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LIVING WITH THE AFTERMATH Trauma, nostalgia and grief in post-war Australia This very powerful and moving book on the shifting patterns of mourning and grief focuses on the experiences of Australian women who lost their husbands during the Second World War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam, and those who suffered when their men came home. The book makes use of extensive oral testimonies to illustrate how widows internalised and absorbed the traumas of their husbands' war experiences. Damousi is able to demonstrate that a significant shift in attitudes towards grieving and loss came about between the mid and the later part of the twentieth century. In charting the memory of grief and its expression, she discerns a move away from the denial and silence which shaped attitudes in the 1950s towards a much fuller expression of grief and mourning and perhaps a new way of understanding death and loss at the beginning of the new century. Joy Damousi is an Associate Professor in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of Women Come Rally: Socialism, Communism and Gender in Australia, 1890-1955 (Oxford, 1994), Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (1997), The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999), which was shortlisted for the NSW Premier's Australian History Prize in 2000, and co-editor (with Marilyn Lake) of Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (1995) (all published by Cambridge University Press). Joy Damousi is also a contributor to The Oxford Companion to Australian History (1998) and The Oxford Companion to Australian Feminism (1998). For my father, George LIVING WITH THE AFTERMATH Trauma, nostalgia and grief in post-war Australia JOY DAMOUSI University of Melbourne CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, VIC 3166, Australia Ruiz de Alarc6n 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Joy Damousi 2001 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2001 Printed in Australia by Brown Prior Anderson Typeface Times {Adobe) 11/13 pt. System QuarkXPress® [BC] A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library National Library of Australia Cataloguing in Publication data Damousi, Joy, 1961- . Living with the aftermath: trauma, nostalgia and grief in post-war Australia. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 0 521 80218 0. 1. World War, 1914-1918 - Social aspects -Australia. 2. World War, 1914-1918 - Psychological aspects. 3. World War, 1939-1945 - Social aspects - Australia. 4. Grief- Psychological aspects. 5. World War, 1939-1945 Psychological aspects. 6. Bereavement - Psychological aspects. I. Title. 155.9370994 ISBN 0 521 80218 0 hardback Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 Introduction 2 War widows remember 1 9 36 64 3 4 5 6 7 8 The wars Memories of death: Loss, nostalgia and regret The question of silence Marriage wars 'Overlooked': Korean and Vietnam war widows Death, solitude, and renewal 99 110 139 164 9 Conclusion 192 Notes Bibliography Index 197 223 233 Acknowledgements My foremost debt is to the war widows who gave so generously and fully of their intimate experiences. Although I have not directly cited material fro