A distant grief: Australians, war graves and the Great War

© 2003 Dr. Bartolo ZiinoThis thesis investigates the ways in which distance shaped bereaved Australians' reactions to separation from the bodies of their dead during and after the Great War 1914-18. It attempts to capture experiences of bereavement at a time when war had radically disrupted Australians' expectations and experiences of death, and as they struggled to find consolation. This study brings distance to the fore as a key condition of death in the Great War, through which we can better understand Australians' individual mourning. This thesis argues that the grave, though absent, remained of central importance to Australian grief. Mourners developed mental images of graves, and imagined their care by others as they sought to engage in familiar practices of mourning. These images formed a basis for relationships between mourners and graves: the bereaved insisted on this kind of proxy care for their loved ones as they grieved at a distance. Distance produced the conditions for a more obviously communal response to bereavement, based on creating and sustaining links between mourners and the graves that most understood they would never see. A widespread recognition of this condition among Australian mourners resulted in a community keenly aware of the shared nature of their grief. The common assumption that graves remained perpetually out of reach produced a range of individual and communal efforts to bring them to mourners in Australia, and mourners to the graves. Relics and images of the dead, photographs of their graves, war memorials, exhibitions, even flowers and ultimately pilgrimages, provided the vehicles by which Australian mourners might make connections with the sites of death abroad, even where graves themselves might not exist. The private and public processes by which Australians attempted to make these links contest the view that soldiers and civilians experienced exclusive realities of war. Distance added poignancy to grief, but it also compelled the bereaved in their attempts to meet their terrible losses