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Sharing Their Legacy: Bringing Home The Stories

Conference Paper 1 (Herraman)

Introduction

Our project began in a sense of dissatisfaction, when we researched the 1995 Yacka book, at how little we knew about Yacka in the First World War. Surviving honour rolls showed that 39 of the hundred-odd adult male population in Yacka had enlisted for the war effort. But we had only a hazy idea of what each of them actually did in the war, or even where they went, or where they had died.

With funding, support and ideas from the Adelaide Veterans Affairs office, we decided to track down and bring home the lost stories of these 39 men, so that something more than their names would be known in their local town. We also aimed to bring home service records for our local archives. Later, we found ourselves deciding, under the impetus of the Sharing their Legacy network, to present the stories in a touring exhibition, to be shown around the mid-North, and also at the Army Museum at Keswick.

During the project, we encountered some interesting issues of research and of presentation.

Research

We trawled through the nominal rolls, mostly on the internet, the Red Cross records in the Mortlock Library, births, marriages and deaths records, and when possible contacted surviving family members. We’re rather proud that we managed to trace the war history of every single name on the war honour boards.

But the most exciting part of our research and also the most illuminating was the finding of the Gale Papers. Mrs Occee Gale, is the sister-in-law of two of the soldiers who had died in the war. She was initially interviewed in our general historical researches. As well as this general approach, we also had placed an appeal on the town notice board for any surviving material from WW1 such as postcards or newspaper clippings. Nothing at all came forth.

It wasn’t until quite late in our research that I went to see Occee again, and she revealed that she was holding a collection of letters sent home from the front.

There wasn’t a huge cache, not much more than a shoebox full of historical documents consisting of letters and photos that had been found when the soldiers had died. Some of these letters give fascinating glimpses of life at home during the war.

There are quite detailed accounts of fundraising for the war effort, and of war-related activities. In addition there are accounts of the work situation both on and off the farm, offering a useful corrective to the notion that everyone was obsessed with the war:

‘The mice are simply awful over here this year … We caught over 200 the last 2 nights in the house alone with poisoned wheat. They are doing terrible damage everywhere.’

There are references to contemporary industrial disputes, and their impact on local life:

‘The passenger train only runs 3 times a week now owing to the coal strike it seems awful funny after been used to getting the mail every day’

There are plenty of indications of a standing rivalry between Yacka and the nearest town, Gulnare.

‘Last night Horace Pelton drove Uncle Will, Mr Pollock, Lizzie & I to Gulnare Strawberry Fete, and it was the driest old turnout I was ever at I do believe.’

There’s also the rural view of life in Adelaide:

‘I won a duck at the cheapjack when I was in Adelaide so I gave it to Aunty Sarah I could not be bother carting it around with me.’

On a personal note, there was the quiet romance between Sam Gale, and the girl his sisters called ‘redheaded Martha’.  Martha was a farm girl in Naracoorte, and she wrote to Sam about such everyday matters as the abundance of fruit that she fed to the pigs, and the difficulties of life in a big household.  She also asks after the keepsake she gave him before he left.  ‘How is my handkerchief getting on, yours is still safe’.

We don’t know what happened to Martha, though I have hopes that some Naracoorte historian may be able to help us out there.[i] 

Now, these may seem to be only snippets of small-town gossip, but these snippets as a whole make a small but real contribution to our understanding of Australian rural life during the war.

And all this turned up when we thought we had already exhaustively trawled the district for whatever was out there.   That is why I called this illuminating – because you never know what is out there until you ask and ask again!

Presentation of material

Now for the matters of presentation, and the ever-challenging question of dealing with sensitive issues, in our case two matters: the very high rate of venereal disease among soldiers, and the inter-town rivalries.

The venereal diseases were all down in the war records for each soldier concerned, since they were fined for every day hospitalised with VD.    This all seemed just part of the historical record to me, and at first I wrote about it quite straightforwardly, holding to an historian’s ethical understanding that to suppress a part of the truth is as bad as to tell a lie.  But this approach met with two protests.  Some people felt that it was not respectful to war heroes to flatly state that they went down with recurrent gonorrhea, or syphilis.  As well, a local woman, a hospital CEO, expressed grave concern that the records were released at all, given that in her professional ethics they should be kept utterly confidential.  I compromised with the first protest, and toned down my references to syphilis and gonorrhea to become just ‘VD’ throughout.  On the other matter of a clash of professional ethics, I decided that the demands of the historian’s ethics were more pressing, given that this was such a major part of the war experience.  Still, I think the intervention from the medical viewpoint was a useful reminder that we’re not just dealing, in discussing such issues, with a clash between bold truth-tellers and timid truth-hiders – the ethics of public history sometimes do need to be balanced with other competing ethical and moral demands.

With the second sensitive issue, the rivalry between towns, I have to admit I was lucky.  The display was primarily about the stories of the individual men, not about inter-town relationships.  But if we ever do undertake a public exhibition about inter-town relationships, that sensitivity will have be faced.

OUTCOMES

As to the outcome of all this, and the display, I hope a few of you will manage to see it at a date to be advised, at the SA Army Museum in Adelaide.  It was a great success in its local area, measured in terms of numbers who came to see it, and in terms of positive benefits to the community – the sense of achievement through the success of the project, the actual increase of records held by the Yacka archives and their accessibility to local researchers, the use of the major community asset of the local hall, and the reinforcing of community cohesion.

I’d like to close by noting what can be extrapolated from our experience for historical research generally. It was the Department of Veterans Affairs that nudged our vague dissatisfaction into becoming a research project.  It was my person-to-person request to Occee Gale that elicited the Gale Papers.  In each case, the pro-active seekers found the history that we went looking for. 

We create public memory by our research, and what we choose to research will become recorded history; possibly, though not inevitably, what we choose to neglect will slip through the cracks.  We therefore have a serious responsibility in targeting our research.  We should not just react to existing public memory, but actively target the history which is most at risk of being lost, or which is farthest from the public mind.

Similarly, reinforcing historical strengths should not be a funding priority of Government; rather, we should be urging Government to apply funds to addressing weaknesses in the public record.

Dr Julie Ann Ellis
Yacka History Group
From a paper given at the State History Conference 25/26 May 2002