War memorials

Almost four years after the Great War had ended, Emily Luttrell, 66 years of age and the mother of fifteen children, wrote to the Australian Prime Minister: I … Beg that your Government will take into consideration my appeal and help me to visit my dear one’s resting place there was seven of our sons went to the war… surely I have won the right to ask such a small favour which was promised by the state government. Unlike France and the United States, Australian governments never promised concessionary fares to the families of dead soldiers. But the perception of a promise having been made is equally significant. Emily Luttrell employed the language of citizen over that of supplicant: her son Arthur’s sacrifice had earned a ‘small favour’ from the nation. The Commonwealth thought otherwise. It ‘would be rather dangerous to [agree] to these requests’, a memorandum to the Prime Minister explained, ‘[and] such privileges might well be abused’. How was never explained. Like the vast majority of the bereaved, Mrs Luttrell never visited the grave of her son. Australia’s soldiers were buried far away. The decision not to repatriate bodies denied next of kin the traditional processes of mourning considered elsewhere in this volume. And even for French and American families the difficulties in recovering remains battered by war and the elements were formidable. Mrs Luttrell may never have seen her son’s grave, but she did visit his surrogate tomb − his memorial. The names of all seven sons who served were carved in native hardwood and displayed at the entrance of Hobart Town Hall in the island state of Tasmania. Arthur’s name was inscribed in parchment, placed in a casket made of pure Tasmanian zinc and buried in the Domain, a civic reserve where the war dead were first commemorated. A tree was planted in his honour, almost certainly by Mrs Luttrell herself. And in 1925 the citizens of Hobart raised Australia’s first state memorial. A tall and stately obelisk, its nobility denied the sordid reality of death on distant battlefields; here the absent became present again.