A Disenfranchised Grief: Post-war Death and Memorialisation in Australia after the First World War*

Abstract

The 1918 Armistice signalled the end of the First World War, but it did not mark the end of war-related deaths. During the 1920s and 1930s thousands of Australian ex-servicemen died from their war wounds. This article examines families’ experiences of grief and loss as a consequence of post-war death, and considers how these deaths were privately and publicly memorialised. It argues that the kin of the post-war dead constituted a community of mourners that was distinct from the bereaved kin of the 1914–18 dead. It reveals how the grief of the post-war bereaved was disenfranchised within Australia's national public commemorative traditions of war which reified the ‘supreme sacrifice’ of the battlefield dead, but rendered invisible the ‘lingering sacrifice’ of deceased ex-servicemen. By identifying and historicising families’ experiences of post-war death and bereavement, this article asserts the distinctiveness and importance of that history, and demonstrates its capacity to enrich and challenge our understanding of ‘war death’ and patterns of grief and memorialisation after the Great War.