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"For us, whose sons are going, the vital thread is snapped."
(Käthe Kollwitz, 27 August 1914)
In his influential study Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, published in 1995, historian Jay Winter finds in European landscapes and artworks traces of "the terrible, almost unimaginable, human losses" of the First World War and "efforts to commemorate the fallen." He observes that the "history of bereavement was universal history during and immediately after the Great War" and that paying attention to markers of bereavement remains important. The end of the Cold War, he writes, has "brought us back not to 1939 or 1945, but in a sense to 1914." Ethnic and nationalist splits that had "seemed past history are painfully present today" (1). Twenty years on, during the current centenary of the Great War, lamenting its "bloody history" and exploring bereavement as universal history appear equally pressing.
Bart Ziino observes that "distance dominated Australian grief in and after the Great War" (10), and that efforts to name the dead wherever possible distinguish this conflict from earlier ones; even so, 22,000 of 60,000 Australian dead remain unidentified. Soldiers' deaths quickly assumed the special cultural meaning of "deaths for the nation," but Ziino argues that in Australia "expressing grief for those deaths remained a largely private exercise. Its public face was stoical ..." (17). The emotional cost was downplayed in the interests of boosting enlistments and curbing "private feelings" that the Minister for Defence claimed would add to the "difficulties and dangers of our men on active service" (Sunday Times 9). Neither grief "as an emotional response to the fact of loss," nor mourning as "the social expression of loss" (Ziino 13), could be allowed to disrupt the efficiency of the war effort. The 1914 War Precautions Act meant that the government could prosecute by court martial if necessary to "prevent the spread of reports likely to cause disaffection or harm." Indeed, an order to be silent was issued by Australian authorities under the provisions of the Act to prevent Adela Pankhurst, Cecilia John and like-minded women from singing in public "I didn't raise my boy to be a soldier/ I brought him up to be my pride and joy,/ Who dares to place a musket on his shoulder/...