Professor Bruce Scates

Professor Bruce Scates spoke at the second of the public forums:

Federation to the Aftermath of WW1.

His talk focussed on the ongoing consequences of the war for individuals, families and the country in the aftermath of the war.

Audio

Transcription

 

 

I acknowledge that the land I stand on always was and always will be aboriginal country. We gather here tonight to mark and to mourn the centenary of the Great War. A war that we are often told was Australia’s first great military conflict. Well, of course it wasn’t. A long and protracted war of dispossession was fought in this country at an appalling human cost and I think that the need for a just and lasting resolution of that conflict confers on us all a great obligation today, and is something I think our shameful prime minister should take heed of.

In acknowledging country can I begin with an Aboriginal story, an Islander story, one of the many forgotten stories of the Great War. This particular story is one that the team at Monash is working on at the moment and can I take a moment to thank two remarkable young post-graduates students Laura James and Bec Wheatley for all the painstaking work that’s gone into the One Hundred Stories’ project. Most of the publications that Laurel cited there are collaborative endeavours – history should be a collaborative project.

The story we want to tell you tonight comes from Cape Baron Island in Bass Strait just across the water there. In the course of the Great War around half the eligible men there enlisted. Their names 21 names in all, are recorded on the island’s war memorial – it’s a simple bronze plaque set upon a pillar of stone. The records don’t tell us why Private James Maynard went to war. Perhaps as with many indigenous servicemen it was a quest to secure full citizenship or perhaps like many white diggers the hope of travel and adventure or more than likely just the hope of earning a decent wage, a regular wage.

James Maynard was wounded twice in action. In 1917 in Passchendaele and in 1918 in the attack on Hindenburg Line. He was sent home a deeply damaged man to Australia unlike his brothers. William and Frank never returned to Cape Baron Island. Frank was killed in 1916 and is buried at Pozières. William went missing at the Battle of Bullecourt and is missing still. The body of that boy was never recovered from the killing fields. So from the end of the war right through the 1920s, the mother writes time and time again to the military authorities and what does she say. She’s hoping to learn something of William’s fate, she’s longing for a photo of his final resting place, craving something to remember him by. This letter was written in that unsteady hand in 1918. That’s over a year since her son goes missing. Two pocket books, a penny, a halfpenny, two discs with a name and a cross, and one little painted flower, and five postcards that’s all I’ve got of my poor old Will- the long aftermath of war.

Eva Maynard’s letter reminds us that the pain, the grief and unspeakable loss of the Great War was visited upon an entire generation. But of course the war wasn’t the only way that Aboriginal Islander people lost their children. In the 1930s this small devastated community was devastated once again as white authorities relocated children including the children of returned servicemen to white families and white institutions on the mainland. Cape Baron Island was a community laid to waste in the aftermath of war. Let us not forget that. We acknowledge Aboriginal people and equally warmly may I acknowledge you. I am delighted to speak at this forum and to do so besides my friends and colleagues Joy and Val.

I hope to do two things today and I’m not going to do any of this as well as the previous two speakers. First of all I want to put on the hat I wear as a member of the advisory council of the National Archives of Australia. Now I’m not sure what this hat would actually look like. It would have to be a dusty old hat. Well you’d think that it would have to be a dusty old hat, but in fact the archives are so very modern. I‘m missing the dust of the archives – I don’t know if Val and Joy agree with me here, but now that everything is digitised – digitisation is fantastic, but it also takes away that parchment that we became addicted to as post graduate students.

What I’m going to do is tell you about a great new digitisation project – Project Albany which is going to revolutionise the way we see the memory of the Great War. And it’s all about the aftermath of the war itself. First a few words by way of background for you. The digitisation of repatriation records was the first and it was the unanimous recommendation of a panel of historians appointed to advise the Anzac Centenary Board in Canberra. Actually I think that it was the only point that the twelve historians locked in a room in Canberra could agree on. Now to date the Australian government has committed $3.5 million to this project. Sounds a lot, but it’s a woefully inadequate amount and I’m appalled, absolutely appalled on the things that it’s being spent – the way that money is being spent in the centennial show. Now today very few people have viewed any of these records and the samples taken by historians have been very small for obvious reasons so what I’m going to do is to walk you through some of these files. And I’m going to explain why their digitisation has to be an urgent priority for the centenary.

Repatriation files deal with the post war period story and what Laurel called the ‘aftermath of the war’. It’s a story that I think has too long been marginalized in the way that we remember 1914 to 1918, or to 1919. Tell me when that war actually ends. I don’t think that war has ended. It is the story of the men and women who came home and what that war did to them, their families and their communities, and it’s called Project Albany because the first batch we are digitising are the men and women who sailed on the first contingent in 1914 – those who returned. I’m going to argue that these files are by their very nature disruptive to a simplistic and romantic view of war that we are fed all the time by the media and then I’m going to introduce you to one of the ways that historians are using these incredible files. In the second part of the talk tonight I’m going to talk a little bit about the One Hundred Stories Project.

The One Hundred Stories are incredibly controversial and caused a rift within the Anzac Centenary Board. In the course of recovering these stories about Australia’s post war trauma historians were told:

These stories are too confronting, they are too uncomfortable, they might embarrass the minister and that wasn’t in keeping (and I’m quoting here a senior public servant) with the mood the centenary should be trying to create.

What are Australians expecting from the Centenary? I was asked.

Well we think they are expecting a warm fuzzy feeling.

A historian who leaves the public with a warm fuzzy feeling about the Great War is not a historian at all.

First of all I want to show you what Project Albany is all about. Now you will find many images of returned service men and women on the National Archives of Australia website. The website has been rebadged-it’s called discovering Anzacs now and that in itself is testimony to the way thousands of Australians have connected through the keyboard to an imagined Anzac past and Joy has written very eloquently about this subject. They visit this site to view the service dossier of a man or women who went to war and thus they insert their family story within a wider kind of national narrative. Discovering Anzacs also provides a space for people to load pictures like this one and to leave their family tributes. their family memories and of course this is one or two generations so we are not really talking about memories, we are often talking about post memories. The site has become a virtual memorial. It’s certainly a place to pay tribute but for the historian these images highlight the selective nature of war remembrance.

Invariably the portraits are handsome and heroic like this dapper bloke here. They remind us of what the French Historian Annette Becker has called ‘the sterilization of war and violence’. Like the memorials we build across the landscapes of Australia and New Zealand, those noble structures of bronze and stone, these clean whole and beautiful bodies conceal the sordid reality of bodies that have been damaged and dismembered, and that have been all together obliterated by war. So by featuring images like this I think the national archives have only told half the story. It is contained and it’s limited our understanding of war and that’s why the repatriation files are so important.

The image that I want to begin with isn’t that image of young confident soldiers proud and handsome in their uniform. It’s an image of a man when he comes back from war. He’s scarred by the experience of battle, he’s been aged prematurely by the terrible things he has seen and he has done. He’s not just a victim and he’s struggling to adjust to his new life as a civilian. This is Bertram Burns. Now Private Burns enlisted at the age of 24. He served in France and he was wounded on two separate occasions. Private Burn’s dossier runs for just 24 pages – there’s just one letter from him, one chance for him to actually speak. It’s this letter and it’s written in 1938. He’s asking to purchase duplicates of service medals lost in a bushfire. He wants to wear them on Anzac day. This man wants his face to be seen that day. Now reading the service dossier tells us very little about Private Burns or his family or his wound or what it did to those he loved. The repatriation files are so much more substantial, and contain three separate files. Hundreds and hundreds of pages and they tell us so much more. What does that sparse entry in the service record GSW Face actually mean? The medical report in the repatriation file refers to much facial disfigurement. I think that Private Burns puts it much better than that. ‘My face,’ he says ‘is practically shot away’. The wound is so severe this man dribbled constantly and there is a continuous discharge from his nose. That’s a post surgery operation-it was much worse before that. Bertram Burns had to live on what is called slop food; his disfigurement was such that employers wouldn’t take him on. He was shunned, he was ostracized. He took up a block of land as a soldier settler but he found himself too weak to work it. Reading the service record you would learn nothing of that; you would learn nothing of his or his family’s post war ordeal. The repatriation records will tell you all of that and they will tell you much more. At the moment I think that the experience of war is recorded in a kind of short hand and one that does lend itself through the media to a kind of proud heroic narrative.

The repatriation files on the other hand help us to imagine what those who haven’t been to war couldn’t possible understand and the visceral quality of that testimony just doesn’t lend it self to that sanitation of war. You read these men’s accounts often in their own words and you begin to imagine what it must have been like to spend days and nights in continual fever and delirium shaking and shivering as the file puts it. You can hear the hushed voices of what they called the whispering men, the ‘gassed’ men whose lungs were slowly corroding, who could barely breathe, who vomited up their meals, who fell over with giddiness, and who, like this man lost confidence in themselves. And you can see the physical and the psychological scars of what was called then a war-wrecked generation and how their injuries also destroyed the lives of those around them; not just for the duration of their war service; not just for the duration of their service record but all throughout their all too short life.

Leroy that ‘gassed man’ in the previous slide turns to drink and he turns on his wife as well. Now you might think that is an unmitigated tragedy, a canvas catalogue of horrors but history is never just that – lets look again at Bertram Burns – there is, I think, a great dignity in Bertram Burns. Look at how that man dressed that day they took his photograph, read about the efforts he made to provide for his family. His war didn’t end though in 1918 did it? Two things I want you to notice about that slide, though there are no prizes for guessing. Look at that phrase ‘sentenced to destruction’. When the repatriation records came to the national archives from the dept of veteran affairs, archives had to decide what to do with them and frankly they posed a huge problem. I mean ‘huge’ quite literally. Ten kilometres of shelving space. Can you imagine that? It’s a veritable forest of files and as is so often the case with bureaucracies people clutch to the most simple solution. I mean who would want to read the medical charts of these long dead men? Maybe there are awkward issues of privacy too. And so for several months the fate of these files hung in the balance. And can I just pay a tribute to the historians and archivists back then who fought for the preservation of these files. And back then wasn’t such a long time ago it was 2004.

The second thing I want you to notice about this file is its name. Thomas Abdullah’s name is telling us something we don’t often hear about the 1st AIF-its social and its cultural diversity. I think that’s a story we need to recover today if we are to say something new about the Great War. Now Thomas Abdullah’s name stands out but in most cases the ethnic, the cultural diversity of the 1st AIF is concealed by the service record. Recruits are described as British subjects-there’s no clue to their Indon, their Chinese, or their Aboriginal descent. Because repatriation records are fuller accounts, because the accounts are embedded in community, because they are a record of families as well as former soldiers they are a record I think that tell us that post war story. I mentioned the visceral quality of that testimony-what makes them facilitate new historical understandings? Why are they so important?

Firstly there is the potential for what are called intergenerational health studies. Few other countries in the world possess so comprehensive a health record for so vast a cross section of the population. And I’m not just talking about veterans either. When former servicemen and women lodged a pension claim they answered detailed questions not just about their own health but also about the health of their families because they had to prove that the illness wasn’t a congenital one. Now current work that’s being done by Janet McCalman at the University of Melbourne has demonstrated the potential of these intergenerational health studies and I think by digitising this collection we are going to be showcasing a remarkable resource to a global community and I think that is terrific. Second point, the repatriation files aren’t just about the health of the nation they are also an insight into society of the day. They tell us about an neglected phase in Australian society and the role of the state in the interwar period and the intervention of the medical expert into the life of an individual citizen, the working of public welfare and private charity. They demonstrate as Marina Larsson and Al Thomson have shown us how war reaches into and damages the social fabric.

The story we have just been working on in the One Hundred Stories is the Rachel Pratt story. I bet you will hear that story on Anzac day. Why? Because she wins the Military medal and she’s the only nurse to do so and that’s something you read about every Anzac day. What people don’t write about every Anzac day is what happens to Rachel after the war. They don’t talk about a woman who loses all purpose in life; who suffers from the post war trauma. They don’t talk about that shard of shrapnel that is lodged in her lung and they don’t talk about what the doctors did to her. They don’t talk about the convulsive shock treatment that was used or putting her into a coma for weeks and weeks as part of that primitive treatment. But I think these are the stories we should be hearing about on Anzac day not simple heroic stories. And for a labor historian like myself these files tell us a great deal about a generation told to sacrifice so much, but lets face it given bugger all in return. Promised a land fit for heroes but often sent to marginal land, men and women unable to find remunerative employment often as a direct result of their injuries. ‘I used to cough and spit so much they always found an excuse to discharge me.’ Reliant on inadequate pensions, and forced into the position of supplicants. Men like Harry here who even had to bludge a smoke from a mate. Imagine the indignity of that – bludging a smoke from a mate. These records also span a vast emotional and political range.

In May last year Marilyn Oppenheimer and I published an article about soldier settlement in NSW using the repatriation files and it’s an extraordinary record. It’s about the men who demand their rights, their entitlements. They’d been promised something when they went to war. They felt cheated by the Government who sent them to work on the marginal lands. It’s a great story about a man named John Carter who is sent a bill by the department saying you owe the dept two thousand pounds and what does John do? He makes a tally of how much his time was worth.

How do you value four years in France, how do you value this injury in my leg and he sends his own bill back to the department saying you owe me money, mate and it’s this kind of moral economy amongst the soldier settlers which I find extraordinary. And what we can do now is triangulate services now we can move from as in John’s case from the service record to the repatriation record to the lands department file that creates a much richer and fuller history, I think.

Now one final point. I have talked about how men survived the war. The repatriation records show us how they struggled to survive the peace and that is not just a man’s story as this remarkable letter by the widow of Don Carney shows. She tells us what it’s like to live on the poverty line pleading just a little bit of help at Christmas time offering that insight into the intermediate economy of the poor. Women’s voices are threaded all through these repatriation files and it’s a woman’s voice I want to begin to end on tonight. This is a letter from Louisa Campbell writing to the department not long after the death of her husband. Now lieutenant A.B. Campbell came back from the war with severe respiratory problems and she writes with an intimacy which I find quite disarming. My husband’s death was the death of all my happiness. He was no whiner; he hid his sufferings with a smile. The circumstances of Lieutenant Campbell’s death are by no means clear but it was a violent death as violent a death as you will ever come across in war. Lieutenant Campbell’s body was cut in two when he fell from a railway carriage in Sydney. He may have opened that door because he was desperate for air. With both lungs collapsing every breath was actually an effort or as the coroner’s report here implies he may have chosen a quicker death than the one that was in store. What is beyond dispute was that Louisa Campbell believed that his death was directly attributed to his war service. He gave his life for his country as surely as if he had died in battle. The department thought otherwise and Campbell’s death was deemed not war related and her pension was assessed accordingly and that’s the most extraordinary and powerful message of these amazing records – it’s not just soldiers in uniform who bear the cost of war and I’ll leave it there, thank you.