| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 108.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Oceania and the Pacific Islands

Pat Jalland. Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918. New York: Oxford University Press.2002. Pp. vi, 378. $55.00.

In 1878, Samuel Pratt Winter, a prominent if eccentric pastoralist in the colony of Victoria, died. Winter, an agnostic, left instructions that a simple stone cairn be erected to mark his grave, in the manner of the local Aborigines. His rejection of a traditional British burial in favor of "being buried in the stones where the blacks are buried" (p. 116) shook the colonial elite. Winter was condemned for insulting his race and his class by denying them the right to honor his death appropriately. This controversy serves as an apt reminder that although death and bereavement are inevitable and universal, the social practices with which they are marked are historically and culturally specific. And, as is demonstrated comprehensively by Pat Jalland's important new history, they are shaped by the circumstances and conditioning of class and gender differences. 1

With the exception of a growing body of scholarship on the commemoration of the military casualties of the world wars, the study of death has attracted little interest from historians of Australia.Indeed, one of the elements attributed to the Australian character—and especially to the legendary figures of the bushman or Anzac soldier—has been the reticence to address death, and certainly to avoid "excessive" outpourings of grief. Jalland's work is timely, providing knowledge about the past to current debates about palliative care, euthanasia, and medical biotechnology. It also contributes to a rising interest in the cultural history of emotion, with its focus on the feelings of individual Australians about the death of family members, especially spouses and children. . . .

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