Mourning the Australian War Dead: Grief and Bereavement During and After World War I

Abstract

Australians lost so many dead in World War I that we struggle to comprehend how they tolerated their grief. Bereavement was complicated by the absence of bodies to mourn, since none of the war dead were repatriated. Experiencing a "distant grief", the bereaved focused their mourning on war memorials, the rituals of Anzac Day and the mythic narrative of the Anzac legend. These ways of mourning continued through World War II until, with the Vietnam War, the war dead were brought home. In recent decades the "memory boom" has generated ways of remembering the war dead that might be understood as a new form of distant grief, in which the distance is not physical but resides in time and degrees of emotional intensity. Show more