| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Joy Damousi. The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare, number 7.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1999. Pp. x, 212. Cloth $64.95, paper $22.95.

During the twentieth century, participation in international wars has had a profound impact on Australian society. Anzac Day, which commemorates the disastrous but heroic dawn offensive mounted by Australian troops at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, remains the nation's most important site of collective memory and public patriotism. Indeed, the cult of the Anzac soldier, with its emphasis on masculine mateship, has been aptly described as Australia's "civic religion." With 60,000 soldiers dead at the end of World War I—a heavy toll for a country with a population of just five million—Australians had to adopt new psychological and political strategies to bear and legitimate their losses. This is the subject of Joy Damousi's new and perceptive history, which explores how "mothers, fathers, widows and soldiers dealt with the grief that resulted from the deaths during and immediately after the two world wars" (p. i). As Damousi points out, notions of sacrifice and the rituals of mourning have histories, and the emotional pain of individuals and communities needs to be understood within specific historical and cultural contexts. This book tells an Australian story, but Damousi is theoretically informed by international scholarship on feminist and psychoanalytical approaches to history and studies on war and memory. . . .

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