'He belonged to Wagga': The Great War, the AIF and returned soldiers in an Australian country town

Abstract

This thesis follows the First World War generation from the Wagga Wagga district in southern New South Wales through the late nineteenth century to the mid-1930s. The environment in which Wagga’s soldiers grew up, their months or years in the army and their lives as returned men touch on the war’s most enduring themes.

Wagga’s volunteers were the country men of AIF lore. Yet many earned their living in the same professions and occupations as city dwellers. While those who laboured on farms or worked as tradesmen might have been the bush men described by contemporaries like Charles Bean, a significant proportion of Wagga’s soldiers were not. Many of the local men who survived the war were profoundly affected. Some never recovered. But the evidence also indicates the breadth of returned soldiers’ involvement in the community. As well as the unemployed, the destitute, those who needed constant care and those who turned to crime, there were veterans who had jobs and families and managed to live what could be considered normal lives.

Local war veterans who succeeded in business or politics, or who were active in community organisations, feature heavily in Wagga’s civic record, but most of the district’s returned men appear only fleetingly. While little of their personal and family lives can be gleaned from these sources, this absence is balanced by the often detailed and sometimes first-hand accounts of individuals’ circumstances in Repatriation Department files. Although these voluminous records are becoming better known they have not previously been used to inform an in-depth study of a single locale’s returned soldiers.

The Government and civic records on Wagga combine to reveal the nuances that underlie the broader national story of the war and the AIF. On many important themes the district’s example suggests both the truth behind commonly accepted views and the extent to which they obscure a more complex reality.