Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-War Australia

248 Pages·2001·11.75 MB·English

by  Joy Damousi

LIVING WITH THE AFTERMATH
Trauma, nostalgia and grief in post-war Australia
This very powerful and moving book on the shifting patterns of
mourning and grief focuses on the experiences of Australian
women who lost their husbands during the Second World War
and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and those who suffered
when their men came home. The book makes use of extensive
oral testimonies to illustrate how widows internalised and
absorbed the traumas of their husbands' war experiences.
Damousi is able to demonstrate that a significant shift in
attitudes towards grieving and loss came about between the
mid and the later part of the twentieth century. In charting the
memory of grief and its expression, she discerns a move away
from the denial and silence which shaped attitudes in the 1950s
towards a much fuller expression of grief and mourning and
perhaps a new way of understanding death and loss at the
beginning of the new century.
Joy Damousi is an Associate Professor in the Department of
History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of
Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in
Australia, 1890-1955 (Oxford, 1994), Depraved and Disorderly:
Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia
(1997), The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime
Bereavement in Australia (1999), which was shortlisted for
the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize in 2000, and
co-editor (with Marilyn Lake) of Gender and War: Australians
at War in the Twentieth Century (1995) (all published by
Cambridge University Press). Joy Damousi is also a contributor
to The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998) and
The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (1998).
For my father, George
LIVING WITH THE
AFTERMATH
Trauma, nostalgia and grief in
post-war Australia
JOY DAMOUSI
University of Melbourne
CAMBRIDGE
UNIVERSITY PRESS
PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia
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Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa
http://www.cambridge.org
© Joy Damousi 2001
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2001
Printed in Australia by Brown Prior Anderson
Typeface Times {Adobe) 11/13 pt. System QuarkXPress® [BC]
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data
Damousi, Joy, 1961- .
Living with the aftermath: trauma, nostalgia and grief in
post-war Australia.
Bibliography.
Includes index.
ISBN 0 521 80218 0.
1. World War, 1914-1918 - Social aspects -Australia.
2. World War, 1914-1918 - Psychological aspects.
3. World War, 1939-1945 - Social aspects - Australia.
4. Grief- Psychological aspects. 5. World War, 1939-1945 -
Psychological aspects. 6. Bereavement - Psychological
aspects. I. Title.
155.9370994
ISBN 0 521 80218 0 hardback
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
1 Introduction 1
2 War widows remember 9
3 The wars 36
4 Memories of death: Loss, nostalgia and regret 64
5 The question of silence 99
6 Marriage wars 110
7 'Overlooked': Korean and Vietnam war widows 139
8 Death, solitude, and renewal 164
9 Conclusion 192
Notes 197
Bibliography 223
Index 233

Acknowledgements
My foremost debt is to the war widows who gave so generously and
fully of their intimate experiences. Although I have not directly cited
material from all of the interviews we conducted, each of the inter-
views was of invaluable assistance to me in the development of this
book. I am most grateful to them all for their enthusiasm and com-
mitment to the project, without which this book would not have been
possible. I also wish to acknowledge the assistance of the War Widows'
Guild of Australia and the War Widows' and Widowed Mothers'
Association who kindly helped with arranging interviews and con-
tacting widows.
I was also privileged to work with Katherine Ellinghaus, whose
organisational skills, initiative and professionalism expanded the pos-
sibilities and scope of this research. Without her considerable support,
her foresight, and meticulous attention to detail, this work would have
been impossible to undertake, let alone to complete. Financial assist-
ance was provided by the Australian Research Council which eased the
task of interviewing.
Others kindly and freely gave their suggestions and ideas. Stuart
Macintyre provided much needed direction on several drafts, and many
of the arguments in this book have evolved and developed through his
considerable input. Emma Grahame applied her formidable editorial
skills to the manuscript during the early stages of writing. Robert
Reynolds and Charles Zika engaged thoughtfully and generously with
my ideas as they formed. Ann Turner read the manuscript, offered
vn
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
incisive comments and gave constant encouragement for which I am
greatly indebted.
At Cambridge University Press, Peter Debus lent ongoing sup-
port and assistance and maintained faith in the project. Paul Watt
contributed invaluable suggestions and wise advice, while Carla Taines
was a skilled and deft editor who made a significant contribution to the
book in its evolution to completion.
My academic and administrative colleagues in the history depart-
ment at the University of Melbourne continue to provide a nurturing
environment within which to research and write. This has provided a
crucial impetus for my ongoing historical inquiry and I thank them all
for their generosity and collegiate support.
Friends continued to engage me in many different ways. I wish
to thank Bain Attwood, Verity Burgmann, Barbara Caine, Georgine
Clarsen, Paul Collins, Ann Curthoys, John Dillane, Sarah Ferber,
Esther Faye, Patricia Grimshaw, Phillip Harvey, Lucy Healey, Katie
Holmes, Diane Kirkby, Rose Lucas, Marilyn Lake, Carmel Reilly,
Suzanne Rickard, Judith Smart, Charles Sowerwine, Marion K. Stell,
Shurlee Swain, Christina Twomey and Julie Wells.
Finally, I have dedicated this book to my father who did not live
to see its completion, but whose life experiences inspired me to explore
the themes of family, identity, grief and courage, which I pursue in the
following pages.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
I am a war widow' explains Pat
Medaris, whose husband, Jack had served in the Korean and Vietnam
wars.
I think it fills me in with Jack because he was away so much at
Vietnam and Korea, Malaysia, but I feel I'm part of that, you know
what I mean? Part of his thing, by being a war widow ... By associ-
ation I feel that I'm actually a war widow through him, so therefore
what I am is part of him. It keeps me connected with him.1
The role of this connection between the past and the present in
shaping identity is one of the key concerns of this book. Through an
analysis of seventy interviews conducted with war widows, my aim is
to explore how memory and identity are linked. What does it mean to
be a war widow? How have memories shaped that identity? How do
women convey their life histories?
This study is based on interviews conducted with Australian war
widows whose husbands died either during wartime, or afterwards
because of a war-related injury. Using oral testimonies as the basis for
a study of war widows opens up possibilities that official sources do
not allow in the same way, for the emotional detail of widows'
experiences is not documented in such material. Rather than consider
war widows primarily as welfare recipients - as others have done - I
shift the attention to the emotional experience of widowhood during
the post-war period.
Using interviews, this work extends the themes covered in my
previous study, The Labour of Loss, and introduces other issues
1
LIVING WITH THE AFTERMATH
through the use of oral testimonies. In the earlier book, I considered the
ways that mothers, fathers and widows dealt with grief immediately
after each of the two world wars. I used letters, diaries and newsletters
to reconstruct the world of the wartime bereaved, and explore the ways
in which grief and mourning mobilised these people.
Unlike these written sources, the interview is the means by which
a narrative takes shape, in the interaction between the interviewer and
interviewee.2 It is in that relationship that historical memory is formed
in a shape which is specific to time and place. The interviews con-
ducted for this book were primarily arranged through advertisement in
war widows' newsletters and through organisations such as the War
Widows' Guild and the War Widows' and Widowed Mothers' Associ-
ation. While the selection of widows may have be skewed in this way,
the stories presented here cover a diverse range of experiences. Each
interview was between one and two hours in length, and conducted in
the home of the interviewee. In most cases, the widows are referred
to by their names, but pseudonyms have been used if widows requested
that their names be changed. Although informants were asked specific
questions, the interview invariably became free-ranging and wider in
scope as the conversation developed. It is also important to remember
that these exchanges are informed by what people can tell us about
their lives, and what they perceive their audience wishes to hear.3 An
interview then is shaped by both participants, but, as Luisa Passerini
points out, the narrative of memory is inescapably drawn from pre-
existing 'ways of telling stories'.4
The use of these sources raises the question of how oral testi-
monies should be read. Oral history has been celebrated for allowing
marginalised groups to find a voice. It has been seen as a means of
retrieving those experiences of women that are eliminated from official
documentation.5 The enterprise of oral history has often been conflated
with women's history and the two have informed each other in re-
trieving women's untold stories.6 Oral history does however, offer
more than a mere supplementation of the historical record. His-
torians have long claimed that its value lies not in 'revealing facts and
events',7 but rather, in showing how the 'facts' are in the 'memory
itself'.8 Portelli has argued it can tell us 'less about events as such than
about their meaning',9 for 'it is always a work in progress, in which
narrators revise the image of their past as they go along'.10 A life story
has a life of its own. Yet these are fragmentary tales, for memory is not
spoken as a coherent, organised whole." In his autobiography, the
writer Graham Greene reflected how 'memory is like a long broken