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Reviewed by:
  • Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840–1918
  • Allan Kellehear (bio)
Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History, 1840–1918, by Pat Jalland; pp. 380. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002, $55.00 Australian, $65.00.

The academic literature on death, dying, and loss from the social sciences in Australia is modest by comparison with its counterparts in the United States or Britain. That observation alone is indication enough of the strength that masculinist, materialist, and bourgeois [End Page 340] values have had on national research and writing priorities. Pat Jalland's work must be seen against the infancy of Australian efforts on this topic.

In her highly detailed and nuanced work, she identifies a uniquely Australian experience of death, dying, and loss in the period between 1840 and 1918. Furthermore, unlike that offered by many of her counterparts in Britain and Europe, Jalland's history is not merely an account of the bourgeoisie's encounter with death. To be sure, there are major chapters devoted to middle-class experiences and their internal diversity in religion, gender, ethnicity, and occupational influences. But Jalland also spends useful and revealing time on marginal historical and social voices—the homeless, paupers, the imprisoned, children, sailors and immigrants, explorers, and bush men and women experiencing death and loss. She explores the bizarre myths (such as "lost children" in the Australian bush) and the terrible realities of violent frontier and wartime deaths. In domestic terms, there is no doubt in my mind that Jalland's book will be widely viewed as a landmark resource for future historical research, social sciences debate, and cultural studies discussion in Australia.

In international terms—comparing her approach to a study of death and loss with others active in the field—there are a number of rather inexplicable omissions and emphases. They are worth identifying for those whose interest is more in the details of historical and social institutions than in the study of death itself. These readers may be unaware of how the assumptions made about death by Jalland inadvertently close out other possible interpretations of national reactions to death or loss.

First, Jalland's book is idiosyncratically overreliant on contemporary stage theories of grief. In particular she seems to regularly refer to the work of just two psychiatrists—the Australian psychiatrist Beverley Raphael and Raphael's longtime British friend and colleague Colin Murray Parkes, also a psychiatrist. There is no reason offered why Jalland prefers to employ stage theory to fill out her observations about grief in Victorian times in Australia. In so doing, she privileges a perspective that Raphael and Parkes employ, but does so without their justification against counterevidence for their arguments.

The psychodynamic emphasis of Raphael and Parkes—based heavily on John Bowlby's earlier attachment theory—leads Jalland to make ill-considered and premature judgments about experiences of grief. Queen Victoria's grief is "pathological" but that of the Australian Dr. John Springthorpe, who built a "Melbourne Taj Mahal" in memory of his dead wife, was not (178). The commonly reported experience of "seeing" one's dead by the bereaved is described as "suffering from illusions," again, recycling the materialist remarks of Raphael and Parkes. The matter of visionary experiences at the brink of death—near- death experiences, deathbed visions, or visions of the bereaved—is a matter of protracted, healthy, and complex debate. There is no consensus about these matters from contemporary psychologists, religious studies scholars, or neuroscientists. Jalland does us all a disservice by glossing these complexities over with an overdose of attachment theory.

Jalland also uncritically accepts the orthodoxy of French historian Philippe Aries when she incorporates the idea that the early twentieth century was the beginning of the era of the "denial of death." Jalland writes of the crucial role death and loss in World War I played in the development of a "new model of suppressed or silent response to loss" (305). When she uncritically incorporates Aries in these assumptions, she must be prepared to accept the same criticisms that have been justly made of his arguments.

There can be no doubt that death-talk began to disappear from everyday [End Page 341...

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