‘In the Shadow of War’: Australian parents and the legacy of loss, 1915–1935

Abstract

Between 1914 and 1918, some 331,000 young male volunteers embarked from Australia to serve in World War I. Almost one in five perished on the battlefields. As over 80 percent of those who enlisted were unmarried, the burden of bereavement fell mainly on the shoulders of ageing parents. Some simply could not cope with the enormity of their loss and took their own lives, while others succumbed to complete physical and psychological collapse, requiring admission to mental asylums. The extent of parental wartime bereavement has mostly been hidden from official histories, but it permanently disabled many Australians. Compounding their psychological turmoil was an imagined trauma, where parents visualised themselves in the trenches amongst the broken and bloodied bodies of their sons. The presence of loss and the permanence of absence was palpable within families, who lived in the shadow of war, long after the Armistice. This article proposes a wider definition of bereavement as imperative if historians are to engage more fully with the multi-faceted experiences of many parents and argues that despite the excellent research conducted by scholars in the field in recent years, the extremities of parental bereavement are still under explored.