Arabic obscenities poured from the mouths of ageing Anzacs.8 The men were much more reticent when it came to considering their journey. ‘All the blokes’, one old bushman remarked, ‘would want to pay respect to the dead, and to have a holiday’. He was not the sort of bloke to sense a contradiction. Other than that ‘he expected a variety of reasons’. And he was right. Letters of application to the Returned Services League encompass sightseeing and commemoration, spirituality and nostalgia. All were keen to make a special case for going – being the first to land, the last to leave, going over the top with Jacka or limping down the gullies with Simpson. Even Frank Redfearn, failed secretary of the 1929 pilgrimage, made a special case for assistance: ‘no one kn[ew] Anzac Cove better than [he did]’.9 The sights these men most wanted to see were hardly the usual tourist destinations. Fred Ainsworth had fought with the Light Horse, surviving the butchery of the August offensive. Now he longed for the chance to raise his head and look beyond the trenches: ‘One thing I have always desired – a return to Gallipoli to see a little more of the locality than “following the Tenth” would permit back in 1915’.10 Nurses, of course, had seen even less. Refused permission to land, Sister Ella Tucker watched from the uncertain safety of a hospital ship as the diggers waded ashore. For two months she had ferried the wounded ‘backwards and forwards’, from the killing fields of the Dardanelles to the squalid, overcrowded hospitals of Alexandria. ‘This time, I wanted to go ashore’, she declared, to ‘see it’, touch it, ‘for myself’.11 For all the travellers, Gallipoli had an almost ‘magnetic’ attraction. A good many thought the ‘tours’ and ‘pleasure cruises’ coupled with the pilgrimage ‘a waste of time’, they came just to

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make ‘this second landing’, just to return to ‘their old stamping ground’.12 And they would return together. With ‘even the youngest nudging seventy’ the pilgrimage was a last chance at reunion, a final opportunity to meet ‘old cobbers’ and lay to rest ‘the dear old comrades’ they left behind them.13 A surprising number spoke with ‘sentimental attachment’ to ‘the hole in the ground’ that had once served as home.14 ‘I went for one purpose’, an old warrior told Ken Inglis, ‘to visit the grave of my old mates and find this . . . particular spot on Dead Man’s Ridge where I lay for three days and four nights after I was wounded’.15 Whether he found that particular spot or not is another matter. Accounts of the pilgrimage suggest a sharp incongruity between memory and reality: Gallipoli’s landscape seemed irretrievably altered. Erosion had blunted the nose of the Sphinx as surely as Napoleon’s artillery had scarred the face of its namesake. The Turks had planted forests on once denuded cliffs and ridges: by 1965 Lone Pine was simply one of many. The shoreline at Anzac had been cut away, access roads driving a track to all but a few of Gallipoli’s cemeteries. And, of course, the old trench lines had long ago subsided. It was all so ‘hard to recognise’ George Holding complained. Once Courtney’s Post was the steepest part of the firing line, now it was a tidy graveyard, all neatly ‘contoured’ and terraced.16 Perhaps it was the cemeteries themselves that had most rearranged the landscape. The Gallipoli these men had known was withered by war and the elements, low-lying heath virtually the only vegetation. Now, in this jubilee year, the War Graves Commission had staged a flower show on the Peninsula. Shrapnel Valley, ‘a sinister name in 1915’, appeared ‘park-like and peaceful’: iris and lavender a blaze of colour and beauty. Only when they wandered away did veterans find the remnants of war, the spent shells and shattered rum jars, bones, skulls, sometimes entire skeletons. They were probably Turkish rather than ‘ours’ but that hardly seemed to matter.17 In this landscape largely ‘cleansed of war’,18 memory soon succumbed to experience. Once the terrain had been ‘murderously difficult’, now veterans were ferried by car between one boutique graveyard and another. Only the bravest broke away to ramble the old track down to the beaches. The flies were gone, the pain, the terror; all the hardships (great and small) long embedded in these men’s consciousness. The very taste of the place had altered. Water at Gallipoli had always stank of kerosene, every meal a rude affair of bully beef and biscuit. Now the pilgrims feasted on tea, fruit and sandwiches, hosted by the men who had once shot at and shelled them. And when they did raise their heads above the trench lines, the world looked very different: ‘With memories of their cramped and exposed bridgehead, the veterans were surprised to find that over the ridge there was a wide

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stretch of open country dotted with farms and small villages. [It was all] green and inviting . . .’19 In short, a sense of loss pervades accounts of the 1965 pilgrimage and it was not just the loss of mates, youth or memory. Fifty years on, ‘their Gallipoli’ had all but vanished, the quest of rediscovery, re-remembering starkly disappointed. Uncannily, eerily, much was simply ‘missing’ – like the graves of mates they couldn’t find, or rum bottles buried in the clay a lifetime ago, only to be recovered broken and empty.20 Watching the pilgrims walk their ‘Holy Land’, Ken Inglis wondered what (if any) impact all this would have on the way we commemorate Anzac Day.21 But those who hoped for ceremony that day were to be disappointed. The second landing, like the first, involved a good deal of accident. Sir Raymond Huish, leader of the ANZAC party, had planned this new encounter with the Turk with military precision: Landing party will form up on the beach with backs to water . . . The party will move forward to meet the Turkish veterans, with hands outstretched. They will take from their lapels the stick-pins and pin them on the Turkish veterans . . . the whole group will [then] form up with the Turkish veterans, facing the sea.22

But the Turkish veterans were assembled a good distance from the shoreline. This time, Inglis wryly noted, the Anzacs would ‘play to Turkish rules’. The Anzacs moved uphill bearing their koala bears, kangaroo and kiwi lapel pins, miniature flags and cartons of cigarettes. ‘Move left and right’, shouted Huish through cupped hands; but it was hard for them to fan out from a narrow track lined by spectators. The two bodies of veterans met in cheerful confusion.23

The confusion was even greater when a Turkish photographer called on the veterans to kiss one another. A firm handshake was reconciliation enough for any self-respecting digger. In less than twenty minutes, the speeches were over and the formalities all but concluded. Huish called on his men to return to the shoreline. The Turks again cheered Australia’s departure.24 While newspaper reports warmed to the informality of the occasion, many a pilgrim regretted its ‘ineptness’. Nothing had been done to mark their visit as a pilgrimage: ‘there was no dawn service – no Last Post sounded – no ceremony of any kind’.25 Writing to Inglis or the RSL Executive, one veteran after another complained of ‘a sense of flatness’. The wreath laying ‘lacked discipline’: ‘people roamed around haphazardly, no one in charge of 128

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anyone or anything’. The speeches seemed irrelevant, the want of order was lamentable: ‘We all went along like Brown’s cows’; ‘The Boy Scouts could [have] done better’.26 Only the New Zealand ceremony on Chunuk Bair was ‘properly carried out’, a Maori lament soaring sharp and solemn along the ridges. Too long the junior partner at Anzac, the New Zealand contingent now dubbed 1965 the ‘Great Australian Bungle’.27 Bungled commemoration made a ‘travesty’ of pilgrimage and as was the case in 1915, it was the leaders not the men who were wanting. Huish had always been an unpopular choice as leader. Not a Gallipoli man himself, many believed he had no ‘moral right’ to make that second landing.28 As the long and taxing journey progressed, it was clear Huish had overlooked the most basic needs of the infirm and the elderly. ‘The pilgrimage’, Louis Grieve declared was ‘poorly organised’, ‘very unpleasant’, in fact ‘a complete nightmare’: I was pushed into a plane, which was overcrowded . . . and arrived at Athens completely exhausted and bewildered . . . Spent three days in Athens . . . existed on dry bread and fruit as the Greek food was shocking . . . The ship’s sanitary and toiletry arrangements were below standard, the hospital makeshift . . . [and] medical supplies practically non-existent. Quite a number of men . . . were disabled soldiers [and] there was no lift available [and] the only food [provided] was Turkish . . . all one could do was pick here and there . . . dry bread [and] fruit was all one could . . . subsist on . . . I was sick [and] badly in need of nourishment by the time we arrived at Gallipoli . . .29

Others were badly in need of a drink: with the beer seemingly watered down and whisky five shillings a nip, thirsty diggers dreamed again of the bars they’d left behind in Australia.30 All these discomforts could be endured had the pilgrimage delivered veterans to the places they longed for on the Peninsula. Men wanted a chance ‘to go around Gallipoli properly’, they needed more time to themselves and less time for speeches. Least forgivable of all, Huish ‘behaved like an officer’ – aloof, self-important, ‘a very poor mixer’.31 ‘I had to respect him as a leader,’ C. L. Sharp declared, ‘but as a man he was nothing more than a prig . . ..’32 The failings of the jubilee pilgrimage were bleated out in newspaper columns, RSL meetings and many an old soldiers’ reunion.33 History can afford to be more charitable. Whatever his personal shortcomings, Huish had achieved what many others had not: a landing at Anzac Cove on the morning of the 25th of April. For a good fifty years that objective had proved as elusive as the heights of the Peninsula on the first crucial days of the landing. 129

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The soldier’s road: early landings Just getting to Gallipoli was no easy matter, particularly for solo travellers in the 1920s and 1930s. A former commander of the Anzac Artillery, Lieutenant General Talbot Hobbs travelled unaccompanied to the Peninsula. Setting forth from Egypt in March 1930, he finally reached the Dardanelles via Athens on a Rumanian steamer. The journey, he complained ‘involved a good deal of trouble, annoyance and expense’. And once he’d arrived, there were still no facilities for visitors. The old general shared his ‘digs’ with Major Tasman Millington in the modest cottage provided by the Imperial War Graves Commission: ‘and I don’t know where else I could have stayed in this half ruined, poverty-stricken town [of C¸anakkale] – not even sure what it is called’. Hobbs crossed the narrows as Millington’s guest, on a motor launch flying the Australian flag and crewed by a White Russian engineer and a scarred Turkish sailor: ‘On landing at Kilid Bahr we stepped into a rather dilapidated Ford . . . (also the property of the Imperial War Graves Commission), and were driven . . . over very rough and . . . dangerous roads by the [same wild] White Russian’.34 For the next three days Millington escorted Hobbs over gullies and graveyards. The Peninsula was ‘a silent and desolate place’ tended only by the Major and his ragged staff of ‘peasant women, Greeks and White Russians’. Hobbs left Gallipoli ‘with a feeling of deep sadness’ and firm advice to any intending traveller. Go to Gallipoli, if you must, with ‘a properly organised party . . . It is not easy to get into Turkey . . . and it is not too easy to get out [either].’35 But old soldiers are not the sort to be easily discouraged. Throughout the postwar period Millington found himself the host of several small parties of veterans, his motor launch, home and dinner table regularly placed at their disposal. And how could he refuse them? The most intrepid of these pilgrims had travelled all the way from Australia. Amongst them was the first Australian Prime Minister to visit the Peninsula. A captain in the AIF, Stanley Melbourne Bruce had fought at Helles and at Anzac. He returned to Gallipoli nine years later, en route home from official duties in London. ‘The same old mud’, he grimaced as he trod a familiar path from the beach to the ridges. Prime Minister Bruce motored around Helles in the same dilapidated Ford provided by the War Graves Commission. Then, as in 1915, the Peninsula paid no heed to the status of its visitors. When snow buried the roads ‘The King of Australia’ ‘donned a sheepskin-lined raincoat borrowed from . . . the local staff, and rode across [to Anzac] on an old Australian waller’. Bruce’s ‘primitive pilgrimage’

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was very different to the elaborate entourage of future politicians. There were ‘no speeches’, ‘no ‘posing’. The old soldier had come just to visit old comrades’ graves and ‘to satisfy himself that every care was being taken of [them]’.36 That is not to say that these early soldier pilgrims lacked a sense of ceremony. Far from it. Mindful that 1935 marked the twentieth anniversary of the landing a New Zealand and an Australian veteran sailed for Alexandria and made their way to the Dardanelles via Athens and Smyrna.37 They reached Chanak in the early morning of 26 April and, with Millington’s help again, made that difficult crossing to the Peninsula. Motor transport was still ‘practically non-existent’, but the enterprising party managed to procure a ‘motor truck’ of ‘doubtful parentage’. Its appearance ‘would have caused derisive laughter [even] in the outback of Queensland’ but it was marginally faster than the carts and mules that had carried earlier parties of pilgrims.38 Tired and shaken, the Anzacs reached the cove a good two days after the anniversary of the landing.39 Larger parties to visit Gallipoli were no more successful in marking the moment of the landing; nor (for the most part) were they distinctively Australian ventures. In 1925 the liner, the Ormonde, carried a party of British and Dominion visitors to the unveiling of the New Zealand memorial at Chunuk Bair. It was followed by the (first) St Barnabas pilgrimage just a year later. Neither party came in April and both were refused permission to ferry pilgrims ashore at Anzac.40 Sailing from England rather than the Antipodes, these early ‘Empire pilgrimages’ carried only small contingents of Australians and New Zealanders.41 Old soldiers, on the other hand, figured large in the ships’ company. Like most of the voyages to follow, the St Barnabas ship, Stella Italia, carried a mixed party of pilgrims and tourists, families of the dead and the men who had fought there: We are not . . . a Pilgrim Ship pure and simple – that is, [we are not] a ship conveying only relatives seeking graves. We muster amongst us a number of ex-soldiers from all parts of the Empire, out here to examine at leisure beaches upon which they landed under fire, and battle areas with which their former acquaintance was perforce of a restricted and subterranean character. Now that the time of siege is past all these, like the Trojans of old, ‘delight to view the Doric camp’ and reconstruct the situation for the rest of us.42

Classical allusion has always been a weakness of Gallipoli historians. The same classics were made to accommodate the presence of Australian nurses on the tour, veterans but non-combatants, once part of an army and now part of a pilgrimage. 131

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‘a party of old diggers braced themselves again for the beaches’: the 1965 landing at Anzac Cove. It was the first such re-enactment since 1926, when the St Barnabas pilgrimage stumbled across the shingle and sought out the graves of their loved ones. Here old diggers embrace old enemies. In the morning we made Mudros Harbour . . . Here a Tasmanian Pilgrim, who had been a nursing sister on the island during the War, laid a wreath on one of the graves in memory of the young cadets of Launceston College, – young gods, as Mr Masefield called them . . . Of the twenty-two of these young Tasmanian lads . . . only two survived; on the headstones she discovered the names of seventeen of them.43

Sister Mutton gathered flowers from the stony ground of Mudros, pressed them carefully in her bible and carried them home to the grieving families of Launceston. The last of Gallipoli’s wounds were still a long way from healing.44 Former nurses, former soldiers, grieving mothers, fathers and wives also made up the first pilgrimage to leave from Australia two years later. Here too the ‘Trojan desire’ to visit old sites of battle determined much of the itinerary: the tour ‘follow[ed] the soldiers’ road’ though Egypt, Damascus and on to Gallipoli. The 1929 pilgrimage also arrived in September, several months after the April anniversary. Refused permission to land at Anzac, they came ashore at Kelia Bay and braved the buckled roads of the Peninsula.45 132

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By far the largest veterans’ tour of Gallipoli was the ‘Soldiers’ pilgrimage’ of 1934. It was, perhaps, a misnamed venture. While some veterans of the campaign were ‘reunited’ on the tour, ‘irresistibly drawn back’ as one report put it, many who accompanied them had never set foot in Turkey. Amongst the 700 were women, children and men far too young to have done any fighting. For them, ‘the long pilgrimage meant but to kneel for a few minutes beside a wooden cross’ or walk a landscape ‘their fathers had made glorious’.46 Only three AIF men joined this great company and travelling from England (where all bar one had settled) they may well have described themselves as ‘Dominion’ rather than Australian soldiers. As would befit a British pilgrimage, the Duchess of Richmond steamed directly to Cape Helles. Shore excursions and picnic luncheons were centred on the former British sector.47 Subsequent Empire pilgrimages, the last led by the Anzac commander General Birdwood in 1936, followed a similar itinerary.48 By then Birdwood (like most senior officers) was well into his seventies and the journey left him drained, physically and emotionally. The Lancastria’s voyage signalled the end of the pilgrim ships, at least in the postwar period. Millington sensed the end of an era as he escorted the last parties of Anzac veterans across the Peninsula. And at Lone Pine he watched Birdwood relive the defeats of twenty years earlier: ‘the old man’s eyes filled with tears as he gazed across No Man’s Land’.49 From 1925 when the Ormonde carried General Godley to Chunuk Bair, to 1936 and Birdwood’s return on the Lancastria, five major cruises had carried ‘old Gallipoli men’ to the shores of Anzac. In all, no more than 300 Australian soldiers came back and that postwar tally includes the small intrepid parties that made their own way to the Peninsula.50 In fact, the largest military contingent to visit the Peninsula was not made up of veterans but of servicemen. In April 1936, as the world again prepared for war, HMAS Australia and HMAS Sydney anchored off Kelia Bay and landed over a thousand of the ships’ companies on the Peninsula. All but a few were too young to have served there; though one man on the Sydney boasted that he’d ‘fought from the landing to the evacuation’.51 Armed with ‘only water bottles and picnic lunches’, the sons of Anzacs soon proved a match for their old adversary: Local transport . . . turned up [Colonel Hughes recalled] in . . . the shape of lorries and cars of sorts; into these piled the Navy . . . Each car was accompanied by a Turkish gendarme, whose mission was to see that the visitors stuck to the roads and paths and did not stray indiscriminately over the landscape . . .

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The . . . Aussies left behind took one look at the Anzac Hills, and melted over the Kebia Plains like sheep out of the shearing pens in their own homeland . . . After about ten minutes . . . the Australian invasion was covering a front of half a mile with a depth about the same, [and the gendarmes] like tired sheep dogs with their tongues out, . . . took to the shade of a tree. One young fellow was heard to remark in Turkish, ‘Well, if their fathers did chase ours, 21 years ago, there is no use in us chasing them’.52

The race ended at Beach Cemetery. There ‘decorum was restored’ as Turks and Australians alike assembled for an ‘impressive service’. A band played, wreaths were laid, and looking out across the cliffs and the beach ‘bare-headed men stood in wondering silence’. Though most could only ‘visualise’ the landing, many still had a strong claim on the Peninsula. At the conclusion of the service, Millington and Colonel Hughes escorted no fewer than eighty sailors to the graves of family members.53 Perhaps the elusiveness of these young sailors steeled the Turks’ determination to finally seal off the Peninsula. In July 1936, just a few months after the Sydney and the Australia had weighed anchor, an international conference at Montreux confirmed Gallipoli as a military district. All access roads were closed and the ancient forts of the Narrows again equipped for battle. Pilgrimages, always a diplomatic difficulty, were now ruled out of the question. Even the staff of the War Graves Commission (long protected by the Treaty of Lausanne) were confined to small enclaves at Anzac, Suvla and Helles, and worked under constant military surveillance. Millington’s launch no longer ferried pilgrims to and fro across the Dardanelles. From 1936 his only passengers were watchful Turkish soldiers.

One man’s journey: Frank Clune on Gallipoli

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For almost a decade the Peninsula was effectively ‘out of bounds’ to Australian visitors, veterans or otherwise. But then Frank Clune never had much very respect for boundaries. A self-confessed ‘wanderer’, the youthful Clune had worked his way around the world. By the age of nineteen, he’d tried his luck as a seaman and lumberjack, teamster and stowaway. The outbreak of war offered the opportunity of yet another adventure. Quitting the goldfields of the Murchison, he enlisted in the 16th Battalion and found himself at Anzac. It was a short and brutal war for Frank. Landing for the August offensive, he was ‘blown up, bombed and bulleted on “Hill 971” [and] invalided back to Australia’.54

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Still with itchy feet, Frank Clune roamed from Sydney to Coopers Creek, on to Cape York and thence ‘all points westward’: ‘in 1938, I did the Grand Tour to Japan . . .; in 1939 wanderlust led me around Java . . .; in 1940 I prowled through Papua . . . and finished up full of malaria . . ..’55 Then came what Frank called ‘his aerial journey’. Appointed a commissioner for the War Comforts Fund, he covered 28 000 miles in 146 days, touring the battlefronts of Alamein, Tobruk and Bardia. Yarning with the troops occupied most of his time, collecting copy for the tale of his adventure. But World War Two was fought in much the same places as the First: Frank sought out the avenues of Australian gums that still flank the war graves of Jerusalem, Beersheba and Gaza. Arriving in Istanbul, he decided to push on to Gallipoli. It was, his guides explained, ‘impossible’. That particular word wasn’t in Frank Clune’s vocabulary. Through an interpreter and a phone line, the ‘ever insistent’ Anzac argued his case all the way to Ankara. ‘There are thousands of parents, wives and sweethearts who lost their loved ones on the Peninsula,’ I said, ‘and they would love to know the ground where they were buried was sacred ground undefiled by savage feet. If a Turk died in Australia and one of your people went half-way round the world to see his grave, what would you think if you were forbidden to go near him . . . war, or no war, I think it only right that I be allowed in.’56

Right was not as strong an argument as the implied slight on the Turkish national character. As the translators grew more flustered, Frank Clune pressed home his advantage: ‘In the past the Turks had a reputation for cruelty and no consideration for foreigners. Why even,’ said I with heat and emphasis, ‘an Australian minister of the Crown, who was a prisoner of war in Turkey, wrote a book entitled “Guests of the Unspeakable”. That’s what the world thinks of Turkey. The world does not know how Ataturk has rejuvenated your country, obliterating the unspeakable element. I want to visit Gallipoli, to lay a wreath on the memorial to Ataturk and a wreath on the Australian monument at “Lone Pine”.’57

Frank did visit Gallipoli. In the spring of 1942 a military escort took him all the way to Anzac. For Frank, like the soldier pilgrims who preceded him, it was a voyage into both history and memory: I slowly walked between the hedge of rosemary, reading the names of my comrades on the little white stones . . . Baker, Batty, Bradshaw, Brown, Denholm, Dunstan, . . . Killed in Action . . . hand to throat action of the bloodied Bomb

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Ridge. Here on Pope’s Plot I placed my wattle wreath to my fallen comrades. The Turkish bugler played the Last Post, and we stood at attention, saluting the dead. A minute’s silence and I turned away. My eyes were moist, I thought of my pals . . .58

A simple ceremony like that was probably all the pilgrims of 1965 had wished for. Ceremonial aside, there were other significant features which distinguished these early visits from all subsequent pilgrimages (soldier and otherwise). The first was the landscape they returned to. For thirty or so years after the evacuation, Gallipoli was (as Clune put it) ‘wild, undisturbed, untouched’, a place befitting a ‘sanctuary’.59 The ground itself was littered with the ‘traces of war’. Sailors from HMAS Sydney found ‘cartridge clips, bullets, shell cases, tattered notebooks, buttons, bayonets, and even rifles’. Young Dan Bowden scrambled down tracks that still marked Shrapnel Gully: ‘we found hand grenades like cricket balls’ and ‘human bones that had been missed by burial parties’.60 These early visitors found Gallipoli unchanged, unforgiving, brutally familiar: Our front line is still clearly marked, lines of deep trenches running up each side of the shadowing valley; here were the reserve lines; there a dressing station sought scanty shelter up a cul-de-sac; here a ration party was caught by a whiz-bang and the rum spilt; here a shallow, muddy well, where . . . water could not be sold for gold. Even after thirteen years it is all terribly real and terribly impressive.

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‘No soldier who kept a diary of those days . . . should leave it behind . . . when he revisits the Peninsula’: the same diarists had lost their bearings thirty years later.61 A second difference between the first and second waves of soldiers’ pilgrimages centred not so much on the place as its people. By 1965 Inglis noted, old Turk and ageing Anzac could no longer see themselves as enemies. There was a sense that the youth of both nations had been laid to waste by war, neither side seemed at fault, the suffering had been shared evenly. One old digger sought out the man who had shot down Private Simpson: ‘I will buy him a drink’.62 Even the crippled put aside their sense of injury: ‘[I intend] to inspect the Quinn’s Post trench where Jacko blew me up. And just to show there is [sic] no hard feelings, Jacko and I might be able to sit down and clean up a bottle of plonk’.63 An earlier era was not quite so generous. True, the rhetoric of reconciliation embellished every ceremonial occasion; old soldiers spoke of their noble foe: ‘An Anzac Honours the Brave Turkish Dead’ declared the second wreath Frank Clune laid at Anzac. And to some extent that reflected

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‘finding an actual grave’: General Monash returns to the battlefield at Mont St Quentin. Monash and his daughter Bertha embarked on one of the first pilgrimages of the ‘devastated areas’, entrusted with collecting photographs of graves for grieving families in Australia. Monash still viewed the landscape as a soldier and noted the tactical disposition of the terrain in his diary.

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(and rekindled) the respect, admiration and sympathy war-weary soldiers – on either side – felt for one another. But campaigns cannot be fought without a heady measure of hatred. In his heated exchange with Ankara, Clune evoked fears and anxieties set deep in the European imagination: the Turks were cruel, savage, other, ‘unspeakable’.64 Earlier pilgrims lapsed just as easily into stereotypes. In many accounts the old enemy is unreliable, untrustworthy and has ‘a good bit of the wild boar’ in his temperament.65 And the very first soldiers to return to the Peninsula hadn’t forgotten old grudges. In 1919 the Australian War Graves staff found a Turkish monument celebrating the Anzacs’ departure. They measured it, photographed it, set a small explosive charge and blew it to pieces. Shards of the marble were sold on the streets of Sydney, the proceeds pointedly devoted to the relief of crippled soldiers.66 By 1965 such an act had slipped quietly from memory. Indeed, the pilgrim ship carried ‘home’ a cargo of booty, riding whips wrested from Turkish officers, captured flags and commandeered watches. Ironically this ‘journey of remembrance’ vowed to forget the past, returning ‘treasures’ and ‘mementos’ captured and hoarded fifty years earlier.67

Getting the old crowd over there: Western Front pilgrimage Such a reconciliation on the Western Front is much harder to imagine. Indeed, in many ways pilgrimages to the battlefields of Northern Europe involved a very different kind of journey. Off the beaten track and shrouded with mystery and danger, visitors to Gallipoli usually sought safety in numbers. The pilgrim ships that plied the Dardanelles carried several hundred passengers. Smaller parties were discouraged; travellers who sought adventure or exotica were directed to Egypt or Palestine.68 By contrast, most of the soldiers who returned to the Western Front went either on their own or in small family parties. Often former comrades travelled together, touring the old trench lines and looking up old estaminets and billets. Mass pilgrimages, like the ones launched intermittently from Britain, were (so far as Australia was concerned) very much the exception. It required considerable resolution to make one’s way to Gallipoli; this was a very deliberate, self-conscious act of pilgrimage. Visitors to the Western Front, by contrast, were just as likely to be extending their Grand Tour of Europe, ‘a visit to the battlefields’ concluding a sojourn on the Continent. The infra-structure was there and (as earlier noted) travel agencies like 138

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Thomas Cook were quick to incorporate battlefield tours in their standard tourist itineraries. Sectors of the line were promptly identified as British, French, Australian or Canadian and marketed accordingly.69 For a returned soldier, signing on for such a tour offered an easy chance for nostalgia; one crossed the Channel in safety, a 1920s pilgrim recalled, and saw only what one wished to see in the time of one’s choosing. Catching a train to Amiens or Ypres and motoring along the old front line, was hardly the challenge of returning to Gallipoli.70 Finally, there was not quite the same incentive to launch a mass pilgrimage to France or Belgium as there was to Gallipoli. Old soldiers saw Anzac as ‘our war’. Landing there had seized Australia’s place in history, holding the cliffs and gullies (a distinct and separate part of the Allied line) seemed so much more memorable than defending the battered landscape of the Somme or Flanders. True, the Gallipoli campaign had claimed fewer lives – four times as many men were killed in France and Belgium. But they were also the first to fall, and being buried in a non-Christian country made the case for a pilgrimage all the more compelling. Leaving the dead on Gallipoli had been ‘the hardest part’ of the evacuation. As troops looked back on the beaches they swore they would return there.71 Perhaps for these reasons the first steps to organise a pilgrimage to the Western Front came as a request from the Empire rather than a genuinely Australian initiative. The appeals began in the early 1920s: both the Empire Service League and St Barnabas actively sought ‘Dominion participation’ in a series of pilgrimages they planned from Britain. As the tenth anniversary of the Armistice approached, the tone of these entreaties became more and more insistent. On 28 January 1928 a cabled message from London thundered off the telex of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League HQ in Melbourne: battlefield tour definitely decided august fourth to eight visiting number of war areas concluding with magnificent march through menin gate where field marshal haig will take salute from five thousand british ex servicemen and one thousand ex servicemen representing every part of empire stop72

The Council of the British Empire Service League summoned ‘a minimum of three hundred’ ex-servicemen from Australia, and relayed on the objectives of the pilgrimage through a detailed wireless message. Honouring the million dead came first of course, but almost as important was an obligation to the living. The pilgrimage would reaffirm the friendships that 139

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bound the Empire together and ‘keep before the rising generation’ the example of Allied sacrifice.73 Perhaps the bonds of Empire were not quite as strong as they used to be. Far from committing the last man and the last shilling, the RSSILA’s response was confused and divided. There were questions of the League’s priorities, of the many and varied obligations they owed to all their members and the larger issue of whether they shouldn’t be fielding a pilgrimage from (and for) Australia. In the latter case, Gallipoli would be the first and favoured destination. In the end, the annual Conference called for the chartering of a vessel but ‘without expense to the League’ and (as every delegate knew) the expense would be considerable. Even with concession fares, former soldiers would pay as much as A£60 (about a third of a skilled white male worker’s annual earnings) and that for a third-class cabin. All other costs would have to be met by the ‘individual’.74 The RSSILA’s failure to secure any government subsidy meant that sizeable reinforcements from Australia were never very likely.75 With only ‘the Officer class’ able to afford the fare all thoughts of an overseas contingent were quietly abandoned. The task of representing Australia fell to a few determined diggers, most of whom had already made their home in Britain.76 From that moment on, mounting a ‘genuinely Australian contingent’ from all States of the Commonwealth, from all walks of life and most importantly from Australia, became something of a mission for many returned servicemen. In 1928 (with the failure of the British Legion initiative already painfully apparent) a conference of soldier settlers in Melbourne proposed an elaborate savings scheme to fund such overseas travel. By putting aside a few shillings a month, ‘combining’ their savings and ‘accruing’ their interest, the fares could be raised by the early 1930s. There was talk that Monash might lead the tour and less realistic hopes for a government subsidy. The Pilgrimage Club began in early 1929; open to ‘all ex-servicemen’ it planned a trip of 184 days and a round-the-world tour of all the major AIF battlefields and memorials. But pennies for the Pilgrimage Club were soon needed elsewhere. The 1930s were a time of crippling economic depression, when most soldier settlers struggled to survive on marginal land and ill-equipped holdings. Almost as quickly as it began, the enterprise was disbanded.77

The coronation contingent

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The push for pilgrimage resumed in 1936, and again it was a British rather than Australian initiative. The plans for the coronation of Edward VIII renewed the Empire’s call to its Dominions: Australia was asked to provide a

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guard of honour for its new sovereign. Ex-AIF men would be best; the young prince had visited the diggers in France and Belgium. And it should be a gesture worthy of Empire: London suggested a thousand men – a pilgrimage the size of a battalion. But getting what one digger called ‘the old crowd over there’ was bound to prove a problem.78 Once again, branches of the League bubbled with proposals. First, there was the familiar recourse to wartime economies. C. S. Gibson, a soldier settler from Mount Gravatt, Queensland, was more than prepared for ‘roughing it’: There are thousands of army hammocks, blankets and mess equipment stored in Australia and England, and these could be lent to the shipping companies for the round trip . . . The food would be plain but plentiful, and every man going on board would have to sign a declaration submitting [to] the selfimposed disciplinary routine . . . [There would be] former doctors of the AIF on board, and, of course, A.M.C. orderlies. Ex-diggers who have [musical] instruments could be encouraged to form bands . . . Special accommodation would be provided for the limbless.79

Organising ‘on the lines of an army unit’ would bring the fare down to between A£20–£30 and it would restore the ‘cohesion, discipline and esprit de corps’ they so missed as civilians. Gibson reckoned he could count on at least 5000 diggers signing on. It would be the first ‘truly representative pilgrimage of ex-AIF men to the . . . battlefields of France [and] the Empire’s shrine at Whitehall’.80 Less elaborate schemes centred on the sale of raffle tickets or a sponsorship scheme to ‘send a digger back’ to England. But by far the simplest thing would be a hefty subsidy from the Commonwealth. And after all, Smith’s Weekly declared, this was their fair and just entitlement. [It’s not as though] the diggers are asking for a free trip – like politicians . . . Many of these men never travelled beyond Palestine and Gallipoli. Some were even promised English leave; but then something happened, as it does in the Army, and the chance was lost.81

Funding the fare to the king’s coronation was owed these men by way of compensation and there were none better qualified to represent Australia. The politicians thought differently. Besieged by one veteran group after another, (and mindful that the sovereign had called for this ‘coronation contingent’) the Lyons Government conceded some assistance. But it was on neither the scale nor the terms that ex-servicemen expected. Only 150 ‘soldiers’ would be sent and barely a half of these would be former AIF members. Moreover, choosing the men would be solely the responsibility of the government. This was a direct challenge to the powerful veterans’

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lobby and one no self-respecting soldier would tolerate. The Chairman of the Ex-Servicemen’s Contingent Committee appealed directly to the Duke of York who, by the end of the year, became King George VI. A thousand men at least must be sent, he insisted, and ‘the[ir] selection . . . left in the hands of the various unit associations’.82 Whoever chose the deputation there was no way around the government’s rigid selection criteria. Simply to have served was not enough. A minimum height of 5ft 7in was prescribed, and all applicants had to prove ‘100 per cent physical fitness’. ‘Good war service’, current service in the Commonwealth Military Forces and a military decoration or two was also seen as an ‘advantage’.83 And rumours were rife that the conservative federal government assessed political as well as medical fitness.84 Many former soldiers found it hard to take this seriously: The casual nature of the digger was illustrated in some of the applications. One candidate omitted to give his address; another failed to give his name; and a third mentioned that his physical condition was perfect but admitted that he was in receipt of a 50 per cent war pension.85

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Those who were selected were expected to ‘acquit themselves like guardsmen’. For middle-aged men, ‘whose waistlines had grown’ somewhat, that proved a little difficult. Billeted at Batman Avenue (an old AIF base in Melbourne) the contingent were equipped with khaki, felt cap, ‘leather to polish, emu feather to keep trim’ and a rifle to carry. Daily they faced a regimen of drill and gymnastics.86 There would be ‘no raggedness and no slouch’ about these honorary Australian soldiers. ‘London would see the Diggers again’, a headline in the Argus declared: ‘People would point to their emu feathers and sunburnt faces. “There go the Australians,” they will say, “Remember them at Gallipoli and Passchendaele!”’ Soldiers like these embodied ‘the essential virility of Australia’.87 Ironically, the pilgrimage that had hoped to be the one most representative of the AIF soon proved the most elitist. Class perhaps was not at issue, indeed former officers were excluded although some signed up ‘as privates’. But the search to find ‘the Anzac type’88 pushed aside the sick, the tired, the ageing: the vast majority, in fact, of all Australia’s ex-servicemen. The average height of the contingent was around 6 foot, prompting complaints from ‘the little fellows’ that they ‘went over the top with the best of them’. Certainly those who had paid the greatest price were the least likely to be chosen. Blind and disabled soldiers were politely turned away; with ‘backs straight, heads erect and chins held high’ the contingent made a ‘stirring sight’ – wouldn’t the crippled rather spoil it? No one suggested an Aboriginal presence, nor (for that matter) an ex-service delegation from Australia’s sizeable Chinese

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community. The coronation contingent perpetuated the AIF’s founding myth; that all who joined up were of ‘British extraction’.89 Finally the quest for ‘Australia’s virility’ was very much a male fantasy. Initially, nurses were told they could not apply for the contingent. In fact, they were one part of the AIF specifically excluded. From the National Council of Women to the Housewives Association of Victoria, women raised their voices in protest. Excluding Australian nurses was an insult to the nation’s womanhood, Angela Booth declared; they had ‘earned the right to representation’; none, eventually not even the government, could deny their ‘magnificent service’.90 But the same arguments were not extended to women who spent the dark years of war knitting socks and sewing bandages, caring for frightened, wounded and crippled men, sending their own (and others’) sons to slaughter. Nurses were part of the Army, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and Red Cross workers just well-meaning amateurs. Patriotic work was also women’s work, unskilled, undervalued and ultimately unrewarded. By contrast the cause of the nurses, very much a profession by the 1930s, seemed ever so much more glamorous.91 In the end, it was all just politics and tokenism: only three Australian nurses joined the ranks of the coronation contingent.

Unveiling Villers-Bretonneux There was very little glamour associated with the last great soldier pilgrimage of the interwar period. And perhaps that is surprising. The opening of the Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux in July 1938 ended what might well be called the golden age of Great War funeral architecture. Its proud white tower rises on a ridge before Amiens, guarding the graves of Australians who (in one of the most crucial actions of the war) turned back the German Army.92 The unveiling ceremony was attended by the largest single contingent of Australian ex-servicemen ever to return to any of the battlefields. Some 400 diggers formed an honour guard for King George VI. Lining the approach to the royal dais, they were marshalled into six sections, each under the command of a former AIF officer. The old AIF stood stiffly to attention as their majesties, the French President and a host of assembled dignitaries filed past them. And for all the pomp and ceremony the day was not without its moments of quite unpractised poignancy: At the conclusion of the ceremony wreaths were laid by the King, the President, and the Rt. Hon. Sir Earle Page on behalf of the Commonwealth Government.

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At this stage a spontaneous gesture on the part of the Queen gave immeasurable satisfaction to all present. During a pause after the wreaths had been laid, Her Majesty was seen to speak to the King, after which she stepped forward and placed on the King’s wreath the posy of poppies received from [a small boy] from Villers-Bretonneux school.93

Even so, the opening of the memorial was in many ways a disappointment. The ‘structure’ unveiled by His Majesty was (as one Labor politician pointed out) not really an Australian memorial at all. The government had ‘violated’ the ‘three fundamental conditions’ set down by the parliament: ‘the architect is . . . not an Australian, the material . . . is not Australian stone, and the workmanship is not Australian’. In doing so it had disregarded a nationwide competition to appoint a genuinely Australian design. William Lucas’s winning proposal was abandoned in the light of what the Prime Minister called Australia’s ‘financial situation’.94 Government economies also altered the character of the pilgrimage. Initially, the RSSILA had hoped for another ‘contingent’ from Australia: at the very least, the Commonwealth should meet all the expenses of ‘an ex-AIF man’ from each State in Australia and a representative of the disabled. But one ex-serviceman in total was all the budget would run to.95 Adding insult to injury, the official entourage sent to open the memorial included R. G. Menzies. It wasn’t his conservative politics that the League found so ‘objectionable’. Unlike the men buried at Villers-Bretonneux, Menzies chose not to fight for the country he owned so much of.96 Finally the 400 who formed the king’s honour guard were no longer Australian residents. Though all had seen service in the AIF, they had settled back ‘home’ in Britain. A Commonwealth grant of A£1 per man subsidised their trip across the Channel.97 It was not quite the same as a pilgrimage from Australia and it didn’t look quite as grand either. Dressed in civilian attire of all sorts and sizes, the four-day pilgrims lacked the Anzac attributes of the coronation contingent. We passed . . . through a guard of honour of Australian ex-soldiers [one of the dignitaries recalled]. Where they came from, goodness knows. They were a motley crowd; probably many of them were odds and ends who have jobs in England. It would probably have been better if a smart guard of British troops had been brought over, but no doubt room had to be made for Australians.98

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It says a great deal about imperialist sentiment and national self-esteem that these words could be written by an Australian.99

In contrast to Gallipoli and other theatres of war, several thousand former servicemen and servicewomen returned to the Western Front in the first twenty years after the Armistice. What they were returning to is problematic. France and Belgium presented a very different landscape to the battlefields of Turkey and it was not just the physical attributes of that landscape that was at issue. The Western Front, as one British pilgrim put it, was imbued with certain ‘emotional associations’; associations altogether absent at Gallipoli.100 The war on the Peninsula was nothing if not relentless. Troops were stationed there until illness or injury forced their evacuation. While some sections of the line were more dangerous than others, nowhere was safe. Turkish guns sprayed shrapnel over virtually the entire Australian position, snipers’ bullets carried death from every corner. And while there were lulls in the fighting, the pain and privation of the war were endless. There was no fresh food, the water was barely drinkable, the trenches and dugouts stank of urine and excrement. Fought in the area of a few square kilometres, the campaign was stiflingly crowded, on the jagged cliffs of the Peninsula the living competed for space with the dead and one could hear and smell the enemy. The same was largely true of the front line on the Somme and Flanders – but in France and Belgium the war was, spatially and temporally, so much more extended. It was not just the physical location of the trenches, an elaborate network of ‘holes and ditches’ weaving all the way across Europe.101 The war itself was run on a circulating roster. After a few days in the forward trenches, exposed to the brunt of battle, soldiers moved back to the support lines and then into reserve. The last could offer safety, security and even a chance to escape the war altogether. The reserve lines bordered the civilian world. From here Australian soldiers on leave ambled through fields and villages, seeking solace, companionship and the surer release of sex or alcohol. Returning to the Western Front, soldiers sought out these ‘pleasant places’. There were ‘pretty little hamlets’, ‘favourite towns and villages’ and, of course, the cafes and bars where men hurried to forget themselves. One man remarked that he went back ‘to find mademoiselle’: another sought the ruined village where he at last had ‘a bath, a sound sleep and a change of underclothing’.102 It was ‘not the war spirit’ that motivated this journey. Coming back was an attempt to ‘conquer the disgust and loathing’ which haunted most survivors, to salvage something from the stolen years,

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Can this be the old salient?: confronting war and memory

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to find joy or hope or tenderness in lives that had been broken and brutalised. The transformation of the old front line was also quite ‘astounding’: Can this be the old salient [one old soldier asked]? As we stand on the wall . . . of the ruined canal I trace the Menin Road out towards that . . . death trap, ‘Hell Fire Corner’. But very soon the view is broken by neat farm houses – red roofed, white walled and homely . . . a hundred chimney pots puff cheerfully heavenward, countless windows glint back the sun . . . [and there is a] patchwork of tilled fields, early crops, industry and comfort. Where are all the signs of the ghastly inferno?103

The ‘inferno’ had long since been extinguished by peace and normality. In Turkey, it would take fifty years for nature to cleanse the stain of war. On the Somme and Flanders, the plough and the builder had accomplished that work (and far more completely) in less than a decade. Visitors to the Western Front, like those later pilgrims to Gallipoli, complained of a sense of loss, a sense of irreality; what had become of the world they left behind them? Many soldiers stood on the site of their old dugouts and wondered whether it was all a dream. They were comparing notes, sitting in the cafes . . . and telling how they went to seek their old headquarters and found shops selling camisoles and silk ‘nighties’. There were even cheap little shops which had sprung up, and were selling souvenirs of the Great War.104

It is difficult to say which the old diggers found more perplexing – the crass commercialisation of war or the surrender of their old front line to camisoles and nighties. Rebuilding ruins was one thing. What disturbed pilgrims far more was that the land itself bore no physical reminder of their suffering. One digger purchased a postcard of a crater on the Albert Bapaume Road, the only blemish, he remarked, on a ‘green, sunny, happy pastoral’.105 The girl who sold it to him ‘could not understand English’. The diggers ‘were there before she was born’, for her the war had only ever been a photograph. As ‘smiling wheat fields effaced the war’ they purged the Australian presence. By 1929 pilgrims reported that none of the diggers’ old trenches remained. Nothing was left but lines cut into the chalk, a shallow scar set on a quiet green countryside. And the actual sites of battle seemed to have vanished. L. A. Robb, NSW State President of the RSSILA, suspected the land longed to forget its history: 146

we journeyed through Warlencout and to the old windmill site at Pozi`eres. That famous spot has been bought for Australia but, beyond a small descriptive

These middle-aged men, revisiting the most ‘intense experience’ of their lives, fumbled for memory in the makeshift displays of private museums. They took a glass of wine and strolled around trench lines that enterprising farmers had maintained: ‘commercialising the dead’ paid better than beet or potatoes. Most complained it was like ‘a dream’; many found it cheap and vulgar.107 Memory had sunk deep in the mud of France and Belgium. The memories that remained were those of dead comrades. Finding an actual grave or name was the most important task facing any pilgrim. On Gallipoli, Major Millington and Colonel Hughes escorted visitors to cemeteries and memorials, sharing something of their grief, mediating their mourning. Death on the Western Front had always been more mechanised: appropriately pilgrimages there were conducted along businesslike lines, systems and procedures far more important than individuals. J. L. Martin had served in the 2nd Field Ambulance during the war and returned to Australia permanently disabled. In 1937 he made his way back to the Somme, determined to find the men he ‘left there’:

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tablet at the roadside, there is nothing to distinguish it from the rest of [t]he countryside. The poppies were blooming thick, where our blood-soaked trenches used to be, at the time of our visit.106

Mr Martin said that the main object of his tour was to see the graves of his old mates. In this regard, he had no difficulty, thanks to the admirable organisation of the War Graves Commission which had bureaus in towns centrally situated in the various zones. Immediately on inquiry, he was told in what cemetery his friend lay buried, or where the monument stood bearing the name of those who had died in that vicinity . . . On arrival at each cemetery he found a book indicating the location of the graves he sought. The system was wonderfully complete. He was informed that the remains of soldiers were [still] being found at the rate of 800 a year, the identification of the Australians [was] simplified by the . . . disc which each man wore . . .108

No doubt the West Australian’s report offered some comfort to families still grieving the loss of loved ones. In truth, almost half the Australians killed on the Western Front were either never identified or never recovered. With the number of limbs and torsos dragged from the earth, ‘wonderfully complete’ was perhaps a false reassurance. Perhaps the most important difference between the Western Front and Gallipoli had to do with perceptions of old opponents. As an executive member of the RSSILA, L. A. Robb took his pilgrimage very seriously. In a month abroad he visited memorials and cemeteries in Palestine, Egypt, Britain, France and Belgium. Wreaths were duly laid in honour of all the

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Allied nations, Robb even expressed regard for the ‘beauty and dignity of the Indian memorial’. No such sentiment was felt for the Germans: ‘[We visited] a cemetery nearby containing 36 500 German dead. Here was no inspiration. The plain, black wooden crosses stood in bare earth with no coverlet of lawn or flowers.’109 The most charitable view of the German graves is that they were ‘pitiful’, sad and sorry evidence of a defeated opponent’s crippled economy. There was no sense that the men buried there had also died for their country, or fought bravely, or even shared a common tragedy. The German was still the Hun, unlike the Turks he would always remain ‘the enemy’. And by the 1930s the world was returning to the trenches.

‘Operation Amiens’: the last great soldier pilgrimage

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A return to peace did not augur well for the pilgrimage movement. The 1950s, in particular, were a time when Australians turned their energies to postwar reconstruction. The steady march of the suburbs replaced the mass mobilisation of men in uniform. War was something Australians would prefer to leave behind them. It was also a period of national realignment; an increasing cultural and political reliance on America weakened much of the old loyalty to Empire. In this changing world order, the Great War lost something of its relevance. It could no longer claim to be the war to end all wars, and the cause for which it was fought seemed a good deal less persuasive than the crusade against fascism. Finally, the ranks of the AIF were steadily thinning. By the 1960s only a few thousand veterans remained – a fraction of 360 000 who had so eagerly embarked from Australia. Despite that, pilgrimages were organised, most notably the Jubilee Tour of Gallipoli.110 Myth had elevated Anzac to the birthplace of the nation and that, as earlier noted, helps to explain the enduring attraction of the Peninsula. Tours to the Western Front were smaller, less celebrated and have left very little mark on the historical narrative. ‘Operation Amiens’ was a notable exception: an elaborate and exceedingly well-documented plan to return thirty diggers to the Western Front for the fiftieth anniversary of Villers-Bretonneux in 1968. Like most military operations, success depended on a realistic, resourceful and totally committed leadership. The organisers, Fred Cahill and Les Irwin, had served as officers with the 9th Brigade: indeed their battalions (based in Newcastle, NSW) had seen the brunt of the fighting. After the war, both became politicians. Few professions could be better acquainted with the diplomatic and logistical difficulties posed by such a pilgrimage. Serving or retired, parliamentarians like these enjoyed certain privileges: subsidised

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travel, secretarial aid, and a seemingly endless supply of stationery. By far the most valuable resources were knowledge and patronage. Irwin was a close friend of several cabinet members, including the Minister for External Affairs, [Sir] Paul Hasluck. He negotiated a steady stream of subsidies and concessions, including medical aid for a party whose average age was in the mid-seventies.111 Friends in high places also open many doors in diplomatic circles: in their time abroad the pilgrims would be received by royalty, feted at Australia House, and honoured at about twenty civic receptions.112 Though the 1968 pilgrimage was technically a private undertaking, these men and women behaved (and were treated) like ambassadors for their country.113 Fred Cahill took on the task of manager. Always a party numbers man, he ran the pilgrimage with vigour and discipline. Cahill began by working what he fondly called the ‘RSL grapevine’, collecting advice and information.114 But he was prepared to seek assistance from anyone: the Department of Interior was asked to develop a film, the ABC expected to provide radio ‘coverage’ and the Director of the Australian War Memorial told to ‘compile two brief war stories’.115 One of Cahill’s most important advisers was Georges Blin, a French war veteran and leading advocate of Alliance Francaise in Sydney. Blin’s work went well beyond translation; he knew how French protocol worked, was well connected with les Anciens Combatants Francais and was endowed with all the ‘grace and politeness’ required of ceremonial occasions. The old members of the AIF, by contrast, had little patience for formalities and left to their own devices their speeches would probably have caused an outcry. One such address claimed Australians had won the war at Villers-Bretonneux, another honoured almost 40 000 diggers who fell in France, and said nothing of a million dead Frenchmen.116 For the two years they corresponded, Cahill and Blin trod a fine diplomatic line, the one boldly ‘Australianising’ every text, the other soothing and respecting local sensibilities.117 The contrast with the 1965 pilgrimage, where the leaders knew little of Turkish protocol and nothing of the language, is striking. Australian servicemen who had settled abroad were another such source of local knowledge. Like many a digger before him, Rex Bristow ran a hotel on the Somme, Reg Bantoft had worked for a coach service and Rolly Goddard was a retired florist. Together, Cahill announced, they covered essential elements of any battlefield pilgrimage: transport, floral wreaths, accommodation and alcohol.118 But really it was being with your own blokes that mattered most. It wasn’t a ‘package tour’ the ‘old Somme men’ sought, but a chance to ‘spend more time in certain places, and to mooch around taking camera shots at . . . leisure’. Only mates who’d ‘been there’ would really understand that.119

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Operation Amiens also took account of the many failures that went before it. In 1965 pilgrims complained the leadership was ‘aloof’, ill informed and that no attempt had been made to foster ‘a team spirit’. By contrast a steady stream of circulars kept the sixty-eight pilgrims ‘in touch’, long before their departure and well after their return to Australia. The advice was polite, clear and comprehensive: personal hygiene, domestic politics and international exchange rates, all fell within Cahill’s jurisdiction. Bulletin 6 prescribed ‘what clothes male pilgrims should take’ (Cahill was not the sort of fellow to meddle with a lady’s wardrobe). Three short underpants were called for (nylon and drip-dry), two pairs of socks (nylon mix) and a plentiful supply of hankies. Jackets and ties were a matter of particular delicacy: ‘If all the men wore ties with a green and gold motif . . . it would lend an Aussie touch’ but nothing, he warned, that might look ‘too dashing’. All the pilgrims were cautioned against ‘strange foods’, and asked to ‘stick to safe subjects’ in conversation. Neither was possible during earlier pilgrimages to Turkey. ‘Being an official party . . . we must also have regard to the good name of the [our] country’: Cahill declared. Never one to underestimate a digger, he asked his boys to do their bit ‘in making the party a happy one, but not necessarily a noisy one’.120 From the early 1920s pilgrims had dreamed of recapturing something of that wartime ‘discipline and cohesion’. 1968 was probably as close as they came to it. At a time when youth festivals across the world were rejecting authority altogether, the old men organised themselves in platoons and drilled in familiar formations. This was not just a matter of playing at soldiers. Aged and infirm, the pilgrims had no choice other than to rely on one another, to act, as Cahill put it, as ‘one family’: [Our group] included men who were totally incapacitated; the lame, the victims of poison gas, the almost blind, the heart sufferers. Physically feeble they carried the flag . . . to every parade and every ceremony . . . They helped one another, determined not to allow anyone to fall out and be left behind. One veteran, aged eighty-four, was advised to fly home from Israel, but the remainder of the group opposed this, and said they would take care of him in the old AIF tradition. They carried his pack and he fell in on every parade.121

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With so elderly a company, care was taken not to ‘cram’ too much into the itinerary. Unlike the 1965 pilgrimage, a good deal of free time was structured either side of most official functions. Private sightseeing was largely left to the purse and inclination of individual travellers and certainly there was none of 1965’s insistence on a self-improving round of antiquities and museums.122 To the contrary, Cahill and Irwin knew the kind of recreation that appealed to ageing diggers. The engineering of an ‘Anzac Day “do”’ in London is

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an ideal illustration. Cahill took some care to explain their ‘requirements’ to (somewhat bewildered) British veterans. The wreath-laying ceremony at Whitehall was all very well, but ‘here in Australia Anzac Day is dedicated to . . . fraternisation’. Would it be possible to host some drinks, the letter politely inquired, ‘tea and cakes’ would not quite be the go, perhaps something a little stronger. Above all: ‘Speeches are not our favourite pastime [no more than] a word of welcome and a reply from our leader’. Music, on the other hand, was entirely acceptable: ‘We always have [a] . . . community song from our World War I repertoire’.123 The engineering of a truly Australian Anzac Day in England suggests again the paradox that lay at the heart of soldier pilgrimage. ‘Fraternisation’ and having a bit of fun was at least as important as commemoration and mourning. The men themselves were quick to acknowledge this. Worried that things were starting to look a bit too serious, Reg Biggs (leader of the Tasmanian contingent) wrote a long letter to the organisers: I fully recognise that this tour is partly dedicated to a purpose, namely, a pilgrimage to the battlefields and certain war memorials with the aim of a tribute to the memory of our Fallen Comrades; also that, as the Dept. of External Affairs is identified with it, courtesy receptions at some embassies and consulates are unavoidable.124

But recognition and approval were very different matters: those who are planning the arrangements must equally bear in mind . . . that the veterans are spending their life savings to see as much as possible of the battlefields and their old rest areas to which they became strongly and sentimentally attached. With this in mind, I have just been studying a large area map of France . . . and drafted out an itinerary.125

Of course there were the obvious landmarks, the ‘many marvels to see and enjoy’ all throughout Paris. On the battlefields, Biggs longed to travel the line again, and visit Lille, the German-held town ‘we looked longingly at . . . from our trenches’. Other longings would surely be understood by every old soldier: ‘the bus could take us to Armenti`eres via the rest and training area we used to go back to. (I’d love to call at the billet . . . near Becourt . . . to see whether that fine girl and my company’s friend Marie is still there)’.126 Pilgrims threatened to ‘wag it’ if the trips to the cemeteries weren’t balanced by time in bars, cafes and other places ‘diggers frequented’.127 In yet another letter, Reg Biggs became quite explicit.: ‘In England, why not a sentimental trip to Salisbury Plain . . .? In France, [let’s do] a round trip . . . through our old rest areas . . . Then have a couple of days doing Paris (wonder whether the Hotel All Nations brothel is still functioning?)’128

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Biggs, it seems, was fully functional. For a good time in Paris, he would happily forgo all but a day’s rest on the homeward journey. These and many other letters remind us that a visit to the Western Front still involved a ‘sentimental journey’. In the twilight of their lives, battlefield feats seemed far less memorable than youthful exuberance and sexual adventure. It also highlights the fact that this particular pilgrimage was a very male fraternity. Of the thirty-six travellers only six were women, and three of these were widows of the fallen. The absence of wives sharply distinguished 1968 from all the pilgrimages that preceded it. And that had a great deal to do with the fact that this was, essentially, a service reunion. By commemorating the 9th’s battle honours at Amiens, the pilgrimage became as veteran-centred an affair as a ‘two up’ game on Anzac Day. Some even argued that all women (including widows) ought to be excluded. A veteran of three earlier tours (1936, 1955 and the 1965 voyage to Gallipoli), Bruce Rainsford felt entitled to an opinion: ‘NO WOMEN’, his letter shouted. Only ‘Somme men’ could understand the real meaning of their journey.129 But perhaps the deeper meanings weren’t really at issue here. In planning that Anzac Day ‘do’ in London, Frank Kennedy argued ‘confidentially’ that the last thing they wanted was the help of the women’s auxiliaries. All that tea, cake and sympathy just ‘got the chaps down’: Tickets for the . . . Reunion were 5/6 this year – but the main complaint – Chaps said it was more like a Mother’s Union Tea Party – because over 60 per cent of those present were women – some chaps who had bought tickets – asked for their money back – No[,] it isnt (sic) a Veterans Reunion.130

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Those women who did join the pilgrimage must have felt resented and excluded. There was no place for them in the boozy camaraderie of wartime.131 To his credit, Fred Cahill was a staunch supporter of women’s involvement in the pilgrimage. Partly, it was the need to make the pilgrimage as ‘widely representative’ as possible. The War Widows’ Guild had as honoured a standing as ‘the veterans organisations and units’. Devoted to remembering the fallen, widows became the last living link with all those mates they had left behind them.132 But Cahill could also see what ‘an asset’ women were in the business of commemoration.133 It was women who wrote to him asking that some ‘small floral tribute’ be placed on the graves of loved ones and family. They had ‘a greater right than anyone’ to mourn their menfolk passing.134 It may have meant that men like Reg Biggs would have to defer that visit to the All Nations Hotel, but charged with organising the tour (and ever mindful of Australia’s image overseas) Cahill was probably thankful.

‘ T o S e e O l d M a t e s A g ai n ’

The tour was a great success despite all these conflicting aspirations. Some things did not turn out quite as Cahill expected. Two of their ‘cobbers’ on the Somme proved unreliable, acting as Rolly Goddard cryptically explained, a bit too much like Frenchmen. A bussing firm stepped in to follow Reg Bancroft’s rambling itinerary.135 And the Western world which should have welcomed them proved a source of unpleasant surprises. The pilgrims found Washington neat and clean but in New York they encountered ‘malignant wogs’ just about everywhere.136 Operation Amiens proved the East was not the only place where pilgrims could indulge their prejudice. Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was the way Reg Biggs came to grief in Flanders. Came to grief quite literally: the old incorrigible wandered off alone to weep by the names of ‘old comrades’. They were blokes ‘he would have done anything for’, mates he still owed a beer to.137 Since the rude reception of 1929, pilgrims had never been quite sure of how France and Belgium would receive them. ‘We all wondered how [it would all] turn out’, Cahill recalled, ‘we expected time had erased the memory of the Australians’ and ‘worried endlessly’ about the weather. The weather could not have been kinder. With the exception of one wet day at Sailly-le-sac, spring sunshine brought life and colour to the still white tombstones of France and Belgium. And the people of Flanders and Picardy had yet another ‘surprise in store for them’: From Armenti`eres to the Somme, every city, town and village ‘turned it on’. Not only had the war of 1914–1919 [sic] been remembered and memorialised, but even the schoolchildren knew its history, its statistics, its tragedy and its triumphs. And they went wild with joy over the Australians. [At] Amiens, Villers Bretonux (sic), Albert, Mt St Quentin, Peronne – they paraded en masse in the streets, waving small paper Australian flags, backed with the French Tri-colour. They . . . sang . . . ‘Waltzing Matilda’.138

But the ‘most moving spectacle and one which brought tears to every eye’, centred on children: they formed guards of honour for us at our Australian memorials, and stood in reverence for English and French ceremonies . . . At the 3rd Divvy Memorial at Sailly-le-sac we found a group of fifty children standing in the rain, wet through. We were an hour late, not knowing that any local participation had been planned. We gathered them in our arms and pushed them into our coach till the rain abated. Then we watched each child solemnly walk to our memorial, kneel down and place a posy of flowers on the steps.139

Sailly-le-sac was the town Cahill remembered the clearest from all those years of fighting: ‘beautiful country with green fields and crops . . . the Maire,

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school, shops . . . the lovely old church’. After months of bombardment, the town was reduced to rubble, its people driven to the roads ‘with all their belongings on handcarts’, its Australian defenders (Cahill amongst them) entombed deep in the cellars. Returning to Sailly-le-sac Cahill recovered that place lost in war and memory, ‘Phoenix-like, [the village] had risen from the ashes’. There was no sense of regret here, no suggestion that the bleak battered landscape should have stayed as it was.140 Rather, for Cahill, history had turned a full circle, the land and its people had been healed, peace and prosperity restored. It was a reconciliation with the past few soldier pilgrims had managed and it was made all the easier by the laughter of the children. 1968 signalled the end of veterans’ pilgrimages. Though some would make their way to the battlefields again, they did so as the honoured guests of a touring government entourage. Veterans were ‘represented’ at the anniversary commemorations of 1975, 1980, 1990 and 1995. In 1998 the last survivors were air-lifted into France to receive the Legion d’Honneur. These were very different journeys to mates ‘embarking again’ and setting off to find ‘old cobbers’. They were more a matter of public relations, diplomacy and a nation’s belated thanks than a truly soldiers’ pilgrimage. And now that there were so few left the government was at last prepared to pay for them. Those who signed on for Operation Amiens sensed they represented the end of an era. Within a year of their return, several of the ‘crew’ had passed on and a good many others were ‘on the sick list’. And unlike in France, there didn’t seem the same respect for ‘old soldiers’. Fred Cahill couldn’t find a sponsor for his film, Jack O’Connor was beaten senseless walking to a meeting of the old battalion, a sordid little war in Vietnam threw all the causes they fought for into question. Australia, it seemed was in a hurry to forget them: ‘Not much interest generally now in W.War I memories’ mourned the final sentences in the last of Cahill’s bulletins.141 A new generation of soldiers would prompt us to remember.

6

‘A grave that could have been my own’: service pilgrimages Gary completed his pilgrimage survey response in October 2000, some six months after his return from Gallipoli. Writing about the trip hadn’t been easy. One of some 19 000 Australians conscripted to fight in Vietnam, war was a subject that triggered difficult memories. At the conclusion of the questionnaire he apologised for writing so little: ‘My answers were very brief, sorry.’ But there was a reason: ‘I think visiting Gallipoli was a very personal experience and not always easy to explain to people who have not fought in a war. I was in Vietnam in 1967.’ In fact, Garry had probably said as much as any of my survey respondents. ‘I cried all day’ was scrawled in capitals at the bottom of the questions.1 Many soldiers’ tears have often fallen on Gallipoli and not just during the fighting. Former (and current) servicemen and women make up a large proportion of Australian visitors to the Peninsula and indeed, to war graves generally. Both the RSL and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra run regular tours to the Western Front and Gallipoli; though open to all, their strongest clientele comes ‘through the services’. A tour to Gallipoli or the Western Front can also form part of a tour of duty. Servicemen and women play a key part in commemorative services; it is difficult to imagine a dawn service there without them. The shrill notes of the Last Post, the solemn music of military bands and ‘the ghostly hollow step’ of catafalque parties echo through the memories of many a pilgrim. Most of the service personnel who completed my questionnaires had fought in World War Two. The oldest was in his nineties and first visited Gallipoli in 1936 with the crew of HMAS Sydney. Dan has returned to Anzac on four other occasions and visits Crete and Greece (where he lost ‘good friends’) whenever he is able. Other veterans had seen action in Korea, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Gulf, and peace-keeping missions in Timor and Africa. A smaller proportion were members of the Army Reserve or officer cadets at the Australian Defence Force Academy, young men and women ‘training for war’ even if they ‘hadn’t actually been in one’. I interviewed one young man who had served with the Special Air 155

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Service in a conflict he didn’t care to name. Like Garry, he was sorry (the SAS, he explained, ‘didn’t do’ surveys).2 Doing the survey responses was a task most service personnel took very seriously. As with family pilgrims, there was a strong desire to contribute to history, to relive the experience, to tell the story. But this was a group that also had a proprietorial interest in Australia’s war graves. Still arrayed in their regiments, the dead (in a sense) belonged to them. Perhaps that explains why a number of battle-hardened veterans responded quite emotionally. A few, like Ray, ‘broke the habits of a lifetime’. During my working life I was constantly bombarded from Academe with surveys, questionnaires, research instruments, etc. etc. which for various reasons, all of which being sound, I ignored. In my whole career I didn’t complete one such document . . . Perhaps had I not had ‘the Battlefield experience’ I would stick to my past habits, but NO one can have that experience and come home the same person . . . You must be patient . . . it’s not the sort of thing one can simply ‘toss off’ from the top of one’s head.3

Ray’s survey response, like all my survey responses, was well worth waiting for.

Heritage and family

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The reasons for these pilgrimages were many. At one level, veterans visit war graves to enforce and honour their military heritage. David served with the Royal NSW Lancers in World War Two, his war took him to New Guinea, Sinai and Palestine. He has marched with his regiment on every Anzac Day since repatriation and at eighty years of age he is marching still. For David, the Regiment embodied traditions of ‘pride, loyalty and duty’. What better way to nurture those traditions than a visit to Gallipoli? Several veterans described themselves as ‘amateur historians’ and many belonged to military history societies. Gary’s sense of history was not quite as studious but easily as plausible: ‘I went to Gallipoli to find out where Anzac Day comes from’. Young female recruits went for much the same reason: ‘We are . . . soldiers [Michelle told me] this is our “Haj”.’4 But this sense of a shared heritage was also deeply personal. A large number of respondents came from what one young officer called ‘military families’. Indeed, a family’s service often straddled several generations. A signalman in World War Two, D.R.’s father was a first-day Anzac; Dick served in Korea with the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment, his father was an airman shot down over Belgium in 1917; Greg came back from

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

Vietnam but five pages of his survey were given over to Uncle Sid, whose body ‘was never recovered’ from the mud of Flanders.5 Several World War Two veterans had been named after uncles lost on the Somme or ‘buried at sea’. They had grown up with the wounds of war, ‘nervy uncles’ crying into the night, fathers strangely unfamiliar, great aunts who grieved away a lifetime.6 Going to Gallipoli or the Western Front was a way, as one put it, of ‘honouring all these men’, a chance to ‘admire’, ‘salute’ even ‘represent them’. Harold J. served almost five years in the army in World War Two but ‘wearing his [father’s] service medals [at Anzac Cove] was the most stirring feeling I have ever experienced’. Stirring for some, ‘spiritual and humbling’ for others. Several veterans spoke of a deep and a solemn sense of obligation.7 And a good many made the journey not just for themselves but also for others; their pilgrimage a living link with history. John L. D. first visited the Somme in the summer of 1950 to see where his father fought, and honour two good mates left behind there. He has since made several pilgrimages to World War One and Two cemeteries but visiting ‘Norm and Paddy’s graves’ for his father’s sake was ‘mentally and spiritually’ the most rewarding. ‘V.X.E.R.’ went to France partly for a friend, an old army mate who was dying: ‘He asked me . . . if I would visit Villers-Bretonneux and see and photograph his uncle’s name on the panel recording his battalion’s missing. This I did in 1980 and my thoughts were of my friend [for much of the journey].’8 V.X.E.R.’s ‘mission’ took him ‘to cemeteries great and small’, photographing graves ‘for a dozen or so members of father’s battalion’. Often as I stood in front of a grave I would realise that, perhaps, I was the only person apart from the gardeners, etc. who had ever stood there, and I would [wonder] if the soldier knew I was there, and thinking of him. [Surely just by doing that] his grave would be a little warmer.9

Clearly this was not just a matter of dutifully honouring Australia’s war dead. For the oldest of my veterans, walking the Anzac battlefields was an attempt to reclaim a very real and very personal memory, to make that sense of connection so many family pilgrims longed for. J.J.S., a veteran of both Korea and Vietnam, remembered his father’s words as he trudged through cemeteries in Britain, France, Belgium and Turkey: ‘“There must have been a better way to fight the war” [he said to me]. That remark goes through my mind whenever I visit [these places]. I think I visit war cemeteries out of respect for my father. For me [,] it’s like going to church.’10 A pilot during World War Two, Ian H. returned to Europe to find the uncle he was named after: ‘He was the eldest of six children of a widowed mother and made my father promise he would not enlist but care for the

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family’. And he was killed on the Somme just two months before the war ended: ‘Until I had seen the grave he was an ethereal name to me but now he was a person, my uncle, who I seemed to know in a real dimension. I was able to really grieve for this fine young [man] . . .’. John T. (RAN, 1943–46) visited Franvillers Cemetery in France to ‘see the place’ where his father had been wounded. For John it made good a lost opportunity, resuming the broken conversations of his childhood: Dad used to tell his exploits to us when we were kids but we didn’t listen, and now I thirst for knowledge of his service. He died in 1970 . . . The war knocked him about – not only his wounds, but he was gassed and I believe his experiences took toll of his emotional stability . . . he could have lived much longer had he not had such [a] terrible war.11

Before leaving Franvillers, John wrote ‘This is my pilgrimage’, clear and firm in the visitors’ book. It is precisely the knowledge of how terrible war is that most distinguishes veterans’ responses from other ‘family’ survey responses, and not just amongst soldiers. Having ‘nursed so many young men’ in World War Two, Helen knew the agony each rose-clad grave at Amiens concealed: ‘My thoughts about war are [always] coloured [she confessed] by my experience in nursing the wounded’. No one nursed or comforted Helen’s two uncles, missing in France for as long as she could remember. ‘Many of the [graves at Amiens] are marked “unknown”’. Yes, she added hopefully, ‘I felt it could have been one of them’. Clarice went to Turkey to honour Bart Creedon, a prisoner of war, ‘place of burial [also] unknown’. But her survey slid, almost imperceptibly, to those she knew intimately and an equally terrible loss of her own. My best friend in training days was Dorothy Gwendolwe Howard Elmes. [We all] called [her] Buddy. She [was] machine-gunned by the Japanese off Banka Island . . . She joined the AANS [Australian Army Nursing Service] because it was ‘the right thing to do’. She was a remarkable exceptional person with a keen sense of humour. I remember her as distinctly now as if she were by my side. She is remembered by all [of us] with the greatest admiration.12

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Like Bart, Buddy has no known grave. ‘Remembering’ them both has taken Clarice on pilgrimages to Gallipoli, Egypt, Alamein, Darwin, Pearl Harbor, Singapore and Washington; each and every one of these journeys have been ‘a profoundly moving experience’. The same generational slippage is apparent in soldiers’ stories. A New Guinea veteran, John’s memory moves restlessly from a cemetery on the Somme to a graveyard at Bomana. Honouring the dead of one war led him to the ghosts of another:

Feelings of guilt and indebtedness are common amongst veterans; in several of the surveys one confronts what psychologists call ‘the postwar trauma’ of survivors.14 A few went into considerable detail, relating stories of mates remembered from school, training and the local cricket team, ‘gallant’ young men, ‘full of life and promise’. It didn’t seem to matter that the survey dealt only with dead of the Great War, respondents wrote down what mattered most to them. In any case, as one respondent reminded me, Australian dead from both world wars often lay together. Their mates and their father’s mates were buried side by side, all too ‘far away from [their] homeland’.15 Visiting these graves prompted different responses from different survivors. Many felt deeply for the families back home, and admired the ‘care and love’ that went into writing every epitaph. Patrick, on the other hand, gazed with disbelief at tombstones eulogising a family’s ‘sacrifice’. ‘Having served in World War Two [I have] witnessed the supreme sacrifice [and there was not a man who died] with cries of patriotic fervour’. War, Patrick concluded bluntly, was an ugly, ‘futile business’ and graveyards not a place for poetry.16 Cemeteries did speak to soldiers though, even to those who had not seen death in battle. Dallas found a grave bearing his initial and surname at Gallipoli, he researched the soldier and found he had no surviving family in Australia:

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

I was overcome by the vastness of the cemetery. I inspected many of the graves – I took particular note of the district, town and country from which the men came and the age of the soldier – the fact that they were very young distressed me greatly, in that they were denied the greater part of their life on earth. This experience had a profound effect on me as it reminded me of my own war experience when my greatest friend was chosen to go into battle the very next day and I was left [behind]. [He] was killed and here I am alive. I recall this experience almost daily.13

For this reason I feel duty bound to act as a makeshift relative and remember his deeds for if I don’t it is likely he will remain nothing but a nameless statistic rather than the person I know he was. To me, Daniel’s grave represents a sacrifice for my benefit . . . but also a grave that could have been my own.17

Wasted lives The grim intimacy of death is one distinguishing aspect of soldiers’ survey responses, a persistent awareness of the tactical significance of terrain is another. Landscapes are a recurrent theme in most of my survey responses. Young and old marvel at how the killing fields of Europe have

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been transformed into peaceful gardens and ‘row after row of pretty paddocks and hedges’. For old soldiers, one suspects, they will always be killing fields. Most viewed the scenery ‘with a tactical eye’ and took a ‘keen interest in what they called ‘battlefield topography’. Even the least prepared reverted quickly to their training. Bill R. fought in the hills and gullies of Bougainville but he was shocked by his first sight of Gallipoli. I . . . notice[d] [a] marked change of mood to . . . our ‘battlefield touring group’ as soon as those foreboding hills and ravines came into view from our bus . . . I was not quite prepared when I was confronted with the rough and steep terrible terrain knowing the Turks always had the high ground. I am a born and bred bush boy, and the flatness of the Mallee country [meant I couldn’t] visualise the desperate disadvantages our men faced in these cliffs and valleys; no matter how idealistic and brave and motivated they might be. – Yes, I quietly wept for them, right there and then.18

Gary J. B., a Military Operations Instructor in Vietnam and Commanding Officer of a battalion took one look at the ground and thought the whole campaign unwinnable. The men he commanded put that to the test immediately. Norm . . . and I decided to go cross-country and [our guide warned us] to be very careful as the trenches and terrain can be very difficult. [We] set off [up] Bridges Road Valley and the steep slopes . . . made our progress very slow. We were heading for the 4th Battalion Parade Ground Cemetery . . . Half an hour later, [we] reached [it] [barely a kilometre from where we started] and the very long thorny bushes had . . . cut us to pieces . . . We realised just how difficult it would have been for the ANZACs with rifle and full pack [not to mention sniper fire and shrapnel].19

Words like ‘exposed’, ‘hostile’, ‘unnerving’, even ‘evil’ are scattered through soldiers’ responses; descriptions that betray the vulnerability (and trauma) of men under fire.20 They contrast markedly with (most) other survey responses; for those who have ‘not fought in a war’ (as Gary put it) the ‘scenery’ of Gallipoli is, first and foremost, stunning, beautiful, breathtaking. One of the words most often used by soldiers to describe the Western Front was ‘murderous’. David M. is a young soldier who has seen how ugly war becomes in Somalia. Four of his great uncles were killed on the Western Front and it didn’t take David long to explain why.

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As a serving Army officer . . . I was struck by the tactical futility of the attacks that occurred in many locations – the openness of the infantry’s approach

Jim too had lost a great uncle at Passchendaele. A Vietnam veteran (and now a stalwart of their Bikie Club) he was simply overcome by the ‘incredible loss of life and the futile waste of it’: To stand and look along a row of headstones all with the same surname, regiment, unit and date of death is utterly horrifying, all males, all of the same family, all gone! The tragedy is repeated endlessly. How could this have been allowed to happen [?]. Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August) describes the historical facts but the unrelenting horror of the trenches is beyond anyone’s grasp.22

Like most of the veterans who wrote extended responses, Jim had read about the Western Front. At an ‘intellectual level’ he knew what to expect there. But there is also a rawness in these soldier accounts that betrays the trauma of combat experience. Trained as a pilot during World War Two, Jackson described the landscape around Verdun as ‘tortured’.

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

and how devastating inter-locking machine-gun fire would have been when supported by massed artillery and barbed wire entanglements.21

[I was outraged by the] decision . . . to throw human flesh out into a direct confrontation with steel objects flying though the air with such rapidity and frightening force that there could never be any doubt as to the horrendous outcome . . . the human body was never designed to stand up to this mass impact and the obvious resultant appalling loss of life on both sides stands now as a mute testimony to man’s greatest miscalculations.23

Servicemen and women were anything but mute. Many, like Jackson, gave full vent to their ‘rage and horror’. Alby R. had served on HMAS Shropshire during World War Two, his father had been an infantryman in France and Belgium and no fewer than six uncles had marched off to the Great War. One of his most vivid memories is his own wartime visit to England: my ship was tied up at Portsmouth [and I made way] to a small village . . . a short distance from the town. It had a church, a pub, a cricket ground, . . . and a World War One memorial. I read the inscription over a dozen names, all [aged] nineteen, all from the same regiment and all killed on the same day. I have always remembered that memorial but didn’t realise until visiting the war graves how uselessly their lives had been thrown away. (‘Squire nagged and bullied till I went to war’).24

Alby’s pilgrimage resumed in France almost half a century later. First he followed the ground his father’s generation had fought over:

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I saw . . . the flat terrain with the high water table and could imagine the floodings caused when drainage systems had been flattened by artillery bombardments. I could [see] it as a windswept quagmire or covered with snow with only the remains of trees and buildings standing and the [bodies] of men and animals scattered everywhere. Although I knew of the tremendous casualties that had occurred I never knew what those numbers meant until I saw the cemeteries. Some contained only a handful of men which probably represented a section and others with hundreds of headstones meant a whole battalion had been wiped out. The closeness of the cemeteries was a shock, it appeared . . . that the same ground had been fought over on numerous occasions and each time a new burial ground . . . opened [for] the latest battle.

Journey’s end was Ypres, where Alby’s father had fought some eighty years earlier. Again Alby found himself drawn to the names on a memorial: As I walked around the Menin Gate reading the names of missing men . . . I began to wonder how many more cemeteries would have been needed to bury them all. I read in particular the missing from my father’s battalion [I stood on the Menin Road along] which thousands of Australians marched and remarched. I tried to picture my father going though the gate and wondering what his thoughts had been at the time.

Perhaps it was all those names which told Alby what to write in the visitors’ book: ‘Lives wasted by criminal stupidity’.25 Allocating blame was a task taken up by many a soldier. Five years in the army, Ray finds Anzac Days ‘very emotional occasions’. ‘[I] have never been able to quite make the distance without weeping’, he confessed, ‘invariably the Last Post’ reduces him to tears. But on Gallipoli (where Ray’s uncle was killed) he felt not so much sorrow but anger. My main reaction was one of absolute disgust that the so-called world leaders could commit such acts of total barbarism as to condemn the youth of the era to such needless torment and death. And further disgust in the knowledge that the so-called leaders of today have not learnt anything from history!26

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Politicians and bureaucrats (again those who’ve not seen battle) come in for a particularly bad press, especially from Vietnam veterans. America could have won the war, Kevin wrote, if it wasn’t ‘for the bureaucrats stuff up’. The same (he continued) was true of Gallipoli, another great series of ‘stuff ups’ that cost the lives of brave soldiers. A sense of betrayal was also felt by some older ex-servicemen, though not quite in the same context. They

I was only eighteen when I enlisted [one Kokoda veteran wrote] we had a real cause but today I feel betrayed by big business – greedy captains of industry – multinationals – greedy politicians who are corrupt even down to falsifying minor travel expenses and greedy lawyers . . . My friends gave everything for a better and secure Australia – Now we have drugs – homeless men women and children . . .27

Another veteran of the same war asked me how the Australian Government could possibly sell land to Japan. ‘I know you are not able to answer that, but I got it off my chest. Thanks.’28 Beyond this generalised sense of betrayal was a much more focused search for ‘those responsible’. A career soldier, James had a clear idea of World War One command structure and allocated blame accordingly. Leadership was poor and incompetent from the War Council through senior staff levels and on to Divisional HQ. He would not trust anyone much above the rank of major: ‘It was patronage, nepotism and [class] structure at its very worse’.29 Several expressed their disbelief that ‘futile over-the-top charges were ordered time and time again – what were they thinking [?]’ Some suggested commanders on the Western Front should have been tried for war crimes. And now (as then) it is all too easy to blame the British. In many of the surveys, brave and dedicated Australian troops are contrasted with effete and callous British commanders. Very few noted that Australian officers failed to challenge their Imperial masters.30 There was some defence of British leadership and predictably this came from what one respondent called ‘the old group’. ‘I still think of myself as a member of the old Empire’, Anthony wrote, and visiting the Great War’s graveyards had made him ‘a bit more loyal, more royal, more proud’.31 John contested the popular fallacy that ‘our boys’ had died ‘in someone else’s war’. ‘Great principles were at stake’ and so too were Australia’s strategic interests. Nor was it only Australians who suffered:

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

may have won the war but what had become of the Australia they fought for?

Anglophobes and ‘Republicans’ who make much of the ‘other people’s wars’ nonsense [do so] to further their own political agenda – perhaps they would benefit from a visit to Cape Helles – my Uncle Percy was one of some 20 000+ Brits who died . . . there and [he] doesn’t even have [a] headstone.32

The youngest of my respondents took quite the opposite position. A junior officer in the army reserve, Sonya honoured her great-grandfather who had fought at Gallipoli. But she would never have fought there.

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I certainly believe there are some things worth risking your life for . . . That I would risk my life to defend my country from a foreign invader goes without saying. But I don’t think that I’d be so keen to invade a country on the other side of the world (which, let’s face it, is what our soldiers were doing) to serve ‘Mother England’.33

While there were stark generational differences in many of the survey responses, individual responses were far from predictable. The ‘monarchy vs. republic debate’ (very dominant in the late 1990s) informed and inflamed many early responses and defied any easy categorisation in terms of class, age or gender. And the most volatile of survey responses categorically rejected any kind of label: I do not join in the condemnation of the English command structure; as they were all brainless members of an upper-crust mentality whose training gave them no concept of how to lead and motivate their troops and no idea of using any initiative. As well, losses were losses, in their eyes and the extent of the losses or the obvious reasons for defeat were lost on their autocratic minds.34

Even more challenging were those respondents who looked beyond national/tribal loyalties to question the purpose of war altogether. One expected ex-servicemen and women to express ‘pride’ in their compatriots. More surprising was the number who thought all the killing, all the dying ultimately ‘pointless’. As with family surveys that recognition of the insanity of war was strongest at Gallipoli. Even the oldest of soldiers acknowledged Australia and Turkey should never have been enemies. ‘Men on both sides were just tools used by generals and politicians’ a World War Two veteran wrote, ‘It wasn’t their war.’ The sense that both sides were victims of Empire at Gallipoli has long been enmeshed in the national mythologies of Australia and Turkey but the Peninsula led Pip to wonder if any war was ever justified.

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The most moving experience was meeting Turkish people visiting their memorials. They would cry and pray and acknowledge their dead with such respect. We stayed one night on Chunuk Bair. Some friends and I went to watch the sun go down and . . . a family of Turkish people arrived. We moved out of their way so that they could take photos . . . but they wanted us to [stay] . . . One old woman took hold of my arm and was hugging me and crying . . . [A] young Turk . . . pointed to Rob [another young ADFA recruit] and said ‘You and me eighty years ago would be fighting, but now we are friends . . . we respect you, Anzacs’. Here were these two young men shaking hands and smiling into the camera when they could have been fighting.

Peter wrestled with very similar questions. Australia and Turkey, he explained, were ‘just pawns being played by the great powers and this made us not enemies but both tragic victims’. On the Western Front, Peter found the grave of his great-great uncle: ‘a small piece of France that will ever be part of our family’. And the young reservist began to wonder if he too wasn’t a pawn, wasn’t a victim: [You] can talk of the Anzac legend, Anzac Day, the diggers and mateship but until you walk the ground, until you see the graves I don’t think you can really understand . . . If anything I have come back more of a pacifist. I have always struggled with the idea [of war] . . . at what point do you consider the interests of your country and nation above the life of another human being? When does it become ok to take the life of another person? I think my trip has confused this issue even further, especially given the state of the world and especially [given] the conflict in Iraq, a war I don’t think Australia should ever have been part of.36

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

It made me think for what? Why did all those men die? Was it so Rob and the young Turk could stand today and be friends? I don’t know.35

Few respondents went as far as Peter but a good many did change their view of war and, in particular, their view of ‘the enemy’. John confessed to ‘an underlying feeling of shame that our country had invade[d] . . . Turkey’. It was no more our war, he added, than the invasion of Iraq or Afghanistan. ‘You had mothers too’, a gruff old soldier scribbled in the visitors’ book at Langemark.37

Coming to terms with war Reconciliation with former enemies was also a common theme in many family survey responses; what makes veterans’ responses so interesting is that they also made peace with themselves and their countrymen. Greg served over a year in Vietnam; his armoured company suffered heavy casualties. With a great uncle lost at Bullecourt Greg knew war wouldn’t be easy but he wasn’t prepared for the ‘ingratitude’ of his fellow Australians. On return from Vietnam I was very bitter and never attended Anzac Day services. I felt the people [of] Australia were ungrateful for what servicemen did . . . Because of the politics of the war they took it out on the . . . vets . . . The RSL was not user friendly and told us it was not a real war, only a police [action].38

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Greg’s visit to Gallipoli ‘changed’ him. It was part of a process of rehabilitation that began with the opening of the Vietnam Memorial in 1992 (‘when I started to meet all my old army mates and we decided to stop punishing ourselves’) and ended in the small hours of the evening in the Boomerang Caf´e at Eceabat, drinking beer and yarning with backpackers. Greg at last felt accepted by young Australians, as interested in his war as they were in that of the Anzacs: Although we began to become a little exhausted by midnight the pleasure of being able to communicate with such young interested people was worth almost as much a feeling as Anzac Day itself. I guess it is the one time each year when the young can sit down with vets and ask all sorts of questions, and sometimes very searching questions, and get on occasions very emotional responses.39

It wasn’t all a ‘pleasure’ though and the ‘knowledge’ Greg wanted to ‘impart’ went well beyond ‘naval and military campaigns’ or the heroics of battle. The evening ended with Greg reading a poem, a ‘survivor’s story’ written by a mate ‘who has [suffered] many years of . . . mental and associated problems’. Entitled ‘Troubled Scenes’ it conveyed ‘the secret guilt’ of many a Vietnam veteran, men whose war will never really be over: You want to know the troubled scenes, that haunt within our minds and dreams The ghosts that wonder here and there, fill eyes with tears and minds with care But there are so many sights we’ve seen, things we’ve done and places been Young women dying, children killed, the blood that seemed so random spilled, The oft young bodies ripped and torn, or greasy smoke that stains the morn . . .40

If reconciliation took on a different meaning for veterans so too did many of the other themes associated with pilgrimage. The sense of communitas was particularly strong, mirroring and reinforcing the ‘close mateship’ of wartime. It was a ‘fellowship’ (as a World War Two veteran put it) that extended well beyond the circle of ex-servicemen. On Anzac Day at Gallipoli soldier and civilian stood together in a common identity as Australians. And their friendship was confirmed in the most cherished ritual of mateship: 166

[Just before] the dawn service i (sic) said to my wife that being away from home for five weeks that i would just love to have a Bundy [Bundaberg rum] . . .

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

‘the most cherished rituals of mateship’: diggers at the dawn service. Gallipoli is their day, a point all too evident in their proud if casual demeanour. The group comprises two generations of war service. There was a tap on my shoulder and this young bloke about twenty-two said ‘here ya go mate have one on me’, he then produced a plastic throwaway cup and a near empty bottle of the stuff and poured the last of it into my cup. An Ayssie (sic) backpacker living in London who didnt (sic) know me from a bar of soap [offered] me his last swallow of rum. I reckon that’s . . . mateship.41 [Q. Peter H. (Charters Towers, Qld)]

Although offerings made at graves were usually not elaborate, they also ‘embodied’ a soldier’s experience. Rising sun hat badges are buried beside an uncle’s headstone, a jar of earth was scattered at the Nek, it came from where the Light Horse was raised ‘and seemed the least I could do for them’. Rob and his father travelled to Gallipoli together, both are career soldiers, both saw service in Vietnam. Rob’s father left several Aussie flags at . . . ‘10th Battalion graves’ (his old World War Two posting), Rob pinned his

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to the names of 16th Battalion men (‘my current army unit’).42 Soldiers, like family pilgrims, decorate graves with wattle and strew poppies on the beaches. The unprepared and unrehearsed respond to the challenge with Anzacs’ legendary improvisation: a career soldier and ‘certainly not a man to express emotion gratuitously’, Terry gathered wild flowers for his uncle’s grave at Gallipoli, ‘took his business card from his pocket, . . . wrote “Billy, we never knew you” and he left it there’.43 Women were the best prepared of service pilgrims and often took a proprietorial interest in the graves of ‘their soldiers’. Patricia D. has visited and tended graves in seven different countries: ‘I have always tried to leave something on some of the graves – nearly always Flanders poppies . . . or I take a cloth and brush in case the grave needs attention’.44 Soldiers seem just as interested in divisional memorials. Older monuments raised in the 1920s were (for the most part) judged ‘noble’ and appropriate. But more recent figurative statuary provoked a storm of controversy. R.C. clearly liked the statue of a digger at Fromelles, but suspected it was the product of a civilian artist: ‘he is wearing part of his equipment incorrectly’. Depictions of ‘ocker’ diggers striding the battlefields of the Somme were another matter entirely. Serving soldiers often warmed to this slightly larrikin vision of themselves and their forefathers. Others (usually older veterans) thought the memorial at Bullecourt ‘loutish and inappropriate’.45 The debate over the depiction of the digger at Bullecourt had much to do with the veterans’ perception of themselves, in particular their own ideal of manhood. Of course, the survey had to have a ‘gender angle’. A few questions in the survey were intentionally evocative and invited a reaction from the reader. One such question read: The overwhelming majority of Australia’s war dead were men. Gender identity (like national identity) is a theme of many epitaphs: they did their duty not just as soldiers but also as men. How did you respond to this appeal to manhood? Can you say how it affected you as a woman or a man?

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It was perhaps fortunate that this was the last question in the survey. Several respondents told me that they didn’t believe in gender (or were simply ‘too old’ for it); many railed against what they called ‘feminist political correctness’. Perhaps I hadn’t understood the ethos of the time, worse still, I had a poor grasp of biology: ‘Men fight wars, women make babies’ an old ‘nasho’ told me.46 By far the most vigorous response came from a retired Major-General: ‘If you are implying that women should share [in war] equally then either you don’t know what trench warfare was like or you don’t know women’.47

‘ A Gr ave That Could Have Been My Own’

‘a sense of obligation’: Dan Bowden, Australia’s oldest service pilgrim with the author on Crete. Dan first visited Gallipoli with the crew of HMAS Sydney in 1936. He has returned on four separate occasions and has also toured the Western Front, the Middle East and the Mediterranean (where he served in World War Two).

Women, for their part, were generally more receptive. Young female soldiers pondered the fearsome levels of testosterone pulsing through military establishments. Men, they confessed, ‘seemed to have an instinct [for] battle’. Former nurses, on the other hand, emphasised men’s fragility: ‘What happens to manhood when you are suddenly reduced to depending on someone for the rest of your life, and we saw many such cases’.48 Others reminded me of the youth of Australia’s soldiers: ‘they were mere lads’ (not men) when they went off to the fighting. Having seen the senseless carnage of war, Margaret thought ‘the male of the species had much to answer for’.49 And just a few brave men were inclined to agree with her. Paul (and his Dutch family) became prisoners of the Japanese in 1941. His mother died of ‘exhaustion and malnutrition’ in the women’s camp in Java; his father also perished and although survivors told him ‘how he died’ the details were (tellingly) absent from the survey response. As a young man, Paul had served with the Dutch Navy, as an old man (and survivor of the Nagasaki bombing) he still lives with war’s ‘terrible consequences’. For Paul, a pilgrimage to war graves was a way of unburdening himself of an ‘impossible history’ and the first graves

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he visited were those of Japanese soldiers. He answered the ‘gender question’ for all his family: ‘I don’t think it particularly manly for men to fight in wars trying to kill each other. It does not appeal to my manhood . . . No father or mother admiring their newborn baby son hopes that he will die a hero in a future war.’50 Others were at last prepared to put the heroism of youth behind them: We were all keen to enlist . . . maybe the glamour of flying had something to do with it and there could have been a degree of manhood appeal there. But the more I think about World War One, the more I am appalled at the way in which this appeal to manhood was manipulated by both sides. The ultimate horror being our own soldiers forced to shoot their fellow soldiers at dawn for not apparently living up to this universal ideal of manliness.51

It is that very ideal of manliness that was tested by a visit to Australia’s war graves. Even the most battle-hardened soldiers ‘cried all day’ (as Gary had confessed in his survey). John B. was in his fifties when he finally visited the Somme. His mother had been a nurse in the First AIF, Uncle Ernest a private and John himself was a member of the Army Reserve. He visited Villers-Bretonneux with a group of railway engineers, and having read their Bean from cover to cover they knew what they would find there. ‘They weren’t Bob Hawkes’ he protested, ‘that is, they did not cry but after twenty minutes at the Australian Memorial, of the eleven men most were in tears . . . In my case it has been the family words at the bottom of the headstone’. The words were: ‘From a far brown land far away’. And from that brown land far away younger Australians set off on much the same journey.52

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Part IV

Testament of Youth

7

Walking with history: learning about war In the weeks approaching Anzac Day, Brisbane’s Courier Mail, like most of Australia’s mass media, takes to thinking about history. Year in, year out, there is little variation; the heroic story of the landing is relived, retold, reinvigorated. But in 2002 a reporter from the Courier found the ‘human interest’ angle every journalist dreams of, a potent combination of children, war, family history and regional focus: a pilgrimage from Mackay North State High School to Gallipoli, the Somme and Flanders. In a column entitled ‘Students Have Their Say’, Dave and Erika (both seventeen) were asked why they were setting out on this ‘journey to find our Anzacs’. With five years service in the Cadets, proud of his country and ‘mad keen’ on history, Dave couched his response in terms of national identity: ‘Gallipoli is a place I’ve learnt about since primary school. To me, it’s the Australian Mecca, a place where we can reflect upon ourselves and what it means to be Australian. The landing was a defining moment in our nationhood.’ Erika defined her journey in a much more tentative way; her language is far more intimate, her pilgrimage far more personal and her sense of history centred on self and family: ‘My great-great uncle was killed at Gallipoli when he was only eighteen, one year older than I am today. I can’t imagine what drove him to offer his life so willingly. [I’ll] visit the place where he died. Maybe then I will understand.’1 Dave and Erika’s stories reached out to the hearts of the Courier’s readers. This was not surprising: war (as we’ve noted) looms large in our nation’s collective memory. The growing attendance at Anzac Day marches, the popular reception of books, films and museums devoted to ‘the digger’, the outpouring of public sentiment at the passing of the last Great War veterans, indeed, the zealous desire of Dave, Erika and thousands of others to visit ‘the Peninsula’, all suggest the hold Gallipoli had and still has over the popular imagination. But Dave and Erika’s responses also remind us of the complex intersection between individual and collective memory; theirs was a deeply personal journey, based as much on the ‘familiar and intimate past’ as the mythic narrative of nation and history. It involved what public

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historians have called ‘the blurring’ of private pasts with ‘larger historical stories’.2

‘War stories’: Dave and Erika Erika has grown up with stories of her family’s loss. Of the three brothers who went to war, only one returned. Uncle Clifford was the first to enlist and the first to die, lost, quite literally, on the battered heights of the Gallipoli Peninsula. Harold was killed two years later, ‘struck in the abdomen by shrapnel’ in bitter fighting around Bullecourt. Again, the sparse language of service dossiers is given a personal dimension. Erika’s ‘brothers’ did not ‘fall’ for king and country: their deaths were cruel, ‘slow’, ‘painful’ and unnecessary. And even Jack (the sole survivor) became in the end a casualty. Having ‘served in both Gallipoli and France, [Jack] returned home from the war [and] married some time in the late 1920s . . . [A few years later] he drowned himself in the dam on his property. It was common knowledge in the family that he suffered from shell shock.’3 For the mother left behind, grief was made no easier by the indifference and insensitivity of the military authorities. The boys’ medals were not released: ‘is [the] father still alive?’, an imperious official asked or ‘any nearer blood relation . . .?’ Adding insult to injury, even Clifford’s initials were recorded incorrectly. From all this trauma and heartache, Erika retrieved a precious memory. At eighty-nine, Aunty May still spoke in loving ways of the ‘larrikin’ brothers who sailed away, ‘good people’, young and bright with ‘green eyes that shone like emeralds’. Erika would make this journey for her, for a mother brimming with grief, for a family who ‘always remembered’.4 Erika’s Gallipoli diaries are a vivid testimony of her experience, a childlike sense of vulnerability fused with a wonder for this richly ‘storied landscape’.5 And again the mythic narrative, the legend of heroic Anzacs, drifts towards the personal, the immediate and the families who to this day mourn for them. Anzac cove is . . . well . . . strange. It is so beautiful, the water is clear, and still, and it is just so peaceful. It’s hard to believe that anything so horrible could’ve happened here. The cliffs are so steep, and they crumble at the touch. How you could ever conceive of climbing them is beyond me. The bushes are small and sharp, they would rip through your clothes in an instant . . . If it were me, I would . . . break all my bones climbing up and falling down the ridges and that’s without being surrounded by gunfire and [the] dying . . . I just don’t know how they did it . . . We visited the tiny cemeteries, tens of them,

Erika ‘walked the hills which are so steep’ and rambled over ridges that once ‘were just lines in my history book’. And from the grandeur of the heights she stumbled down to the still cold ground of graveyards: ‘The epitaphs stand out – with many like “Some day, some time, we’ll understand. Mother” scattered [all] around [me]’.7 There was no epitaph for Clifford. His name was just ‘one of many’. But that made her task no less difficult:

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as soon as you think that’s all there could possibly be, there are more, dotted all over . . . the ravines . . . It was a pure massacre . . .6

I was the third to say my eulogy and I got through it . . . no sniffling or crying . . . but it was hard to hold it in. I don’t know what was running through my mind during it, but after [,] all I could think was what a waste. Eighteen [years of age], no grave, no one has ever come to visit him before me, what a waste. And that’s when my eyes got red and I couldn’t hold it . . . I just kept thinking of all the things he missed out on. All the things he didn’t do or see.8

The next time Erika saw Clifford’s name was on Anzac Day itself as thousands assembled for the Lone Pine commemorative service. The sense of communitas extends again, beyond the close circle of friends and teachers to a ragged ‘congregation’ of tour groups and backpackers: People were . . . filing into the cemetery, so I took the opportunity to go up to Cliff’s name and tape a poppy [alongside it]. I just wanted it to be up there against his name during the [ceremony], for the whole congregation to see. People tend to . . . notice something that stands out, so I thought that perhaps, while looking at the name during the minute’s silence, thinking about the lives lost, someone other than myself might take notice of my great uncle and just pause a moment for him. . . . that’s what I thought he deserved.9

Erika’s attempt to individualise Clifford’s name, to mark him out from the larger symbol of a nation’s sacrifice, resisted what some historians have called the ‘totalising discourses’ of commemoration. To her, the name on the panel at Lone Pine was no abstract tribute to the fallen (the property of state and nation) but a real individual, a man whose memory lived on in both herself and her family.10 As the ceremony progressed, though, the mood of Erika’s diary changes. The personal is subsumed by the public, the familiar displaced by the national and a sense of pride and patriotism all but overwhelms that restless sense of loss and mourning. Quite unexpectedly, Erika’s Gallipoli becomes a celebration: The . . . service itself was truly amazing. The diggers came in one by one, and each received a round of applause . . . Then the ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie’ came

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out in someone, which brought the ‘Oi Oi Oi’ out of us. Then there was . . . applause for a jar of Vegemite and a thong. Everyone was smiling, happy, having a great time. There were no morbid faces or anything like that, just all these backpackers laughing and socialising, ‘I still call Australia Home’ was sung, . . . I really felt proud to be Australian.11

In a sense, Dave’s journey began in the place Erika’s ended. He had always expected to be proud, and proud he was. Indeed, it was hard to imagine any prouder moment than when he stood on that ‘distant’ shore, that ‘land of fable’, Gallipoli. From the outset, Dave’s narrative was steeped in the discourse of history and nation. Even when he spoke of individual experience, of a ‘little place inside of us that was waiting to be opened and explored’, his focus was on ‘the Anzac spirit’, a ‘rallying call’, a destiny:12 I know at air cadets when we go for hikes, and we see a hill in our way, instead of plotting around it, we go straight over it. If we are on a plain, and [we] see a hill on the horizon, it’s ‘all right, lads, we’re going over it’. Most of us prefer to go bush when it’s raining and cold. We don’t salute cadet officers. I guess Gallipoli is a yardstick by which we compare all of our . . . experience to.13

The differences between Dave’s and Erika’s accounts are even more striking in their description of the landscape. Erika’s Gallipoli, is ‘quiet’, mysterious and brooding, its ravines stark and spectacular, its beaches ‘still’ and sorrowful. It left her in awe and in wonder. For Dave, the beauty of the Peninsula is of an altogether different kind; dramatic, inspired, the setting of a tragic but ultimately triumphant vision. Revisiting the site of the landing on Anzac eve, the young man raised the Australian flag as other young men had before him: The sun was starting to set, and the beach was bathed in a golden glow . . . the breeze picked up enough to take the flag out to full flight. It was then standing on North Beach, where all those years ago so many men had lost their lives under the flag that I was flying . . . that I finally felt like an Australian.14

Erika’s dead were brothers, sons, family, a sense of loss pervades every page of her diary. Dave’s dead are first and foremost soldiers, ‘a generation that passed into history as nation makers’. And for a boy who would be an airman even death sang out a challenge:

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An appeal to manhood [was on many of the epitaphs] and was typical for the time . . . It, for me, conjured up images of the Norse Valhalla, that this was the ultimate way for a ‘man’ to die. I [was] full of amazement and wonderment at how these men could run into certain death willingly. It really makes me stop and think whether I would be able to do the same.15

I mean, I never really comprehended the scale of the losses, the sheer size of the battles fought until I stood in the middle of Tyne Cot Cemetery and felt completely surrounded by . . . uniform headstones . . . It really hits home when you see row after row of names on memorials like Thiepval and the Menin Gate, as well as our Australian National Memorial. No one can ever truly say that they are prepared for what they see, [the] sheer scale of the tragedy – no one.16

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On Gallipoli, Dave could imagine death as heroic, read through the lens of history, ‘the fatal shore’ was imbued with courage, purpose, even ‘magic’. But there was nothing magical about the killing fields of France or Belgium. Here death was ‘sad’ ‘pathetic’ ‘overwhelming’. Here his written survey assumes the quality of a conversation, abrupt, emphatic, shaken by memory:

It is on the Western Front that Dave’s journal turns, the ‘big words’ give way to thoughtful introspection. Suddenly, the focus is on what ‘sacrifice’ means to the families left behind, even ‘the generations that came after them, their sons and daughters’. If Erika discovered pride and patriotism at Lone Pine, a tiny graveyard to the north of Ypres marked (for Dave) a similar emotional juncture: Today was the day I finally got to meet Pte G. Dalziel MM, of the 9th Battalion . . . The day was overcast at first, but started to clear up as we drove along . . . We didn’t seem to have too much trouble finding the cemetery . . . tucked away in a quiet area [of farmland] . . .. The sun had started to come out . . . I got off the bus and found the grave. And all I could do was sink down to my knees and cry . . . I . . . spent some more time alone with George . . . but . . . after a while, I had to leave. I . . . left a little piece of me in that far off corner in Belgium, and returned with a sacred gift for the family: a little piece of their soldier.17

Dave and Erika’s testimonies make for rewarding reading. Neatly typed for public presentation, scrawled by hand in soiled travel diaries, thrown together in conversation or email, their account of their journey is thoughtful, sincere, sometimes disturbing. They travel across a spectrum of emotion, their passage through sadness and pride, an awkward kind of grief and an almost raucous nationalism breaches simple gendered stereotypes, defies easy categorisation. And yet their stories are by no means exceptional. All the respondents from Mackay North were equally open and generous, all were as searching, as intimate, all imbued with the same bitter-sweet quality.

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For family Rich, diverse, evocative, Dave, Erika and all the Mackay pilgrims had one thing in common – their journey, as Erika put it, was made for others. Often the men honoured were distant family members. It is a measure of the cohesiveness of a community like Mackay that twenty of their seventy-six mem orials bore the names of cousins, uncles and even great-great grandparents.18 Tara described her pilgrimage as a family ‘responsibility’, a journey of the ‘heart’: ‘I visited the uncles of my grandfather whom I am very close to. I was in a way carrying out a duty that he and our family would never have been able to do.’19 And a few actually followed in the footsteps of those who went before them. Catherine has four relatives killed overseas, in 1998 her sister Paula first charted the way across the cemeteries of Europe. Rebecca’s John had been visited twice before, by a brother in 1964 and by his parents in the 1920s.20 Commemorating one’s own heightened the importance of their pilgrimage. For the young especially it involved a blunt encounter with mortality. Elise found her uncle’s name chiselled in the cold white stone at Lone Pine. She traced her fingers, softly deliberately, along each of the letters. ‘Strange’ she scribbled in her diary, this ‘my own flesh and blood’.21 Rebecca thought a part of herself was laying in the heavy clay of France; Todd crumbled down by the grave of his great uncle: ‘It’s my name’ he spluttered, ‘my name on the headstone’: ‘he [felt] so close to me, like a brother and I could actually visualise a face staring straight back at me . . . I . . . sat and talked to him for a while . . .’22 Whether the names were the same as their own or not, all these students felt a close association with the men they ‘visited’. After months of research they became, as Sam put it, as good as ‘family’.23 The emotional investment involved in uncovering a soldier’s past is nowhere more clearly seen than in Elise’s diary, a record kept faithfully from the project’s launch in May 2001 to her return to Australia almost a year later. An early entry deals with the project’s first fundraiser, one of those ‘popcorn and grease’ affairs that punctuate every school’s calendar. Something happened that evening that would change Elise’s view of herself and the community around her: we had a display down in the hall where we also [had] the ‘Living the Legend’ playing [a video presentation of the 1998 Mackay pilgrimage]. I was there by myself and this elderly couple came in. They bought some raffle tickets and spoke for a while about how great this all was . . . A little while

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‘in the pitiless wind of the Somme’: Elise, a student from North Mackay High School, confronts the death of a generation. The names at Thiepval pile up with alphabetical precision. later . . . this couple were still there [still] watching the video. And the man was crying – just a couple of tears – but I was just amazed by the fact that this man who had no personal link with us or anyone on the last trip could sit down and watch this video and be [so] touched by it . . .. [It took] my breath away . . . left me speechless.24

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Elise had ‘no personal link’ with the men she had been assigned to research. Nor had she thought all that much about the purpose of commemoration: ‘I have never been able to really understand Anzac Day’ she confided to her diary, ‘[It’s] . . . always just been names and a story; but nothing more’. But the old man weeping in the school hall told her there was something ‘very special’ about the journey she’d embarked on. And every day that she researched John, James and Edward, she felt a little ‘closer’ to them: ‘These men were but [three] of 60,000, but I know that [they] and their stories will always live on [,] not only in their families but also in me. These men died eighty-four years ago in some foreign place, but somehow it feels now as if they are alive again, not in the physical sense, but at least to me.’25 Feeling ‘connected’, ‘in touch with’, ‘close’ was a recurrent theme in all the Mackay survey responses. As Elise’s diary suggests, it gave rise to diverse, even conflicting emotions, ‘a sense of sadness at how they lost their lives, a sense of pride for what they had done . . . many other emotions that were indescribable’.26 As Rian listened to Tracey’s tearful eulogy for three brothers killed on the Somme, he forgot the wind and rain that howled all around him: ‘[Two were] both killed within hours of each other in the same battle . . . she told us about [the] one brother who survived frantically searching the battlefield for the bodies of his siblings. [That story] will . . . stick with me for the rest of my life’.27 Family stories seem to circle all the Mackay pilgrimages. For Lyn, the students’ research ‘put a human face’ on history, showing the young that the casualties of war ‘are not just numbers but real people, with real lives and blood relations’. And it answered questions that had troubled Lyn’s mother all her long lifetime. Norman and Gordon Bignall had simply disappeared in France; Katie’s research at last ‘explained’ what became of them. Family members noted ‘a sense of closure’, and thanked these young people for easing the burden of memory. For Christine, the children’s visit to her great-uncle’s grave ‘made a connection between my father and the uncle he never knew’. Like the pilgrims of the 1920s the young made the journey for her: ‘I feel that having these children from North Mackay High visit Charles’s grave brought a sense of peace and closure to what was such a violent, horrid and lonely place for him to die’.28 Jess laid Charles to rest in that bleak windswept cemetery near Ypres.

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The pilgrimages that still set out from Mackay are nothing if not a shared history. In the late 1990s when the project first began, the students’ research was driven by the interest and support of their community:

Six years later the meetings and the sharing continue. Born in 1926 Joan had only ever ‘known’ her uncle ‘through her mother’s stories’: after four years of war, he died of pneumonia within weeks of the Armistice.30 They were stories that touched the heart of a younger generation. ‘Carriers of memory’, the children from Mackay took Joan’s prayers to the ‘boy’ who died a lifetime ago.31 Prayers were not the only messages. The tokens carried from Mackay are powerful symbols of both loss and belonging. The most conventional, most predictable, were the flags, the poppies, the crosses, splashing vivid colour on the stark white stones of remembrance. And yet even these very abstract symbols were also deeply personalised, set beside photographs of men who were killed, woven with letters, poetry, place names, inscribed with a prayer for those forever missing. As with so many family pilgrimages, these offerings were attempts at reunion: photographs of grandchildren and great-grandchildren the dead never knew, scenes from a sunny landscape back home buried in the cold damp earth of Flanders. Heather gathered soil from the old railway station at Mackay: there her uncle worked, there his name and face were emblazoned on the honour board, from there he went to war and never came home again. Todd took a handful of earth from his great uncle’s grave, leaving a photo a grieving grandmother treasured all her lifetime. Amanda pressed a child’s sporting medallion into land taken and held at the cost of a generation. Elise left a string of poppies, the words ‘I will never forget you’ entwined around them.32 Symbols, gestures and sentiments like these evoke a sense of home, of place, of ‘deeply shared significance’.33 Often they were intricate, intimate, fashioned – like gumleaf, prayer and poppy – with loving significance. But as we’ve noted with so many other journeys, spontaneous gestures were no less significant. After hours in the pitiless wind of the Somme, the children from Mackay pulled their treasured kangaroo pins from their jackets and wedged them by the names of the missing at Villers-Bretonneux.34 Sometimes, particularly in Turkey, the landscape itself seemed its own memorial. Gallipoli, for Bess, was ‘truly sacred’, ‘quiet’ ‘beautiful’, as ‘sad’ as it was ‘spectacular’. It was ‘our other, suspended place, frozen in time and spirit, part Dreamtime, part nightmare’ but always deeply ‘connected

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One of the first people to contact us was Mrs Amy Taylor, a woman who had lost her brother in the First World War. She had just turned 100 when she told us some moving stories about her late brother Herbert . . . When our group finally commemorated Herbert at his grave in France, each of us felt we knew him and were meeting him for the first time.29

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with history’. Jess likened her feeling for the Peninsula with the ‘reverence’ indigenous Australians held for their most ‘sacred land’.35 And Tracey’s diary developed the same theme with forceful emotional clarity: The first steps I took on the beach will be a moment I will remember for the rest of my life. Feeling the sand run through my fingers and looking out into the crystal clear water was a sacred moment . . . I bent down to put my hand in the water and for a moment the ice water seemed to give me a warm feeling all over. [And there was] an eerie feeling which I will never forget. It was hard to imagine the beautiful blue water in front of me was once stained with the blood of hundreds . . . The soft sand leaching [with] the same blood. I sat by myself for quite some time, listening and watching for the steady breaking of the waves as they met the shore . . .36

The landscape on the Western Front lacked the epic grandeur of Gallipoli, gently sloping farmlands replaced the tangled, wild ridges. But here too nature conspired to invest place with meaning. Time and time again the student diaries noted the driving rain, ‘the freezing cold’, the punishing wind and more often than not they welcomed them. It helped to imagine what it was like for ‘our soldiers’.37 And in quieter moments the cemeteries of the Somme took on a disarming, fragile beauty. Bess and Joeleen ‘felt like . . . angel[s]’ as they stepped softly over the cherry blossom carpeting Daours Communal Cemetery. Here Christine’s thoughts turned to her soldier: ‘As we walked across the [beautiful pink] carpet, our shoes picked up the dainty petals, leaving green spots where we stepped. I began thinking about Eric Connelly and the things he would have seen, thought, smelt . . . touched, written . . .’38 Christine wondered how Eric coped, far from hope, comfort and ‘loved ones back home’; wondered how families received the news of his death, ‘we have to invent words to describe the emotion, sorrow and mourning’, wondered how she would cope when she finally found the grave of her soldier: ‘[soon] it would be my turn and I could hear my heart breaking’.39 She might not have coped at all were it not for the support of her fellow travellers. Photographs of the Mackay commemorations capture much of their intimacy, recording ‘the grammar of gesture’. Like the lines from Laurence Binyon’s celebrated ‘Ode’, the posture and formation are distinct, deliberate, unvarying: the group huddles in tight clusters around the grave of the man they’re commemorating, one holds a wreath of poppies, another delivers the eulogy – heads bowed, eyes fixed, focused, tearful. Often, they are holding one another, shielding the speaker from the buffeting wind, offering comfort and warmth when hands begin to shake and voices begin

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‘heads bowed, eyes fixed, focused, tearful’: the closing moments of an Anzac service. Prior to laying the wreath, Bess recited the Ode and evoked the story of ‘her’ soldier. After months of research, the man buried on Gallipoli’s shore somehow seemed to belong to her.

to ‘quiver’.40 Teachers and students invariably stand together, at this moment of ‘raw emotion’ there is no longer a distance between them.41 Sometimes the circle widened even further, embracing those who just a few days before had been total strangers: Ziya, the ‘knowledgeable’ Turkish guide, who offered ‘insight’ into a new land and a new culture; Yves,

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‘our froggy friend’, who led them through the cemeteries of the Somme and Flanders; even camera-clad historians who followed them ‘a bit like stalkers’.42 The friendships that sprang up on this journey were, as Sam noted, something special: perhaps because they were friendships forged in the rituals of pilgrimage.43 And as is so often the case with friendship, gifts played their part in cementing relationships, in sharing and celebrating stories. At Peronne Communal Cemetery, Yves led Todd across the carefully manicured grass to the grave of his great uncle. And there he presented the boy from Australia, the country that had come to his country’s aid, with a picture of the first Mont St Quentin memorial: it marked the place where Sam Fraser’s life had ended. The entry in Todd’s diary cuts deep into the page: ‘I melted at this point, after all the things [Yves] has done to help me find and understand Samuel Fraser, he is kind and very thoughtful, to give me this picture in which you can see . . . where Sam . . . perished . . . you will be a part of us now and forever, so thanks mate and God bless you’.44 ‘Part of us’ is a recurrent phrase in virtually all the Mackay diaries, the bonds between them (many thought) could never be broken.45 And here there is an irony. Students left Mackay with a mission to honour the families of the fallen, by journey’s end they too had become a kind of ‘family’.

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Private services were one aspect of pilgrimage, official commemorations another. Like virtually all the school groups that visit Gallipoli or the Western Front, the students from North High were also asked to play a part in far more formalised ceremonies. And they did so willingly. Indeed, in many cases, these public performances are the highlight of their journeys, steeped in drama, oratory and emotion. The students were skilfully incorporated in the commemorative structures framing Anzac Day. First came the dawn service on North Beach, a sleepless night in the bitter cold ending in a rousing chorus of ‘Advance Australia Fair’. Initially, most felt distanced from the ceremony, partly because ‘everyone was so tired’ but mostly because there was ‘so much media’.46 Even so, the Ode and the Last Post, echoing voice and bugle across the hill tops, triggered ‘powerful’ emotions. Gathered in this great company, standing on what seemed the very shore of history, Rebecca and her friends ‘watch[ed] the moon disappear into the horizon and the sun rise from behind the sphinx, [and] the national anthem brought tears to my eyes’.47 By early afternoon, the group had reassembled at Lone Pine, a ‘yahoo’ atmosphere prevailed as ‘the old diggers’, teachers, students and backpackers

Tara said her poem . . . I’m sure it either gave everyone goose bumps or brought tears to their eyes. Like the dawn service the most emotional part was the Ode but what made me cry the most was the playing of ‘I Still Call Australia Home’. It wasn’t sad tears but happy tears that across the other side of the world over 10 000 mostly young Australians had travelled and gathered to remember those who sacrificed their lives for us . . . I know the Anzac spirit is truly alive and kicking.48

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mingled together. Then the company from Mackay was lifted to the very centre of attention.

The Anzac spirit took a different form on the Western Front. There the ceremonies were more restrained, more ‘polite’, more formal. Even so Mackay again assumed a central place amongst this community of remembrance. Flanked by soldiers and veterans, feted by mayors and greeted by the cheers of schoolchildren, the students laid wreaths at Menin Gate and on the steps of the Australian National Memorial. Erika recited ‘In Flanders Fields’ at Bullecourt, Elise called pilgrims to the Ode for the evening service at Ypres, Dave donned his uniform and saluted the massed names of the missing. In each case they wrote of ‘pride’, ‘honour’ and ‘duty’. Integrated in the official services, commemoration said as much about patriotism as it did about mourning.49 One might well argue (as many historians have) that commemoration in this context serves a conservative political purpose. Public memorials and the rituals of remembrance that attend them displace personal mourning with an acceptance of ‘death as sacrifice’, a necessary sacrifice for the wellbeing of the nation. The sordid reality of death in war is ennobled, sanitised, reified, forgotten.50 But pride in one’s country and reverence for the men who died for it need not involve so unthinking a nationalism. Few survey responses were as thoughtful as that returned by young Clifford. On the one hand, Clifford had the greatest admiration for the men who had fought and the greatest possible pride in his country’s ‘sacrifice’: I can’t hide or describe the respect I feel for any man or woman prepared to die, to end, for another. They’re heroes and legends and that willingness to die for another to serve people and put their needs ahead of their own is what I believe in most. It . . . moves me inside, it stirs my soul just to think of it.51

On the other hand,‘sacrifice’ for Clifford was also set in a very personal dimension. His constant point of reference all through the survey and all through the pilgrimage, was the dead soldier he went to commemorate. One of eleven children, one of 60,000 casualties: ‘I know that Victor enlisted because [of] his younger brother Harold, he wanted to look after

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him . . . [He] was in his thirties when he enlisted. [Younger men could have gone in his place but he went] to protect his family’.52 Victor didn’t die for anything so abstract as his country. He died ‘to protect his family and mates back home, . . . and for [the] mates he made there’. And although Clifford chose the word ‘pride’ to describe his visits to Great War cemeteries: ‘I had another reaction . . . when I allowed myself to feel it. When I thought about where the world would be today, what the men who died or those that were scarred physically or mentally by having family/mates die – what these men could have achieved in life’.53 Clifford’s survey response shifts, gradually but ineluctably, away from ‘patriotic orthodoxies’ and towards the terrible waste of war. And Clifford, like the best of Mr Goodwin’s history students, knew the ‘wounds’ the Great War inflicted festered across the generations: ‘The wounds of war are family, friends dying, creating hate and distrust of others in the world, these wounds can heal in time but they leave a scar. And a scar isn’t as good as the flesh originally, it’s just better than an open wound’.54 It was with a thought for ‘others’ that Clifford’s survey ended. For Turkey, a country that ‘should never have been our enemy’, which ‘lost so many of its children’; for Germany, and ‘the poor common soldier’ buried in a mass grave on the Somme who ‘didn’t really know what he was fighting for except that his country asked him to’. None of these ‘were evil men’, ‘no more evil than our boys’.55 It was war that was evil. The politics of commemoration are nowhere better expressed, and nowhere more clearly contested, than in the Great War’s memorials. Like Clifford, the vast majority of Mackay respondents were troubled, even ‘spooked’, by the massed graves of German soldiers, ‘dark and gloomy’ with ‘only dirt thrown on top and names recorded on pieces of black steel’.56 Georgina felt immeasurably ‘sad . . . [for these] men who fought for their . . . country but have been forgotten or ignored’, and Catherine ‘just felt depressed and sick in the stomach . . . it was like no one had learned from these soldiers’ experiences’.57 The lesson Erika took from her visit called commemoration itself into question; even these ‘sacred’ sites of memory were opened to interrogation:58 When visiting the memorials it became very clear who the ‘winners’ of the war were. All Commonwealth graves had white headstones, a symbol of peace, hope and purity, whereas German graves were black, symbolising death, despair and nothingness . . . It was quite sad to see that after all this time, grudges against the ‘enemy’ are still as strong as ever. In German cemeteries [the graves are overgrown and untended] but German mothers lost their sons just as Australian mothers did . . .59

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But it was Ataturk’s words set on that great memorial by the sea that most impressed the Mackay children, ‘words about how “our” sons were so far from home and would be looked after [by the Turkish]’.60 It must have been, Todd noted ‘a great comfort for the grieving families back home’. And it was a stark contrast to the landscape of Gallipoli, the hills and ridges scarred with cemeteries; one long grave that reminded Todd ‘how ruthless war can be’. Ataturk’s words were not lost on this young traveller: ‘Humans should do all they can do to avoid war. It seems like murder to the highest degree. [Ataturk’s] message makes you [realise] that we are not Australian or Turkish but [simply] people’.61 The Mackay children realised something else at Gallipoli, that we were the invaders. Climbing to the summit of Plugge’s Plateau, ‘looking out to the waters where the Australians would have approached . . . [Tara] saw things from a Turkish perspective’: Visiting the graves made me realise that these were real people with families who were also affected. Seeing [them] made me feel sorrowful for all the damage that was caused. I looked past my bias and [felt] for their great losses . . . all they were doing was defending their country.62

It was perhaps the most important message any of these young travellers carried home from their pilgrimage. Hopefully, the same message reached the readers of the Brisbane Courier Mail.

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‘It’s like a Mecca, like a pilgrimage’: backpacker journeys The day after Anzac Day, weary, worn and not a little hung over, Mike found the time to make a detailed entry in his diary. For this middle-aged man from the Northern Territory, Gallipoli had proved a place of ‘mixed emotions’: The dawn service was sombre, dignified, and ghostly with the dawn and lights throwing a soft sheen over the gently breaking sea. A morning you would imagine the original Anzacs experienced only with starbursts of shell and rattle roar of machine gun. I [thought] of a quiet expectant death on a lapping shore.

Dawn on the beach was ‘like a funeral’, he thought. It enshrined the ‘sadness [of] friends/family the dead left behind them’. The service at Lone Pine was another matter entirely. Set high on the ridges of the Peninsula, sunbaked and windswept, the site had witnessed the bloodiest fighting of the campaign. Here men became . . . animals. [They] throttled, bashed, bayoneted . . . [It was a struggle] to survive and the Australian ceremony reflected it . . . [There was] a larrikin din of party homage . . . There are catcalls, laughter, talk. There’s also [an] undeniable recognition of the torture and pain of this little acre. Those below the ground would rise to the sound and party with their great-grandchildren – and they’re all young, all boisterous, all full of life.

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Intimate and inquiring, Mike’s diary explores a series of dichotomies; death and vulnerability on the day of the landing, ‘murder’ and a passion for life in the pitched battles of the August offensive. But most interesting of all is Mike’s insistence that the young who claimed Lone Pine as ‘their service’ were somehow ‘the reincarnation of the boys and men of 1915’. In so many ways, they were like them: ‘full of life, vigour, fun, insolence and disdain of death’, addicted to lives of ‘adventure’ and ‘travel’. Mike dubbed them ‘the clones of Anzac’, young men and women with little regard for ceremony or authority, ‘cheering and joking’ as dignitaries milled helplessly around

By God, time has not stood still, it’s done cartwheels and the same cocky mates are at it again. I look at one chunky young larrikin, louder than most. He’d have a go – ‘Quinn’s Post?! Yair Mate, I’ll go. She’ll be right!’ God it’s terrifying but so refreshing, to see this strength, this unbridled love of life, this . . . sense of immortality in a place of death.1

Barbara, on the other hand, witnessed the same scenes very differently. Like Mike, she drew a striking parallel between ‘the boys of 1915’ and the ‘healthy, vibrant young people’ gathered around her: [Most came] with sleeping bags [and] cartons of beer. We had a horrible feeling that it was going to be a big party for them! But they were genuinely moved by the dawn ceremony and joined in the Australian ceremony at Lone Pine with emotion and sensitivity. [Many] walked up the ridge [to Lone Pine] and silhouetted against the sky they could so easily have been the Anzac troops of 1915 climbing into position. This brought home to me very clearly . . . how young and strong and enthusiastic those troops would also have been, but . . . instead of a walkman they would have carried a rifle.

‘ It’s Like a Mecca, Like a Pilgrimage’

them. In the end, Gallipoli would be their day. History, Mike concluded, had turned a full circle.

Where Mike sensed unbridled adventure, Barbara observed a quieter kind of reverence: I was concerned at first that it might just be a stopover on the backpacker beat . . . but having been with them for the night and the next day . . . hearing them sing and cry; seeing a group of young people on the beach – about forty of them – listening to a scratchy old tape recorder playing ‘The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and looking out to sea and thinking of what had been, . . . I realised that this lovely young generation . . . were moved by a tragedy that took place eighty-five years ago and that it was their age group that we were honouring by our travels.

Mike had watched the young climbing back into the trenches that had claimed their forefathers, ‘cheering and joking’ at danger and death. Barbara, by contrast, wondered if ‘reading the inscriptions on the graves and noting the ages of the men who died’ made every one ‘a pacifist’. It was ‘such a terrible waste of our young’, she concluded, ‘I hope [these handsome young men and women] never have to go through anything like . . . Gallipoli’.2 No doubt there are many reasons why these two accounts should differ so dramatically. The first is a diary, written within hours of the event, hasty, impressionistic and clearly keen to capture the thrill of ‘being there’. Barbara’s survey response is more reflective: since she ‘came home’ she had

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‘the thrill of being there’: on Anzac Eve, Australian backpackers occupy the North Beach commemorative area. The Boxing Kangaroo flag discreetly disappears at dawn but re-emerges (just as full of fight) at the rowdy Lone Pine service to follow.

‘been trying to work out why these thousands of young people made the long journey to Gallipoli’. Memory had mellowed her impressions, the doubts and fears of that first encounter laid decisively to rest. Both responses say as much about their authors as they do the events themselves. Well into her sixties, a woman from Sydney’s North Shore had very little in common with a Territory boy from Humpty Doo. Taken together though, these two accounts remind us of the diversity of what commentators call the ‘backpacker experience’. The young’s response to the killing fields of the Great War may well be as complex, and as various, as that of previous generations. How the young remember Gallipoli introduces us to a third and very different kind of narrative. Heather decided not fill out my questionnaire but forwarded the email she sent to all her friends and family. It ‘explained’ why she went to the Peninsula and what the ‘experience’ meant to her. And it began in the city that swells with young Australians every April, Istanbul.

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Had a fabulous time in Turkey. Arrived on Saturday last week, had [four] days in Istanbul which was madness. Saw Blue Mosque, St Sophia, toured the grand Bazaar which consists of over 4000 shops under one roof!! I think we got ripped off . . . the money all looks the same at first and the Turkish inflation rate is out of this world.

Took six hours to get there and we arrived in the wee hours of the morning. It was pitch black when we got to Anzac Cove. The tour hopped off the bus and we were mobbed by people everywhere. We lost our tour guide in the crowd. 10 000 Aussie and Kiwis. The seven of us from Edinburgh managed to stay together, we ended up right at the back of the service. There were bodies sleeping [on] the ground everywhere and it was FREEZING BLOODY cold!!! . . . We were wondering what in the hell we were in for . . . and thinking ‘only 4.5 hours until the dawn service’ . . .

‘ It’s Like a Mecca, Like a Pilgrimage’

Heather said nothing of the bars and nightlife of the city; the ‘family emails’ of young travellers are not always full accounts of their journey. Heather’s journey resumes (discreetly) on Anzac eve as she joined the winding convey of vehicles that carried thousands to the Peninsula.

Dawn came sooner than Heather expected. Her account begins to shift, from the adventures and tribulations typically experienced by tourists to the higher purpose of a pilgrimage: The sky . . . change[d] colour from black to dark blue then to midnight blue, then the RAAF band cranked up. We sang hymns and said prayers . . . The best and most moving speech for me came from Gary Beck [,] director of the War Graves Office. He talked about how it was that time of the morning in 1915, when all our Aussie blokes landed on Anzac Cove at dawn with 40kg packs on there (sic) backs, soaking wet . . . and expecting to be . . . somewhere totally different [not facing this] ridiculous terrain. He really put it all into perspective. Then came the wreath laying followed by more speeches.

Like Barbara, Heather was worried that her young companions would tire too easily of the service. As the Last Post howled to a close, she braced herself for two minutes of silence. I was prepared for pissed idiots to be yelling out in the crowd but there was not a peep to heard. EVERYONE WAS QUIET [an event so unusual that it merited Heather’s capitals]. Contrary to what everyone tells you – including the media – there were no Aussie pissheads to be found . . . At the end of the service came the Turkish national anthem . . . followed by the Australian anthem. The crowd yelled it out and it could be heard all over Anzac Cove. It was a fantastic feeling . . .

Like Mike, Heather noted the wild mood swings at Lone Pine. At one moment everyone took part in the ‘the traditional Aussie Crowd Wave . . . What a laugh . . . Even the official guests, diggers and military participated’. And the next, there was a speech about a young man killed at Gallipoli, ‘a personal reading from a family . . . diary’.

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Very touching and everyone was balling there (sic) eyes out . . . Next came the Turkish national anthem, [and] the Aussie national anthem [again] . . . The whole crowd went mental and sung (sic) as loud as it could . . . I could not [begin] to describe the feeling of togetherness with the people there, real Aussie spirit. Everyone I spoke to said the Aussie service was 100 times better than the dawn service.

The day ended for Heather as Anzac Days often end back home in Australia. With all an old digger’s initiative, she sought out companionship, gambling and alcohol. We headed to our hotel in Eceabat . . . a dormitory, filthy dirty and no water at all . . . [We] had a second wind by then and headed off to one of the two pubs in this one-horse town. One pub is called Vegemite Bar and the other is called Boomerang Bar. We visited both of them, made heaps of new friends, drank a few beers and played two up.

But Heather’s Anzac experience wasn’t quite over. The next day she was back at Anzac Cove where ‘a Turkish tour guide . . . explained the whole series of events from beginning to end’: We walked along the beach and up to Brighton Beach where they were supposed to land. We really got the feeling of how the Aussies got shafted by the British. Walked back to Shrapnel Valley, back to Lone Pine, had lunch at Chunuk Bair. Visited the cemeteries. We learnt all about the battles, walked through the trenches. Afterwards we toured the . . . little museum and then on the bus for the long trip back to Istanbul.

Heather’s account was worth citing at length. It is faithful to the way Gallipoli is remembered by the young, charting emotions and events in a language and style typical of her generation. It also helps explain why the Peninsula has become so attractive a destination, particularly for young backpackers. Heather ends her report with a typical traveller’s summary, the ‘word of mouth’ recommendation that will beckon the next wave of wanderers on to Gallipoli: The long, long, long waiting, no toilets, no shops for food and water, . . . no sleep for forty-eight hours, not being able to shower for two days. All made up for it in the end. Anzac Day in Gallipoli would have to be the best thing I have ever done. I feel every Australian should go . . . I say again – BEST thing ever.3

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It is hard to say exactly what the best thing was about Gallipoli – patriotism, companionship, the chance (after too long abroad) to stand

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(and drink) with Australians. One reading of Heather’s diary would be to dismiss it as a young traveller’s quest for emotional as well physical adventures. Lone Pine had the ‘best feel’ to it, a celebration of Australianness and something of a relief after the long morning of the dawn service. ‘Laughter’, ‘singing’, Aussie crowd waves and bawling your eyes out, all were part of the entertainment. ‘The Turkish government put on an air show for us’, Heather declared, as if war planes served no other purpose.4 Friends and family back home were told ‘our blokes’ were ‘shafted’ by the British; nothing was said of the number of British dead, or what Gallipoli meant (and still means) to Turkey. But Heather’s account is not dismissed so easily. The young traveller listened attentively to all the speeches, was ‘most moved’ by the readings of soldiers’ diaries, stood in solemn silence to show her respect to the war dead, was keen to ‘learn about all that happened’. Heather acknowledged the Turkish national anthem as readily (if not as enthusiastically) as her own and in this fervently Australian account also found space to say something for the New Zealand National Service. Most important of all, Heather’s Gallipoli was not confined to Anzac Day. The following morning found her walking a succession of cemeteries, where the human cost of war was all too apparent. Heather urged her friends to go to Gallipoli ‘even if it’s not on Anzac Day’. For her the Peninsula had a story to tell, it was a place of deep significance ‘for every Australian’. This chapter will examine the backpacker experience. The story, as Heather’s account suggests, is far from a simple one; it is open to different, complex, even quite contradictory readings. Nor are these backpacker pilgrimages entirely confined to Gallipoli. In gradually increasing numbers, the young also tour the Western Front, a journey vastly different to the twoday ‘stopover’ at Gallipoli. Finally, as Heather’s account again suggests, there is a need to shift the focus of inquiry. Every year, the nation puzzles over the influx of young people to Anzac Day; few think to ask the young what this pilgrimage really means to them. Here we seek a more ethnographic and more participatory approach, retrieving a testament of youth in terms that they themselves find significant and meaningful.

From the landing to the ‘beach party’ In a single hurried evening, tourist buses (like Heather’s) ferry more young Australians to Anzac Cove than all who were rowed ashore on the day of the landing. But this relentless ‘invasion’ of the Gallipoli Peninsula is really only a very recent phenomenon. Thirty years ago, the Anzac Day ceremony

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was a low-key and quite intimate affair; officials from the Australian War Memorial and the War Graves Commission remember services of barely a dozen people. With a bitter war waging in Vietnam, and Australia’s youth conscripted to fight it, ‘few young travellers’ cared much for commemoration. The end of the Vietnam War began a gradual reappraisal of the Anzac experience; a number of historical dramas – from Bert Facey’s bestselling autobiography (A Fortunate Life) to the epic cinema of Gallipoli – reinterpreted the campaign of 1915 as at once an odyssey of youth and a great Australian tragedy. A shifting political climate and the need to claim Australia’s place in a changing world order encouraged the old association of war, mateship and nationalism. From the mid-1980s, a series of Australian prime ministers embarked on much-publicised pilgrimages to war graves overseas; regardless of the rhetoric, all looked to Gallipoli for votes and inspiration. Meanwhile, structural shifts within the travel industry made the Peninsula a more desirable tourist destination: ‘off the beaten track’, historic, exotic and commanding an excellent exchange rate, Turkey quickly became part of ‘the backpacker circuit’. By 2000 the narrow beach where the landing first took place could no longer contain the crowd and a new commemorative site was unveiled by the Australian Prime Minister. With over 15 000 in attendance and a viewing audience of over a million back home, the dawn service had became a media extravaganza and a ‘must do’ for young travellers from Australia. Not all had gathered there in what officials liked to call ‘the solemn spirit’ of commemoration. A traveller in her twenties, Kristie reported that Gallipoli has become ‘an important part of the backpacker calendar – much like running of the bulls, beerfest etc.’ She herself went as ‘a mark of respect’ but ‘lots of backpackers go to meet like minded people . . . Lots go just to party. Lots go to say they’ve been’. And getting there is certainly a lot easier than for other generations of pilgrims. Few of the young who descend on Gallipoli for those few days each year come directly from Australia.5 Most visit the Peninsula as a part of a rambling world tour and many belong to the huge expatriate community that now nestles in the heart of London. Not even terrorist threats deter these determined travellers. Like thousands of others Danae ignored repeated warnings not to visit Turkey. It was something she was always going to do, and from Britain Gallipoli was ‘a lot closer and lot cheaper’. ‘I would say 90 per cent of the expat. population in the UK would do this trip’, Danae added ‘and some stupid DFAT notice was not going to stop me going’. Not to go would ‘be giving the terrorists what they want’ and anyway, was London really any safer?6 The routes to Gallipoli are many. In Britain, Anzac Day usually falls between Easter and a Bank Holiday; package tours carry ‘the London crowd’

After being in london (sic) for only two months, I found myself lost in routine and basically in a rut. Not the reason I came to London at all. The pilgrammage (sic) to Gallipoli was part of an inner cleansing process that I hoped would refocus me. And it did.10

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to the Peninsula for around a week’s wages.7 Some carefully position ‘the Anzac experience’ at the beginning or end of travels through Greece and Turkey, others are almost accidental visitors, joining in because they’re ‘in the vicinity’ and it is simply so ‘cost effective’ to get there.8 Most travel in groups, expatriate ‘households’, ‘mates I met up with’, ‘friends from a small town back home’ were typical formations.9 But the journey to Gallipoli can also be a lonely one. Writing from her flat in Shepherd’s Bush, Sharon described herself as ‘a solo traveller seeking out another part of herself’’:

Not all had such high expectations of their travels. As yet another Mexican wave rippled to a close, and the last chant of ‘Aussie, Aussie Aussie’ mercifully faded, I asked Kate D. what had brought her to the dawn service.11 Kate D.: its pretty interesting er I dunno it’s just very exciting to see I never get the opportunity so I may as well come over while I’m here it’s so close it’s good just to come and see everything and have a good week Scates: Did anything surprise you about Gallipoli? Kate D.: Yeah we haven’t been to bed yet [not] for the past three days . . .12

Gallipoli was another experience, another adventure. And the dawn service was really only a small part of it. Aside from the ceremony on the 25th, package tours offer a visit to Troy, a boat cruise along the coast and plenty of free time in the bars of C¸annakale. Tour operators invite the young to join the Anzac experience and then wind down back in Istanbul, where the fleshpots of Turkish baths and belly dancers eagerly await them.13 One might well think that such a journey had more to do with tourism and consumption than it does with pilgrimage or history. Julie-Anne complained that there were a number of ‘real losers’ on her backpacker tour from London: ‘I [even] remember someone asking who the Australians were fighting’. ‘To be perfectly honest’, Luke confessed, ‘I didn’t know very much about Anzac Day whatsoever, other than the fact that Essendon and Collingwood played [football] every Anzac Day!’14 Finally, like many a tourist attraction, the journey to Gallipoli involves what might well be called the ‘commodification’ of history. Recruitment posters have been cleverly recrafted: the image of an Anzac straddles the straits of the Dardanelles issuing his cooee call to a new generation of travellers. At Eceabat (‘port’ of the Gallipoli ferry) the Boomerang Cafe bakes

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its Anzac biscuits; at C¸annakale (transformed overnight to a backpacker village) enterprising street stalls sell their Gallipoli t-shirts. Packaging the Peninsula is a deeply ahistorical exercise and (to some) it seemed at odds with the very purpose of their journey. Peta was one of several young travellers who complained that the landing had been converted into some kind of ‘beach party’. While the patriotism was pleasing the drinking fest and rock concert atmosphere was appalling. Put a pile of Aussies and Kiwis on a patch of land, with unlimited cheap beer, a giant stereo system for sound checks and a few stray footballs – and the place resembled a beach party . . . By the time the Australian service at Lone Pine was over I was stuck between feeling extreme patriotism, sorrow and disgust . . . Most kids between seventeen to twenty seemed to view the experience as a Rite of Passage and brought the t-shirt as proof. My view is that this kind of commercialism is exploitation of the biggest [kind]. Anzac Day is a WAR MEMORIAL DAY – not a party . . . Let’s leave the party at home.15

‘A spiritual thing, definitely’ Peta’s misgivings should probably be placed in perspective. For Catherine, it was a simple matter of statistics. In a crowd of over 15 000 some were bound to see the day ‘as an excuse to get drunk and walk around with a flag on your back’. But for most, the motivation ‘just to be there’ ran much deeper – a point acknowledged by even the most sceptical of observers. Well into his seventies, Murray had seen service in some of the bloodiest theatres of the Pacific. He was also ‘the son of an Anzac’ and ‘since I was a small boy it was my pre-Anzac Day job to polish my father’s medals’. In the early hours of the morning, the old veteran looked uneasily across a memorial site crammed with bodies, beer bottles and sleeping bags. But like Barbara above, he soon found the ‘solemnity’ of the ‘young folk’ moved him as much as the ceremony. The ‘beach party atmosphere’ disappeared as the day gave over to commemoration: ‘Only once did a young chap start to make a noise and was immediately silenced by his peers . . . Gallipoli [restored] my faith in the younger generation’.16 The Peninsula was ‘not just a stopover’. Many backpackers described it as ‘spiritual’ experience, ‘as close to a sacred day as Australians ever get’. Their survey responses suggest a hunger for ritual and ‘meaning’, a search for transcendence in an age as secular as our own. And the word pilgrimage 196

Kate F.: today when we were walking around and that I just had tears in my eyes the whole time . . . it was really really moving and it’s, it’s like a Mecca basically, like a pilgrimage for Australians. Scates: Pilgrimage is a big word. Kate F.: Well, look around you, there’s a fair few people here and you don’t get that many people outside of Australia coming together [for nothing]. I think to me it’s a spiritual thing, definitely. I didn’t come here to party. I came here to commemorate what they did, what they did for us . . . I think that’s the majority of people as well.17

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sprang to the lips of those who surely do not often use it. Kate F. had left Newcastle fifteen months before and spent most of her time working in London. Like the young folk she travelled with, she felt compelled to go to Gallipoli.

‘What they did for us’ was a recurrent phrase in the responses to my survey. No less than for their parents and grandparents, these young pilgrims felt a sense of debt to those who had fought and died. And interestingly, the sacrifice of one generation became conflated with that of another. Several said they went ‘out of respect for [their] grandfather (who fought in World War Two)’ and the ‘old diggers’ at services back home ‘who always brought a tear to my eye’.18 Many have seen this as a revival of patriotic fervour in a post-Vietnam generation and a number of survey responses do exude the most chauvinistic kind of nationalism.19 Even so, the need to say ‘thank you’ (even ‘sorry’) was often more personal than patriotic, a bridge between one generation and another, a willingness to acknowledge the importance of home perhaps when one is so far away from it. As a child, Katie ‘used to stay with [her] grandfather’. On Anzac Day, ‘he’d go off to the dawn service in Melbourne’, returning quiet, distant, somehow a stranger. ‘I now understand why he used to go and I hope one day to make it to the [Melbourne] service to honour him and the men and women who fought with him.’ Lisa’s grandfather had also been a soldier and was ‘the man [she’d] admired most in the whole world’. Her diary charts the long and difficult journey from one commemorative site to another, moving along the beach on a ‘pitch black freezing night’ and climbing exhausted up the sunlit ridges of the Peninsula. Gallipoli’s landscape framed intense and unexpected emotions: whilst she had ‘never . . . felt so proud to be an Australian’, Lisa also knew this was a very personal journey. I will never forget looking out across Lone Pine seeing a sea of young and old Aussies, all ages, some wearing and waving Australian flags – all silent through

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‘how proud I was of him’: a young woman wears her grandfather’s medals at Gallipoli. Walker’s Ridge and the Sphinx emerge from the morning shadow behind her. Here the landscape whispers memory. the whole ceremony, all standing when told. All saying ‘Amen’ and ‘we will remember them’ at exactly the right time . . . All singing . . . I kept looking up at the blue sky above Lone Pine and over Suvla Bay and telling Pop that I loved him and missed him, and how proud I was of him.20

Sometimes Pop was actually present. A surprising number of backpacker respondents met up with families on the Peninsula; a few travelled from one commemorative site to another, criss-crossing the Mediterranean in a journey through generational memory. I was travelling with my grandparents, father, uncles, aunty, cousins, friends and boyfriend [Sarah reported]. It was amazing to be there with people who are so special to you. Especially my father and grandparents. My grandfather was based in Crete in World War Two, and the family continued the trip from Turkey to Crete to remember his fallen friends.21

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‘Hanging on to history’ Dismissing the backpacker pilgrimage is a relatively easy exercise and one taken up with zeal by many a newspaper journalist. Every Anzac Day the media parades images of flag-clad drunken youth, literally oblivious to ‘the real meaning’ of Gallipoli. Historians, on the other hand, ignore this Anzac revival at our peril. Ninety years since the landing there is a real possibility that history is happening without us. For the young, Gallipoli is first and foremost a ‘historic landscape’, charged with stories they’ve grown up with, suffused with memories, myths and meanings. Visiting the site loaned an immediacy to once distant events, the history ‘that had only ever happened on TV’.23 Clutching cameras and water bottles young backpackers scrambled along trench lines and ridges imagining themselves ‘a part of the story’:24

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No less than the pilgrimages of the 1920s and 1930s, these were family journeys; ‘History with a capital H’ made meaningful through a ‘personal connection’ with the past, a convergence of collective and individual memory.22

walking out on . . . the beach there was a sort of, sort of tingle down your spine you knew that was the beach where they had landed and you could see how imposing it really was looking up the cliffs . . . I guess you’re told in sort of your history lessons . . . but I don’t think you really appreciate it25

‘Hanging on to our history’ mattered a great deal to these wandering Australians. At one level, this had much to do with asserting a sense of national identity; a quest for what many called ‘Australianness’ in an age of rampant globalisation. Gallipoli, Katie pointed out, ‘gives you something to tie yourself to while you are travelling overseas – gives you an identity of who Australians are and what has influenced our culture . . . it’s hard to appreciate it without having travelled’.26 In terms remarkably reminiscent of 1915, Helen argued Anzac gave us all ‘a sense of national unity’: Pride in ourselves, mateship, love of the underdog and a need that is ingrained in all Australians to help their fellow man in time of need, whether it be war, drought or fire. Australians . . . had to stick together no matter what. Sure it was terrific, gruesome, probably not our war to fight but it brought the nation together.27

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That ‘Australian spirit’ is usually defined in opposition to the British. Historians have noted that commemoration can be ‘profoundly ahistorical’ and that is certainly the case with many a backpacker pilgrimage.28 The men who fought and died in the Dardanelles did so out of Imperial as much as national loyalty: a young nation’s ‘baptism of fire’ confirmed Australia’s place in the Empire. Today the landing is remembered very differently, ‘a balls up’ as one young man put it and (of course) entirely the fault of the British. The complaint that ‘we were led like lambs to the slaughter’ was common (even expected) – what is much more interesting, much more challenging, is the admission that we should never have been there in the first place.29 Naomi, a proud expatriate in search of her history, believed her countrymen were sacrificed for a cause ‘that had nothing to do with them’. Appalled by the loss of Turkish as well as Australian life, she would write simply ‘shame’ in Lone Pine visitors’ book. Though she went to ‘pay [her] respects to [those] who gave their lives for our country’, Natalie found herself full of ‘anger’: ‘anger at the waste of young human lives . . . I did not feel pride in what they did, but sorrow’. Young Kerry was appalled that so many epitaphs spoke of ‘glory’: ‘I feel more sad than anything else; it’s such a waste of life, waste of time, it’s ridiculous. I just hope it never happens again’.30 The time young travellers spend on the Peninsula is often described as ‘an educational experience’, it made them realise that there is ‘more than one perspective’ on the past, that history itself is both complex and contested.31 Virtually all the respondents ‘had no idea’ of the scale of Turkish losses prior to their visit: ‘I don’t ever remember being told at school. What we learnt I think was very one-sided. Being in Turkey makes you realise that they were fighting for their country and in their country we were the enemy’.32 And for some the tragedy of war went well beyond the old complaint that ‘we were cannon fodder for the British’. Within a day of arriving on the Peninsula, Priscilla ceased to see the fighting ‘from an Australian point of view’: On Gallipoli . . . there are the graves of so many nations, I really felt the personal tragedy of war and thinking about the experience of . . . these men transcended nationalities. I thought about human loss, human bravery, etc. not purely Australian. My visits made me feel sorrow for these people, all they never got to experience, the loss their families would have felt. It made me examine my life in a different way.33

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Priscilla’s testimony alerts us to the paradox of Anzac pilgrimage – a rite of ‘Australianness’ transcending a narrow sense of nationalism. The beaches that witnessed the landing and with it the mythic narrative of nation, now set the scene for a much more personal kind of history. As they walk the cemeteries of Anzac, the young note the ages on the epitaphs: these

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lives which ‘ended before they even began’ could well have been their own. Young women thought of the boys they loved and journeyed with, young men imagined mates and, of course, themselves in some shallow grave on the Peninsula. A surprising number wrote with great tenderness of the same mothers they were so keen to escape back home in Australia.34 Matt expected to be proud to be an Aussie that day, but found himself weeping by a grave that read ‘A Mother’s All’ in a lonely corner on the Peninsula. Unlike many older pilgrims who journey to Gallipoli, the vast majority of young people know of no close relative buried in those tiny cemeteries. But that (as we’ve seen) does not diminish the sense of ‘belonging’ at the emotional core of any pilgrimage. David was in his twenties when he set off to live in London and do the Grand Tour of many a young Australian: ‘I was planning on working for the winter and then heading off in the Spring to seek fame, fortune, love, lust and a suntan on the continent’.35 But David found himself, in his ‘Wallaby jersey’, at Gallipoli: You stand next to the memorial, above the blue . . . Aegean, and you hear the gentle lapping of the water on to the shore below and the place gains a voice and becomes real. You can hear the explosions, the shouts . . . the accents as if you were there in 1915 . . . It’s possible to imagine the men as they climbed out of the trenches . . . they all lay [sic] there now, in row after row, much as they did when they died . . . I found one grave for G. P. Castle of the 2nd Battalion . . . killed at Lone Pine some time between August 6 and August 9. Private Castle was twenty-five and from New South Wales. I stood there looking at this man’s grave and realised that I was twenty-five and from New South Wales.36

History had gained a face and a voice for David.

‘If Anzac Day can unite us . . .’: Indigenous responses Encountering history (and reckoning with national myths) proved equally problematic for Indigenous Australians. Greg, Colline and James made their pilgrimage to Anzac in 2004, determined to honour Indigenous servicemen who fought there in 1915. At first, Colline wondered why they ‘bothered’ to fight at all. Aboriginal people were not even citizens of the country many would die for, and enlisting itself involved a ‘denial’ of their Aboriginality (in theory, at least, only those of ‘predominantly European extraction’ could serve in the AIF). The contribution of Aboriginal servicemen (and women) from both world wars has yet to be properly recognised and on returning to Australia these ‘one-time war heroes’ returned to ‘menial jobs’ on the

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fringes of white society: ‘Black diggers were good enough to fight with white fellas and die with white fellas, but not good enough to vote when they got home or even have a drink with their old mates’.37 Despite these inequalities (or rather because of them) enlisting in the first AIF and sailing off to war could advance the cause of Aboriginal citizenship: ‘My feeling [Colline explained] is that they wanted to be part of Australian society and be in the great adventure . . . with all the other young boys’. The friendships formed under fire, the mateship that transcended racial boundaries, the sense that whites and blacks could bond together in a common sacrifice, all this, she concluded, was well worth fighting for. Greg and James went even further, claiming an Aboriginal place in the lexicon of Anzac: ‘Hubert Tripp [an Aboriginal man] was on the first boat on the first landing at Anzac. I know war is terrible but I feel real proud that I had a brother boy there when our men first hit the beach’.38 The testimony of these three ‘proud Kooris’ suggests two important aspects of indigenous responses to the Peninsula.39 The first was an acknowledgment of the nexus between land and identity. Colline spoke of ‘our natural physical and spiritual attachment [to] the land’ and she, Greg and James were all struck by how much Gallipoli resembled ‘parts of Australia’. There was the same stark brown earth, the olive green scrub, the yellow blaze of gorse that reminded Greg of wattle. Colline went so far as to describe the land as ‘sacred’; this was ‘hallowed ground’, a place ‘where her brothers had walked’, a place spiritualised through sacrifice. But Colline also knew that this wasn’t her country: ‘The land back home is everything to us. It’s our earth, it’s our mother, . . . just the same [as] the Turks thought [when their country] was invaded’.40 And that was not the only common ground these three Aboriginal students found with Turkey. James admitted war was terrible but believed Gallipoli carried a more important message, a much needed message of reconciliation: And like I keep saying you know it’s freaky with our Turkish brothers that we’re the only two countries in the whole world that have become mates [after such bitter fighting] . . . we showed the world how the world should be after a war and the world didn’t listen . . . [If other countries had] acted the way we acted the world would be a better place today.

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Reconciliation was not just with a former enemy. James, Colline and Greg travelled with seven other university students, white students with backgrounds considerably more privileged than their own. As is so often the case with pilgrimage, their journey, their adventure, and ‘too many tears at the graves of too many soldiers’, ‘brought them all together’: ‘This trip is all

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‘Anzac Day can unite us’: Indigenous and white Australians link their Wallaby jerseys at Gallipoli. Behind them the Razor Back curls towards the face of the Sphinx: scrambling across it has become a rite of initiation for many young travellers. Note the relic James has plucked from the soil – bush skills have long proved useful at Gallipoli.

about unity’, Colline declared. ‘We’re all from such different backgrounds. If Anzac Day can unite us as one people all together why the hell can’t it work at home?’41 No doubt there is something quite distinctive about Aboriginal responses to Anzac, and Koori people themselves (like James, Greg and Colline) are best qualified to write that history. In some regards though their pilgrimage bears much in common with other travellers’ responses. Nowhere is that more clearly illustrated than James’s presentation at the Nek and his own private encounter with history. James knew the site was ‘murderous’ long before he got there. Several times during his impromptu talk he referred to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli: the artillery fire that cut short several minutes before the attack, the failure to synchronise watches, disastrous orders that should have been countermanded, false sightings of marker flags driving men on to slaughter. Four suicidal charges each as hopeless as the first cut the 8th and 10th Light Horse to pieces. James also remembered his Bean. Over there, he pointed, sunglasses glistening in the Aegean sun, ‘300 dead men in the area the size of three tennis courts’. The film, James pointed out, was loosely based on

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the story of Wilfred and Gresley Harper, two boys from the bush like himself, who ‘grew up [together], went to school [together], got into trouble [together] . . . went off to war together. Both ended up dying together. You can’t get closer than that’.42 It wasn’t just the readings from primary sources that made James’s pres entation so powerful. A Larrakia man, steeped in community, James knew the importance of family: That’s the story of my blokes. It’s a story I thought had to be told. There’s thousands of stories like it. You know growing up with such a strong influence of family and having such close brothers there’s no way I’d be able to see my brother killed before my eyes.

And the tragedy of the Nek continued well after the killing was over. Wilfred and Gresley’s family begin writing to the Defence Department in 1915 and their letters, hoping and pleading, continued to 1967: That’s forty-two years of correspondence, of pain, of heartache. Having children of my own you know you wouldn’t want to believe this had happened and a part of you would always think ‘No way, they are still alive somehow’; and to me that’s the worst thing that could ever happen . . . [All that was left of their boys was a couple of] postcards, a letter, two bandages and some gloves. And that’s all [the family ever] got. Nothing personal, nothing to say this is my son. [None of] the things you hold on to the most.

James ended with his own tribute to the Harper boys, boys taken by a war that no longer made much sense to him. A bellowing lament broke the stillness of the cemetery: I sit here beside you Eighty-nine years on You taught us about strength and mateship and bond I’m from the outback A long way from Gallipoli But I’ll never forget this moment From now to eternity. Sometimes I think and wonder Shit, what a waste And I’m glad that I have daughters That no war can take.43

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James pinned his poem to an Aboriginal dot painting and buried both in No Man’s Land.

How daughters respond to war and to Gallipoli in particular, is another intriguing aspect of the backpacker pilgrimage. Historically, the Peninsula was a site of male sacrifice. It was men who fought the campaign of 1915 and it is men alone who are buried there. For Australia, New Zealand and, of course, Turkey, the story of the landing has become a foundation myth; feminist scholars have noted the irony that the slaughter of young men ‘gave birth’ to these nations.44 There is, as one young woman put it, something ‘blokey, blokey, blokey’ about the way Gallipoli is often remembered. Visiting the Peninsula, young men seemed ‘enthusiastic’ to scale the steepest cliffs and ridges, claiming the heights the Anzacs had longed for.45 Kat noted that her tour party ‘broke into two groups’, groups divided quite clearly along lines of gender: ‘[we] three girls were more interested in walking and looking and sitting to watch the sun[set], whereas the . . . blokes were much more physical in their exploration of the area. [They liked to think of themselves as Anzacs]’.46 Arguably, part of the attraction of the Peninsula is that it offers a return to an older and more elemental code of masculinity. In 1915 it was still possible for men to be heroes, the world, several survey responses noted, was ‘simpler’ and ‘more straightforward’ back then.47 Female travellers have no such masculine code to guide them. Of course, some successfully claim the legend as their own. By climbing the cliffs of Gallipoli, plunging into the waters of the Aegean, playing two up, yarning, drinking, young women prove themselves, in these ‘modern times’ the mates and ‘equals’ of men.48 Others were wary of any such comparison. ‘Not particularly a feminist’, Lisa thought it time to ‘put the gender rubbish aside’: ‘men have a more glorified role [in war] than women . . . women played a part, but it cannot compare to the mateship and sacrifice [of men]’.49 But by far the more common response was to question the ‘masculinist values’ that made men glorify war.50 Many found ‘the connection between . . . duty honour and being male, outdated and exclusive’ and Veronica was appalled ‘by propaganda campaigns which played on this idea of “manhood” . . . I thought of those who were called cowards for deserting or staying at home and I wept for their inner, personal torture. [It was] SO UNFAIR’.51 Women imagined ‘how the wife and mother’ of young soldiers must have felt,52 several wrestled with the way a generation justified its loss: Can [I] say how it affected [me] as a woman . . .? SAD. 16-year-olds are not men. They had to grow up too quickly and die before their time. The appeal to manhood broke my heart, yet it strongly reflects the pride in their

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‘The appeal to manhood broke my heart’

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heroism. Mothers proud of their boys. You can picture them talking of their son, reddened, watery eyes yet with a determined smile on their faces – a smile which doesn’t quite get to their eyes. I think of boys in Year 10 at school. No way are they ready for war.53

Nor, one suspects, are many of the young men who visit Gallipoli. There is a great deal of male posturing on the Peninsula, a device, perhaps, to keep ‘the horror’ at bay.54 But most of the tracks that criss-cross the gullies end in a graveyard and there young men face the grim reality of war. The ‘rough young men . . . [I travelled with] seemed just as touched as the girls’, Jacqueline remembered. She watched them weeping and shaking, leaving ‘a part of [their] heart’ by those lonely graves.55 Such grief eclipsed any puerile kind of patriotism. ‘It was not the Australian Government’s memorial that moved me to tears’, Josh confessed, ‘but one erected by the Turkish [people] to the Australian soldier’s mothers . . . “Your sons now lie in the bosom of a friendly nation”. Five years on I can still see it very clearly’.56 And Josh remembered just as clearly the skull he had found half embedded in the clay. It really drove home to me that 50 years earlier I would have been there or in some [other] theatre of war. The nine months my mother carried me. Every nappy she changed. Every schoolteacher’s word. All the friends I had made. Would have been cut short. You really do ask yourself, would you do it . . . no easy answer.57

In Flanders fields

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The answers don’t get any easier when one considers those other ‘theatres of war’. The Western Front is very different to Gallipoli and attracts a very different kind of visitor. Though much easier to access than Turkey far fewer young Australians make their way there. Those that do go have a much clearer sense of mission. Chris preferred to be called a pilgrim than a backpacker; his journey had more to do with ‘history’ than sightseeing: ‘Many of those going to Gallipoli . . . are on a chase for the sun holidays. They head South for a bit of warm weather . . . I wonder if so many of them would visit Gallipoli if it were situated further North . . . [somewhere out of] the “backpacker circuit”?’58

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Though Chris ‘did a Leger’s Holiday Tour Company’ trip, his guide (he insisted) was a ‘genuine’ historian whose whole ‘life was dedicated to the study of World War One’.59 Others charted their own course across Flanders and the Somme, ‘John Laffin’s guide to Australian cemeteries on the Western Front, C. E. W. Bean’s Anzac to Amiens and books on specific battles’ accompanying them. Pilgrimages such as these were a very studious undertaking; they were not ‘tacked on’ to a holiday or ‘pre-packaged’ on the internet.60 Many, though certainly not all, claimed a family association with the site. Martin had as many as twenty relations killed on the Western Front, finding them was at once a ‘spiritual’ quest and a ‘journey of discovery’. Julie-Anne’s great uncle was killed on his first day on the Somme; her survey response recounts the stories of him as if it were yesterday. Garry was only eight or nine when his great-grandfather died but the trauma of his war service had always haunted the family. Even today his survey response reads with disarming intimacy: I remember my mum telling me [that] once when she was at his place . . . she said how cold it is [and winters are cold in Glen Innes]. ‘Girly’, he replied ‘you don’t know how cold it is until you have to [lie] under a dead man to keep warm’. He served in the 4th Infantry out of Ypres as a driver. It felt so strange to walk down the same streets as he [had] so many years later [and see] the bullet holes still in the church. [It] changed my life. What I call a wake up call. Thank you for jogging my memory.61

The ceremonies these pilgrims attend lack the ‘glamour’ of Gallipoli. By his late twenties, Andrew had visited cemeteries in England, France, Belgium, Turkey and Thailand. In each case he went to honour the fallen and was appalled by the ‘Bali party atmosphere’ that opened proceedings on the Peninsula. The spotlights, the bands, the chant of ‘Aussie Aussie Aussie’ detracted from the solemnity. Having been to the Anzac services in France we felt that these (that is, the French ones) were more moving, more relevant and much less of an event. Despite the fact that the French services were closer to London and easier and cheaper to get to I felt the people who attended them were there for the right reasons . . . not just because it was trendy.62

There was very little that is ‘trendy’ about the Western Front. The epic scenery of Gallipoli, its wilderness and beauty is altogether absent. This is a thoroughly domesticated landscape: year after year farmers plough the fields with practised indifference to those buried beneath them. The cemeteries that dot these farmlands are very different to the memorials of the Peninsula. To begin with, there were so many more of them. ‘It seemed you could

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hardly drive two kilometres and not see at least [one] of them’. Cemetery after cemetery, ‘acres of dead’ stood mute witness to the scale of carnage.63 The distance of the Western Front was another defining factor. In a day, David remembered, he could ramble across the ridges of the Peninsula, breathing in ‘the smell of pine trees and rosemary . . . the faint dusty aroma’ of Gallipoli. But David watched the Western Front pass by him through the windscreen of a hire car; based first in France and then in Belgium.64 The same was true for Naomi: . . . I was not prepared for the experience of visiting the Somme. We travelled the district in a triangle from Amiens and it seemed a new cemetery appeared on every rise. In the semi-frozen mists of January the monuments and cemeteries were eerie and desolate, the only [people we saw] were the staff of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The experience left us overwhelmed by the number of men trodden into the red mud, and bereft at the loss . . . that so many died on a patch of soil where life would have gone on the same whether it was French or German seemed tragically laughable.

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And here (as Naomi’s account suggests) the slaughter seemed so much more anonymous. There is something small and intimate about the graveyards of the Peninsula, quiet places nestled by the sea or ‘tucked away in the gullies’. The cemeteries on the Western Front, by contrast, are crowded with the graves of thousands. Melinda remembered ‘feeling . . . extremely lost in a sea of white gravestones’. Priscilla found herself ‘quite unprepared for the row after row of headstones for men as young as eighteen . . . name after name [it] was almost mind-numbing’.65 Nor do the dead seem to ‘belong there’. At Gallipoli, the landscape ‘seems [many insisted] ours, Australian’, the words of Ataturk, memorised by many a visitor, assure the dead they rest in the warm bosom of a ‘friendly country’.66 But nowhere is less like Australia than the flat frozen fields of Flanders: ‘The land on which they fought’ Julie lamented ‘was truly foreign in every way possible’; though she searched for days she never found the grave of her great uncle. In all, the Western Front lacked what one backpacker called an ‘inspirational quality’. Here the war and the killing was at its bleakest and its most industrialised. ‘Sheer waste’, Sophie scribbled tersely across her survey response, ‘state sanctioned mass murder’.67 Attempts to instil patriotic sentiment in such a landscape are bound to fail miserably. Rachel felt overwhelmed by the number of dead, ‘to see the countryside and feel the cold and rain’ brought home all the soldiers’ suffering:

And that loss was endured on both sides of the trenches. Rachel also visited a German war grave site in Belgian Flanders . . . I think any feelings of anger or hatred towards the old enemy are immediately defused by the realisation that they lost sons and brothers too. When it is all broken down, people are killed, one by one, on both sides. They all had names. By turning these names into numbers, the meaning of it all was lost.69

‘ It’s Like a Mecca, Like a Pilgrimage’

some of [them] were the same age as me . . . I visited the graves at Passchendaele and the violence through which the soldiers died seemed in complete juxtaposition to the beautiful, restful setting where they are now buried. I think pride in one’s country is a hollow emotion when compared to the loss endured in the face of war.68

Men were just as likely to ponder the meaning of Flanders. James had been brought up to revere Anzac Day: in fact some of my earliest recollections of childhood are being taken to the Anzac Day march in Newcastle by my father. As a youngster I believe I was more willing to accept the Anzac values of bravery and self-sacrifice of the Australian soldier as nation builder – without question . . . [it] became a semi-religion for me.70

At the age of twenty-five, James finally visited the cemeteries of Northern France; there he found ‘a lost generation of Australians’. Midst the enormity of the carnage, ‘the rhetoric’ was emptied of meaning, there was no place here for ‘heroes and idols’, even the elaborate monuments to Australia’s dead seemed ‘arrogant and boastful’. James was ‘breathless, lost for words’ on the killing fields of Flanders. But his survey response remains a forceful reckoning with a myth the young are still brought up with: I did not feel the tunes of British race patriotism pumping through my veins whilst walking among these cemeteries, but nor did I respond to them with a jingoistic republicanism. I think, and this is the great irony about the Anzac ‘legend’ today – that it is above and beyond politics, or imperialism, or ‘nationalism’ for that matter.When I visited the cemeteries of Northern France the question which so frequently came to mind was [why?], . . . what did [all] these [young] men die for?71

It was a question James was no longer able to answer.

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Conclusion: journey’s end Private George Irwin went missing at Gallipoli in August 1915. Last seen plunging into the Turkish trenches at Lone Pine, his body (like countless thousands of others) was never recovered from the carnage. His mother begins writing to the Red Cross in 1916: I have interviewed so many boys who were with mine in the enemy trench and were blown up that I have . . . come to think that he might have been in one of these explosions, and been carried to some hospital in England suffering from loss of memory . . . [I’ve been] told . . . there were a number of cases like this . . .1

Sarah Irwin continues to ‘hope’ ‘pray’ and imagine until the very end of the war: I have never been able to think of him as dead. I feel he is still living somewhere. I write regularly to Turkey, but hardly expect a reply still something urges me to write and I will keep on trusting and hoping, until this dreadful war is over and all the prisoners are exchanged.2

Twelve years after his death, Private Irwin’s parents finally made their way to Gallipoli. Their journey had taken them 12 000 miles from Australia, first to Britain, then to Italy and finally across the Mediterranean to Turkey. They travelled in the company of 300 others, a ‘mixed party’ of grieving parents and returning soldiers determined to walk ‘the hallowed ground’ of the Peninsula. All were united in a common quest, ‘all were connected with the precious dead of Gallipoli’. In the blistering heat of September, the Irwins climb to the summit of Lone Pine and Australia’s Memorial to the Missing. Unable to lay the body of their son to rest, they take a rubbing of all that is left of him, a name. Photographs published in the Sydney press captured that moment of communitas for many a mourning family back home in Australia. Mrs Irwin, whose long search for her son has finally ended, is crumpled at the base of the memorial. Her face hidden from view, her hands limp and motionless, her eyes fixed on George’s name as it is traced out before her. Beside her rests a formal wreath of paper poppies 210

Conclusion

‘bent with grief at Lone Pine’: the Irwins trace their son’s name from the galleries of the missing. George disappeared without trace within a few metres of the memorial. This is as close as they will ever come to finding him.

(carried by the pilgrimage party) and her own ragged posy of freshly picked flowers. It is Mr Irwin who kneels level with his son’s name, a firm hand holding the paper in place, stoic, solemn, reverent. The couple is aided by an official from the War Graves Commission; to him they have entrusted a ‘sacred duty’, wardenship of the memory of their son.3 This book has charted the many pilgrimages that have carried Australians to the battlefields of the Great War. They are journeys across immense physical, emotional and psychological distances, sea voyages that lasted from one season into another, thankless years of correspondence trying to locate (and 211

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visualise) a distant grave, a lifetime of grieving around a few soiled belongings, all of a son, husband or brother that never came home. In some ways, of course, the Irwins’ story is exceptional. In the 1920s Gallipoli was a distant and dangerous destination – very few Australians could afford to make the journey. But countless thousands imagined it. It was no coincidence that the Irwins’ pilgrimage was reported so fully in the media, that photographs of the couple, bent with grief at Lone Pine, were so widely circulated. Their loss came to symbolise that of a generation, the name they touched might have been any name. In short, the Irwins are recruited here as proxy mourners, through their actual journey (rehearsed in those long years of ‘praying’ and ‘hoping’), grief-stricken families imagined their own. And therein lay the paradox of pilgrimage, a private act of personal devotion laid the basis for a community of bereavement and belief. The Irwins were not the only proxy mourners. The ‘precious dead of Gallipoli’ were entrusted to officials from the War Graves Commission, men (and very occasionally women) charged ‘in perpetuity’ with the care of cemeteries overseas. The photograph of the Irwins suggests a kind of partnership: grieving parents are guided to their son’s memorial and assisted, firmly but gently, in taking that etching of his name. But this book has revealed a much more fraught and complex process of memorialisation. Families often challenged the state’s right to ‘appropriate’ their war dead; they insisted on their own memorials and epitaphs, demanded the recovery and identification of butchered bodies, argued that even missing men were entitled to a ‘name’ or a ‘grave’. The debates surrounding commemoration of the war dead also assumed transnational dimensions, individual Dominions pleading their case before the Empire. Gallipoli’s graves, in particular, bear witness to a persistently ‘Australian sentiment’. In time, Imperial treaties acknowledged what the Irwins knew instinctively: the Peninsula was ‘sacred’ to Australia, ‘an Anzac estate’ carved from Turkish soil. Gallipoli was not the only ground ‘hallowed’ to Australia. Travelling via the ‘old country’, the cemeteries of the Western Front soon formed part of a recognised ‘pilgrimage’ itinerary. This book has explored the subtle differences between tourism, travel and pilgrimage; it has retraced the routes whereby tens of thousands of Australians made their way to France, Belgium and ‘the Holy Land’. Every journey was distinctive, an uncertain mix of commemoration and sightseeing, nostalgia for some, grieving for others. Each involved a measure of hardship, fellowship, adventure. But each journey ended, as the Irwins’ journey had ended, at the moment where mourners recognised a name. Pilgrimages were at once traumatic and cathartic journeys into memory. They brought together the brave and the broken-hearted; they required courage at the very moment they promised consolation.

Conclusion

Pilgrimages were global journeys and Return to Gallipoli has made two quite distinctive contributions to international debates surrounding memory and war. As several scholars have noted, ‘grief, bereavement and mourning are the backdrop to many [historical] studies’, particularly the collective commemoration centred around war memorials. By contrast, we know very little about grief itself, its ‘individual ordeal’ expressed ‘first and foremost . . . in dreadful solitude’.4 Through the ordeal of families like the Irwins, I have recovered the phases of grief and mourning; the first frantic letters written to soldiers and the authorities, anxious years of correspondence with the Red Cross, diaries that descend into the dark, private world of bereavement. Through these broken, scattered voices, we have relived the moment and the aftermath of loss. These forgotten archives were one source for this book, surveys and interviews another. The testimony of today’s travellers is poignant, powerful, evocative; often challenging and sometimes disturbing, it expresses a deep sense of ‘historical sensibility’. And it suggests that the whole process of mourning the dead, the grief that began with Gallipoli, is still far from resolution. The history of Australian pilgrimages now spans four generations. Ninety years on, the dead still seem to call us from the grave. Families still sift through archives in search of frail memories, they still wonder at the fate of men forever missing and cherish photographs, letters and medals first treasured decades ago. Today’s pilgrims walk in the footsteps of those who went before them. Ageing war veterans gaze across the ground that consumed a generation, young backpackers whisper prayers they barely remember, the nieces and nephews of long-dead soldiers gently trace their fingers across a name, their name, chiselled softly in the stone. No less than pilgrims of the 1920s, those ageing parents burdened with grief, today’s travellers find companionship, solace, even a kind of reverence in their journey. Setting out to recover history, nationhood or adventure, they discover some new dimension to others and themselves. And over ninety years since the day of the landing, the sadness seems undiminished; the first Australian pilgrims, families like the Irwins, wept openly at the graves of their countrymen; in the brittle light of Anzac morning Australians weep there still. The grief may not be as bitter as for those who lost their loved ones, it may not lead to anguish or to madness, but it is real and unrelenting just the same. The Irwins called Gallipoli sacred – denied a grave, they sanctified a landscape. Today there is an outcry over ‘desecration’ wrought by road works; rumours of a mass grave at Fromelles have rekindled that old demand to recover our missing dead. The battlefields of the Great War still cast their shadow on Australia; like the Irwins we visit them to lay our ghosts to rest.

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Of course, there are differences as well as continuities. The site of pilgrimage has steadily shifted: once the Western Front and Palestine were the most common destinations; now the legendary landscape of Gallipoli is well within our reach. Just as dramatic are changes to ‘commemoration’s calendar’. Today pilgrimages and ceremonies centre around Anzac Day; few families mark the death of individual soldiers and major battles like Pozi`eres or Villers-Bretonneux are largely (though never entirely) forgotten. Pilgrimage has changed and so too have its participants. Who of the Irwins’ generation imagined Australia’s youth re-invading the shores of Anzac? Who would have thought that air travel could become so affordable or that a global tourist industry would breach the very boundaries the Great War established? The sheer numbers involved are little short of astounding: once the occasional cruise ship skirted the Peninsula, now convoys of buses ferry thousands every year to the cemeteries and the beaches. The revival of Anzac pilgrimage has surprised and perplexed historians. Once we believed the memory of war would fade with the last of the diggers; contrary to all expectations, the Anzac mythology and the pull of the Peninsula has grown even stronger. The reasons for this are many and various. Wanderlust, a nostalgia for the past, the search for traditions in ‘a society without rituals’, all help to ‘explain’ the ‘annual migration’ to Gallipoli.5 And arguably memory, like tourism, is now something of an industry. The burial of the Unknown Soldier, anniversaries of the landing or the end of World War Two have reinvented and rehabilitated our memory of war.6 In short, Anzac Day has become fashionable, especially at Gallipoli and especially amongst the young. Once a solemn day of mourning, it is now a much vaguer celebration of nationhood.7 In the process, history has been commodified, an experience purchased with an air ticket. Perhaps we should be wary though of neat generational distinctions. From the 1920s to today, battlefield pilgrimage has straddled a vast emotional and political spectrum, incorporating conflicting strands of nationalism and pacifism, scepticism and nostalgia, commemoration and adventure. There is nothing so unprecedented about today’s ‘backpacker experience’: pilgrimage and tourism have always travelled together. Evaluating grief is also a risky business, particularly given the changing moods and rhythms of every pilgrim’s journey. Was the anguish of the Irwins any less real for the deck games and dances they enjoyed on the Stella? Is the reverent silence of the dawn service very much diminished by that raucous flag-waving at Lone Pine? Returning to Gallipoli, indeed to any of the cemeteries of the Great War, still involves a pilgrimage. These are the ‘inspirited’ journeys of a

Conclusion

remorselessly secular age. And no less than the Irwins, today’s travellers walk a landscape charged with memory. At one level, they long to be connected with an event so much larger than themselves, the Great War that shaped and marred a century. At another, their sense of the past is ‘personal’, ‘local’ and ‘familiar’, a record as fragile and as intimate as shreds of tattered uniform, or that simple paper etching of a name. Most important of all, Anzac pilgrimage belongs to those who undertake it; it transcends the shallow rhetoric of the media and the politicians, confronts the agony of history, deplores war’s tragic, brutal waste. Standing at the Nek or VillersBretonneux, few of my pilgrims spoke of pride or glory, here hearts were broken at very moment nations were made. As we approach the centenary of the landing, returning to Gallipoli will become ever more important to the way Australians define themselves as a people. And those ‘grieving mothers from far away countries’ may never ‘wipe away their tears’.

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Epilogue: The ghost of memory Midsummer, Melbourne A hot northerly wind batters its way down Bourke Street. Grit from the Mallee pounds against shop windows, scrapes along tram tracks and settles in the eyes of shoppers and tourists. Today the temperature will climb to the high 30s, already the city seems to wilt, her green and shaded avenues slowly baking in the furnace. The old post office sorting centre is built of solid bluestone – built to withstand centuries of Melbourne’s cruellest summers and bleakest winters. Like so many other public buildings it has faced the indignity of endless recycling. Once a monument to the efficiency of Victoria’s post, it now houses the records of ‘Human Services’: personal files, departmental memos and the case-books of long closed hospitals and asylums. ‘The order from the Public Records Office has come through – looks like we’ve got something.’ Melanie’s voice is cheerful and excited. Researchers seldom call at Human Services and a historian is a welcome change from the usual interdepartmental inquiries. All last week, we’d worked through asylum admission books, heavy, leather-bound volumes, groaning with patients’ particulars. Then, as today, certifying insanity was a grim legalistic business.1 Then, as today, doctors speculated on the ‘supposed cause’ of madness: Frances V., ‘fidgeting and delusional/ loss of husband and son at war’; Bessie S., ‘two brothers killed in France/ says she has taken God’s place and God has taken hers’; Ellen N., ‘howls through the night/ excited by seeing returning soldiers/ her own son killed on the Somme’; Horatio H., ‘brother killed at the Front, but . . . endlessly searches the streets for him’.2

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The case notes stood on a trolley by my desk. An archivist had sealed each file in cellophane, a simple (and supremely sanitary) conservation measure. But once the seal was broken a sordid shambles would spill out on the table. There was nothing clean or ordered about a case history and certainly nothing predictable. Many ‘admissions’ were sullen and submissive, weakened

E p i l og u e

with worry, ‘a vacant look on their faces’, their minds fixed ‘on something far away’.3 Others were ‘noisy and restless’, ‘talked incessantly and incoherently’, tore wildly at their hair and their clothing, struck out at everything around them.4 All were obsessed by the fate of sons, brothers and husbands seemingly swallowed up by war. Beatrice E. believed her husband was ‘destined to die in France’, naked and shouting hymns, she was found wandering the streets with nothing but ‘a bible in her hand’. Emma H. struggled with barbed wire she believed tangled all around her, ‘fretting’ over loved ones had driven her ‘quite queer’.5 John H.’s brother was killed at the front, but the dear boy’s ghost was still ‘hovering all around him’. Many spoke to spirits, ‘saw figures of their dead son’, writhed with pain for every soldier wounded a world away.6 Many confessed ‘a great desire to die’ themselves: ‘nervy’ and suicidal since the death of her husband, Laura L. scratched her face and body and then flung herself over a balcony. ‘A small elderly woman’ who had ‘lost a son in the war’, Margaret C. walked with cold determination ‘into the sea’.7 Others struggled to reconcile themselves to fates only the maddest could imagine. Private Alex A. has been missing since the carnage at Bullecourt and we are never likely to find him. A Red Cross inquiry initiated by the family ran the grim gamut of possibilities: killed by a shell, shot down in the field, possibly wounded in a prison camp. ‘So let it be, So let it be’ his grieving mother chanted as they carried her away to the madhouse.8 In the madhouses themselves, these files would record every kind of indignity, patients tied to chairs by day and locked in padded cells at night, the hours of meaningless menial labour, electric shocks to the brain, seemingly endless sedation. Through the cellophane you couldn’t smell the vomit of forced feeding, the chloroform or the urine, but it wasn’t very hard to imagine.9 I walked towards the desk and fumbled with the cords of my computer. ‘We’ve got a file out the back too – one of the Yarra Bend Admissions. Like to take a look?’ It probably wasn’t correct procedure. The boundaries between researcher and archivist are clearly drawn, the stacks and the reading room separated by years of training, professional codes and several hefty manuals of health and safety regulations. But someone had turned on the cricket in the office of Human Services, there was a post-Christmas languor in the air and the easy goodwill that so becomes Australians. ‘That would be great.’ We walked softly on the linoleum floor: gliding past the half-lit shelves it seemed as if the archives were sleeping. At a juncture in the stacks, Melanie flicked a switch and the rows of boxes were suddenly, rudely illuminated. ‘It’ll be up here somewhere – I can’t quite reach it.’ I pulled at the box, lost my grip and the contents plummeted all around us.

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‘The face of grief’: distraught, exhausted, malnourished, Mary Jane’s anguish cries out from her photograph. Hundreds of grieving wives, parents and siblings were institutionalised in the 1920s; for many the war never ended.

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Mary Jane stared up at us from the shiny scuffed surface of governmentissue lino. She was one of thousands of Australian mothers whose sons went to war, one of hundreds who was institutionalised, unable to deal with first the worry and then the grieving, one of a generation whose imaginary journeys to war graves ended only in an endless nightmare. The file would describe her ‘frightful appearance’ and every mother’s fears cried out from that photograph.10 The eyes that fixed us in their unrelenting gaze, the deep lines that marked her mourning, the thin tense face of a woman who refused to eat and who dreamt every night of piecing together the scattered bones of her child’s body. It was the face of grief and it howled its pain and its sorrow in the quiet ordered recesses of the archives. ‘Oh dear’, Melanie uttered, ‘this is terrible’.

The bus stop was a fair distance from the entrance of Glenside Hospital; I walked through the blistering heat towards it. Sarah met me at the Administration Block, a 1960s brick building at odds with the gothic structure towering behind it. Glenside was built to inspire awe, festooned with the turrets and battlements an overly excited architect thought suited to a madhouse. ‘Strange we still have admission papers here, most of the old records were sent to the archives years ago, there’s no sense to it, it’s madness.’ Sarah seemed quite unaware of the irony. ‘We’ll make you as comfortable as we can but we’re not really equipped for researchers. You’ll have to look through the records here, we’ll have them brought over from the hospital. Best go over and see what we’re in for.’ Sarah opened the heavy door of the old asylum and a blast of cool air rushed around us; I imagined (again) the scent of fear and chloroform. ‘They’re housed in the vault – it was probably a safe once and some people say it was used to confine the patients. As you’ll see, it’s not really the best conditions for storage.’ Far from it. The case records of Glenside Asylum are stacked several metres high, all the way to the ceiling. Some of the more recent files have been gathered up in cardboard archive boxes but most papers lie in simple bundles, fraying cotton ribbons holding them together. Just a few kilometres away, the rest of the Glenside deposit is in the care of State Records, in humidity controlled, ‘state of the art’ archives. There the catalogue describes them as a precious part of the State’s heritage. But there is nothing precious about the papers scattered around me. They lie there rotting and forgotten like so many of their namesakes. ‘I understand what you’re saying. Grief can have a terrible effect on people. I’ve seen it myself. And not to have a body to bury that must have been the worst of all. Funerals are a way of saying goodbye, we need that.’ There is a shuffle in the ceiling and I realise rats may be nesting in the papers. For a moment, I remember the bodies these families grieved for, flung about in the mud, lacerated by shellfire, writhing with the vermin of No Man’s Land. ‘But some people you say went over there – made a pilgrimage to the grave. That must have helped, mustn’t it?’ I wondered how best to answer her.

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Midsummer, Adelaide

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Notes Bibliographical note Full references to all sources are provided in the notes and a list of archives visited is detailed in the acknowledgments. For the convenience of readers, I have included the location of more obscure pamphlet collections. The survey responses referred to here are held at the School of History, University of New South Wales, awaiting transfer to the archives of the Australian War Memorial. For a detailed discussion of their scope (and my methodology) see Bruce Scates, ‘In Gallipoli’s Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Australian Historical Studies, 33, no. 119, April 2002.

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1 Questionnaire (henceforth Q.) completed by Jenny N. (Largs North, SA). To enhance readability, surveys completed in block letters have been reproduced as standard written text. I have also substituted ‘and’ for the symbols ‘+’ and ‘&’. To secure anonymity, I have referred to respondents by their first name, initial and place of origin. 2 Q. Jenny N. (Largs North, SA). 3 John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London: Sage, 1990), pp. 16–17. For a review of this literature see the Annals of Tourism Research devoted to pilgrimage, vol. 9, no. 1 (1992) and Michael Pearson, ‘Travellers, Journeys, Tourists: The Meanings of Journeys’, Australian Cultural History, no. 10 (1991), pp. 127–9; for slippery distinction see Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. 38. 4 Ian Reader and Tony Walter, Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 3, 63; Victor and Edith Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). 5 For the intersection between private and collective memory see Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. by Lewis A. Coster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 52–3; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Graham Dawson, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 22–3. For ‘storied’ places see Robert Finch, Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), p. 44. 6 Bruce Scates, ‘In Gallipoli’s Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Australian Historical Studies, 33, no. 119, April 2002; Q. Russel S. (Murrumbeena, Vic), Alfred D. (Mansfield, Qld); Paula Hamilton, ‘The Knife Edge: Debates

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about Memory and History’, in Memory and History in Twentieth Century Australia, Kate Darian Smith and Paula Hamilton (eds) (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 15. For studies of wartime bereavement see Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 5; Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), Joy Damousi, Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experience and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004). Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 293; Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 7. For ‘connectedness’ see Roy Rosenweig’s and David Thelan’s ambitious study, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) also Australian Cultural History, No. 22, 2003; Bob Bushaway, ‘Name Upon Name’, in Ray Porter (ed.), The Myths of the English (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1992). Peter Read, Returning to Nothing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Haunted Earth (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003); Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire’, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26, Spring 1989.

Chapter 1 1 Lyall Papers, Ms 10132, La Trobe Library, Victoria (henceforth La Trobe); Service Dossier for Gnr Brian Lyall, National Archives of Australia, (NAA:) B2455/1227. 2 Lt E.H. Chinner, E.H. Abbott, Red Cross Wounded and Missing files, Mortlock Library, SRG 76/1(henceforth RCWMF Adelaide); Pte D. Hunter, R.G. Bogle, Red Cross Wounded and Missing files, Australian War Memorial, 1DRL/0428 (henceforth RCWMF Canberra). These records have now been digitised http://awm.gov.au. Families even wrote to senior officers demanding more complete details of their loved one’s death, see Elsie Urqhart to John Monash, nd [1917], Ms 1884, Box 14, Folder 8, National Library of Australia (henceforth NLA). 3 See papers communicating the death Spr George Berry, Mackay Papers, Ms 12668, Box 3494, Berry Papers, Ms10025, La Trobe. 4 Pte W.G. Croser, RCWMF Adelaide. 5 L-Cpl P. J. Blakemore, RCWMF Canberra. Note too the way that casualty lists often incorrectly recorded men’s deaths, transcript of an interview between Beth Robertson and Dorothy Robertson, ‘South Australian Women’s Responses to the First World War’ (henceforth Robertson Oral History), State Library of South Australia, OH31. 6 In Sigmund Freud’s classic formulation, the ‘resolution of mourning’ involves an end of the ‘search’ for the dead and the ‘detachment of their memory’, Totem and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960). See also Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds

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(eds), History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003). Pte H. Antram, RCWMF Adelaide. Pte T.R. Jones, RCWMF Canberra. See the outline of the Bureau’s function by Vera Deakin, Pte Bert Hargraves; Pte R.J. Frazer, RCWMF Canberra. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), ch. 2; Pte R. Adams, RCWMF Canberra. Ptes C.E. Foster, M.W.H. Dillion, C. Compson, M. Docherty and F.W. Fox, RCWMF Adelaide; Pte T.J. Clarke, RCWMF Canberra. Pte R.C. Crowe, RCWMF Adelaide; see also M.O. Harrison who ‘went forward in a charge from Hill 60 . . . and never returned’, RCWMF Canberra. Pte W.R. Blacksell, RCWMF Canberra. Sgt A.E. Burn; Capt. Hardy, Pte A.C. Clarke, RCWMF Canberra. Ptes C.J. Boyd and J.W. Barnwell, RCWMF Canberra. Philadelphia Robertson, Red Cross Yesterdays (Melbourne: J.C. Stephens, 1950), p. 29; Capt. Dudley Harvey, RCWMF, Canberra; Pte L.C. Jacobs, RCWMF, Adelaide. J.M. Winter, ‘Communities in Mourning’ in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn ShevinCoetzee, Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), pp. 326, 337. Sgt R.W.W. Adam, RCWMF, Canberra. These observations support Winter’s pioneering study, Sites of Memory, p. 41; for a subsequent study of ‘self censorship’ by the Bureau see Eric F. Schneider, ‘The British Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau: A Truth Telling in the Great War’, War and History, vol. 4, no. 3, 1997, pp. 301 ff. Recommendation by Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, in Circular Letter to Inquiry Bureau, 11 September 1917, Mortlock Library, SRG 76/23; I thank Melanie Oppenheimer for kindly providing this reference. Various cases, RCWMF Folders 1–10, Box 141. Pte R.S. Phillips, RCWMF Canberra. Suicides were some of the most difficult deaths to convey and reports to families are deliberately ambiguous. Statement by Pte W. Patterson, Pte D. Jones, RCWMF Canberra. Pte F. Leahy, RCWMF Adelaide; Pte H. Thorpe, RCWMF Canberra. Pte W. Bolton, Pte John Clarke, RCWMF, Canberra. Diary of Pte L.W. Colley-Priest, 22 September 1918, Mitchell Library (ML) Mss 2439. For ‘heart rendering experience’ of recovering the dead see W.E. Gillett, ‘A Chat from Khaki’ (1920), ML Mss 1585. Pte R. Ansley, Pte W. Huntley, Tpr M.S. Blyth, RCWMF, Canberra; Diary of Rev. Andrew Gillison, 18 May 1915, AWM PR 86/028. Pte R.T. Buckley and Sgt R.R. Poynting, RCWMF Canberra and Adelaide. Lt W. Irving, RCWMF, Canberra. See, for instance, transcript of an interview with Mrs Bates, Robertson Oral History; papers of Ptes Joe and Oliver Cumberland, AWM, PR 86/147; Fergusan Brothers’ letters, AWM PR00005; diary of Pte Roy Richard, ML, CY2972. Letter by Alan Mackay to his family, 6 September 1918, Mackay Papers. For a useful introduction to the role of clergymen in the Great War see Michael McKernan, Padre: Australian Chaplains in Gallipoli and France (Sydney: George Allen

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& Unwin 1986). I am grateful to Geoff Treloar for reference to several articles; Cpl C.M. Mackie, RCWMF, Adelaide, for service records see AWM Honour Roll. Fr Barry, Catholic Press, 3 May 1917 (I thank Patrick Porter for drawing my attention to this source); the news that James Keenan did not suffer long was some little comfort for his family but they seem equally anxious to know if he was attended by a Catholic priest, Pte J. Keenan, RCWM, Canberra. Patrick Porter, ‘“The Sacred Service”: Australian Chaplains and the Great War’, War and Society, vol. 20, no. 2, October 2002, p. 49; Rev. D.B. Blackwood, ‘Statement of Experience’, AWM, 1DRL/0619. Cpl A.J. Jack, RCWMF, Canberra; see also Army Correspondence Book, papers of Chaplain W.E. Dexter, PROO248/7; ‘Battle Bullecourt’, papers of Rev. Jacque, AWM 1DRL625. Letter by Chaplain A.B. Brocke, 23 May 1916, Imperial War Museum (henceforth IWM) MCR47. Diary of Chaplain F. Shannon, 1, 22 January 1916, AWM PR84/337; diary of Sister Elsie Trantor, 19 June 1917, 14 April 1918, AWM, 3DRL/4081. Trantor diary, 1 April 1918. Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 1; Spr O.E. Clarke, RCWMF, Canberra. I owe this approach to Tony Walter, ‘A New Model of Grief: Bereavement and Biography’, Mortality, 1 (1), pp. 2–26. Queenslander, 22 April 1916; see also ‘Graves Where our Heroes are Buried’, 8 January 1916. C.F.N. Macready, The Registration and Care of Graves (London: HMSO, 1916); Our Empire, 18 September 1920; Alan Mackay to his family, 6 September 1918, Mackay Papers; for a harrowing account by one such War Graves Registration Unit (WGRU) photographer see papers of I.L. Bawtree, IWM 75/89/1. British Australasian, 4 December 1919; for a typical example of one such card see papers relating to the death of Sgt Roy Bromley, Bromley Family Papers, Ms 10145, La Trobe Library. British Australasian, 4 December 1919; note the ‘very pleased’ response of Catherine Welsh, who immediately ordered a dozen further copies, Service Dossier for Pte L.J. Welsh, NAA: B2455/3334. Elizabeth Hallem and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001), pp. 117–18; J. McLean to W.H. Zimmer, 19 April 1922; W.H. Zimmer to Director, War Museum, 29 April 1922, ‘Graves: Re Inquiries re same, photos etc’, AWM 93, No. 6288, 17/4/108. J. McLean to W.H. Zimmer, 19 April 1922; W.H. Zimmer to Director, War Museum, 29 April 1922, ibid. Zimmer to Director, War Museum, 29 April 1922, ibid., ‘Graves: Re Inquiries re same, photos etc’, AWM 93, No. 6288, 17/4/108. John D. Keating, ‘John Garibaldi Roberts’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, vol. 11 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988); Herald, 5 August 1920. John Roberts Diary, 13 September 1919, 21 June, 19 October 1920, 1 February, 1 March, 13 September 1921; Scrapbook, vols 2–4, 8; Roberts Papers, La Trobe Library, Ms 8183; Ms 8108; C. Web Gilbert also made a pilgrimage to the grave on Roberts’ behalf, see correspondence dated, 12 and 14 May 1919.

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50 Daily Telegraph, 22 April 1922; Argus, 4 April 1922; Sydney Morning Herald, 23 March 1922; British Australian and New Zealander, 5 February 1925. 51 ‘Illustrated lecture on Overseas War Graves’ by Col. C.E. Hughes MBE, AWM, 93/30/1/5; ‘Battle Lectures Correspondence’, AWM 38 DRL 6673 813. 52 See the work of Isabella Ramsey in France and Belgium and reports on the progress of the War Graves Commission in Gallipoli; ‘The Graveyards in Gallipoli’, Manchester Guardian, 4 March 1924, clipping in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Archives, Maidenhead (henceforth CWGC) WG 437/4/2; Ian Hay, The Ship of Remembrance Gallipoli-Salonika (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926); C.L. Head, A Glance at Gallipoli (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931); J.C. Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice: The Story of the Empire’s Million War Dead and Australia (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1932); Lt Col. Graham Seton Hutchison, Pilgrimage (London: NP, 1935); see also various photographic accounts published for a popular market, ‘General Aspects: Pilgrimages, Item 4, Liddle Collection, University of Leeds. 53 British Australasian, 11 March 1920; Rose Venn Brown, letters dated 12 June, 3 September 1919; Catherine Boss to Mrs Venn Brown, 24 June 1919, AWM 2DRL/0598; note very similar efforts by Rev. A.T. Holden, papers of Cpl C.V. Birch, PR91/098, AWM. 54 Correspondence to Mrs Venn Brown from C. Chasting, Ada McGregor, Ada Jurd, Elizabeth Macrea, June–September 1919. Not all found comfort in Rose Brown’s kindness. Hanna Fenwick could not find her brother’s name on the list Brown compiled. Did that mean ‘my darling brother is not killed and that he will return to us . . . do try and get some new[s] for me . . . I pray night and day’, Hannah Fenwick to Mrs Venn Brown, 19 June 1919; ibid. 55 Sydney Morning Herald, 2 August 1922. 56 Our Empire, 18 February 1922. 57 Ibid.; the Oxenhams extended this ‘kindly work . . . to many a family in Australia’, British Australasian, 24 February 1921. 58 A.G. Hampson and J.C. Goodschild, Where the Australians Rest: a Description of many of the Cemeteries overseas in which Australians – including those whose names can never be known – are buried (Melbourne: Government Printer, 1920), p. 3. 59 Ibid., passim; C.E.W. Bean to H. Trumble, 18 February 1920, AWM 38 371 22/13; a similar purpose was served by photographs of the battlefields and cemeteries published in the press around Anzac Day, see, for example, Sydney Mail, 26 April 1922. 60 Hampson and Goodchild, Where Australians Rest, p. 2. 61 Red Cross Record, May 1918; Our Empire, 18 June 1921; ‘Photographs of Graves and Cemeteries in which Deceased AIF Soldiers are interred supplied to relatives’, AWM Registry File; ‘Re Photographs War Graves’, RSL Papers, NLA Mss 6609, Box 28, file 2545. 62 ‘Photographs of War Graves’, AWM 93/17/1/117; The British Australasian, 28 July 1921, Daily Telegraph, 28 April 1924, clipping in Anzac Fellowship of Women Papers (AFW Papers), Box 3, National Library of Australia, Ms 2864; The traffic was also reversed. Note the shipment of frozen rosemary from Gallipoli to Australasia, Sec IWGC to E. Thornton-Cook, 10 January 1935, CWGC 437/4/2. 63 David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’ in Joachim Whaley (ed.), Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), p. 230; Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 54.

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64 Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 314–17; Arthur Conan Doyle, The Wanderings of a Spiritualist (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921); Diary of Richenda Cooper, 25 June–25 December 1918, Clifton papers, LISWA [Battye Library] MN 1294, Acc. 4034A. I thank Pat Jalland for drawing my attention to this last source. 65 See, for example, Rutherford Waddell, Killed in Action (Wellington: np 1919), pp. 2–3; Rev. James Green, The Angel of Mons, nd, ML 940.393/6; Q. Nora M. (Dubbo, NSW). 66 Q. Nora M. (Dubbo, NSW). Interestingly, Richenda Cooper’s daughter also laid a family ghost to rest through her pilgrimage, see correspondence dated 11 Oct ober 1926, Eleanor Keall correspondence, LISWA 4035A/218; Service details for Pte Edward McGlashan were kindly provided by Peter Dennis. 67 Ken Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), pp. 273–6; note also a select viewing at Australia House; The British Australian and New Zealander, 22 March 1928. 68 See Arthur Conan Doyle’s assessment of the spiritualist properties of Longstaff’s work, British Australian and New Zealander, 10 May 1928, 30 May 1929. Note the claim that the whole areas surrounding Ypres had become ‘a vast cemetery’, Australian War Memorial, Menin Gate at Midnight or the Ghosts at Menin Gate, Melbourne, nd. 69 Herald, 9 February 1932. 70 Roberts Diary, 22 July 1919. 71 See Gladys Anderson’s bitter reminiscences: ‘Lots of people got all their belongings of their boys home. Well, we didn’t get anything at all. They were just absolutely slaughtered [and nothing was left]’, Robertson Oral History; military incompetence and the sinking of Allied shipping also helps to account for the loss of soldiers’ kits. 72 Lyall papers; Pte S.G. Slater, RCWM Adelaide; L. Cpl R.M. Jones, RCWM Canberra. 73 See the collection of Colin’s personal effects, Mackay Papers. 74 Pte V.S. Burns, RCWM Canberra; note too ‘anxious’ correspondence from Mrs Catherine Welsh, longing to receive ‘any belongings . . . his disc or anything’ from her son. When nothing could be recovered from Belgium she ordered a dozen extra photographs of his grave; Service Dossier for Pte L.J. Welsh, NAA: B2455/3334. 75 Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experience and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004), p. 135. 76 Letter Alice McLow to Eustace Birch, 22 June 1919, Birch Papers; for continuation (and explanation) of these practices see E. Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’ in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Oxford: Berg 1999). 77 IWGC, Fourth Annual Report, 1922–1923, London, 1923 p. 6; Octavia Smith to Dept of Defence, 17 October 1924, NAA: MP B1535/0 746/8/803;; M.E. and M.A. Thompson to J. Treloar, 14 January 1922, AWM 93/17/1/110. 78 G.R. Harrison Collection, PRG 1022, Mortlock Library of South Australia. 79 Red Cross Record, June 1917. 80 Hallem and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, pp. 92–103; D. Klass, P.R. Silverman, S.I. Nickman (eds), Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief (Washington: Taylor & Francis, 1996); note the placement of poetry describing a grave alongside published obituary for a loved one, Hope Papers, Ms 12598, La Trobe Library.

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81 For preliminary surveys of the ‘In Memoriam’ columns see Scates and Frances, Women and the Great War, pp. 109–11, Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 100–1. 82 Sydney Morning Herald, 25 April 1916. 83 Ibid., 12 July 1919. 84 Ibid., 25 April 1916. 85 Ibid. 86 Sydney Morning Herald, 6–8 May 1916, for details of service see AWM Honour Rolls. 87 For an exhaustive visual record of the memorials raised in the immediate aftermath of war see ML Newspaper Clippings, vols 241–2, also Inglis, Sacred Places. 88 A useful introduction to these debates, though one that privileges European literature, is offered by Alex King, Memorials of the Great War in Britain: The Symbolism and Politics of Remembrance (Oxford: Berg, 1998), introduction; Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire, trans. Marc Roudebush, Representations 26, Spring 1989. pp. 7–25. 89 Winter, Sites of Memory, p. 93. 90 Moriaty reaches a similar conclusion in regard to Britain. C. Moriaty, ‘The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials’, Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society, vol. 39, 1995, p. 12. 91 Author’s field trips to St Mathew’s Church, Wilberforce and Waverley, Rookwood and Ebenezer cemeteries, 1997–2002; I thank Julie Wells for the reference to a soldier’s ‘grave’ in Tasmania. 92 Queenslander, 1 January 1916. 93 A. Greenberg, ‘Lutyens’ Cenotaph’, Journal of the Society for Architectural Historians, vol. 48, 1989, pp. 5–23; Christopher Hussey, The Life of Sir Edwin Lutyens, (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 1989) , pp. 392–5; for Australian examples of cenotaphs ML, Newspaper Clippings, vols 241–2; F.U.J. Tinkler, ‘The Cenotaph’, National Library of Australia, Ms 4630. 94 S. Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture (London: Bodley Head, 1990); Melanie Oppenheimer and Bruce Scates, ‘Australians at War’, in M. Lyons and P. Russell (eds), Themes and Debates in Australian History (Sydney: University of New South Wales, 2005); Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 155–6, 192; for similar conclusions on Canada see Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble: Memory, Meaning and the First World War (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1997). 95 Notes from author’s field trips to Perth, 1997, 2004; clipping from the Great South Herald, 4 March 1922, Newdegate Scrapbook, vol. 4, Battye Library 3297A; Ptes O. and W.S. Fisher; Tpr C.E. and Pte A.H. Gilbert, RCWMF Canberra. 96 For debate between commemoration and utilitarianism see Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 36–9, Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 138–44. 97 Daniel Sherman, ‘Bodies and Names: The Emergence of Commemoration in Interwar France’, American Historical Review, 10:2 (April 1998), p. 455; Leonard V. Smith, Stephane Audoin-Touzeau, Annette Becker, France and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), (trans. Helen McPhail) p. 167; see also T.W. Laquer, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in J.R. Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 150–67. 98 Ken Inglis’s outstanding study likens the unveiling of a memorial to a secondary burial when a community is forced to confront (and overcome) its grief. I am indebted

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to Prof. Inglis for these descriptions of unveilings from the Wagga Daily Advertiser and the Daily Telegraph, Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 209, 215. For comparable instances see Town Hall Boulder, The Ceremony of Unveiling the Memorial Tablet . . . Boulder, 1920. ‘Gates of Remembrance’, unidentified clipping, AFW papers Box 15; Centre for Soldiers’ Wives and Mothers, Commemoration Service at the Wharf Gates at Woolloomooloo, . . . In the Presence of their Excellencies the Governor-General and Lady Foster, Sydney [1923]. Toowoomba Chronicle, 22, 30 January 1922, Toowoomba Mothers’ Memorial Papers, AWM PR 83/44. folder 3; William Lucas, ‘The National War Memorial for Victoria: A Review of the Competition’, La Trobe Library, Ms 12951, Box 1716. W.H. Swancott to OC Base Records, 16 April 1921, AFW papers, Box 14; note the work of a Digger Vigilant Society in Sydney; tending their comrades’ graves, was ‘a matter of sentiment and duty to us’; see also Bruce Scates, ‘The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War’, Labour History, no. 84, November 2001, pp. 44–5. Register, 14 March 1919; Women’s War Memorial Committee, Minutes of the General Committee, 12 March 1919; Women’s War Memorial Committee, The Women’s Memorial to Fallen in the Great War: Objects, Adelaide nd, Women’s War Mem orial Committee of South Australia Papers, State Library of South Australia, SRG 89. For further discussion of women’s place in the culture of commemoration and their representation in memorials themselves see Ken Inglis, ‘Men, Women and War Memorials: Anzac Australia’, Daedalus, 116/4, Fall 1987; Catherine Speck, ‘Women’s War Memorials and Citizenship’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 11, no. 23, 1996. Women’s War Memorial General Committee Minutes, 5 November 1919, ibid. Register, 26 April 1923, League of Loyal Women Press Clippings, State Library of South Australia, SRG 684/2; Dorothy Gilbert to W.R. Letharby (IWGC), 23 August 1919; Dorothy Gilbert to J.E. Talbot (IWGC), 18 December 1919, ibid; for personal details see Dorothy Gilbert, ‘Memories of Pusey Vale and the Gilbert Family, 1839–1923’, PRG 266/14 Mortlock Library. Dorothy Gilbert to Lord Mayor, 16 January 1920, ibid. Ibid.; Dorothy Gilbert to W.R. Letharby, 23 August 1919, ibid. Ibid. Women’s War Memorial Committee, The Women’s Memorial, Adelaide nd, ibid. Register, 24 March 1922.

Chapter 2 1 C.E.W. Bean to John Bean, 3 February 1919, Letters Concerning Australian Historical Mission 1919, AWM 38, 8042/49. 2 C.E.W. Bean to Mother and Father, 29 February 1919, ibid.; C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission (1948), (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990), p. 50. 3 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 4 C.E.W. Bean to John Treloar, 11 March 1919; C.E.W. Bean to Major Cameron, 13 March 1919, Australian Historical Mission, AWM 38, 3DRL 8042/48.

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5 Bean, Gallipoli Mission, pp. 15–16; Australian Historical Mission Diary, 26 February 1919, AWM 38, 3DRL 606 item 229; C.E.W. Bean to G. Lambert, 12 March 1923, Bean Papers, AWM PRO1618/1/1. 6 Historical Mission Diary, 18 February 1919; Bean, Gallipoli Mission, p. 98. 7 Historical Mission Diary, 24 February 1919. 8 Ibid. 9 Australian Historical Mission Diary, 4 March 1919, AWM 38, 3DRL 606 item 230; Amy Lambert (ed.), Thirty Years of an Artist’s Life (Sydney: Society of Artists, 1938), pp. 112–15. 10 Correspondence between W. Warren Kerr and W.M. Hughes, 31 December 1915, 6 January, 21 February 1916, ‘Arrangements in Connection with Graves for the Fallen Australian Soldiers Buried in Europe’, NAA: A11849/1, 2350/2. 11 Decode of cablegram received from the High Commissioner’s Office, London, dated 23 December 1918, NAA: A 458/1, P337/6 Pt 1; for further details see War Diary of Graves Registration Unit, Gallipoli, 15, 19 November 1918, ‘Report on Work under the GRU on Gallipoli’, British Public Records Office, PRO WO95/4954; WO 32/5640. 12 A.D. Lees to Brenda Lees, 11 September 1919, IWM 91/22/1. 13 Memorandum to C.E.W. Bean from High Commissioner, 8 January 1919; NAA: A2909/2 A543/1/3. 14 C.E.W. Bean to Mother and Father, 29 February 1919, Letters concerning Australian Historical Mission, AWM 38, 8042/49. 15 Bean, Gallipoli Mission, pp. 45–6; Bean cabled two reports and the originals are capitalised, see AWM 38, item 51; NAA: A2909/2 A453/1/3 (henceforth Bean, ‘Gallipoli Report’). 16 C.E.W. Bean to J. Treloar, 11 March 1919, AWM 38, item 51; Bean, ‘Gallipoli Report’; Sydney Morning Herald, 1 January 1920; see also Percy George Doherty’s letters (a New Zealand member of the War Graves Detachment), Kippenberger Military Archive and Research Library, Aotearoa/New Zealand, No. 1989.994. 17 Bean, ‘Gallipoli Report’; see also private accounts of senior officers with the IWGC, letter: A.D. Lees to Brenda Lees, 8 June 1919, IWM, 91/22/1. 18 ‘War Memorials’; W.M. Hughes to Lloyd George, 3 April 1919, PRO, FO 141/510; WO32/4843. 19 ‘Proposed cession to Great Britain of land in Gallipoli containing graves of British troops’, PRO (Kew), WO32/4843. 20 Alan Box to Fabian Ware, 10 August 1919, CWGC: WG 751, Part 1; Diary of Lillian Doughty-Wylie, 2 February 1919, IWM 6665 79/37/2; Alan Box to C.E.W. Bean, 10 October 1919, AWM38, 3 DRL 673/371; Sydney Morning Herald, 12 August 1920. I also thank Bill Gammage for his valuable advice. 21 Hampson, Where Australians Rest, p. 54. 22 Bean ‘Gallipoli Report’; T.J. Pemberton, Gallipoli To-day (London: E. Benn Ltd, 1926), p. 64. 23 Times (London), 10 November 1928; C. Hughes to C.E.W. Bean, 25 April 1920, 29 December 1923, AWM 38, Item 51; Reveille, 28 February 1930. 24 Bean, ‘Gallipoli Report’ (my emphasis). 25 Joseph Cook to W.M. Hughes, 7 October 1922, British Australasian, 22 July 1920; C. Hughes to G.D. Pearce, 15 October 1924, NAA: A458 F337/7; Pemberton, Gallipoli To-day, pp. 95–6.

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26 McCready, Care of Graves; Notes of a Meeting [of the Graves Registration Unit] Held at the War Office . . . on 25th September 1916, NAA: A11849/1 2350/2. 27 Minutes of a meeting of the Prince of Wales’ National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves, 17 January 1917, NAA: A11849/1 2350/2; Col. Anderson to A. Fisher, 11 August 1916, NAA: A11849/1 2350/2; Egyptian Gazette, 30 June 1921 (I thank Rae Frances for this reference); author’s notes on visit to Chatby Cemetery. 28 Minutes of a Meeting held at the War Office . . . 25 September 1916, Minutes of a meeting of the Prince of Wales’ National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves, 17 January 1917, NAA: A11849/1 2350/2; Frederic Kenyon, War Graves: How the Cemeteries Abroad will be Designed (London: HMSO, 1918). 29 Minutes of a Meeting held at the War Office . . . 25 September 1916, Minutes of a meeting of the Prince of Wales’ National Committee for the Care of Soldiers’ Graves, 17 January 1917, NAA: A11849/1 2350/2; Edwin Lutyens to Emily Lutyens, 12 July 1917, Clayre Percy and Jane Ridley (eds), The Letters of Edwin Lutyens to his wife Lady Emily (London: Collins, 1985), p. 350. 30 Kenyon, War Graves, pp. 1–7 for description of the cross see Frank Fox, The King’s Pilgrimage (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), Frontice, Richard A Fellows, Sir Reginald Blomfield: An Edwardian Architect (London: Zwemmer, 1985), p. 105; Hussey, pp. 372–6. 31 Kenyon, War Graves, passim, Minutes of the 6th Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 19 November 1918, PRO AIR 2/75, Edwin Lutyens to Emily Lutyens, 28 August 1918, The Letters of Edwin Lutyens, p. 363. 32 Charter of Incorporation of the Imperial War Graves Commission May 1917, PRO (Kew) HO 45/21621; IWGC, Seventeenth Annual Report, 1927; for labour of love see Minutes of Proceedings of the 44th Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . on 20 April 1922, p. 3, NAA: A2909/2 A453/1/3; for Kipling see Fabian Ware, The Immortal Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 56. 33 See the celebrated speech by Winston Churchill, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 4 December 1920; Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, ‘Conflicts and Divisions’ (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996). 34 Reveille, 1 July 1935. 35 ‘Remarks by the Imperial War Graves Commission re burial of next of kin in war graves . . .’, PRO ADM 1/8617/231 ‘Maintenance of War Cemeteries’, PRO WO/32/3145; War Graves: Statement of Reasons in Support of . . . the Imperial War Graves Commission, British Library, 7816 h 82. 36 As one might have expected, this was most marked when it came to the control of Dominion contributions to the Commission, ‘War Graves Endowment Fund Personal and Secret Cables’, NAA: CP290/1, 1/7. 37 Speeches by Lord Cecil, Winston Churchill, Sir James Remanant and Viscount Wolmer, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 17 December 1919; 4 May 1920; these deliberations were widely reported in the Australian media, Our Empire, 18 May, 18 June, 18 November 1920, Age, 30 November 1920. 38 Lutyens cited in Philip Longworth, The Unending Vigil: A History of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 1917–1967 (London: Constable 1967), p. 48; on crosses, see extracts from parents’ letters cited by Lord Wolmer, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 4 May 1920.

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39 Speech by Lord Cecil, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 17 December 1919; petition to the Prince of Wales [requesting cruciform headstone], CWGC, Add 4/2/7; Service dossier for L. Cpl Keith Comb, NAA: B2455/5348. 40 Minutes of the Sixth Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 19 November 1918, PRO AIR 2/75, Extract from 38th Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, NAA: M404/7/95; see also questions put to the Parliament, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 14 July 1919, 2 March 1925. 41 Horace Halloran to J.C. Watson, 5 May 1916; Exhumation: Halloran to Watson, 5 May 1916, NAA: MP367/1, 446/10/3410; Bartolo Ziino, ‘A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War’, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne 2004, p. 73. 42 Kenyon, War Graves, p. 5; see speeches by Burdett-Coutts, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 4 May 1920. 43 Pte P. E. Smith, RCWMF Adelaide, my emphasis. 44 As many as ninety-seven men were buried in one mass grave at Pozi`eres, see remarks attributed to Lt Browne, Letters of H.H. Pepper, SLV Ms 11262 MSB393. 45 Sec ANA to Andrew Fisher, 15 March 1917, NAA: A11849/1, 2350/2; Minutes of Proceedings of the 40th Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 20 December 1921, NAA: M404/7/95, pp. 8–9. 46 For the ‘policy of equality of treatment’ see Winston Churchill’s speech to the Commons, British Parliamentary Debates (House of Commons), 4 May 1920; traditions of military commemoration (and the lack of them) are surveyed at length in George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World’s Wars (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 3–50. 47 C.E.W. Bean, ‘Notes on Cemeteries at Malta and Anzac’, AWM 3DRL 606, Item 231 A [1]; Herbert Brittain (IWGC) to A.R. McBriar (War Office), 18 October 1928, CWGC CM 412; author’s notes on 2002 visit to Pieta and Chatby cemeteries. ´ 48 Author’s notes on 2004 visit to Etaples Cemetery. The same clear spatial delineation is apparent at Rouen. 49 Note the call to arrive at ‘some definite decision’ in regard to private memorials, Minutes of the Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission, 17 January 1922, NAA: A2909 /2 A453/1/3. 50 Horace Rumbold (British High Commissioner, Constantinople) to H. Bentinck (HM Minister, Athens), 24 December 1921; Diary of Lillian Doughty-Wylie, 30 April 1915, 9 January 1919. 51 Longworth, Unending Vigil, p. 43; War Graves of Empire, p. 24. Note also the family memorial raised by the Dowager Countess de la Warr in the British cemetery of Messina. Its presence was tolerated until the 1930s, PRO FO 651/14. There are still private memorials (to officers) in Rouen Cemetery. 52 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism (London: Allen Lane, 2001), introduction; Minutes of the Proceedings of the 44th Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 20th April 1922, NAA: A2909 /2 A453/1/3. 53 ‘War Graves Abroad’, Department of Defence Minute Paper, NAA: MP B1535/0 746/8/803; Memo: Director of Works to IWGC, 25 April 1922, CWGC WG 1544 Pt 1. 54 Minutes of the Proceedings of the 41st Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 17 January 1922, NAA: A2909 /2 A453/1/3, ibid; Kenyon, War Graves, p. 9.

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55 ‘Correspondence with the Imperial War Graves Commission . . .’ AWM 25 135/36; Edwin Lutyens to Emily Lutyens, 28 August 1917, The Letters of Edwin Lutyens, p. 354. 56 Note the number of letters to next of kin returned marked ‘unknown’, ‘Inscriptions on Graves of Members of A.I.F.’, NAA: MP B1535/0 746/8/803. Working-class families were also more likely to be semi-literate, despite advances in free, compulsory and secular education. 57 Ziino, ‘A Distant Grief’, p. 73; Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 111–12. 58 The following inscriptions were recorded on the author’s study tours of various war cemeteries in 1994, 1997, 2000 and 2002. Pte W. Manson (New Butt); Capt. J. Banc (New Butt); Pte A.W. Dreves (4th Battalion Parade Ground); Pte C. Kirkby, (Harefield); Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, p. 111. 59 Pte C.A. Buchanan (Lijssenthoek); Pte W.E.M. Forsyth (Daours); Pte R.O. Harwood (Shell Green); Pte H.W. Marsh (Bernafay Wood); Pte C.A. Plaque (Brookwood); Pte R.S. Fynney (Villers-Bretonneux). 60 Sgt F.L. Partridge (Villers-Bretonneux); Pte A.J. McCaffrey (Villers-Bretonneux); Drv. M. Burbidge (Brookwood); Gnr O.F. Richardson (Brookwood). Service details from AWM’s Honour Roll. 61 Pte H.T.R. Lynch (Brookwood); Sgt J.C. Miles (Villers-Bretonneux); Pte F. Scott ´ (Villers-Bretonneux); Pte W.R. Johnstone (Etaples); Pte A. Tatterson (Hooge Crater). 62 Pte R. Connor (Aeroplane); Pte R. McCulloch (Lone Pine); Pte E.H. Robertson (Sanctuary Wood); Pte A. Jones (Sanctuary Wood); Drv. H.G. Pam (Lijssenthoek); Pte R.E. Mcintyre (Shrapnel Valley). 63 Lt. J.W. Nelson (New Butt); Pte E.G. Low (Ari Burnu); Pte J.E. Barclay (Shrapnel Valley). 64 Cpl W.E. Renfree (Harefield); Pte A.J. Fowler (Lijssenthoek); Pte G.W. Miller (Lijssenthoek); Gnr W.L. Wingley (Harefield). 65 Hallem and Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture, p. 27; Pte R. Scott (Bethlehem West); Pte R.G. Dawes (Dartmoor Cemetery); Pte J. McAllister (Shrapnel Valley). 66 Pte L.A. Dayton (Lijssenthoek); Pte S.C. Scott (Hooge Crater); Lt. L.J.W. Payne (Vignacourt); Lt. E.R. Cotterill (Quinn’s Post); Pte R.L.L. Sandow (Lijssenthoek). 67 See (for example), Cpl A.W. Dixon (New British), Pte A.J.G. Taylor (Tyne Cot); John Laffin, We Will Remember Them: AIF Epitaphs of World War One (Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1995), p. 88; Pte R.T. Munn (Shell Green); Pte J.J.C. Carr (New British); Pte H.J. Proud (Sanctuary Wood); Pte H. Atkins (Lijssenthoek). 68 Lt L.C. Guy (Lijssenthoek); Tpr H. Rush (Walker’s Ridge); Pte E.R. Stone (Tyne Cot), Cpl G.P. Cameron (Shrapnel Valley); Maj. J.E. Sergeant (Shell Green). 69 Laffin, We will Remember Them, passim; Pte W.L. Rae (Villers-Bretonneux); Service Dossier for Pte W.L. Rae, NAA: B2455/5348. 70 Longworth, The Unending Vigil, pp. 43, 56; Sydney Morning Herald, 15 September 1921, Diary of the Australian War Graves Detachment, March–August 1919, AWM 224 Mss 611. 71 ‘War Graves’, Reveille, 31 December 1928. 72 John Oxenham, ‘Discoverer of Missing Men: Major Allen of the A.W.G.S.’ pp. 1–2, NAA: A 458/1 R337/7; British Australasian, 16 March 1922. 73 Oxenham, ‘Discoverer of Missing Men’, p. 4.

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74 ‘Graves: Imperial War Graves Commission’ PRO FO286/775, Reports of the Commission were muted in the press and I thank Bart Ziino for locating the Australian record of this inquiry; Sydney Morning Herald, 28 May 1920, cf Inquiry, NAA: MP367/1 AA446/10/1840. For government expectation see AWM 25 135/36. 75 Pte Thomas Gibbs, RCWMF Canberra; Sydney Hibbert Diary, pp. 11–12, G.S. Liddle Collection, University of Leeds. 76 Military orders for the First and Fourth Australian Divisions dated 29 October 1918, 2 June, 26 September 1917, ‘Instructions to Chaplains [re] location and registration of graves’, AWM 25 135/18. Further complications emerged when men ‘bringing in disc’ were killed themselves see C.E.W. Bean to J. Treloar, 11 August 1931, AWM 38 3 DRL 8042/ 66. 77 Fifth Annual Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, London 1925; pp. 4–5; Eighth Annual Report of the Imperial War Graves Commission, London 1928, pp. 5–6; note the impression Cape Helles made on early Australian pilgrims; diary kept by Ina Marshall on the Ormonde, 15 May 1925, private collection. I thank Norman Marshall for access to this source and Robin Prior and Bill Gammage for alerting me to its existence; J.J. Talbot Hobbs Diary, April 1930, LISWA 4618A/12. 78 British Australasian, 16 October 1919, British Australian and New Zealander, 3 September 1925, 8 November 1919; Illustrated London News clipping in Mitchell Library, Newspaper Cuttings, vols 241–2; Herald (Melbourne), 6 August 1921. ‘Memorials: Eastern Theatres general’, NAA: A2909/2 AGS6/1/1; for Suez incident see Minutes of the Battlefield Memorials Committee, RSL Papers, Ms 6609, Series17, Box 19, NLA. 79 Commonwealth of Australia, Architectural Competition for the Australian War Mem orial at Villers-Bretonneux, France, in William Lucas Papers, ML Q940.939; Report by C.E. Hughes for Minister of Defence, 15 October 1924, NAA: A458 F337/7, I thank Richard Reid for his advice regarding the 1st and 4th Division memorials. 80 Note the discussions of jurisdiction over particular memorials where British and Australian troops shared sections of the line, ‘National Battlefield Memorials, PRO WORKS 20/96. 81 Herald, 1 September 1921; see also 2 September 1921. 82 Ibid., 3 September 1921; note her suggestion that parents would raise the money themselves rather than leave their loved ones ‘lying in lonely, untended and unknown graves’. 83 British Australasian, 20 January, 29 September 1921, Our Empire, 19 January 1920, Sydney Morning Herald, 7 February 1920, 26 October 1921. 84 British Australasian, 3 November, 10 November 1921, Sydney Morning Herald, 10 October 1921. 85 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’, Collected Poems 1908–1956 (London: Faber & Faber, 1961), p. 188; extract from letter by F.S. Alford, Memorandum for Prime Minister’s Department, NAA: A2902/2 AGS/1/2; a similar public outcry accompanied the end of search work on Gallipoli, British Australasian, 8 and 15 December 1921. 86 William Lord to Minister for Defence, 29 November 1918, ibid. 87 Alan Box to Fabian Ware, 4 March 1919, ibid. 88 Extracts of Minutes of Meeting of the Imperial War Graves Commission . . . 15 April 1919, ibid.; note such concerns over commemoration of the missing by British parents, correspondence dated 17–21 May 1927, CWGC WG219/2/1.

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89 P. J. Keating, ‘Funeral Service of the Unknown Australian Soldier’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, No. 24, April 1994, p. 4; George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers, also Ken Inglis, ‘Entombing Unknown Soldiers: From London to Paris to Baghdad’, History and Memory, 5:2 (1993), pp. 4–12, Joanna Bourke, ‘Heroes and Hoaxes: The Unknown Warrior, Kitchener and “Missing Men” in the 1920s’, War and Society, vol. 13, no. 2, October 1995, pp. 41–63. 90 Adelaide Cemetery Visitors’ Book, 1993; I am grateful to Richard Reid and the staff of the Australian War Memorial for information relating to the burial of the Unknown Soldier; for the recurrent campaign to bring home an Australian soldier see historical notes by J.L. Treloar, Australian Battlefields Memorials Committee, 5 March 1947 and the committee’s vexed debate on 13 June 1946.

Chapter 3 1 Pte. J. Overson, RCWMF Canberra. 2 David Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and commemoratioon of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Berg 1998), p. 29; Travellers Gazette, LXIX (August 1919), p. 13. 3 Mail (Brisbane), 13 July 1929. 4 Annie Munro to S.M. Bruce, 19 November 1920, NAA: A 1608/1 F 27/1/7 Pt 1; T.H. Kewley, Social Security in Australia, 1900–1972 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1973), p. 120. 5 Memorandum to the Prime Minister, 15 June 1925, NAA: A 1608/1 F 27/1/7 Pt 1; Jane McMillan to Prime Minister Hughes, 29 October 1921, NAA: A458 L337/7. 6 Emily Luttrell to Minister of Defence, 23 June, 16 October 1922, NAA: A 1608/1 F 27/1/7 Pt 1. 7 Emily Luttrell to Minister of Home Affairs, 6 March [1923], ibid. 8 ‘Application for Concession Fares . . .’, 29 December 1922, ibid. 9 Sun (Sydney), 12 June 1925; see Stagg’s correspondence to major dailies, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 January 1925. 10 Sun (Sydney), 12 June 1925; for earlier approaches see G.E. Forrest to Prime Minster’s Department, 18 December 1922, NAA: A 1608/1 F 27/1/7 Pt 1. 11 Age, 1 November 1923; Ernest Scott, The Official History in the War of 1914–1918. Australia During the War, vol. XI (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989) (1936), pp. 697–738; Herald, 1 November 1923; British Australasian, 8 November 1923. 12 Argus, 11 October 1923. 13 Age, 1 November 1923; Herald (Melbourne), 7 August 1924. 14 B.P. Magazine, June 1929; Ros Pesman, David Walker and Richard White, The Oxford Book of Australian Travel Writings (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996), introduction. 15 Australasian Traveller’s Gazette, June, July 1920; P. Brendon, Thomas Cook: 150 Years of Popular Tourism (London: Secker & Warburg, 1991). 16 B.P. Magazine, March 1929. 17 Home, 1 December 1923; British Australasian, 5 March 1921; see also the itinerary of the first Australian pilgrims to visit Gallipoli, British Australasian, 27 May, 22 July 1920; 10 February 1921; vessels were inspected at Chanak but a special permit was

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21

22 23

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needed to land there, C.E. Hughes to sec Australia War Graves Section, 21 January 1921, NAA: A 1608/1 F 27/1/7 Pt 1. C.E. Hughes to C.E.W. Bean, 25 April 1920; Bean to Hughes, 13 April 1919, Bean Papers, AWM, Series 5, 3DRL 8042, item 51. Report by C.H. Hughes (IWGC) for Minister for Defence, NAA: A 458 F 337/7; C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Report, AWM 38, item 51; NAA: A2909/2 A453/1/3. C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission (1948), (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990), pp. 342–3; St Barnabas Church, Gallipoli Salonika St Barnabas 1926, p. 18, IWM, Misc 816, Box 53; first-class tickets issued to the Marshall sisters, uncatalogued papers of Ina and Eadith Marshall (c. 1922–1930), private collection. See unidentified clippings from the British press entitled ‘Pilgrimage to Gallipoli’, ‘War Graves Visit’ and; ‘Visits to War Graves’, ibid., Ian Hay, The Ship of Remembrance: Gallipoli – Salonika (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1926); Australasian Traveller’s Gazette, November, December 1926. St Barnabas, ‘Cruise to Gallipoli and Salonika: Passenger List’, Stopford, ‘St. Barnabas Pilgrimage to Salonika and Gallipoli 1928’, CWGC SDC 93 ACON 149. Report by C.E. Hughes, 11 April 1921, ‘Pilgrimage to Soldiers’ Graves’, NAA: 337/7; Thos. Cook & Son to Major G.L. Phillips, Australian War Graves Services, Australia House, London, 20 May 1921, NAA: A1608/1, F27/1/7 Pt 1; ‘Graves: IWGC’, PRO FO 286/775; Egyptian Gazette, 30 June 1921 (I thank Rae Frances for this last reference). For later tours incorporating the British War Cemetery in Jerusalem see Australasian Traveller’s Gazette, January 1932; earlier reports were more discouraging, ibid., 9 June 1921. British Australasian, 27 May 1920. Service dossiers for Capt. W.T. Bryan, NAA: B2455, British Australasian, 4 August 1921; Tpr K. Harrington, NAA: B2455/268; British Australasian, 19 August 1920; 13 November 1924; Tpr T.R. Murray, NAA: B2455/766; for a case of a widowed mother and her daughter travelling with independent means see report of Mrs Morrice Walsh of Hobart, British Australian and New Zealander, 28 July 1932, Service Dossier for Gnr G. Walch, NAA: B2455/15210. British Australasian, 7 October 1920; 4 August 1921. Ibid., 18 November 1920, 17 April 1922, British Australian and New Zealander, 29 September 1927. British Australasian, 26 May 1921. H.E. Garraway to Base Office Records, 16, 26 April 1918; Service Dossier of Pte E.R.E. Garraway, NAA: B2455/31218. British Australasian, 17 February1921. Ibid., 17 June 1920. Ibid., 13 November 1924. Ibid., 7 July 1921; 14 July, 4 August 1921 Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 292; note the remarks of Jane McMillan concerning the pilgrimage of prospective mothers, ‘naturally these women are not young’, Jane McMillan to Prime Minister Hughes, 14 November 1921, NAA: A458 L337/7. British Australasian, 9 October 1924. Service Dossier for Cpl Cyril Hobler, NAA: B2455/3346, Case of Cpl Cyril Hobler, RCWMF Canberra.

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38 British Australasian, 22 December 1921; Angela Woollacott, To Try Her Fortune in London: Australian Women, Colonialism and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), ch. 4; see also Ros Pesman, Duty Free: Australian Women Abroad (Melbourne: Oxford University Press 1996). 39 Service Dossier for Spr John Greenan, NAA: B2455/6592; British Australasian, 4 August 1921. 40 By contrast, some graves are the focus of repeated visits; see the claim by Mrs Villiers Brown that every year a member of the family tended the grave of her husband in France, British Australian and New Zealander, 22 December 1932. One suspects that most of these relatives were resident in Britain. 41 Alice Tickner to War Office, Whitehall, 15 November 1920, Service Dossier for Lt Mervyn Tickner, NAA: B2455; British Australian and New Zealander, 29 April 1927; the number of wives and siblings visiting graves increases during the 1930s; by contrast ageing parents are unable to make the journey, see, for instance, Mary Brodie’s pilgrimage to the grave of her ‘soldier husband’, and W.J. Day’s journey from Fremantle to France to find the grave of his younger brother; ibid., 23 January 1936; Service Dossier for Capt. B.G. Brodie, NAA: B2455; British Australian and New Zealander, 19 September 1929; Service Dossier for Pte C.T. Day, NAA: B2455/3440. 42 British Australian and New Zealander, 31 March 1927; Sydney Mail, 24 December 1919. 43 S.M. Bruce, ‘Soldiers’ Graves: The Prime Minister’s Report [released to the press, 25 April 1924]’, NAA: A 458/1; R 337/7. 44 British Australasian, 3 April 1924. 45 Ibid., August 1920. 46 Ibid., 26 February 1920, 25 March 1920, 4 August 1921,12 June 1919; West Australian, 16 November 1937; for details of ex-AIF men (working for travel agents, the IWGC or just themselves) see Reveille, 1 February 1935. 47 John Oxenham, The Helping Hand (London: YMCA, nd) in ‘Arrangements for Cheap Travelling Facilities for Relatives visiting Graves in France and Belgium’, PRO AIR 2/152; ‘The Salvation Army’, CWGC WG 646/6/81/1 Toc H, The Old House: A Handbook for Pilgrims (London: NP, 1930); Sydney Morning Herald, 17 March 1922; British Australasian 17 January 1924. 48 ‘Visits to War Graves in France and Belgium by Relatives of Deceased Officers and Men’, PRO ADM 1/8611/154; letter to the Sydney Bulletin, cited in British Australasian, 2 June 1921. 49 See for example, the warm recommendation of Rev. Canon Waddy in Jerusalem, ‘an old King’s Grammar master from Sydney and a well known Australian cricketer’: just the sort of fellow Australian pilgrims would get on with, C.E. Hughes to Australia House, 11 April 1921, NAA: 337/7. 50 Diary entries for 13, 14 July 1921, papers of Dorethea Mary Bowen, Liddle Collection, University of Leeds. 51 Ibid., 20 July 1921. 52 E. Edwards, ‘Photographs as Objects of Memory’, in M. Kwint, C. Breward and J. Aynsley (eds), Material Memories: Design and Evocation (Oxford: Berg 1999); Geoff Dyer, The Missing of the Somme (London: Phoenix Press, 2001), p. 36. 53 See stills from the film, ‘Gallipoli’, British Australasian, 21 April 1927; Frank Fox, The King’s Pilgrimage (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), British Legion, The Battlefields Pilgrimage (London: NP, 1928).

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54 British Australasian, 21 May 1925; uncatalogued papers of Ina and Eadith Marshall (c. 1922–1930), private collection. 55 Janet McGrath to the author, dated, Moranbah, August 2003. 56 Notes from author’s field trip to Gallipoli, April 2000; Q. Winsome P. (Bellevue Heights, SA); I am indebted to Ken Inglis for referring me to this remarkable correspondent. 57 Service Dossier for Lt H. McColl, NAA: B2455; notes from author’s field trip to Villers-Bretonneux, France, October 2001; British Australasian, 23 August 1922. 58 Courier (Brisbane), 27 September 1926; the cone from Lone Pine continued to be a coveted (and much replanted) relic from Gallipoli, see ‘War Relics and Trophies, Gallipoli’, AWM 38 726. 59 Gallipoli Salonika 1926, p. 18; note that the same extracts were republished in Australia, Anzac Day Commemoration Committee, Queensland, Anzac Day 1927 (Brisbane: 1927). 60 Ibid., p. 17. 61 Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 7, 46. 62 Service Dossier for Capt. M.B. Higgins, NAA: B2455 and below. 63 Higgins to Prof. Frankfurter, 27 December 1918, Higgins Papers, NLA Ms 2525, Folder 1; Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir (London: Harrap, 1931), p. 233. 64 Correspondence, Mervyn Bournes Higgins to his mother, bound collection, Higgins Papers, NLA Ms 1057, Series 3, Box 7, see (in particular) letters dated 30 November 1914, and 3, 9, 12 June 1915, and 13, 18 July 1915. 65 Peter Burness, The Nek: The Tragic Charge of the Light Horse at Gallipoli (Kenthurst, NSW: Kangaroo Press, 1996), p. 107; for mention in despatches see Record of Active Service, Service Dossier Capt M.B. Higgins, NAA: B2455. 66 Correspondence, Mervyn Bournes Higgins to his mother, bound collection, Higgins Papers, NLA, Ms 1057, Series 3, Box 7, letter dated 17 December 1916. 67 Statement by T.J. Lee and Tpr Byrne, Capt M.B. Higgins, RCWM, Canberra. 68 John Rickard, H.B. Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), chs 8 and 11; correspondence from Higgins to Major McClean, 23, 30 January 1917; Major McClean to Higgins, 28 January 1917, Higgins Service Dossier. 69 Correspondence from Higgins to Major McClean, 28 March, 9 April 1917; Major McClean to Higgins, 12 April 1917; Higgins to Senator Pearce, 31 March 1917, Higgins Service Dossier. 70 Correspondence from Higgins to the Imperial War Graves Commission, 25 February 1925; ibid.; diary entry for 20 January 1924, Higgins Papers, NLA, Ms 1057, Series 3. 71 H.B. Higgins, ‘The Grave at El Magdabha’, Higgins Papers, NLA, Ms 1057, Series 3; John Rickard, ‘Reading the Victorian Family’, in Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch: Essays in History and Psychoanalysis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), p. 92. 72 St Barnabas, St. Barnabas Pilgrimage to the Somme (London: 1923); Pilgrimage to Menin Gate, London, 1927, British Library (London). 73 T.J. Pemberton, Gallipoli To-day (London: E. Benn Ltd, 1926); Hay, Ship of Remembrance. The reception of these texts was amplified by reviews in leading papers.

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74 Fox, The King’s Pilgrimage; for a revealing account of the role pilgrimage played in the Catholic imagination see Annette Becker, War and Faith: the Religious Imagination in France, 1914–1930 (Oxford: Berg, 1998). 75 Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, pp. 168–9; sec. to Neville Howse, 29 February 1928, sec. to Benson, 5 April 1928, Benson to sec. 17 April 1928, RSL Papers, NLA Ms 6609, Series B, Box 32, file 3476; Reveille February 1928, p. 21; March 1928, p. 2. 76 Herald (Melbourne), 10, 23 February 1928. 77 Age (Melbourne), 22 February 1928. 78 Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (London: Reaktion Books, 1996), pp. 153–68; E.A. Rushbrooke to P. E. Deane (sec. Prime Minister’s Dept), 29 May 1928, NAA: A1608/1. 79 F. Redfearn to S.M. Bruce, 1 May 1928, ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Walter S. Elliot (Pres. Imperial Ex-Service Association of Australia) to P. E. Deane, 6 July 1928, ibid. 82 C.H. Hughes, ‘Confidential Memorandum for the Secretary, Prime Minister’s Department’, 11 June 1928, ibid.; for details of inquiry see Capt. Martin and Frank Redfearn to Prime Minister Bruce, 26 July 1923, Memorandum from Department of Defence for the Prime Minister, 22 November 1920, Prime Minister: Graves Services – Charges of Maladministration, 8/6/1921, NAA: A457/1, 1410/7. 83 C.H. Hughes to F. Redfearn, 8 May 1928, ibid. 84 Prime Minister’s Office to Major Clark, President United Services Association, 16 December 1928; memorandum regarding Proposed Pilgrimage to Gallipoli Peninsula, Prime Minister Department, 25 January 1928, NAA: A1608/1. 85 C.E. Hughes to Col. T. Murdoch, 8 May 1928, NAA: A1608/1; Walter S. Elliot (Pres. Imperial Ex-Service Association of Australia) to P. E. Deane, 6 July 1928, ibid. 86 Herald (Melbourne), 1 May 1928; Telegraph (Brisbane), 29 December 1928. 87 Telegraph (Brisbane), 29 December 1928; for a brief account of the American tour see Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism, pp. 160–2. 88 ‘Tour to the Battlefields and War Graves’, NAA: A1608/1, F27/1/7, Pt 1; Mail (Brisbane), 19 February 1929. 89 Examiner (Launceston), 4 April 1929. 90 Herald (Melbourne), 2, 12 January 1929; Sun (Melbourne), 27 February 1929. 91 Herald, 12 January 1929. 92 Ibid., 28 December 1928; 12 January 1929. 93 Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives, 7, 21 March 1929, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, House of Representatives, vol. 120, pp. 852, 1613. 94 Herald, 23 April 1929; Sun, 27 February 1929, 2 April 1929; Examiner, 4 April 1929. 95 Kristin Ann Hass, Carried to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 96 Mercury (Hobart), 18, 20 May 1929; Herald, 19 May 1929; Register, 22 May 1929. 97 Herald, 19 May 1929. 98 Ibid., 10, 11 May 1929. 99 Ibid., 17 May 1929. 100 Register (Adelaide) 24 May 1929; British Australian and New Zealander, 22 January 1925; D. Parkin, ‘Mementoes as Transitional Objects’, Journal of Material Culture, 4 (3), pp. 303–20.

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101 Register, 30 May 1929; Herald, 22. 30 May 1929. 102 Register, 1 June 1929; West Australian (Perth), 15 June 1929. 103 Register, 22 May 1922; for the role of the IWGC in distributing the tokens see extracts from Capt. Murphy’s Report for Sir Fabian Ware, 1929, NAA: A461/7, E337/1/9 Pt 1. 104 Herald, 21 March 1929. 105 Age, 10 June 1929; Herald, 8 June 1929. 106 Herald, 10 June 1929. 107 News (Adelaide), 10 June 1929; West Australian, 18 June 1929; see, for example, service dossiers for Lts G.T.K. Tench, N. Siddall; Capts F.W. Moulsdale and W.S. Frayne, Major T.H. Redford, NAA: B2455. 108 Herald, 9 July 1929; Guardian, 13 July 1929; Advertiser (Adelaide), 13 July 1929. 109 Courier (Brisbane), 12 July 1929; 110 Service Dossier of Pte V. O’Shea, NAA: B2455/2208; Herald, 7 October 1929; Pte V. O’Shea, RCWMF, Canberra. 111 J.C. Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice: The Story of the Empire’s Million Dead and Australia’s 60,000 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1932), p. 24. 112 Sun, 8 October 1929. 113 Ibid.; Thomas Laquer, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, John R. Gillis (ed.), Commemorations: the Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 152–6. 114 Sydney Morning Herald, 20 July 1929; Register, 20 July 1929; for text of Bruce’s message see correspondence from the Prime Minister’s Office to the United Services Association dated 31 May 1929, NAA: A461/7, E337/1/9 Pt 1. 115 Age, 30 July 1929; Service dossier for Lt G.T. Tench, NAA: B2455. 116 Courier (Brisbane), 22 July 1929; Herald, 19 September 1929. 117 Chronicle (Adelaide), 17 July 1926; Sydney Morning Herald, 6 June 1927; Mail (Adelaide), 3 November 1928. 118 Advertiser, 1 August 1929; News (Perth) 11 November 1929. 119 Herald, 21 September 1929; Sydney Morning Herald, 25 July 1936. 120 Herald, 21 September 1929; St Barnabas, 1927 Menin Gate Pilgrimage, London 1928, British Library, London. 121 Bob Bushaway, ‘Name Upon Name: The Great War and Remembrance’, Porter (ed.), The Myths of the English, pp. 137, 161; David Lowenthal, The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 5; George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World’s Wars (New York, Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 6–7, 152–6. 122 Herald, 19 September 1929; Herald, 21 September 1929. 123 Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice, pp. 61–2; see C.E.W. Bean’s appraisal of Waters’ ‘pathetic style’, C.E.W. Bean to J.C. Waters, 30 October 1931, AWM 38 3DRL 6673 708. 124 Herald, 31 July 1929; Evening News, 1 August 1929. 125 News (Perth) 11 November 1929; Herald, 16 September 1929. 126 Labour Daily (Sydney), 19 November 1929. 127 Bulletin (Sydney), 14 August 1929; Labour Daily (Sydney), 19 November 1929. 128 The contemporary response is cited by Inglis, Sacred Places, pp. 273–4; Anne Gray, ‘Will Longstaff’s Menin Gate at Midnight’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, April 1988, pp. 47–50 and Australian War Memorial, Menin Gate at Midnight (NP, nd), Mitchell Library, pamphlet file 940.2939.

134 135

136

137 138

Guardian (Sydney), 2 August 1929. Ibid.; see also West Australian, 2 August 1929. For cemetery history see http://www.cwgc.org. Ware, The Immortal Heritage, p. 33; Argus, 7 August 1929. Sydney Morning Herald, 9 August 1929; Age, 7 August 1929. The episode owed much to a fraught relationship between the Mayor and British representatives of the War Graves Commission. A few months earlier, the Mayor had refused to authorise the closure of a building site when the remains of two soldiers were recovered. The workers, he argued, had a right to earn their livelihood. The episode was also atypical. While ‘bombastic’ memorials were viewed with disfavour by the French, Australian pilgrims ‘[spoke] in the most glowing terms of the kindness and attention shown them’, Herald, 7 August 1929, British Australasian, 5 June 1922; British Australian and New Zealander, 12 April 1928; Sydney Morning Herald, 27 August 1929. Mercury (Hobart), 9 August 1929; Advertiser, 7 December 1929. Burns Philp, Minutes of the 48th and 52nd Annual General Meetings, 15 May 1930, 15 May 1932, Burns Philp Minute Book, Noel Butlin Archives, ANU, N115; ‘See the Islands’, BP Magazine, 1 June 1931. Note the prevalence of articles like ‘Budgeting for Travel’, sure indices of the decline of the industry, ibid., 1 December 1931. Advertiser (Geelong), 9 August 1930; Argus (Melbourne), 8 December 1930; Telegraph (Brisbane), 20 June 1935. Both Burns Philp and rival firms like Thomas Cook continued to offer visits to war graves in the Holy Land, but these were optional diversions on the conventional passage from Australia to Britain, B.P. Magazine, 1 March 1934. Sun (Melbourne), 8 August 1933; British Australian and New Zealander, 19 August 1937. Villers-Bretonneux Memorial: Press Statement, RSL papers, Series B, box 28, file 2535; see also the discussion of the (earlier) ‘Coronation Contingent’ Imperial War Graves Commission, Eighteenth Annual Report (London: HMSO, 1938).

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129 130 131 132 133

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5

6

7 8 9 10

Alex S.F., ‘An Epic Journey’ (Sydney, 2000). Q. Alex S.F. (Sydney, NSW); interview at Gallipoli, 23 April 2000. Alex S.F., ‘Journey’. Ibid. Q. Edwin G. (Wollongong, NSW), Anon [F. 60–9] (No Home Town Provided – henceforth NHTP); for a useful introduction to the uses of historical sensibility see Nancy Wood, ‘Memory’s Remains: Les lieux de memoire’, History and Memory, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring/Summer 1994, pp. 123–49. For discussion of routes/companies see Q. Susan C. (Bunbury, WA) Margaret F. (Randwick, NSW), for family networks Q. Margaret R. (West Ryde, NSW); John S. (Highton, Vic.); Damien W. (Potts Point, NSW). Q. ‘Alice’ (Melbourne, Vic.) [real name and suburb withheld on request]; Margaret S. (Stanmore, NSW). Q. Maryanne Bourke (Normanhurst, NSW). Q. John M. (Mac) (Wollongong, NSW). Q. Myra B. (Aberdeen, NSW); Angela S. (Sydney, NSW).

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11 Q. Angela S. (Sydney, NSW). 12 Graeme Davison, The Use and Abuse of Australian History (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2000), p. 85; see also Charles Maier, ‘A Surfeit of Memory? Reflections on History, Melancholy and Denial’, History and Memory, no. 5 (Fall/Winter), pp. 136– 52. 13 Q. Jim V. (Eastwood, NSW); Ross M. (Canberra, ACT); Terry S. (North Sylvania, NSW); John C. (Redfern, NSW); John B. (Cargo, NSW). 14 Q. Peter R. (Scarborough, Qld); Robert F. (Melbourne, Vic.); for meaning invested in artefact see Sue Georgevits, ‘Places of the Heart: Personal Narratives of the Past through the Objects People Keep’, Oral History Association of Australia Journal, no. 22. (2000), pp. 72–7. 15 Q. John B. (Cargo, NSW). 16 Ibid. 17 Maurice Halbwach, On Collective Memory, ed. And trans. By Lewis A. Coster (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 52–3; see also the exchange prompted by David Glassberg’s ‘Public History and the Study of Memory’, The Public Historian, vol. 19, no. 2 (Spring 1997); Robert Finch, Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989), p. 44. 18 Q. John M. [Mac] (Wollongong, NSW). 19 Ibid. 20 Correspondence by Mike M (Point Cook, Vic.) to the author dated 2 May 2003. All citations above to the same. 21 Paul Ashton and Paula Hamilton, ‘At Home with the Past’, Australian Cultural History, no. 22, 2003, pp. 13–27. 22 Q. Brenda W. (Perth, WA); Pat G. (Vaucluse, NSW). 23 Correspondence by Mike M. (Point Cook, Vic.) to author dated 2 May 2003; Q. Margaret A. (Cessnock, NSW). 24 Steve P. (Barrack Heights, NSW). 25 Q. ‘Alice’ (Melbourne, Vic) [real name and suburb withheld on request]; Janette C. (Canberra, ACT) Jennifer L. (Warrimoo, NSW). 26 Q. John T. (Gunnedah, NSW), C.F. (Macquarie, NSW), Alison D. [Tucky] (Geraldton, WA). 27 Q. Jean W. (Peakhurst, NSW); Todd L. (NHTP – Angresse, France); Ian P. (Main Beach, Qld). 28 Q.R.T.G. (Horsham, Vic.). 29 Ibid. 30 Pauline L. (North Tamborine, Qld). 31 Q. Winsome P. (Bellevue Heights, SA). Thanks to Ken Inglis for putting me in touch with this remarkable respondent. 32 Ibid. 33 For instances of messages in visitors’ books see Q. Peter and Yvonne K. (Keiraville, NSW); Q. Mary P. (Waitata, NSW). 34 Q. Mary P. (Waitata, NSW); see also Bruce’s account of a soldier who simply ‘vanished’ from a hospital ship off Alexandria: ‘His family (parents and siblings) suffered terrible grief over not knowing what happened to him’, Q. Bruce B. (Latham, Vic.). 35 Q. Lorraine A. (Wendouree, Vic.). 36 Q. Jennifer L. (Warrimoo, NSW).

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37 Q. Audrey C. (Sandy Bay, Tas.). 38 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti Structure (London: Penguin, 1969); Q. Bob B. (Maroubra, NSW); Helen W. (Kenmore, Qld); Charles S. (Fremantle, WA). 39 Q. Jim E. (Bungendore, NSW); Richard B. (Canberra, ACT); note the newsletters still distributed (nine years on) from Australian War Memorial Travel Groups and the networks (social as well as commemorative) fostered by the FFFAIF. I thank Des A. (Lower Templestowe, Vic.) and Craig L. (Richmond, NSW) for their warm introduction to both groups. For Light Horse Association see Q. Robert P. (Somersby, NSW). 40 Q. Charles S. (Fremantle, WA); See also Joyce’s account of the service at Menin Gate, the names of three of her relatives set high above her, Joyce K. (Blackburn, Vic.). 41 Q. Lyn and David T. (Coogee, NSW); John M. (Wollongong, NSW). The relocation of the dawn service to North Beach and its remaking as a media spectacle has greatly diminished this sense of shared significance. R.G.’s comments were typical of many: ‘I imagined the pure dawn darkness, then the sun rising but there was none of that feeling of “awe”. The television lights spoilt the whole atmosphere for me. On arriving back home, I have heard the same remarks. . . . “We would have been better off going to the dawn service at St. Kilda”.’ R.G. (Pakenham, Vic.). For a more positive appraisal, likening North Beach to being ‘in a church’, see John S. (Mulgrave, Vic.). 42 Q. Damien C. (Melbourne, Vic.). 43 Q. Sibyl C. (Carrington, NSW); Rosemary P. (Koolunga, NSW); Kerry M. (Alexander Heights, WA); Matthew D. (Sydney, NSW); see also Ross McG. (Richmond, NSW). Note the message in St Mary’s Visitors’ Book, Harefield, England: ‘Our Uncle Leo Lang is buried here. Thank you for looking after him’; author’s notes on visit to Harefield, 1998. 44 Q. Dianne M. (Strathmore, Vic.) 45 Q. Joan B. (Stockton, NSW). 46 Q. Jacqueline H. (Kew, Vic.). 47 Author’s notes on visit to Belgium war graves, November 1997; Michael H. (Kew, Vic.). 48 Q. Fred B. (Echuca, Vic.); John A. (Cessnock, NSW), Jo H. (Adelaide, SA); Carolyn Z. (Newport, NSW). These attitudes were expressed across all age groups. Anthony was so angered by British indifference to Australian losses on the Western Front that he longed ‘to spit’ on Haig’s memorial in St George’s Church in Ypres. It said much for the healing fostered by pilgrimage that he prayed for Haig instead: Q. Anthony H. (Canberra, ACT). 49 Q Jacqueline H. (Kew, Vic.), Q. ‘Alice’ (Melbourne, Vic.) [real name and suburb withheld on request]; Ross P. (Cessnock, NSW). 50 Q. Peter E. (Springbrook, Vic.). 51 Q. Mrs P. T. (Launceston, Tas.); Jim E. (Bungendore, NSW); Charles S. (Fremantle, WA); Myra B. (Aberdeen, NSW); Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (New York: Cornell University Press, 1974), p. 210. 52 Q. Jenny N. (Largs North, SA); Marian J. (Hillsdale, NSW); Christine H. (Montague Bay, Tas.); Betty B. (Lyneham, NSW). 53 Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976); p. 41; Q. Fay K. (Belmont, Vic.), David C. (NHTP); John O. (Warrenwood, Vic.); Myra B. (Aberdeen, NSW).

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54 Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: A.A. Knopf, 1995), pp. 11–16; Q. Myra B. (Aberdeen, NSW); David B. (Sydney, NSW). 55 Q. Rod McN. (indecipherable, Vic.); Robert C. (Potts Point, NSW); interview with Kate D., Gallipoli, 25 April 2000; Q. John H. (Southbank, Vic.); Jan Peacock, ‘A Short Account of my Trip to Gallipoli for Anzac Day, 25th April 2000 – A Letter to Australia All Over’ (ABC Radio) appended to Questionnaire. 56 Q. John M. (Mac) (Wollongong, NSW). 57 Q. Charles S. (Fremantle, WA); interview with Myra B. (Aberdeen, NSW) 14 December 1998. 58 Q. ‘Alice’ (Melbourne, Vic.) [real name and suburb withheld on request]; Damien C. (Melbourne, Vic.), Roger C. (Brighton, Vic.); interview 27 April 2001 [name withheld on request]; this reading is informed by Ronald Finucane, Ghosts: Appearances of the Dead and Cultural Transformation (New York: Prometheus Books, 1996); Peter Read, Haunted Places (Kensington, Sydney: UNSW Press, 2003). 59 Author’s notes from visits to British, French and Belgium war graves in 1994, 1997 and 1998; one respondent planted ‘a small Irish flag on [a] grave with an Irish name at Suvla’, Q. Roderick R.S. (Falconbridge, NSW); Marianne C. (Port Macquarie, NSW). 60 Author’s notes from visits to British, French and Belgium war graves in 1994, 1997 and 1998; Q. Margaret C. (Roseville, NSW). 61 Peter Read, ‘Remembering Dead Places’, Public Historian, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 33–4; Q. Richard B. (Canberra, ACT), Rod N. (Melton, Vic.); Betty B. (Lyneham, ACT); Jean G. (Harbord, NSW); author’s notes from visits to Lone Pine, 23 April 2000. 62 Interview with Alan K. (Blakehurst, NSW), Sydney, 2 June 2001. 63 Peter Read, Returning to Nothing: The Meaning of Lost Places (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 6; Q. Mrs P. T. (Launceston, Tas.); Jim E. (Bungendore, NSW); Charles S. (Fremantle, WA); Alan K. (Blakehurst, NSW); Ron C. (Lugarno, NSW); Ross P. (Cessnock, NSW). 64 For the notion of materialising memory see Elizabeth Hallem and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Q. John H. (Southbank, Vic.); Peter P. (Wagga Wagga, NSW); correspondence from Julie R. (Mount Barker, SA) dated 3 May 2003, 19 April, 20 July, 12 September 2004. At the time of correspondence, Julie planned to take soil from Rufus Rigney’s grave home to the Point Macleay mission. It will be scattered on the graves of family members. 65 Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 45, 120–3; Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 55–6; author’s notes from visit to Villers-Bretonneux Cemetery, October 2000; survey of ‘samples’ from visitors’ books held at Historial de le Grande Guerre, Peronne, France. 66 Author’s notes from visit to Villers-Bretonneux Cemetery, October 2000; survey of ‘samples’ from visitors’ books held at Historial de le Grande Guerre; for other ways in which ‘war mythology’ (promoting ‘a selective national identity’) is confused or contested see Alistair Thomson, ‘Memory as a Battlefield: Personal and Political Investments in the National Military Past’, Oral History Review, vol. 22, no. 2, Winter 1995, pp. 53–75. 67 Valerie M. (Salisbury, Qld); see also the response by Q. ‘Alice’ (Melbourne, Vic.) [real name and suburb withheld on request].

Chapter 5 1 K.S. Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1965’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, April 1991, p. 24; C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Correspondent, The Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean, selected and annotated by Kevin Fewster (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983), diary extracts for Sunday 25 April. 2 Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage’, p. 24. 3 Charles Werner to A.W. Keys, 20 January 1965; Herbert Lillyjohn to A.W. Keys, 3 February 1965, RSL Papers, Series 21, Box 1112, NLA, Ms 6609, successful applications are filed in Box 1111, henceforth ‘RSL Gallipoli Applications’. 4 For details of how the money was disbursed see Raymond Huish to A.W. Keys, 27 May 1964; ibid., Box 1112; RSL Gallipoli Applications. 5 Canberra Times, 15 April 1965. 6 RSL and RSA Gallipoli Pilgrimage, Report by Sir Raymond Huish, RSL Papers, Box 343; Age, 15 April 1965, Canberra Times, 21 April 1965. 7 Geelong Advertiser, 19 June 1965. 8 Sydney Morning Herald, 23 April 1965. 9 Canberra Times, 15 April 1965; Raymond Huish to A.W. Keys, 14 January 1965; Charles Werner to A.W. Keys, 20 January 1965, RSL Papers, Box 1112; RSL Gallipoli Applications; F. Redfearn to A.W. Keys, 20 March 1965, ibid., Box 127. 10 Fred Ainsworth to A.W. Keys, 17 December 1964, RSL Gallipoli Applications. 11 News (Adelaide), 6 May 1965. 12 Canberra Times, April 1965; L.E. Garlick to A.W. Keys, 14 July 1964, RSL Gallipoli Applications. 13 C.W.B. Fitchett to A.W. Keys, 11 June 1964, RSL Papers, Box 1112; C.L.G. Taylor to A.W. Keys; G.T. Allen to A.W. Keys, 2 July 1964, RSL Gallipoli Applications. 14 News (Adelaide) 20 April 1965. 15 Canberra Times, 25 April 1966. 16 George Holding to A.W. Keys, 16 June 1965, RSL Papers, Box 1112. 17 Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage’, p. 26. 18 See the recollections of Laurence Stone, a member of the 29th Division, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1957’, Gallipoli Pilgrimages, Liddle Collection, University of Leeds. 19 Age, 27 April 1965. 20 A.J. Wright to A.W. Keys, 16 May 1965, RSL Papers, Box 1112. 21 Canberra Times, 24 April 1965. 22 ‘Operation Landing Party’, Gallipoli Pilgrimage Report, RSL Papers. 23 K.S. Inglis, ‘Return to Gallipoli’, ANU Historical Journal, October 1966, vol. 1, no. 3, p. 3. 24 Canberra Times, 27 April 1965. 25 Age, 26 April 1965; Inglis, ‘Return to Gallipoli’, p. 3. 26 Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage’, p. 24.

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68 For the concept of catharsis see Walter, ‘War Grave Pilgrimage’, in Ian Reader and Tony Walter, Pilgrimage in Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 82. 69 Russel C. (Blakehurst, NSW) 70 Ibid.

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27 J.E. Cooper to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1112. 28 See the emphatic protest from NSW over Huish’s selection, RSL Executive Minutes, 2 March 1965, ibid., Box 84; Canberra Times, 25 April 1966; News (Adelaide), 19 April 1965; West Australian, 15 February 1965; Canberra Times, 24 April 1965. 29 Louise Grieve to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1112. 30 M.J. Locke to A.W. Keys, 20 May 1965; James Pickett to A.W. Keys, 29 May 1965, ibid. 31 Australian, 28 April 1965, 1 May 1966; Inglis, ‘Gallipoli Pilgrimage’. 32 C.L. Sharp to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1112. 33 See, for example, reports to the National Executive, 22 May 1965. 34 Reveille, 31 December 1930; Talbot Hobbs Diary, April 1930. 35 Ibid., British Australian and New Zealander, 8 May 1930. 36 Service Dossier of Capt. S.M. Bruce, NAA: 2455; S.M. Bruce, ‘Soldiers’ Graves: The Prime Minister’s Report’, NAA: A 458/1; British Australasian, 14 February 1924; Bruce had previously ‘inspected’ the Western Front, ibid., 3 January 1924. 37 G.A. Randwell to A.W. Keys, undated, RSL Papers, Series 21, NLA, Ms 6609, Box 1111; Auckland Herald, 7 June 1935. 38 Auckland Herald, 11 June 1935; for description of Gallipoli’s transport (or rather the lack of it) see Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 1934. 39 This is as close as Australia and New Zealand came to commemorating the twentieth anniversary of the landing, despite the efforts of a ‘Gallipoli Council’ set up to promote such a pilgrimage, Sunday Times (Perth), 1 July 1934, Mercury (Hobart), 11 August 1934. 40 The second St Barnabas pilgrimage was allowed to land at Anzac in 1928 but the party arrived in September when the ‘weather was favourable’ for cruising the Mediterranean, Stopford, ‘St Barnabas Pilgrimage to Salonika and Gallipoli 1928’, CWGC ACON 149. 41 British Australasian, 21 May 1925. 42 Hay, Gallipoli, Salonika, St. Barnabas 1926, p. 29. 43 Ibid., pp. 14–15. 44 Ibid., for verification of names see Gallipoli and Salonika Pilgrimage, ‘Passenger List’ (np, 1926), IWM, Misc. 816, Box 53. 45 J.C. Waters, Crosses of Sacrifice: The Story of the Empire’s Million Dead and Australia’s 60,000 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson 1932). 46 Auckland Herald, 9 June 1934. 47 Visit to Gallipoli by the S.S. Duchess of Richmond: Shore Arrangements’, Passenger Lists, brochures in the file of Capt. E.F. Wettern, Liddle Collection; note also regrets from pilgrimage organisers that ‘only a few Australians’ were able to join the tours, Herald, 26 May 1936. 48 See reports of visits by the Ormonde (1925), the Duchess of Richmond (1935) and the Lancastria (1936); T.J. Pemberton, Gallipoli To-day (London: E. Benn Ltd, 1926); H. Harris, ‘The Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1936’, IWM, uncatalogued ms. 49 Herald (Melbourne), 20 May 1936. 50 For ‘old Gallipoli men’ see Cyril Hughes to C.E.W. Bean, 27 December 1922, Bean Papers, AWM, Series 5, 3DRL 8042, Item 51. The figure is a tally from the columns of the British Australasian. 51 Sun (Melbourne), 11 August 1936; British Australasian, 7 May 1936. 52 Cyril Hughes to Fabian Ware, 3 May 1936, CWGC, 535, 2014, p. 720, pt 1. 53 Herald (Melbourne), 11 August 1936; Sun (Melbourne), 11 August 1936.

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54 Frank Clune, Tobruk to Turkey: With the Army of the Nile (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1943), pp. 289–92; Try Anything Once: The Autobiography of a Wanderer (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1947), ch. 11. 55 Clune, Tobruk to Turkey, p. 292. 56 Ibid., pp. 288, 73, 195. 57 Ibid., p. 195. 58 Ibid., ch. 18, p. 218. 59 Ibid., ch. 18, p. 217; see also Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 1934. 60 Sun (Melbourne), 11 August 1936; News (Perth), 11 August 1936; Sydney Morning Herald, 17 July 1934; Harris, ‘The Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1936’, ‘Report on Return Visit by Dan Bowden Ex-Royal Australian Navy’, kindly provided by Mr Bowden. 61 Daily Telegraph (Brisbane), 7 August 1928; Harris, ‘The Gallipoli Pilgrimage 1936; Gallipoli, 1915–1965, Record of the 50th Anniversary Pilgrimage, Liddle Collection. 62 Inglis, ‘Return to Gallipoli’, p. 3; Canberra Times, 22 April 1965. 63 W. Barry to A.W. Keys, 7 January 1965, Applications for Gallipoli Pilgrimage. 64 See in particular, the exchange of military civilities, Sun (Melbourne), 11 August 1936, Clune, Tobruk to Turkey, pp. 205, 219, 195. 65 C.L. Head, A Glance at Gallipoli (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1931), p. 44; ‘Gallipoli Twenty Years Later’, Cornhill Magazine, March 1935. 66 Bean, Gallipoli Mission, Mary Booth Papers, ML, Mss 1329. 67 H. Brewer to W.G. Osmond, RSL Papers, Box 1112; Courier Mail (Brisbane), 22 April 1965. 68 Correspondence from Lt Col C.E. Hughes, Deputy Director of Works, IWGC, to OC, Australian War Graves Services, Australia House, London, 31 January 1921, NAA: A1608/1, Item F27/1/7, pt 1. 69 The ‘regular tourist routes’ were still favoured by British visitors. Having reached Ypres or Amiens, Australian pilgrims were advised to hire ‘a taxi cab’ and pursue their ‘special interest’, West Australian, 16 November 1937. 70 Reveille, 21 July 1931. 71 See, for example, C.E.W. Bean (ed.), The Anzac Book (London: Cassell, 1916), pp. 25–7; 154; C.E.W. Bean, The Story of Anzac from 4 May, 1915 to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1930), ch. 30, vol. 2; for a discussion of Gallipoli’s elevation to legend see Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004). 72 Letter from E.J. Dibdin, General Secretary RSSILA, to Sir Neville Howse VC, Minister in Charge of Repatriation, 29 February 1928, NAA: A1608/1; Item F27/1/7, pt 1. 73 Ibid., see also Age, 26 March 1928. 74 Reveille, 31 March, 31 July 1928. 75 ‘Proposal by Association of Returned Sailors and Soldiers’ Clubs of New South Wales to Organise a Pilgrimage to the Battle-Fields . . . ’, memo to Prime Minister, dated 29 January 1928, NAA: A1608/1; Item F27/1/7, pt 1. 76 British Legion, Battlefields Pilgrimage, p. 57. 77 Reveille, 31 December 1928; 30 April 1929; note also the failure to revive the proposal, despite the twentieth anniversary of the landing, R.D. Hadfield to J. Webster, 6 December 1934, RSL Papers, Item 4392C. 78 Smith’s Weekly, 24 October, 31 December 1936; Herald (Melbourne), 8 July 1936. 79 Mercury (Hobart), 13 February 1936. 80 Ibid.

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81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93

94

95

96 97 98

99

100 101

102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

246

Smith’s Weekly, 25 April, 1 August 1936. Ibid., 24 October, 31 December 1936. Sun (Melbourne), 22 December 1936; 1 January 1937. Mercury (Hobart), 25 January 1937. Smith’s Weekly, 31 December 1936. Argus (Melbourne), 15 February 1937; Herald (Melbourne), 8 February 1937. Argus (Melbourne), 15 February 1937; Age, 15 February 1937. Sun (Melbourne), 1 January 1937; Herald (Melbourne), 4 February 1937. Sun (Melbourne), 6 April 1937; Herald (Melbourne), 4 February 1937. Sun (Melbourne), 13 January 1937; Age, 11 February 1937; Telegraph (Sydney), 25 February 1937. Herald (Melbourne), 15 January 1937, 27 January 1937. ‘The Villers-Bretonneux Memorial’, Commonwealth War Graves Commission Register, pp. 5–13. ‘Order of Ceremonial’, Programme of the Unveiling of the Villers-Bretonneux Memorial; memorandum for the Prime Minister’s Department, Canberra, on the Villers-Bretonneux unveiling 22/7/38, dated Australia House, 7 September 1938, RSL Papers, Series B. Building, 12 March 1926; Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, 7 June 1938, p. 1907; Secretary to the Prime Minister to Gen. Sec. RSSILA, 6 May 1938; ‘Australian Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux’, CWGC SDC 46, also WGS57/3/2, pt 1. Sun (Melbourne), 11 February 1938; RSSILA circulars Nos 122/38 – 23 March 1938, 125/38 – 29 March 1938; Secretary to the Prime Minister to Gen. Sec. RSSILA, 25 March 1938, RSL Papers, Series B. Argus (Melbourne), 26 March 1938; Age, 26 March 1938. RSSILA circular 129/38, 8 April 1938, RSL Papers, Series B. Letter from L.C. Robson, Headmaster, Sydney Church of England Grammar School to Peter Board, Chairman of the School, dated (Kent) 24 July 1938, RSL Papers, ANL Ms 6609, Series B, Box 64, file 8180. I thank David Lloyd for originally drawing my attention to this file. This is not to say that Robson’s view was altogether representative. English by birth and disposition, these remarks say as much about class as they do about nationalism. For a far more charitable view of the contingent see Lt Col Jacob’s report, letter to Sir Gilbert Dyett, Fed. Pres. RSSILA, 26 September 1938, RSL Papers, Series B. Evening News (Perth), 6 August 1928. To borrow Siegfried Sassoon’s memorable description. For a detailed account of ‘geography of the trenches’ see Marc Ferro, The Great War 1914–1918 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), pt II. Herald (Melbourne), 7 February 1931; Age, 4 August 1928. West Australian, 23 October 1928. Evening News (Perth), 6 August 1928. Herald (Melbourne), 23 September 1929; Reveille, 1 January 1934. Reveille, 1 January 1934. West Australian, 16 November 1937. Ibid. Reveille, 1 January 1934.

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110 For previous expeditions to Gallipoli, marking the fortieth and forty-fifth anniversaries of the landing see Bruce Rainsford to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1110, T. Yeomans to A.W. Keys, 18 June 1964, G.B. Spiers to A.W. Keys, ibid., Box 1111. 111 Leslie Irwin to Paul Hasluck, Minister for External Affairs, 5 December 1967; draft of letter to all pilgrimage applicants, Records of the Third Division 1968 Western Front Pilgrimage, AWM , 3DRL 603, AWM, 3 DRL 6037. Unless otherwise stated, all subsequent references in this chapter relate to this substantial collection. 112 Letter from A.J. Kennedy to Fred Cahill, Australia House, 10 April 1968, letter from J.A. Piper, Australian Embassy, Paris, to V.D. Robinson, Frelinghien, 23 April 1968. 113 Note seeking of patronage from the French Ambassador in Australia and insistence the party be ‘officially recognised’ overseas, ‘Minutes Committee Meeting’, 18 August 1967. 114 ‘Circular to Battalion Delegates: Proposed pilgrimage 1968’, by F.J. Cahill, April 1967. 115 ‘Conference with the Minister for External Affairs on Pilgrimage Requirements’; letter Fred Cahill to Les [Irwin], undated; Fred Cahill to Director, Australian War Museum, 3 January 1968. 116 Georges Blin to Fred Cahill, 6 March 1968. 117 See correspondence exchanged (and amended between Georges Blin and Fred Cahill, especially September to November 1966 (the critical planning period); also letter from V.D. Robinson (a soldier who settled on the Somme) to Georges Blin, 20 April 1969, letter from Les Irwin to Maire, Villers-Bretonneux, 6 January 1968. 118 ‘AIF Remembrance Pilgrimage 1968: Bulletin No. 4’, see also correspondence from Rex Bristow, 30 October 1967; Rolly Goddard, 6 March 1968; these men also aided earlier pilgrimages, most notably that conducted by Sir William Yeo some years earlier, letter from Rolly Goddard to Fred Cahill, 24 February 1968. 119 Letter from Reg Biggs (Tasmanian Liaison) to Fred Cahill, 4 December 1967. 120 ‘AIF Remembrance Pilgrimage 1968: Bulletin Nos 6, 8 & 9.’ 121 Frank Cahill, ‘Remembrance Pilgrimage Film: Suggestions for Introduction and Exhibition’. 122 ‘Draft of Letter to all Pilgrimage Applicants’. 123 Letters from Fred Cahill to Air Commodore B. Roberts (Ret), 29 January [1968] and Frank Kennedy (RSL Representative in ‘Blighty’), 14 October 1967; Letter from Frank Kennedy to Fred Cahill, 9 October 1967. 124 Reg Biggs to Fred Cahill, undated letter. 125 Ibid. 126 Ibid. 127 Letter from Reg Biggs to Fred Cahill, October 1967. 128 Biggs also modified the American itinerary suggesting a run up to Niagara Falls instead of ‘the waste of time at the United Nations joint’, letter Reg Biggs to Fred Cahill, 5 September 1967. 129 Letter from Bruce Rainsford to Fred Cahill, 20 September 1967; for similar advice for the jubilee pilgrimage see Bruce Rainsford to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1110. 130 Letters from Frank Kennedy to Fred Cahill, 9 October 1967, 9 February 1968. 131 There were similar protests on women’s inclusion in the jubilee tour though one woman, Dr Seager, quickly earned the admiration of sickly diggers, Louise Grieve to A.W. Keys, RSL Papers, Box 1112. Though pleased to take advantage of Dr Seager’s

247

N o t e s ( Pa g e s 1 5 2 -- 1 5 7 )

132

133 134 135

136 137 138 139 140 141

professional skills, the RSL executive persistently addressed her as Mrs Saeger, A.W. Keys to Mrs Seager, 23 March 1965, ibid., Box 1111. ‘AIF Remembrance Pilgrimage 1968: Bulletin No. 6’; also correspondence from Janet Mayo (National President of the War Widows’ Guild of Australia) to Fred Cahill, 15 February 1968 and Cahill’s earlier letter to the same dated 24 January 1968. ‘Management Fund: Statement Covering Pilgrimage Tour.’ Letter from Judith Timbrell to Fred Cahill, 16 April 1968; ‘AIF Remembrance Pilgrimage 1968: Bulletin No. 6’. Letter from Fred Cahill to Reg Bancroft, 13 December 1967; Letter from Rolly Goddard to Fred Cahill, 24 February 1968; Letter from Fred Cahill to J. Piper, 4 March 1968. Frank Cahill, ‘Pilgrimage Report – American Section’. Ibid., ‘Ypres Section’; letter from Reg Biggs to Fred Cahill, undated. Fred Cahill, ‘Again in Picardy’. Ibid. Fred Cahill, ‘Again in Picardy’. Pilgrims’ Club, ‘Newsletter to Members of AIF Veterans’ Pilgrimage and Associated Officials’, April 1969; ‘9th Brigade AIF Veterans’ Association: Circular to Pilgrimage Members and Brigade Personnel’, 30 June 1969. A few years later, Tamworth RSL organised a pilgrimage to mark the battle at Mont St Quentin. It was a much smaller affair and less carefully documented, for details see RSL Papers, Ms 6609, Box 44 and 69 NLA.

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1 Q. Gary B., (Gawler, SA). 2 I thank John Waller (the AWM’s travel agent) for his advice on this matter; Q. Charles S. (Fremantle, WA), Fay G. (Gracemere, NSW); discussions and correspondence with Dan Bowden, April 2005; interview with Robert S. (Gallipoli, 24 April 2002). 3 Correspondence to the author from Ray W, dated 25 July 2003. 4 Q. David C. (Duffy, ACT); Paul G. (Griffith, ACT), David Ch. (Fisher, ACT); Harold F. (Runaway Bay, Qld); Gary B. (Gawler, SA); Michelle S. (Sydney, NSW). 5 Q. Mandy A. (Potts Point, NSW); D.R. (Melbourne, Vic.); Dick W. (King River, WA); Greg R. (Everton Hills, Qld). 6 Q. Frank P. (Mitcham, Vic.), James M. (Cottesloe, WA); TE. N. and HT. N. (Blacktown, NSW); Conrad P. (Rockhampton, Qld). 7 Q. James W. (Eastwood, NSW); Christopher W. (Mona Vale, NSW); Jim E. (Bungendore, NSW); Harold J. (Runaway Bay, Qld); Stanley C. (Gracemere, Qld). 8 Q. JL. D. (Armadale, Vic.) and correspondence to the author dated 12 May 1988; V.X.E.R. (no home town provided – henceforth NHTP). These cross-generational journals can also be reversed; at eighty-four years of age, Patrick (RAAF, World War Two) took photographs of a relative’s name at Lone Pine because ‘[my] niece and nephew asked me to’, Patrick C. (Warrnambool, Vic.). 9 Q. V.X.E.R. (NHTP); see also Graham’s journey ‘to honour a dear friend of mine’ killed in the futile advance on Kritihia, Graham G. (Merrijig, Vic.).. 10 Q. J. S. (Red Hill, ACT).

N o t e s ( Pa g e s 1 5 8 -- 1 6 6 )

11 Q. Ian H. (Carlingford, NSW), John T. (Gunnedah, NSW). 12 Q. Helen S. (Pearl Beach, NSW). 13 Q. John P. (Berry, NSW); for a similar response from a Vietnam veteran see Daniel G. (Canberra, ACT). 14 See, for example, Melvin Lansky and Carol Bley’s study of Vietnam survivors, Posttraumatic Nightmares: Psychodynamic Explorations (Hillsdale NJ: Analytic Press, 1995); for the role of forgetting in survivors of war more generally see Eric Leed, ‘Fateful Memories: Industrialised War and Traumatic Neuroses’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2000, pp. 85–100. 15 Q. H.B.W. (Narrabeen, NSW); V.X.E.R. (NHTP). 16 Q. John C.S.W. (Warrawee, NSW); Patrick C. (East Preston, Vic.). 17 Dallas F. (Campbell, ACT). 18 Q. Don H. (Mitcham, SA), Joe C. (Mona Vale, NSW); Q. Bill R. (Red Cliffs, Vic.). 19 Q. Gary J.B. (Griffith, NSW); Report of the RSL appended to Q. Greg R. (Everton Hills, Qld). 20 Kal´ı Tal, Worlds of Hurt: Reading the Literature of Trauma (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 16. 21 See, for example, Desmond C. (Como, WA); family correspondence attached to Q by Peter D. (Mudgeeraba, Qld); Joe C. ‘An Appointment with the Dead: An Address given to the NSW Military Historical Society’, and appended Q; Q. John S. (Kew, Vic.) David M. (Greenwich, NSW). 22 Q. Jim S. (Eschol Park, NSW). 23 Q. Jackson M. (Nth Lambton, NSW). 24 Q. Alby R. (Doncaster, Vic.). 25 Ibid. 26 Q. Ray W. (Lambton, NSW). 27 Q. Kevin McD. (Dunkeld, NSW); John H. (Westlakes, SA); H.B.W. (Narrabeen, NSW). 28 Q. Lloyd J. (Launceston, Tas.). This was very much a minority response. 29 Q. James B. (Lismore, NSW). 30 Neale K. (Brisbane, Qld); David E. (Scottsdale, Tas.); Paul H. (Charters Towers, Qld); Stan S. (Mt Hawthorne, WA), John P. (Castle Hill, NSW). 31 Q. Anthony W. (Maroubra, NSW). 32 Q. John T. (Gray’s Point, Qld). 33 Q. Sonya D. (Dolans Bay, NSW). 34 Q. John T. (Gunnedah, NSW), Michael F. (Weston, ACT), Douglas McD. (Killara, NSW). 35 Q. Phillipa C. (Coogee, NSW). 36 Q. Peter D. (Sydney, NSW). 37 Q. John S. (Victoria Park, WA); the incident at Langemark is related in a questionnaire by Valerie P. (Salisbury, Qld); for corroboration see Jeff’s impression’s of the site, ‘they died for their country, they did their duty, they were some mother’s sons’, Q. Jeff B. (Campbell, ACT). Others were not prepared to forgive so easily: ‘[I] never visited German cemeteries [,] they brought it on themselves’, Q. Stanley C. (Gracemere, Qld). 38 Q. Greg R. (Everton Hills, Qld). 39 Ibid. Note a similar response by R.E.S., a rifleman and conscript, whose visit to Gallipoli made it possible ‘to return to Vietnam’, Q. R.E.S. (Wavell Heights, Qld).

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40 Q. Greg R. (Everton Hills, Qld); ‘Troubled Scenes’ by L.R.J. appended to Greg R.’s survey response. 41 Q. Peter H. (Charters Towers, Qld). 42 Q. Chris B. (NHTP): Paul H. (Charters Towers, Qld); Rob C. (East Fremantle, WA). 43 Q. Warren B. (Nth Ryde, NSW); James H. (Tuart Hill, WA); David J. (Scottsdale, Tas.); interview with Ashley E., Gallipoli, 23 April 2000 and subsequent correspondence to the author dated 6 February 2001. 44 Q. Patricia D. (Hurstville, NSW). 45 Q. Warren L. (New Gisborne, Vic.); R.C. (AWM, Canberra); Ian H. (Carlingford, NSW), Douglas M. (Killara, NSW); Joe C. (Mona Vale, NSW). Whatever their faults, the Australian memorials were a vast improvement on ‘gigantic bronze statues’ raised by the Turkish Government. Gallipoli, Joe complained, had ‘assumed a sort of Disneyland, theme park ambiance’, Joe C. (Mona Vale, NSW). 46 Q. Jack M. (Brookfield, Qld) James M. (Cottesloe, WA); Don H. (Lower Mitcham, Vic.); D.W.R. (Lane Cove, NSW); Alfred M. (Yass, NSW). 47 Q. Gordon M. (Warrawee, NSW), the respondent did add that he did not intend to be offensive. 48 Q. Sarah H. (Campbell, ACT); Gabrielle C. (Duntroon, ACT); Helen S. (Pearl Beach, NSW); see also Jan M,’s thoughtful response as a woman who has tirelessly sought recognition for Australia’s war nurses, Q. Jan M. (Seymour, Vic.). 49 Q. Lorraine L. (Hornsby, NSW); Margaret M. (Bridgeman Downs, Qld). 50 For the unburdening of impossible history, see Cathy Caruth, ‘Trauma and Experience’ in Caruth (ed.), Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 3–5; Q. Paul C. (Belrose, NSW). 51 Q. Jackson M. (Nth Lambton, NSW). Our ‘own soldiers’ presumably refers to Allied forces. The Australian Army did not enforce the death penalty. 52 Q. Garry B. (Gawler, SA); Jon B. (Pearce, ACT).

Chapter 7 1 Courier Mail (Brisbane), 9 April 2002. I thank Mike Godwin of Mackay North State High School for forwarding these clippings. 2 Roy Rosenweig and David Thelan, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), chs 1, 4. 3 Erika H., ‘History Speech’, four-page typescript appended to survey response. 4 Ibid.; see also the research profile on ‘her’ soldier, Pte. Clifford Hennessy, in North Mackay’s Commemorative Booklet, ‘We Will Remember Them’, (Mackay: NP. nd [2002]). 5 Robert Finch, Writing Natural History: Dialogues with Authors (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989) p. 44. For other such encounters with place and memory see the exchange prompted by David Glassberg’s ‘Public History and the Study of Memory’, The Public Historian, vol. 19, no. 2, Spring 1997. 6 Erika H., Journal, 23 April 2002. 7 Ibid.; see also Q. Erika H. (Mackay, Qld). 8 Erika H., Journal, 24 April 2002. 9 Ibid., 25 April 2002.

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N o t e s ( Pa g e s 1 7 5 -- 1 82 )

10 For a revealing study of the elision of bodies and names and the ‘displacement of individual memory’ see David Sherman, ‘Bodies and Names: The emergence of commemoration in interwar France’, American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 2, April 1998, pp. 443–66. 11 Erika H, Journal, 25 April 2002. 12 David S., ‘Anzac Eve Presentation’ and untitled paper (statement for media release), emailed correspondence to author, May 2002. 13 David S., ‘Anzac Eve Presentation’. 14 David S., Presentation Evening Address [September 2002]. 15 Ibid.; Q. David S. (Mackay, Qld). 16 Q. David S. (Mackay, Qld). 17 David S., Journal, 1 May 2002; see also ‘To the Relatives of George Dalziel MM’. 18 Family and community affiliations are noted in the commemorative booklet, ‘We Will Remember Them’. 19 Q. Tara W. (Blacks Beach, Qld). 20 Q. Catherine and Paula L. (Mackay, Qld); Rebecca F. (Mackay, Qld); ‘We Will Remember Them’. 21 Elise A., Journal, 24 April 2002. 22 Rebecca F., Journal, 1 May 2002; author’s notes on visit to Peronne Communal Cemetery; Todd F., Journal, 30 April 2002. 23 Q. Sam W. (Mackay, Qld). 24 Elise A., Journal, September 2002. 25 Ibid., 27 January, 21 February 2002; Rosenweig and Thelan, The Presence of the Past, p. 126. 26 Q. Catherine L. (Mackay, Qld). 27 Rian S., Journal, 28 April 2002; for the emotional ‘trauma’ of presenting the eulogy see Tracey J., Journal, 28 April 2002. 28 Qs completed by Lyn S. (Sarina, Qld), Christine C. (North Mackay, Qld). 29 ‘People We Met’, Mackay North State High School, Lest We Forget web site, 30 Q. Joan B. (Walkerston, Qld); for details of Edmund Furneyvall’s death see Q. Tracey J. (Mackay, Qld). Every Anzac Day, Joan lays a wreath for Edmund, as her mother had before her. 31 Henry Russo’s vivid phrase is echoed in many survey responses. See, for example, Erika’s remarks: ‘We were their messengers, and for many, the messages were very special’. 32 Q. Heather H. (Mackay, Qld); Todd F., Journal, 30 April 2002; Q. Amanda (Mackay, Qld); Q. Elsie A. (Mackay, Qld). 33 Peter Read, ‘Remembering Dead Places’, Public Historian, vol. 18, no. 2, Spring, 1996, pp. 33–4. 34 Author’s notes on visit to Villers-Bretonneux, 29 April 2002. 35 Bess H. and Jessica C. ‘Gallipoli’, Modern History Essay, manuscript appended to survey response. 36 Tracey J., Journal, 23 April 2002. 37 See, for example, journal entries from Bess H., and Jessica C., 28 April 2002. 38 Joeleen S., Journal, 27 April 2002; Christine P., Journal, 27 April 2002. 39 Christine P., Journal, 27 April 2002.

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N o t e s ( Pa g e s 1 8 3 -- 1 9 5 )

40 Keith Thomas, ‘Introduction’, in Jan Bremmer, A Cultural History of Gesture (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 6; for shaking hands and voices see Jess’s description of Kate’s first commemoration at Gallipoli, Journal, 23 April 2002. 41 Christine C., Journal, 23 April 2002; Q. David V. (Mackay, Qld). 42 Q. Katie M. (Mt Pleasant, Qld); Todd F., Journal, 30 April 2002; Bess H., Journal, 2 May 2002. 43 Q. Sam W. (North Mackay, Qld). 44 Todd F., Journal, 30 April 2002. 45 Q. Katie M. (Mt Pleasant, Qld). 46 Darren C., Journal, 25 April 2002; Joeleen S., Journal, 25 April 2002. 47 Rebecca F., Journal, 24 April 2002. 48 Ibid. 49 See the commemorative booklets outlining proceedings, ‘We Will Remember Them’; ‘Group Commemorative Service: Australian National Memorial, 27 April 2002’; author’s notes on ceremonies at Villers-Bretonneux and Menin Gate, April– May 2002; Q. David S., Erika H. (Mackay, Qld). 50 See, for example, Thomson, ‘Memory as Battlefield’, pp. 53–5. 51 Q. Clifford D. (South Mackay, Qld). 52 Ibid.; see also Clifford’s research profile of Staff Sergeant Victor Hansen, ‘We Will Remember Them’. 53 Q. Clifford D. (South Mackay, Qld). 54 Ibid.; Edward Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and their Battlefields (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), p. 4. 55 Q. Clifford D. (South Mackay, Qld). 56 Q. Tracey J. and Catherine L. (Mackay, Qld). 57 Q. Georgina T. (Blacks Beach, Qld); Catherine L. (North Mackay, Qld). 58 See Jacques Le Goff, History and Memory, trans. S. Rendall and E. Claman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 55–6 for a revealing discussion of the ‘struggle’ over remembrance. 59 Q. Erika H. (North Mackay, Qld). 60 Jessica C., Journal, 23 April 2002. 61 Q. Todd F. (North Mackay, Qld). 62 Q. Tara W. (Blacks Beach, Qld)

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Q. Mike M. (Humpty Doo, NT). Q. Barbara A. (Roseville, NSW) Heather L., email correspondence to the author dated 1 May 2002. Ibid. Q. John McG. (Camperdown, NSW). Q. Danae B. (Cairns, Qld); Stacey A. (Devonport, Tas.). Q. Kristie H. (Strathdownie, Victoria). Interviews with Sylvia S. (Melbourne, Vic.) Fiona W. (Gerringong, NSW) and Adam W. (Adelaide, SA) Gallipoli, 25 April 2000; for ‘London Crowd’ see Q. Lisa B. (Cairns, Qld). 8 Q. John McG. (Camperdown, NSW); Amanda L. (Cremorne Point, NSW); Julian T. (Wollstonecraft, NSW).

N o t e s ( Pa g e s 1 9 5 -- 2 0 0 )

9 Q. Lisa B. (Cairns, Qld); Andrew W. (Erskineville, NSW), Sharee R. (Merredin, WA); Emma O. (Albury, NSW). 10 Q. Sharon R. (Ashburton, Vic.); for travel as a quest for ‘self-definition’ see Eric Leed, The Mind of the Traveler: From Gilgamesh to Global Tourism (New York: Basic Books, 1991), p. 51. 11 Q. Kristie H. (Strathdownie, Vic.); interviews with Sylvia S. (Melbourne, Vic.); Fiona W. (Gerringong, NSW); Adam W. (Adelaide, SA), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000. 12 Interview with Kate H. (Berringer, NSW). 13 Interview with Kursat Y. of C. Tour, Istanbul, 27 April 2000. 14 Q. John H. (Southbank, Vic.), Julie-Anne O’H. (NHTP), Luke S. (Geelong, Vic.). 15 Q. Peta V. (Byron Bay, NSW). 16 Q. Catherine W. (Wellington, NZ); interview with Rachel B. (Darwin, NT), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000; Q. Murray J. (Toowoomba, Qld). 17 Q. Barbara A. (Roseville, NSW); interviews with David K. (Adelaide, SA); Kate F. (Newcastle, NSW), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000. 18 Q. Mel M. (Brisbane, Qld); Kyrsten H. (Newcastle, NSW); Gabrielle C. (Sydney, NSW). 19 Q. Geoff R. (Gladesville, NSW). 20 Q. Mel M. (Brisbane, Qld); Kyrsten H. (Newcastle, NSW); Gabrielle C. (Sydney, NSW); Katie H. (Melbourne, Vic.); diary extracts appended to Q by Lisa B. (Wangaratta, Vic). 21 Q. Katherine S. (Melbourne, Vic.); Sarah S. (Melbourne, Vic.). 22 Roy Rosenweig and David Thelan, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 126. 23 Q. Sharee R. (Merredin, WA); Gabrielle E. (Melbourne, Vic.). 24 Interview with Kerry D. (Sabrina, Qld), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000; Q. Sylvia H. (Echuca, Vic.). 25 Interview with Michael C. (Manly, NSW), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000. 26 Q. Jodie F. (Mittagong, NSW); Katie H. (Brunswick East, Vic.). 27 Ben Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991); Q. Helen M. (Kenmore, Qld). 28 David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York: Free Press, 1996), pp. 3–6; see also Lowenthal, ‘Fabricating Heritage’, History and Memory, vol. 10, no. 1. (Spring 1998) pp. 5–24. 29 For a rewarding inquiry into the tension between nationalism and imperialism see Ken Inglis’s classic essay, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin, no. 100 (March 1965) reproduced in Lack (ed.), Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K.S. Inglis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998), pp. 18–42; Q. Aaron H. (Narangba, Qld); Anne L. (Gloucester, NSW); Karen B. (Adelaide, SA); John Mc.G. (Cronulla, NSW). 30 Q. Naomi B. (Woy Woy, NSW); Natalie B. (Hawthorn, Vic.); Kerry D. (Sabrina, Qld). 31 Interviews with John M. (Adelaide, SA), Gallipoli, 25 April 2000; Sharona C. (Kensington, NSW), Gallipoli, 23 April 2000; discussions with John and Sharona (in particular) suggested a clear distinction between what David Lowenthal has called heritage and history, the former ‘an exclusive myth of origin and continuance’ (the stuff of ‘those patriotic cliches at School’) the latter ‘a critical spirit of inquiry’ which refuses ‘to substitute an image of the past for its reality’, Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past, pp. 128, 102. 32 Q. Mel M. (Brisbane. Qld).

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254

33 Ibid. 34 Questionnaires completed by Jacqueline M. (Dromana, Vic.); Priscilla E. (Strathfield, NSW); Annabel W. (Gold Coast, Qld); Josh C. (NHTP). 35 Personal correspondence from David B. (Randwick, NSW). 36 Ibid. 37 Presentation by Koorie students at the Kum Hotel, UNSW Gallipoli Study Tour, Eceabat, 29 March 2004; for a discussion of ‘lost’ history of Aboriginal servicemen and women see A. Jackomos and D. Fowell, Forgotten Heroes: Aborigines at War (Melbourne: Victoria University Press, 1993); also (from a community perspective) Rebe Taylor, Unearthed: The Aboriginal Tasmanians of Kangaroo Island (Kent Town, SA: Wakefield Press, 2002), pp. 270–7. I discussed Aboriginal perspectives on the Peninsula with Bob S., who represented his community at the unveiling of the new commemorative site in April 2000. Bob’s views had much in common with Greg, James and Colline, particularly in regard to the strangely Australian quality of Gallipoli’s landscape. 38 Koorie presentation at the Kum Hotel. 39 Ibid. ‘Koorie’ was the term Greg, James and Colline favoured and they extended it to include all Aboriginal people. Born in Darwin, James is a Larrakia man, Colline belongs to the Kalkadoon community in Qld, Greg’s country is northern NSW. 40 Koorie presentation at the Kum; for a discussion of the sacrilisation of place by a white scholar respectful of indigenous stories see Peter Read, Haunted Earth (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003), esp. pp. 77–91. 41 Koorie presentation at the Kum. The same question has occurred to many young backpackers touring Gallipoli. A banner reading ‘Say Sorry’ greeted Prime Minister John Howard when he opened the commemorative site at North Beach in 2000. Author’s notes on visit to Gallipoli, 25 April 2000. 42 Presentation by James P. at the Nek, 28 March 2004; for historical details see Peter Burness, The Nek: The Tragic Charge of the Light Horse at Gallipoli (Sydney: Kangaroo Press, 1996), chs 10–14 also C.E.W. Bean, Gallipoli Mission (1948) (Sydney: ABC Books, 1990), p. 109. 43 Presentation by James P. at the Nek. 44 Marilyn Lake, ‘Mission Impossible: How Men Give Birth to the Australian Nation – nationalism, gender and other seminal acts’, Gender and History, 4 (3) 1992, pp. 305– 22; see also David Lowenthal’s discussion of women’s exclusion from the process of ‘memorialisation’, ‘History and Memory’, The Public Historian, vol. 19. no. 2 (Spring 1997), pp. 38–9. 45 Interview with Anna M. (Maroubra, NSW), 21 November 2000. 46 Kate W. (Stewarts River, NSW). 47 See, for example, Q. Geoff R. (Gladesville, NSW). 48 Q. Sarah H. (Campbell, ACT); this sometimes prompted a call for ‘more recognition’ of the role women played during wartime, see Q by Alison C. (Bridgetown, WA). 49 Q. Lisa B. (Cairns, Qld). 50 Interview with Sharonna C., Gallipoli, 23 April 2000; Q. Catherine W. (Wellington, NZ), Gina A. (Allawah, NSW). 51 Q. Kate B. (Leichhardt, NSW); Veronica T. (Alberton, Qld). 52 Q. Jacqueline M. (Dromana, Vic.), Fiona B. (Melbourne, Vic.). 53 Q. Melissa G. (Kirrawee, NSW). 54 Q. Murray F. (Gold Coast, Qld).

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Q. Jacqueline M. (Dromana, Vic.); Jackie D. (Wangaratta, Vic.). Q. Josh C. (NHTP). Ibid. Q. Chris H. (Carlingford, NSW). Ibid. Q. Andrew D. (Aspendale, Vic.); Chris H. (Carlingford, NSW); Anon (Gold Coast, Qld); as always, there are occasional exceptions, Justin was an ‘accidental’ visitor stumb[ling] upon Adelaide cemetery Whilst I was cycling around’, Q. Justin J. (Canberra, ACT). Q. Martin W. (NHTP – London); Julie-Anne O’H (NHTP – Singapore); Garry H. (Loftus, NSW). Q. Andrew D. (Aspendale, Vic.). Q. Chris H. (Carlingford, NSW); John C. (Coogee, NSW), Sophie L. (Paddington, NSW). Typescript appended to Q by David B. (Randwick, NSW). Q. Melinda R. (Randwick, NSW); Priscilla E. (Strathfield, NSW). Q. Janelle J. (Taylors Lakes, Vic.); typescript appended to Q by David B. (Randwick, NSW). Q. Ken B. and Julie D. (Byawatha, Vic.); Sophie L. (Paddington, NSW). Q. Rachel S. (Randwick, NSW). Ibid. Q. James C. (New Lambton, NSW). Ibid.; for a remarkably similar testimony see Q. John C. (Coogee, NSW).

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55 56 57 58 59 60

Conclusion 1 2 3 4

J. Irwin to Vera Deakin, 16 March 1917, Pte G.R. Irwin, RCWMF (Canberra). Ibid., 4 August 1918. Sydney Mail, 20 October 1926; 25 April 1931. Stephane Audoin-Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War (London: Profile Books, 2002), ch. 7; see also (for a British perspective) Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory (Oxford: Berg, 1994). 5 Hugh Mackay, Turning Point: Australians Choosing their Future (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1999); Nora, ‘Between History and Memory’; Age, 24 April 2004; Graeme Davison, ‘The Habits of Commemoration and the revival of Anzac Day’, Australian Cultural History, no. 22, 2003. 6 I thank Joan Beaumont for these observations, Graham Seal, Inventing Anzac: The Digger and National Mythology (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2003). 7 Herald Sun (Melbourne), 25 April 2000; I owe this reference to Graeme Davison and thank Peter Stanley for his comments on the same.

Epilogue 1 For studies of the Asylum in Australia see Stephen Garton, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in New South Wales (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1988); Catherine Colborne, ‘Hearing the Speech of the Excluded’, in Joy Damousi and Robert Reynolds (eds), History on the Couch: Essays in History and

255

N o t e s ( Pa g e s 2 1 6 -- 2 1 8 )

2

3 4

5

6

7 8

9 10

256

Psychoanalysis (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003) ch. 1; Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experience of Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004), ch. 4, and my earlier study of the psychological impact of long-term unemployment in the 1890s depression; Bruce Scates, A New Australia: Citizenship, Radicalism and the First Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This paraphrases the Admission Warrants and case papers for Frances V., Sunbury Hospital, Victorian Public Records Office (VPRO) F1826, Box 7; Bessie S., Glenside Hospital (uncatalogued admitted 5 March 1920); Ellen N., Royal Derwent Hospital, Archives Office of Tasmania (AOT) HSR 285/18; Horatio H., Glenside (adm. 6 September 1919). The large number of men encountered in this survey belies the common claim that it was women alone who grieved to the point of madness. Male patients included brothers, sons and fathers as well as soldiers. See, for example, John McA. and Fred B. Glenside (adm. 9 November 1917), Royal Derwent, AOT HSD 285/2. Edith H. Callan Park Hospital Discharge Papers, New South Wales State Records (NSWSR) 14/10063; Ellen D. Mont Park Hospital Admissions, Department of Human Services (DHS) AS 1994/114–1; Edward R., Glenside (adm. 16 October 1919). Beatrice E., Sunbury VPRO 0762 Box 7; Emma H., Glenside (adm. 12 August 1916); also Mary R., Glenside (adm. 23 August 1919); Agnes S., Sunbury VPRO F1823 Box 7. John H., Glenside (adm. 8 July 1016); Edith H. (above); Eliza C., Broughton Hall Admission Papers, NSWSR Box 14/10056; Elizabeth R., Sunbury VPRO F1691 Box 7. Vida H., VPRO Sunbury F1763 Box 7; Laura L., Royal Derwent, AOT HSD 285/15; Margaret C., Callan Park Discharge Papers, NSWSR 14/10–056. Eliza A., Sunbury VPRO 0762 Box 7; a condition of access to insane asylum records is the de-identification of all patients’ names. I therefore cannot provide the surname of Pte A.’s RCWM file. The names of the archivists involved are fictional. For particularly disturbing cases see Marguerite I., Glenside (adm. 1 July 1916); Amy H., Royal Derwent, AOT HSD 285/10. Mary Jane M., Yarra Bend Hospital, DHS 94/104/34; estimates are based on Annual Hospital Reports published in Parliamentary Papers and the case papers themselves.

Survey Informants AH AT Aaron I Adam F Adam W Adrienne W Ailsa Ailsa C Al W Alan C Alan K Alana F Alby R Alex B Alex McC Alexandra Mc Alexandra SF Alexandra T Alfred C Alfred D Alfred M Alfred M Alice F Alison C Alison D Alison S Alistair J Allen H Amanda D Amanda F Amanda L Andrea S Andrew A Andrew C Andrew D Andrew D Andrew R Andrew W Andrew W Andrew W Andy B

Bermagui, NSW Mount Waverley, VIC Putney, NSW Chirnside Park, VIC Adelaide, SA Griffith, NSW Perth, WA Chapman, ACT Narara, NSW Ascot Vale, VIC Blakehurst, NSW Melbourne, VIC Doncaster, VIC Ulladulla, NSW Balmain North, NSW Inverell, NSW Chifley, NSW Cremorne, NSW Eastwood, NSW Mansfield, QLD Frankston, VIC Yass, NSW Melbourne, VIC Bridgetown, WA Sunset Beach, WA Carina, QLD Sydney, NSW Croydon Park, NSW Brisbane, QLD Mackay, QLD Cremorne Point, NSW Labrador, QLD Horsham, VIC NHTP Melbourne, VIC Aspendale, VIC St Ives, NSW Arcadia, NSW Cairns, QLD Erskineville, NSW NHTP

Angela S Ann O Anna M Annabel W Anne-Maree E Anne S Annette H Annette H Annette P Anthony C Anthony H Anthony W Ashley E Audrey C BG BJR Barbara A Barbara K Barbara S Barry B Barry M Bede P Ben E Benjamin D Bernard & Joan O Bernard G Bernie K Bert K Bess H Bess H Betty & Keith S Betty B Betty C Betty K Betty L Betty L Bill B Bill D Bill G Bill L Bron B

Mosman, NSW NHTP Maroubra, NSW Gold Coast, QLD Marayong, NSW Sydney, NSW Brunswick West, VIC NHTP Kensington, NSW Manly, NSW Yarralumla, ACT Maroubra, NSW Canberra, ACT Sandy Bay, TAS Page, ACT Briar Hill, VIC Roseville, NSW Urangan, QLD Caloundra, QLD Thornleigh, NSW Lavender Bay, NSW Canberra, ACT Mackay, QLD Narrabri, NSW Ermington, NSW Brighton le Sands, NSW Alice Springs, NT Cooma North, NSW Mackay, QLD North Mackay, QLD Coffs Harbour, NSW Lyneham, ACT Lugarno, NSW Vermont, VIC West Beach, SA New Gisborne, VIC Perth, WA Queenscliff, VIC Turner, ACT Waverton, NSW NHTP

257

Survey Informants

258

Bill L Bill R Bill SF Bill Y Birra R Blair S Bob B Bob C Bob F Bob L Bob N Bob S Bob S Bob S Bobbie L Brad C Brenda W Bria T Brian & Nancy S Brian E Bronwyn M Bruce & Joan M Bruce B Bruce D Bruce G Bryan M Burnie N CF CL Caitlin H Carol B Carolyn B Carolyn Z Catherine McD Catherine W Cathy D Cathy Cecily R Charles S Charlie L Cherie G Cherry C Chris B Chris H Chris L Chris P Chris Christine H Christine L Christine P Christine R Christopher W

North Sydney, NSW Red Cliffs, VIC Chifley, NSW Clare, SA Toowoomba, QLD Williamstown, VIC Maroubra, NSW East Fremantle, WA Melbourne, VIC Mackay, QLD Mt Pleasant, WA Bonalbo, NSW Empire Bay, NSW Nth Mackay QLD Terrey Hills, NSW NHTP Perth, WA Brisbane, QLD Quirindi, NSW Sylvania, NSW Balmain, NSW Como, NSW Latham, ACT Narrabri, NSW Weetangera, ACT Swan Hill, VIC Ringwood, VIC Macquarie, ACT Nubeena, TAS Campbell, ACT Werribee, VIC Nyngan, NSW Newport, NSW Grafton, NSW Wellington, NZ Sans Souci, NSW NHTP Ashfield, NSW Fremantle, WA Sydney, NSW Brisbane, QLD Box Hill, VIC NHTP Carlingford, NSW Brisbane, QLD Pearcedale, VIC Engadine, NSW Montagu Bay, TAS Mackay, QLD Mackay, QLD Ramsgate, NSW Mona Vale, NSW

Ciem D Clarice N Clifford D Colin O Colin W Colline G Connie C Conrad P Coral T Craig L Craig S DA DR DR Dallas F Damien C Damien C Damien W Dan R Danae B Daniel G Danielle G Daphne T Darren C David B David B David C David C David C David J David K David K David M David S David T David V Dawn L Deborah G Deborah S Debra W Des A Desmond C Diane and Ron M Dianne M Dick W Don H Don McD Don R Donald F Dorothy F

Weetangera, ACT Castle Crag, NSW South Mackay, QLD Killara, NSW Eastwood, NSW NHTP NHTP Rockhampton, NSW Dolan’s Bay, NSW Richmond, NSW Queanbeyan, NSW Dolan’s Bay, NSW Melbourne, VIC NHTP Campbell, ACT Melbourne, VIC Sunbury, VIC Potts Point, NSW Glen Waverley, VIC Cairns, QLD Canberra, ACT Randwick, NSW Hazelbrook, NSW Mackay, QLD Canberra, ACT Warwick Farm, NSW Duffy, ACT Fisher, ACT NHTP Scottsdale, TAS Adelaide, SA Wanniassa, ACT Greenwich, NSW Mackay, QLD Coogee, NSW Mackay, QLD Sydney, NSW Perth, WA Perth, WA Carina Place, QLD Lower Templestowe, VIC Como, WA Lesmurdie, WA Strathmore, VIC King River, WA Mitcham, SA Mont Albert, VIC Glen Waverley, VIC Wauchope, NSW Eight Mile Plains, QLD

Mildura, VIC Bentleigh, VIC Yass, NSW Mawson, ACT Killara, NSW Cottesloe, WA Cabramatta, NSW Michelago, NSW Lane Cove, NSW NHTP Coffs Harbour, NSW Wollongong, NSW Felixstow, SA Narrabri, NSW Mackay, QLD Kerang, VIC Chapman, ACT Nerang, QLD Albury, NSW Parramatta, NSW NHTP Bayswater North, VIC Mackay, QLD Red Cliffs, VIC Perth, WA Gold Coast, QLD Gracemere, QLD Belmont, VIC Perth, WA Gerringong, NSW Mitcham, VIC Mont Albert, VIC NHTP Capertee, NSW Echuca, VIC Durack, QLD Belmore, NSW Duntroon, ACT Melbourne, VIC Loftus, NSW Gooloogong, NSW Gawler East, SA Griffith, NSW Collingwood, VIC Holsworthy, NSW Emu Plains, NSW Beecroft, NSW Willoughby, NSW Gladesville, NSW Sydney, NSW Canberra, ACT Rylstone, NSW

George M George W Georgina T Gerald W Geraldine R Gill C Gina A Glen Glenda E Glenys H Glyn P Gordon M Gordon R Graham B Graham G Graham G Graham H Graham S Grant R Greg F Greg H Greg H Greg M Greg R Greg S Gregory M Gregory S Gwen B HD Harold J Hayley S Hazel A Hazel K HBW Heather L Heather L Heather Helen B Helen C Helen L S Helen M Helen M Helen McC Helen W Herbert S Hilary E Huia P Hyacinth M Ian H Ian I Ian J

NHTP Macmasters Beach, NSW Mackay, QLD Woollahra, NSW Glen Iris, VIC Brisbane, QLD Allawah, NSW Mt Gambier, SA Bungendore, NSW Cobden, VIC Raglan, NZ Warrawee, NSW Mosman, NSW Avalon, NSW Gracemere, QLD Merrijig, VIC Springvale, VIC Melbourne, VIC Baulkham Hills, NSW Nerang, QLD Newcastle, NSW Glen Innes, NSW Elsternwick, VIC Everton Hills, QLD Blakehurst, NSW Elsternwick, VIC Coburg, VIC NHTP Kerang, VIC Runaway Bay, QLD Baynton, VIC Koumala, QLD Chermside, QLD Narrabeen, NSW Adelaide, SA NHTP Mackay, QLD O’Sullivans Beach, SA Norman Park, QLD Pearl Beach, NSW Brisbane, QLD Highton, VIC Kenmore, QLD Kenmore, QLD Wynnum West, QLD Annandale, NSW Esperance, WA Cathcart, NSW Carlingford, NSW Kangaroo Flat, VIC Armidale, NSW

Survey Informants

Dorothy M Dot H Doug A Doug F Douglas McD Drew J Dudley M Duncan O DWR EP ES Edwin G Egan L Elaine J Elise A Eliza S Elizabeth J Emily F Emma O Eric A Eric B Eric G Erika H Ernest R Evan H Evan S Fay G Fay K Fiona McK Fiona W Frank P Frank P Frank T Frank VL Fred B Fred H Gabrielle C Gabrielle C Gabrielle E Garry H Gary & Anne J Gary B Gary JB Gary O Gavin M Gavin Y Geoff G Geoff M Geoff R Geoff T Geoff W Geoffrey M

259

Survey Informants

260

Ian K Ian P Ian P Ian S.H Inez & Colin W Irene G Isabel D JG JR JS JW Jacinta K Jack M Jack M Jack M Jackie D Jackson M Jacqueline H Jacqueline H Jacqueline M James B James B James C James C James H James M James M James M James P Jan B Jan B Jan B Jan B Jan D Jan E Jan K Jan Mc Jan P Jan S Jan S Jane H Jane L Jane McG Jane Janelle J Janet C Janet W Janette C Janice P Janie S Jean B Jean D Jean G

Canberra, ACT Huntingdale, VIC Main Beach, QLD Carlingford, NSW Pearl Beach, NSW Bardwell Valley, NSW Mackay, QLD West Ryde, NSW Drummoyne, NSW Red Hill, ACT Childers, QLD NHTP Brisbane, QLD Brookfield, QLD Humpty Doo, NT Wangaratta, VIC Nth Lambton, NSW Bridgetown, WA Kew, VIC Ormond, VIC Lismore, NSW Fairy Meadow, NSW Ascot Vale, VIC New Lambton, NSW Tuart Hill, WA Cottesloe, WA Eastwood, NSW Newcastle, NSW Darwin, NT Killcare Heights, NSW NHTP Pearce, ACT Perth, WA Blaxland, NSW Bruce, ACT Albury, NSW Seymour, VIC Westbrook, QLD Brisbane, QLD Forbes, NSW Sydney, NSW Singleton, NSW Camperdown, NSW Gold Coast, QLD Taylors Lakes, VIC Williamstown, VIC Roleystone, WA Canberra, ACT Canterbury, VIC Frankston South, VIC Buderim, QLD NHTP Harbord, NSW

Jean W Jeff B Jeff K Jennie P Jennie S Jennifer C Jennifer L Jenny H Jenny N Jessica C Jessica C Jill G Jim E Jim M Jim S Jim V Jo H Joan M Joan W Jodie F Joe C Joeleen S John & Judy H John A John A John B John B PT John B John B John C John C John C John CSW John D John D John D John F John F John H John H John L John L John M John M John M John M John Mac John McG John McG John McQ

Peakhurst, NSW Campbell, ACT Sydney, NSW Kempsey, NSW Walgett, NSW Avondale Heights, VIC Warrimoo, NSW Albert Park, VIC Largs North, SA Mackay, QLD North Mackay, QLD Weetangera, ACT Bungendore, NSW Balmain, NSW Eschol Park, NSW Eastwood, NSW Flinders, SA Como, NSW North Balwyn, VIC Mittagong, NSW Mona Vale, NSW Mackay, QLD Loganholme, QLD Cessnock, NSW Killara, NSW Orange, NSW Cargo, NSW Launceston, TAS Davidson, NSW Western Creek, ACT Coogee, NSW Ferny Grove, QLD Sans Souci, NSW Warrawee, NSW Armidale, VIC Sydney, NSW Tura Beach, NSW Randwick, NSW Yarralumla, ACT Southbank, VIC West Lakes, SA NHTP Pymble, NSW Mapleton, QLD Milton, NSW North Rocks, NSW Summerland Point, NSW Alderley, QLD Camperdown, NSW Sutherland, NSW Balgownie, NSW

June R June S Justin J Karen B Karen B Kat W Kate D Kate F Kate H Kate H Kate N Kate S Kate W Kath B Katherine S Katie H Katie H Katie M Katie S Katrina T Kay O Kaye T KB Keith B Keith M

Bargara, QLD Warranwood, VIC Berry, NSW Geelong, VIC Victoria Park, WA Crows Nest, NSW Kew, VIC Mulgrave, VIC Grays Point, QLD Hurstville, NSW Dolan’s Bay, NSW Gunnedah, NSW NHTP Pearce, ACT Mumbannar, VIC Eastwood, NSW Mona Vale, NSW Randwick, NSW NHTP Buderim, QLD Chapman, ACT Blackburn, VIC Burwood, QLD Tarro, NSW Mount Barker, SA NHTP Summerland Point, NSW Briar Hill, VIC Caringbah, NSW Canberra, ACT NHTP Maylands, SA Stewarts River, NSW NHTP Newcastle, NSW Berringer, NSW Wollongong, NSW Hobart, TAS Capalaba, QLD Stewarts River, NSW Pearce, ACT Melbourne, VIC Brunswick East, VIC Melbourne, VIC Mackay, QLD Milperra, NSW Mackay, QLD Como, WA Traralgon, VIC Leichhardt, NSW Newcastle West, NSW Coorparoo, QLD

Keith S Ken B & Julie D Ken I Kerri F Kerry & John M Kerry D Kevin F Kevin M Kevin McD Kim E Kirstin H Kristie H Kristina W Krysten H Kursat Y Kylie W Kylie W Kylie W Kyrsten H Lana M Larissa D Laura C Lauren M Lawrence M Lawry & Megan D Leah T Leanne G Leisha M Leone M Leonie H Les H Les M Lesley D Liane L Linda B Lindsay E Lisa B Lisa B Liz B Lori C Lorraine A Lorraine H Lorraine L Loyd J Luke S LV & MJ H Lydia M Lyn M Lyn S Lyn S Lynda F Lynn & David T

Coffs Harbour, NSW Byawatha, VIC O’Connor, ACT Mordialloc, VIC Alexander Heights, WA Sabrina, QLD NHTP Newton, SA Dunkeld, NSW Moonee Beach, NSW Tweed Heads, NSW Strathdownie, VIC NHTP Wallsend, NSW Istanbul, Turkey Tamworth, NSW Bathurst, NSW Wembley, WA Newcastle, NSW Sydney, NSW Julia Creek, QLD Sydney, NSW NHTP Boronia, VIC Mackay, QLD Tyntynder South, VIC Red Cliffs, VIC NHTP Goulburn, NSW Dargaville, NZ Wanniassa, ACT Roseville, NSW The Patch, VIC Perth, WA Mackay, QLD Dromana, VIC Cairns, QLD Wangaratta, VIC Greenwich, NSW Westleigh, NSW Wendouree, VIC Mitcham, SA Hornsby, NSW Launceston, TAS Geelong, VIC Lyneham, ACT North Sydney, NSW Hyde Park, SA Sarina Beach, QLD Stockton, NSW Launching Place, VIC Coogee, NSW

Survey Informants

John O John O John P John S John S John S John S John S John T John T John T John T John W Jon B Jonathan P Jonathan W Joseph C Josh C Josh C Joy McM Joyce C Joyce K Judith H Judy L Julie R Julie-Anne O’H June N

261

Survey Informants

Lynn L Lynne D MK MM Melanie H Melanie O Malcolm L Malcolm W Mandy A Manie K Maree R Margaret & Brian Y Margaret A Margaret A Margaret C Margaret F Margaret G Margaret H Margaret H Margaret M Margaret M Margaret M Margaret M Margaret N Margaret O Margaret R Margaret S Marian J Marianne C Marion M Marion M Marion S Marjorie L Mark A Mark F Mark K Mark W Martin C Martin W Martin W Martine S Mary B Mary H Mary J Mary J Mary P Mary T Maryanne B Maryanne Y Matt C Matthew D

262

Ballarat, VIC NHTP Warragamba, NSW Rose Bay, TAS Brisbane, QLD Sydney, NSW Ashfield, NSW Brisbane, QLD Potts Point, NSW Forest Lake, QLD NHTP NHTP Cessnock, NSW Rivett, ACT Roseville, NSW Randwick, NSW Wamberal, NSW Carlingford, NSW Cockatoo, VIC Bridgeman Downs, QLD Brisbane, QLD Manly, NSW Orchard Hills, NSW Lyons, ACT Katoomba, NSW West Ryde, NSW Stanmore, NSW Hillsdale, NSW Port Macquarie, NSW Pymble, NSW Stanthorpe, QLD Cowra, NSW NHTP, VIC Killara, NSW Brisbane, QLD Somerville, VIC Canberra, ACT Brisbane, QLD NHTP Kensington, London Sydney, NSW Townsville, QLD Seaforth, NSW Hawker, ACT NHTP Waitara, NSW Noble Park, VIC Normanhurst, NSW Collaroy, NSW Narrabeen, NSW Sydney, NSW

Matthew H Matthew L Matthew P Maureen D Maureen K Maureen P Maurice C Mel M Melanie O Melinda R Melissa G Meredith C Mhairi N Michael C Michael C Michael F Michael H Michael M Michael McK Michael N Michael P Michael S Michelle H Michelle L Michelle S Mike G Mike M Mineko A Moina M Monica J Monique P Murray B Murray F Murray H Murray J Murray J Murray S Murray W Myra B Nancy E Naomi B Naomi P Naone C Natalie B Nathan C Neale K Neil T Neville H Neville P Nick M Nicolas J

Canberra, ACT Baulkham Hills, NSW Adelaide, SA Thirroul, NSW Adelaide, SA Thirroul, NSW Dubbo, NSW Brisbane, QLD NHTP Randwick, NSW Kirrawee, NSW Turramurra, NSW Maude, NSW Manly, NSW Margaret River, WA Weston, ACT Kew, VIC Point Cook, VIC NHTP Lyons, ACT Faulconbridge, NSW Reid, ACT NHTP NHTP Sydney, NSW North Mackay, QLD Humpty Doo, NT North Turramurra, NSW St Helens, TAS Narrabri, NSW Cherrybrook, NSW Slacks Creek, QLD Gold Coast, QLD Hawker, ACT Canberra, NSW Toowoomba, QLD Brisbane, QLD Camperdown, NSW Aberdeen, NSW Oatlands, TAS Woy Woy, NSW Katoomba, NSW Narrabundah, ACT Hawthorn, VIC NHTP Brisbane, QLD Chambers Flat, QLD Drummoyne, NSW Perth, WA Brisbane, QLD Sydney, NSW

Pauline M Perry B Peta V Peter & Mary M Peter & Win H Peter & Yvonne K Peter B Peter C Peter C Peter C Peter D Peter D Peter E Peter H Peter I Samantha R Peter J Peter P Peter P

Narrabri, NSW Singleton, NSW Adelaide, SA Bradbury, NSW Melbourne, VIC Dubbo, NSW Stockton, NSW Moore Park, QLD Clayfield, QLD Launceston, TAS Waterfall, NSW New Lambton, NSW Hay, NSW Vaucluse, NSW Narara, NSW Hurstville, NSW Balgowlah, NSW Hazelbrook, NSW Albany, WA East Preston, VIC Warrnambool, VIC Belmont, VIC Belrose, NSW Griffith, ACT Charters Towers, QLD NHTP Warradale, SA Holder, ACT Glenmore Park, NSW Mackay, QLD Mackay, QLD North Tamborine, QLD Warradale, SA St James, WA Byron Bay, NSW Wahroonga, NSW Bungendore, NSW Keiraville, NSW South Arm, TAS Wagga Wagga, NSW Bunbury, WA Sydney, NSW Mudgeeraba, QLD Sydney, NSW Springbrook, QLD Miranda, NSW Boggabri, NSW Melbourne, VIC Narrabri, NSW Mackay, QLD Rose Bay, NSW

Peter P Peter R Peter S Phil I Phil T Philip H Phillip T Phillipa C Priscilla E PTF G R&AM RC RD RES RG RJF RM RTG Rachael S Rachel B Rachel B Rachel F Rachel S Raelene F Ralph G Ray W Rebecca F Reginald P Rian S Richard B Richard M Richard R Rick D Rick H Rob B Rob C Rob O’R Robbie B Robbie G Robert & Valma L Robert B Robert C Robert C Robert H Robert J Robert M Robert M Robert P Robert S Robyn F Robyn H Rod C

Wagga Wagga, NSW Scarborough, QLD Buderim, QLD Paddington, NSW Neutral Bay, NSW Toorak, VIC Neutral Bay, NSW Coogee, NSW Strathfield, NSW Neutral Bay, NSW Sherwood Cres, Canberra, ACT Blaxland, NSW Wavell Heights, QLD Pakenham, VIC Woollahra, NSW Point Clare, NSW Horsham, VIC Sippy Down, QLD Darwin, NT Mackay, QLD Belair, SA Randwick, NSW Chifley, NSW Laidley, QLD Lambton, NSW Mackay, QLD Kensington, NSW Mackay, QLD Canberra, ACT North Sydney, NSW Canberra, ACT Melbourne, VIC Townsville, QLD Woodend, VIC East Fremantle, WA Holland Park, QLD Woodend, VIC Drummoyne, NSW Wodonga, VIC Macquarie, ACT East Fremantle, WA Potts Point, NSW Kambah, ACT Brisbane, NSW Hamilton, QLD Richmond, NSW Somersby, NSW Concord West, NSW Campbell, ACT Leichhardt, NSW French’s Forest, NSW

Survey Informants

Nicole J Nigel C Nikki M Nina B Nina G Nora M Joan B Norman S Oliva H PT Pam B Pamela H Pamela K Pat G Pat W Patricia D Patricia M Patricia W Patricia W Patrick C Patrick C Patty C Paul C Paul G Paul H Paul K Paul M Paul V Paul W Paula L Corrine C Pauline L

263

Survey Informants

264

Rod C Rod L Rod McN Rod McN Rod N Rod R Rodney C Roger C Ron B Ron C Ron C Ron G Rory H Ros G Rosalie T Rosemary P Ross & Narelle K Ross M Ross P Rowan J Russ G Russell C Russell S Russell S Ruth M Ruth T SB SL SP Sally H Sam & Muff N Samantha B Samantha W Sara W Sarah H Sarah H Sarah H Sarah R Sarah S Sasha F Scott C Scott M Sharee R Sharon R Sharonna C Sharron P Shirley B Shirley W Simon S Sonya D Sophie L

Merewether, NSW Currumbin Valley, QLD Dallas, VIC NHTP Melton, VIC Maroubra, NSW Mosman, QLD Brighton, VIC North Shore, VIC Lugarno, NSW Melbourne, VIC Burpengary, QLD Yungaburra, QLD North Mackay, QLD Clayton, VIC Koolunga, SA Sydney, NSW Canberra, ACT Cessnock, NSW Sydney, NSW Irymple, VIC Blakehurst, NSW East Gosford, NSW Mumbannar, VIC Narrogin, WA Grays Point, NSW Gisborne, VIC North Geelong, VIC Kambah, ACT Narrabri, NSW Narrabri, NSW Mackay, QLD Mackay, QLD Narrabri, NSW Echuca, VIC Campbell, ACT Echuca, VIC Camperdown, NSW Melbourne, VIC Sydney, NSW Bondi Junction, NSW Canterbury, NSW Merredin, WA Ashburton, VIC Randwick, NSW Canberra, ACT Echuca, VIC Lane Cove, NSW Yass, NSW Dolan’s Bay, NSW Paddington, NSW

Stacey A Stan S Stanley C Stanley G Stephen A Stephen B Steve P Steven L Steven W Strath S Stuart H Sue M Susan C Susan D Susan M Susan N Sybil C Syd W Sylvia S Tara W TE & HT N Terry S Terryl F Thelma M Tim W Timothy S Timothy S Timothy W Tobias Y Todd F Todd L Tony F Tracey J Troy H Trudy H Una K VD Valerie H Valerie M P Vernita Z Veronica T Victoria M Vx-er WD WH Warren B Warren F Warren L Warwick Mc

Devonport, TAS Mt Hawthorn, WA Gracemere, QLD Carlingford, NSW Brisbane, QLD NHTP Barrack Heights, NSW Battery Point, TAS Kambah, ACT Burren Junction, NSW Canberra, ACT Gwynneville, NSW Bunbury, WA NHTP Potts Point, NSW Tura Beach, NSW Carrington, NSW Peakhurst, NSW Melbourne, VIC Blacks Beach, QLD Blacktown, NSW North Sylvania, NSW Merewether, NSW Floreat Park, WA Putney, NSW NHTP Sydney, NSW Valentine, NSW Clarkson, WA Mackay, QLD NHTP Sydney, NSW Mackay, QLD Randwick, NSW Sydney, NSW Narrabeen, NSW Peakhurst, NSW Griffith, ACT Salisbury QLD Box Hill, VIC Alberton, QLD NHTP NHTP Peakhurst, NSW Collaroy, NSW Nth Ryde, NSW Lilli Pilli, NSW New Gisborne, VIC NHTP

Epping, NSW Bundaberg, QLD Mitcham, VIC Moura, QLD Pearce, ACT

William C William J William S William W Winsome P

Stockton, NSW Longueville, NSW Salamander Bay, NSW Cromer, NSW Bellevue Heights, SA

Katherine W Kris I Kirstyn Mac Mal P Margaret F Matthew C Maurice G Mick M Michelle L Paul W Peter I Richard L

NHTP Balmain, NSW NHTP Footscray, VIC Nerang, QLD Sydney, NSW Coburg, VIC Point Cook, VIC Caringbah, NSW Glenbrook, NSW NHTP Baulkham Hills, NSW Canberra, ACT Faulconbridge, NSW Mt Hawthorn, WA Southbank, VIC Clare, SA Warranwood, Vic Adelaide, SA Glen Iris, VIC Nar-Nar-Goon, VIC Somerton Park, SA Sydney, NSW Kippa-Ring, QLD NHTP

Further Survey Informants Alison Van D Amanda D Andrew M Andrew P Anne R Barry B Brett T Bran C Chris B Clare H Clare W Craig C Eileen W Evan S Glenys M Grant M Helene C Jacqueline M James H Jennifer M Jill W John H Josh D Julie M Justin K

North Shore, VIC Manly West, NSW Claremont, WA Fremantle, WA Kensington, NSW Sydney, NSW Cairns, QLD Mt Gambier, SA Hawthorn, VIC Annandale, NSW Magill, SA Red Hill, QLD Atherton, QLD NHTP NHTP Sydney, NSW NHTP Dromana, VIC Woolloomooloo, NSW Narrabundah, ACT NHTP Rossmoyne, WA Figtree, NSW Sydney, NSW Kaleen, ACT

Robyn R Rod S Ross B Samantha R Sharon E Sherrin B Stuart G TL Trevor L Victoria H Victoria McF Wendy C Warwick S

Survey Informants

Warwick S Wendy D Wendy W WG & MP M Wilfred C

The author also acknowledges the assistance of informants recorded as ‘anonymous’, the Simpson Prize winners, and all participants in the 2005 pilgrimage to Crete and Gallipoli hosted by Veterans and Friends of the Australian 6th Division and Allsun Tours.

265

Index

266

Aboriginal people 201, 204 accommodation xix, 73 Adam, Fred 120 Adam, Sgt 7 Adelaide cemetery 107 African troops, memorial to 48 Ainsworth, Fred 126 Aitkins, Charles 42 ‘Alby R’ 161 ‘Alex’ 100 Alex A. 217 Alford, F. S. 58 Allen, Major Alfred 53, 56 ‘Angela’ 103 Antram, Harry 5 Anzac Cove, see Gallipoli Anzac Day at Gallipoli xviii, 184 celebration in London 150 change in significance 214 indigenous responses 201, 204 pilgrimages to memorials 31 Anzac Fellowship of Women 31 Anzac to Amiens 207 Anzacs, identifying bodies as 53, 54 Ari Burnu cemetery 4 Armour, Edgar 28 Armstrong, Miss L. E. 73 Ataturk, Kemal 115, 187 ‘Audrey’ 111 Australia military heritage 156, 159 national identity 199, 201 nationally organised pilgrimages 84, 88, 141 Australia House 72 Australian Historical Mission, duties at Gallipoli 34 Australian Memorial, see Villers-Bretonneux Australian Travel Service 73 Australian War Memorial

battlefield tourism 102 correspondence with 16 pilgrimages organised by 155 Australians, French attitudes to 96, 114 avenues of honour 29 backpackers, pilgrimages by 188 Baker, Herbert 42 Bantoft, Reg 149 Baradine 91 Barclay, Private J. E. 51 Barnwell, Private 7 battlefields landscapes 116, 121 reclamation of 94, 146, 147 topography of 160, 161 tourism to 64, 67, 102, 139 Beach cemetery 134 Bean, C. E. W. 207 duties at Gallipoli 34, 41 on Where Australians Rest 20 Beatrice E. 216 Belgium, see Flanders; Western Front belonging, sense of 201 belongings, return of 22, 24 Bessie S. 216 Biggs, Reg 151 Birdwood, General 133 Blacksell, W. R. 6 Blakemore, Percy 5 blame, allocating 162 Blin, Georges 149 Bloomfield, Reginald, Cross of Sacrifice 32 Bolton, Bill 9 bonding 113 Bowden, Dan 136 Bowen, Dorothea 74 Bradley, Walter 12 Brice, Miss H. H. 72 Brickhill, Elsie 94 Bristow, Rex 149

Cahill, Fred 148, 152 cemeteries Adelaide 107 Ari Burnu 4 Beach 134 Brookfield 50 Chatby 41 Courtney’s Post 127 creation of 34, 60 Daours 182 Etaples 47 evidence of journeys to 78 Franvillers 158 German 148 headstones for 43, 45 in Malta 46 Langemark 114 lectures on 17 Lijsenthoek 19 memorials in 27 Mount Scopus 92 Plugge’s 39 standardised 41 Walkers Ridge 116 Western Front 208 cenotaphs 28 censorship of distressing details 9 Challenor, George 26 Chatby cemetery 41 Chauvel, General 66 children, journeys by xxiii Chunuk Bair bodies at 35 ceremony at 129 pilgrimage to 69, 76

unveiling of memorial 131 Clarke, A. C. 7 Clarke, Emily 14 Clarke, Major Lowther 86, 87, 90 Clarke, Private 10 Clayton, P. B. 76, 78 clergymen, presence at graveside 12 ‘Clifford’ 185 Clune, Frank 135, 138 Cole, Mrs 80 Colley-Priest, Langford 10 Comb, Mrs F. E. 45 commemoration 95, 175, 186 commodification of history 195 Commonwealth War Graves Commission, see War Graves Commission communitas 112, 121, 175 among veterans 166 compensatory presence 50 Conan Doyle, Arthur 21 concession fare requests 64 connectedness 180 Cook, Major A. E. 46 coronation (George VI) pilgrimage 140, 143 Courier Mail 173, 187 Courtney’s Post cemetery 127 Cowie, Private 46 Croser family 4 Crosier, Corporal 10 Cross of Sacrifice 32 Crosses of Sacrifice 95 Crowe, Louisa 6 cult of remembrance 95, 98 Daours cemetery 182 ‘Dave’ 176, 177 Davidson, Private 46 Davison, Graeme 104 dawn service at Gallipoli 113 see also Anzac Day , Day, W. J. 96 Deakin, Elizabeth 66, 67 Deakin, Sister Lucy 14 Deakin, Vera 6, 7 deaths in battle 4, 8 delusions from grief 216 Denton, Victor 28 desecration fears 36, 37 diaries ‘Alex’ 100 ‘Erika’ 174 of serving personnel 10

Index

Britain, attitudes to Australians 116 see also England British Army 35, 163, 200 British Australasian 71 criticises War Office 56 lists pilgrimages 69, 71 British Empire Service League 84 British Legion 140 Brookfield cemetery 50 Bruce, Stanley fails to support Redfearn scheme 88 invited to join pilgrimage 85, 95 visits Gallipoli 130 Bullecourt, memorial at 56, 168 Burbidge, Maurice 50 Burnett, Sir John 39 Burns, Mrs 22

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Index

Dodson, Frederick Allen 24 Doughty-Wylie, Charles Hotham 47 Doughty-Wylie, Lady 47 Duchess of Richmond 133 Eceabar 195 ecological imperialism 40 Edwards, ‘Doc’ 73 El Maghdaba 82, 83 ‘Elise’ 178 Ellen N. 216 Elmes, Dorothy 158 Emma H. 216 emotional catharsis 121 ‘Empire pilgrimages’ 131 Empire Service League 84 England, see also Britain Anzac Day celebration in 150 battlefield tourism from 64 mass burials in 46 officers from resented 116 pilgrimages from 131 epitaphs for Hugh McColl 80 for missing men 52 suggested by relatives 48 ‘Erika’ 174, 176, 186 ´ Etaples cemetery 47 exhumation for reburial 52 for robbery 37 of Mervyn Higgins 83

268

family history 101, 104, 109, 178 military involvement 156 family pilgrimages xxii, 63, 84, 100, 121 fellowship, see communitas Fenn, Rev A. F. 46 Fisher, Lizzie 29 Flanders, see also Western Front attitudes to Australians 96 battlefield reclamation 94 floral tributes poppies 118 wreaths 20, 30 Fox, Janet 6 France, see also Western Front attitudes to Australians 96 Frances V. 216 Franvillers cemetery 158 Fromelles, mass grave at 213 Fuggle, Mrs 21

Gallipoli 1965 pilgrimage , 125 access to closed 134 Anzac Day at xviii battle conditions 145 cemetery construction at 36, 41 changes to landscape 127 dawn service 113 demands to cede to Australia 38 difficulties getting to 130 gender differences in response to 205, 206 marketing to Australians 195 personal impressions of 188 scenery of 160 souvenirs from 68 students’ impressions of 174, 176, 181 United Services Association Tour 93 Gallipoli (film) 117, 193, 196, 203 ‘Gallipoli Ship’ 91 gardens at Gallipoli 40, 127 battlefields returned to 94 of remembrance 43 Garraway, Edward Emmerson 70 Garraway, H. Emmerson 70 Geddes, Private 9 gender angle, see men; women genealogy, see family history George V, grave pilgrimage by 23, 66, 84 George VI 140, 143 German cemeteries 148, 186 ghost stories 21, 118 Gibson, C. S. 141 Gilbert, Caroline 29 Gilbert, Dorothy 31 Goddard, Rolly 149 Government headstones 44, 48 grammar of gesture 182 Grave at El Maghdaba, The 83 graves descriptions of 25 initial marking of 10 photographs of 15 socioeconomic differences in 80 Graves Registration Unit 15, 36 Greenan, John 72 grief 96, 213, 216, 219 Grieve, Louis 129 Grimwade family 78 guilt feelings 159

identification of bodies 53, 54 Imperial Ex-Service Association 86 Imperial War Graves Commission, see War Graves Commission indigenous responses 201, 204 Inglis, Ken 125 Inquiry Bureau, see Red Cross insanity, from grief 216, 219 inscriptions, see epitaphs Inwin, Edwin 11 Irving, Gertie 11 Irving, Lieutenant 11 Irwin, Les 148 Irwin, Private George 210 Irwin, Sarah 210 Jalland, Pat 21, 71 Jeffries, Mrs J. 98 ‘Jenny’ xviii, xx ‘John’ 104

John H. 216 Johnstone, W. R. 50 Jones, Mrs 5 journalism, see media Jubilee Tour of Gallipoli 148, 154

Index

Halloran, Horace 45 Hardy, W. D. 7 Harrison, George 23 Hay, Mrs Snowden 71, 89 headstones, production of 43, 45 Heather 190, 193 Henderson, Margaret 26 Henderson, Sgt 26 Higgins, H. B. 81, 84 Higgins, Mervyn 81, 84 historical sensibility 101 history, commodified 195, 199, 201 Hobbs, Talbot 130 Hobler, George 71 Holy Land, battlefield pilgrimages 69, 92, 126 honour rolls 27, 33 Horatio H. 216 Hotel Anzacs xix Howe, Hedley Vickers 35 Hughes, C. E. 86 Hughes, Colonel Cyril 40, 134 escort duties 147 generosity of 68 in War Graves Registration Unit 37 Hughes, William Morris authorises continuing search for missing 58 requests title to Anzac area 38 suggests cemetery size increase 59 Huish, Sir Raymond 128, 129 hunger for meaning xx

‘Kate F.’ 197 Keating, Paul 60 Kennedy, Frank 152 Kenyon, Sir Frederick 42 Khedival Mail 68 Kipling, Rudyard 42 Kooris, see Aboriginal people Laffin, John 51, 207 Lambert, George 35, 36 Lancastria 133 landscapes 116, 121 see also battlefields Langemark German cemetery 114 Laura L. 216 Leahy, Private 9 lectures, on war cemeteries 17 Lijsenthoek cemetery 19 Lone Pine cemetery at 116 memorial at 56, 88 mood swings at 191 service at 188 United Services Association Tour 93 unofficial unveiling 88, 93, 94 Longstaff, Edward, The Vigil 21 Longstaff, Will 97 Menin Gate at Midnight 21 Lord, William 59 Low, E. G. 51 Luttrell, Arthur 64 Luttrell, Emily 64 Lutyens, Edwin design for French cemeteries 42 London Memorial 28 on epitaphs 49 Stone of Remembrance 32 Lyall, Brian 3, 4 Lyall. Mrs 3, 4 Lyons government 141 ‘Mac’ 105, 113 Mackay, Alan 11, 15 Mackay, Colin 11 Mackay North State High School 173, 187 madness, from grief 216, 219 Malta, cemeteries in 46 Mangen, Father 92

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Index

270

manhood 168, 205, 206 Margaret C. 217 Martin, J. H. 84 Martin, J. L. 147 ‘Mary’ 111 ‘Mary Jane’ 219 Massey, William 38 Maude, Sir Stanley 47 McAdam, Jane and Margaret 76 McAllister, Private 51 McCaffrey, Private A. J. 50 McColl, Hugh 80 McDonald, Rev 71 McGlashen, Edward 21 McIntyre, R. E. 50 McKernan, Michael 103 McLean, Major 16 McMillan, Jane 64 media Courier Mail 173, 187 in Anzac Day at Gallipoli 184 on United Services Association tour 92 medical staff, see nursing staff mementos, see souvenirs memorials, see also Lone Pine; Menin Gate avenues of honour 29 Bullecourt 56, 168 Chunuk Bair 131 honour rolls 27, 33 in Adelaide 32 in cemeteries 27 Mont St Quentin 56 names on 30, 55 Thiepval 95 to African troops 48 to officers 47 to unknown dead 60 to women 31 Turkish, blown up 138 Villers-Bretonneux 56, 107, 143 Western Front 95 memory objects 16, 22, 24 men and manhood 168, 205, 206 narratives by 108 response to Gallipoli 205, 206 Menin Gate 95, 96, 97 Menin Gate at Midnight 21, 97 Menzies, R. G. 144 Middle East, pilgrimages through 69, 92, 126 ‘Mike’ 106, 188

Miles, Sergeant 50 military authorities, see British Army; War Office military heritage 156, 159 Millington, Tasman escort duties 134, 147 generosity of 69 hospitality of 130 in War Graves Registration Unit 37 missing men, see also unknown dead commemoration of 52, 60 continuing search for 58 correspondence about 6 in 1937: 147 Mitchell, George 85 Molyneux, Reverend 76, 78 monarchy vs. republicanism 164 Monash, General Sir John on Wattle Tribute 89 photographs grave 17 support for mass pilgrimage 66 Mont St Quentin, memorial at 56 monuments, see memorials Mount Scopus cemetery 92 mourning, see grief Mullineux, Padre M. 17 Munro, Annie 64 Munro Ferguson, Lady 8 Mutton, Sister 133 ‘Myra’ 118 names on memorials 30, 55 nationally organised pilgrimages 84, 88, 141 nationhood xxii, 214 Nek, Indigenous presentation at 203 Nelson, Lieutenant J. W. 51 New Zealand ceremony at Chunuk Bair 129 pilgrimage from, to Chunuk Bair 69 requests title to Anzac area 38 troops at Chunuk Bair 35 Nobby (Qld) 28 nursing staff excluded from national pilgrimage 143 letters from 13 view of manhood 168 obituaries 24, 27 O’Connor, Jack 154 offerings 118, 167

Page, Sir Earle 143 Pam, H. G. 50 Partridge, Sgt F. L. 50 party atmosphere 193, 196, 207 Patterson, Private 9 personal messages 119 Phillips, Major 72, 74 Phillips, Robert 9 photographs of graves 15 of mourning 210 of pilgrimages 76, 78 Pieta cemetery 46 Pilgrimage Club 140 pilgrimages by families 63, 84, 100, 121 by ship 69 by veterans 125, 154 history of xix literature about 18 nationally organised 84, 88, 141 of 1929: 133 of 1934: 133 of 1935: 131 of 1965: 150 of 1968: 148, 154 of 1998: 154 United Services Association Tour 90 ‘Yankee pilgrimage’ 87 Pill, Mrs 6 Plugge’s cemetery 39, 187 political issues 95, 98, 162, 186 poppies 118 possessions, return of 22, 24 postwar trauma 159 Pozi`eres Ridge 116 proxy mourners 212 public grief in obituaries 24, 27 Public Record Office Queensland Pictorial 15 Quinn’s Post xviii Rae, Private W. L. 51, 121

Rainsford, Bruce 152 Ralph, Neil 103 Ray, H. W. 118 Read, Peter 119 Reading, Leslie 28 reconciliation with enemy 115, 165, 170 Turkish veterans 137 Red Cross graves decorated by 20 Inquiry Bureau 7 interviews with survivors 9 photographs from 15 Wounded and Missing Bureau 5, 9 Redfearn, Frank 85, 95, 98, 126 relics deceased’s possessions as 23 for Australian War Memorial 34 repatriation of bodies, demands for 45 republicanism 164 research by students 180 Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League, see RSL reverence 189 Richardson, O. F. 50 Robb, L. A. 146, 147 Roberts, Frank 17 Roberts, John Garibaldi 17 RSL asked for travel aid 65 fails to join 1928 pilgrimage 84 pilgrimages organised by 155 response to British call for Australian pilgrims RSSILA scheme, see RSL S, Albert Edward 103 sacrifice, respect for 197 Sailly-le-sac 153 Salvation Army hostels 73 Samson, Matron 63 schoolchildren xxiii, 173, 187 Scott, Private 50 Sellheim, Susan 66 service personnel pilgrimages by xxii, 155, 170 pilgrimages by veterans 125, 154 survey responses 158 shared experience 112, 121 Sharp, C. L. 129 Short, Mr and Mrs 71 Shrapnel Valley 127 shrines to lost family members xxi relics in 23

Index

officers, privileged treatment 44, 46, 48 O’Grady, Sir James 88 Operation Amiens 148, 154 Ormonde 69, 76, 131 ornamentalism 48 O’Shea, Mrs 93, 94 O’Shea, Vincent 93, 94 Overson, Private 63 Oxenham, John 19, 53

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Index

272

siblings, surviving, letters from 11 Simpson’s grave 116, 121 Smith, P. B. 46 Smith’s Weekly 141 ‘Soldiers’ pilgrimage’ 133 Somme offensive imaginative reconstruction of 107 letters written after 8 souvenirs 80 from Gallipoli 68 shops selling 146, 195 spiritualism 21 spirituality 196, 199 St Barnabas Church hostels 73 organises pilgrimages 69 pilgrimages by 131 seeks Australian pilgrims wreaths from 20 Stagg, W. J. 65, 85 standardised graveyards 41 Stella d’Italia 69, 131 Stevenson, Major G. F. 3, 4 Stone of Remembrance 32 students 173, 187, 202 Students Have Their Say 173 suicide through grief 217 surrogate journeys xxi, 3, 33 survey of Anzac pilgrims xx survivors letters from siblings 11 Red Cross interviews with 9 Talbot House 73 Tatterson, Private 50 Tench, George 94 Tench, Hazel 94 The Grave at El Maghdaba 83 The Vigil 21 Thiepval memorial 95 Thomas Cook 67 Tickner, Alice 72 Toc H hostels 73 togetherness, see communitas tourism, see battlefields, tourism to Tournouer, G. de 86, 91 Trantor, Elsie 13 travel agencies, see battlefields, tourism to travellers’ accounts, see pilgrimages tree planting 29 see also gardens Tripp, Hubert 202

trophies, see relics; souvenirs Troubled Scenes 166 Tubb, Major F. H. 19 Tucker, Ella 126 Turks attitude to Gallipoli 164 desecration by feared 36 reconciliation with 137 veterans, meeting with 128, 129, 164 ‘Uncle Albert’ 120 ‘Uncle Clifford’ 174, 176 United Services Association Tour 90, 91 United States 87, 148 unknown dead 19, 60 see also missing men Veitch, Mary 25 Veitch, W. E. ‘Darby’ 25 Venn Brown, Rose 18 veterans, pilgrimages by 125, 154 see also service personnel Victoria Cross winners 49 Vigil, The 21 Villers-Bretonneux attitudes to Australians 97, 99, 114 memorial at 56, 107, 143 visitors’ books 120, 121 comments in 162, 200 destruction of xxi Walder, Daisy 72 Walkers Ridge cemetery 116 Walters, J. C. 92 War Graves Commission charged with care of dead 212 confined to enclaves 134 destroys visitors’ books xxi generosity of 68 in Australia House 72 organisation of 147 plans for Gallipoli 41, 44 Wattle Tribute 89, 90 War Graves Detachment, ceases searching 56 War Graves Registration Unit 15, 36 war memorials, see Australian War Memorial; memorials War Office 15, 36 Graves Registration Unit 15 insensitivity of 174 war work, recognition of 66 Ware, Fabian 43, 59 wasted lives 159, 165

as pilgrims 72 in 1968 pilgrimage 152 narratives by 108 protest against exclusion 143 service personnel 156, 168 war memorial to 31 ‘Wonderful Specially Conducted Inclusive Tour’ 87 wooden crosses marking graves 23 Woods, Private 46 Woolloomooloo wharf gates 30 Wounded and Missing Bureau, see Red Cross wreaths 20, 30

Index

Waters, J. C. 95 Wattle Tribute 88, 90 Western Front 1965 pilgrimage 153 Anzac ceremonies at 185 battle conditions 145 battlefield reclamation 94 battlefield topography 160, 161 battlefield tourism 102 cemeteries on 39 imaginative reconstruction of 107 pilgrimages to 138, 140, 206, 209 reconciliation with enemy 115 students’ impressions of 177, 182 Where Australians Rest 19 Wilkins, George Hubert 35 Windeyer, W. A. 18, 58 ‘Winsome’ 110 Winter, Jay xxi women Anzac Fellowship of Women 31 as daughters 205, 206

Yankee pilgrimage 87 Yarra Bend asylum 217 Young Men’s Christian Association 15, 73 young people xxiii, 173, 187, 188, 202 Ypres, Menin Gate 95, 96, 97 Zimmer, W. H. 16

273