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Book Reviews
| Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009). ISBN 978-1921410550. 336pp.
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| In Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War, Marina Larsson cites a letter the sister of a World War I veteran wrote in 1929 to the Repatriation Department. Her brother had enlisted in 1915, to be returned in 1917 with multiple health problems: lungs damaged by gas, severe trench foot, and 'shell shock.' For the past twelve years, the sister reported, her mother had done little else but extend dedicated care to her severely disabled son and we hear some details of her home remedies faithfully pursued. Through a myriad of such fragmentary insights Larsson builds a thick-textured, illuminating and poignant portrait of the lives of families who found themselves responsible after the war for the wellbeing of injured servicemen. Larsson's book, the first wide-ranging exploration of how families coped, makes a welcome contribution to Australian social history of the interwar period and in particular, to the social history of health. |
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If there were few Australian families untouched by the horrendous World War I death toll of some 60,000 servicemen, this must have been even more true of the families of the 90,000 who suffered injuries. Larsson reminds us forcefully of the ways families' dread of news from the battlefront of injuries was realised and subsequently reinforced by the changed men whom they welcomed home and attempted to reintegrate into civil society and community, husbands and sons who returned with unremoved shrapnel, deaf or blinded, minus limbs, with infectious diseases, or with their nervous system shattered. Much of the burden of personal care fell on the shoulders of the women closest to them, but to keep the men and families intact was a task that demanded the astute marshalling of all avenues of help, ranging from the state's provision of pensions and facilities, to the services of voluntary service organisations and such charities as the Red Cross, to the contribution of kin and neighbours. Families confronted years, sometimes decades of caring for damaged relatives that despite their best efforts often ended in premature deaths. |
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To research her subject Larrson worked from veterans' documentation—letters, communications with government officials, which proved a rich social history resource—although she is at the same time sensitive not only to protocols of seeking help that were crucial for success, but also to the silences—those matters best left alone and dealt with through other avenues. She supplemented the government and private papers with oral interviews she conducted with some eleven children of disabled veterans born between 1922 and 1932. These added significantly to the force of her narrative, given particularly that the official documentation often offered her fragmentary moments in her subjects' lives leaving us absorbed without knowledge of outcomes even in the immediate context. |
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Shattered Anzacs enhances our knowledge of the dreadful health problems that the men endured, and the frequently ineffective remedies that with the best will in the world doctors prescribed. Veterans' injuries were not stable but in many cases worsened with time. When the men returned with war-related illnesses that were socially unacceptable, their families' plight was even worse. Venereal disease was assumed, mistakenly, to be curable; men could and did infect their wives. The tuberculosis men had contracted in the wet and the cold of closely packed trenches, was another scourge. One veteran, having passed the disease to his four children in turn, set himself up a tent in the backyard hoping to save his wife from contagion. Mental illness, not infrequently exacerbated by excessive alcohol use, took a terrible toll on families, through erratic frightening scenes, domestic violence and the social isolation that ensued. Amidst these trials and tribulations successive governments and the well meaning Repatriation Department pursued their goal of returning men to manly breadwinning, barely recognising the sacrifices of families in the cause of the men's rehabilitation. |
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Larsson situates a huge national problem of health and medicine within a rich context of familial relationships, the web of voluntary support, and the policies of the state to tease out how the treatment of disability and disease operated within the workings of gender and family. If she found that the authorities seemed unable to escape from deeply held cultural values that underwrote the pension system and expectations of family care as normative, she also found impressive displays of incredible stoicism combined with duty, decency, and altruism of a high order. Speaking as the daughter of a World War I soldier three times injured on the Western front, I read Shattered Anzacs with particular interest. To my mind, this is social history at its best. |
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| PATRICIA GRIMSHAW
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| UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE |
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