Collecting Women’s Memories: the Australian War Memorial, the next of kin and Great War soldiers’ diaries and letters as objects of memory in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

Historians typically use soldiers’ diaries and letters to validate battlefield experiences. In this article the author interrupts that seamless journey from the battlefield to the archive to the history book, and treats soldiers’ diaries and letters not as texts but objects of memory, as did bereaved relatives during and after the Great War in Australia. Significantly, it was women who tended to come into possession of dead soldiers’ diaries and letters, as they were more often than not the nominated next of kin. Taking as a case‐study a program to collect Great War soldiers’ diaries and letters undertaken by the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s and 1930s, the author explores aspects of the gendered nature of collecting: women’s role in the generational transmission of memory, and their link between personal and national memory, and household/family and archive/institution. This article also invites reconsideration about the nature of historical evidence: are diaries and letters solely texts whose linguistic signs are ‘evidence of experience’ or are they simultaneously material artefacts that offer fresh understandings of women’s lives?