Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business (review)

Jalland uses the cipher of emotional culture to anchor an account of two pro-found changes in death and grief across 20th century Australia. Phase one was a suppressed, privatised sorrow that constrained peoples emotional lives. Phase two was a shift where death was made respectable again, seen in new secular rituals, the resurgence of ANZAC Day and the presence of public discussions about death, euthanasia and palliative care.

The causes are linked to the specific impact of two world wars on the Australian experience of death and dying that were already changing due to the broad demographic and technical transformations taking place. Jalland has gathered an impressive range of textual sources including in-memoriam notices, personal correspondence, official letters, personal and institutional biographies and newspaper articles and drawn them across a significant historical period from the 1880s to the 1980s.

Sixteen chapters are organised into five parts. Part One presents the argument that social changes after 1880 represent a move to cultural practices centred on death denial and silent grief and focuses on 'agents of change'. The author explains death denial and silent grief and introduces key biographical sources to explore the account of Australia's 'shift in emotional history' (p19).

Part Two discusses how death denial and silent grief came to be the dominant Australian cultural script. It is a complicated tale of death and dying practices forged under combat in the battlefields of the First and Second World War being transposed—almost wholeheartedly and unquestioningly—into civilian life. The entrenched chaos of WWI and prisoner of war experiences of WWII serve to rip apart the incumbent death practices of comforting grief focused on domestic mourning over marked graves filled with known bodies. The wars ushered in a host of new death practices and technologies obsessive in their internalisation and gruelling in their lack of resolution. Australian ways of death in the post war decades become marked as death denying in its silent grieving.

Yet, in parts three, four and five—miraculously, it seems the cultural script begins to alter again as surviving WW II veterans find their lost diaries and their voice with them, and begin to talk about their experiences, reliving their losses with the civilians in their lives. The medical advances that both postponed and moralised against death are brought into question in the waves of public discussion and institutional debate about euthanasia and palliative care. Part four's tale of Australian bodily disposal moves from ornate funerary, commemorative and burial practices through wartime austerity to a post war atmosphere of severe economic competition and de-ritualisation of funerals coupled with the speedy uptake of cremation. Quite rapidly, during the 1980s this transforms into the re-ritualisation of the disposal of the dead in space conscious ways.

Broadly, this book is a coming of age story for Australian death practices. In another register, it is a historian's analysis of the definitive connection between war and sorrow, killing and grieving, and how they may influence large scale, civilian death practices. In that regard, the book is inspired in its attempt to draw together military and civilian domains and explore their intimate and far-reaching connections.

Jalland offers the general reader and death and dying scholar alike the opportunity to reflect upon the different ways in which death and emotional life get articulated in ways that leave a historical trace. Poignant narratives convey an emotionally intense atmosphere combined with rarely seen photographs, powerful paintings and artworks.

These are all the charms of a well researched book. However, it is the book's flaws and limitations that really make it worth reading. I have to admit that I did become engaged with it at an emotional and cognitive level though I'm not sure whether that was in spite of or precisely because of the things that annoyed me.

The book's organisation is uneven. Part II...