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

The "death awareness" movement that appeared in the United States in the 1970s had its counterpart in Australia, where it also was stimulated by the publication of Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's book On Death and Dying in 1969. Kübler-Ross developed a psychological model of death and dying based on the experiences of terminally ill patients, to counter the neglect of these patients within conventional medical care. A seminar held at Melbourne's St. Vincent's Hospital in 1971 marked the beginning of the Australian movement to foster more open and informed responses to death and grief both in the hospitals and in the general community (pp. 204–5). The "death awareness" movement gathered momentum during the 1970s, leading, Pat Jalland claims, to a shift in Australian society away from the culture of death avoidance that became apparent in the years following the end of the Great War—a culture characterized by social and psychological responses to death where thoughts and feelings about death were avoided, ritual was minimized, and the expression of sorrow was confined to the private lives of the bereaved. Jalland's concern in this study of death and dying in twentieth-century Australia is to explain the culture of death avoidance as an outcome of Australia's involvement in two world wars and the development of twentieth-century medical practice.

Silence, as Jalland notes, is characteristic of a culture of death avoidance, which makes the historian's task of tracing the emergence of this culture more difficult. However, the statistics she quotes to demonstrate the extent of Australia's involvement in the Great War suggest that this episode would have had far-reaching consequences for the personal lives of individuals and for society in general. One in five of the Australians who volunteered to fight for King and Empire was buried in foreign soil; 60,000 of them were killed within a space of four years, and the final resting place of around 25,000 remained unknown to families and friends. It has been estimated that bereavement touched every second Australian family. Jalland fleshes out this statistical picture to good effect, using diaries, letters, and oral testimony to show how, in coming to terms with their loss, bereaved men and women tended to minimize their own privations out of respect for those suffered by the men on active service. Individuals tended to feel that an open display of their personal grief was out of place when so many were bereaved. The silencing of grief was further encouraged by soldiers' letters, which presented the stoicism of the battlefield response to death as a model for civilians. Newspaper "In Memoriam" notices displayed a diminishing reliance on religion for support in bereavement, and a growing resort to memory to make sense of intolerable loss.

Jalland claims that the repression of grief and the diminishing reliance on religion, already evident in late nineteenth-century responses to death and loss, was accelerated by Australia's participation in the Great War and then reinforced during the Second World War. She skilfully employs a range of resources to demonstrate the characteristics of this change at the level of the individual and in the broader society. Her achievement is weakened, however, when she attempts to define the change more precisely in a discussion of public responses to two tragic events of the interwar period: a colliery disaster in New South Wales, and the Black Friday bushfires in Victoria. The responses to these events, as demonstrated in newspaper reports and the recollections of those who experienced the bushfires firsthand, emphasize stoicism and practical assistance; they display, Jalland notes, none...