25/09/2025
My notes from last year’s presentation as part of the series All About That Place 2024, Pacific Edition. https://open.substack.com/pub/anneyoungau/p/homebush-during-world-war-1
I talked about Homebush, a gold mining hamlet in central Victoria, Australia, and its contributions to the WW1 effort. The town's post-War plans to establish structures of public memory were fitful, constrained, and fiercely contested.
With few exceptions, every Australian town, small and large, has its war memorial, a secular shrine erected to the memory of the local men and women who signed on. There are over 4,000 of them. These monuments sometimes bear a statue of an infantryman resting on reversed arms, head bowed, the formal stance of a soldier contemplating killed comrades. They obtain a certain dignity and authority, however, though not from their status as civic furniture. A memorial gets what force it has from its list.
Every memorial has a list of the names of the men and women who served their country in the War. It is the list that brings it to life; these are the names—and what could be more intimately distinctive?–of flesh-and-blood human beings who did their duty.
So it is shocking to discover a shrine with an incomplete list. If we intend to honour a man for his contribution to a noble cause by inscribing his name on a list, he is disgraced and insulted by its absence.
In the course of my research into the wartime history of the small town of Avoca, Victoria, near Melbourne in Australia, I was dismayed to find that only half the names of those who had served in the War appear on its Memorial’s roll-call of the town’s soldiers. The list was—and is—shamefully incomplete. Why?
My notes from a presentation as part of the series All About That Place 2024, Pacific Edition
