Anzac Memories Revisited: Trauma, Memory and Oral History
2015; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 42; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/ohr/ohv010
ISSN1533-8592
Autores Tópico(s)German History and Society
ResumoAbstractIn this article I return to interviews I conducted in the 1980s with Australian World War One veteran Fred Farrall, armed with new historical sources and new ways of thinking about war, suffering and memory. My interpretation of Fred's war and its consequences was central to the approach to individual and collective memory, and their complex interaction across time, which I articulated in my book Anzac Memories. Focusing on Fred's experience and narrative of shell shock and pacifism, this article complicates my understanding of Fred's war and postwar life, and of how he created and recreated his war memory in different contexts and relationships, including the relationship between interviewer and interviewee, historian and witness. I investigate ideas about trauma, intersubjectivity, and memory composure that have become important theoretical tools for oral historians.Keywordsmemoryoral historyshell shocktraumawar For invaluable feedback on drafts of this article, many thanks to members of the Melbourne Life Writing Group and our Monash Research Group, and especially to Siân Edwards, Sean Field, Katie Holmes, Jim Mitchell, Kathy Nasstrom, Mike Roper and the anonymous reviewers for Oral History Review.Notes 1 Anzac refers to the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, which was formed during World War One—Australian popular memory tends to forget the New Zealanders. 2 Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Melbourne (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994); Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Melbourne (Victoria, AU: Monash University Publishing, new ed., 2013). 3 Kyla Cassells, "Anzac Day Is a Celebration of War," Socialist Alternative, 23 April 2010, at http://www.sa.org.au/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=4716:anzac-day-is-a-celebration-of-war&Itemid=393, accessed 9 April 2013. My writings about Fred Farrall ("The Return of a Soldier," Meanjin, 47, no. 4, 1988, 709-716; and "Anzac Memories: Putting Popular Memory Theory into Practice in Australia," Oral History, Spring 1990, 18, no. 1, 25-31) have been reprinted in a number of anthologies. Quotes in this article are from interviews I recorded with Fred Farrall on July 7 and 14, 1983, and April 2, 1987. The transcript and audio of those recordings with Fred Farrall can now be accessed through the Australian War Memorial at www.awm.gov.au/collection/s01311. 4 Farrall, letters to "My Dear Mother," December 20, 1917; to "My Dear Laura," October 16, 1917; and to "Dear Sam," October 10, 1917: Box Miscellaneous 2/1/1/—2/3/2, Series 1987.0418, Farrall Papers, University of Melbourne archive. On soldiers' wartime letters, see Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9-25; Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 58-63; Michael Roper, "Re-remembering the Soldier Heroes: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War," History Workshop Journal, 50 (Autumn 2000): 181-204; and Alistair Thomson, "Anzac Stories: Using Personal Testimony in War History," War and Society, 25, no. 2 (2006): 1-21. 5 E.F. Hill, Bryan Kelleher, Alan Miller and Ralph Gibson, with Fred Farrall, Celebration of Fred Farrall's 90th Birthday (Melbourne: Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, 1987), 20. 6 Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009); Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, (Oxford: Oxford University Press Australia, 1996); Peter Stanley, Men of Mont St Quentin: Between Victory and Death, (Melbourne: Scribe, 2009). For details of the National Archives of Australia (NAA) series B73, see, http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/DetailsReports/SeriesDetail.aspx?series_no=B73, accessed 30 April 2013. The Farrall references are from his Hospital (H101649) and Medical (M101649) files in the B73 series. 7 This synthesis draws on the Australian studies of shell shock in Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, 151 and 149-77; Garton, The Cost of War, 158 and 143-75; and Kate Blackmore, The Dark Pocket of Time: War, Medicine, and the Australian State, 1914-1935 (Adelaide: Lythrum Press, 2008), 173-80. See also Peter Leese, Shell Shock: Traumatic Neurosis and the British Soldiers of the First World War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Paul Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry and the Politics of Trauma in German, 1890-1930, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); Michael Tyquin, Madness and the Military: Australia's Experience of the Great War, (Canberra: Australian Military History Publications, 2006). See also Fred Turner, Echoes of Combat: Trauma, Memory, and the Vietnam War, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); Anton Kaes, Shell Shock Cinema, Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, (New York: Scribner, 1995); John E. Talbott, "Soldiers, Psychiatrists and Combat Trauma," The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 27, no. 3 (1997): 437-454; Nigel C. Hunt, Memory, War, and Trauma, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 8 Medical Report, 22 October 1917, Evidence File, 1939, M101649; Meadowbank Manufacturing Company, Reports, 23 May 1939 and 5 November 1926, M101649. 9 Dr. Rutledge, 26 October 1920, M101649; Farrall, Appeals, 23 October 1926 and 30 October 1926, M101649; Dr. Graham, 6 November 1926, M101649; Farrall 2, pp. 24-5; Doctors Willis and Smith, Medical Report, 16 December 1926, M101649. 10 Farrall, letter to the Deputy Commissioner, 12 March 1927, M101649. 11 Dr. Willcocks, 31 January 1927, M101649; Dr. Allen, 14 July 1928, M101649; Dr. Francis, 10 February 1927, M101649; Dr. Parkinson, 1 March 1927, M101649. 12 Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, 206-33; Lloyd and Rees, The Last Shilling, 144 and 251-52. 13 Dr. Willcocks, 31 January 1927, M101649; Dr. Allen, 14 July 1928, M101649; Dr. Parkinson, 1 March 1927, M101649; Clinical assessment, 17 January 1939, M101649; Dr. Smith, 22 March 1927, M101649; Dr. Minty, 25 January 1927, M101649; Out Patient Notes, 13 October 1931 and 11 January 1937, M101649. Fred's political development is described in our 1983 interview, but is also detailed in a government intelligence report: Deputy Director, Australian Security Intelligence Organization, Central Office, Canberra, Secret Report to Secretary of Public Service Board, 23 August 1949, Control Symbol C89597, Series A367, NAA, at http://recordsearch.naa.gov.au/scripts/Imagine/asp, accessed January 10, 2013. The report lists Fred's activities from 1931, when he was arrested carrying a "loaded hose pipe" in his pocket during an anti-eviction rally outside a court. 14 Dr. Minty, 25 January 1927, M101649; Dr. Willcocks, 10 February 1927, M101649; Dr. Smith, 22 March 1927, M101649. 15 Farrall, Claim, 9 May 1939, M101649; Michael Roe, "Arthur, Richard (1865–1932)," Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/arthur-richard-5061/text8437, accessed January 10, 2013. On Arthur, see also Damousi, Freud in Australia, 26. 16 Dr. Godfrey, 24 July 1939, M101649; Dr. Crowe, 15 August 1939, M101649; State Board, 28 August 1939, M101649. Fred's appeal against the 1939 decision was rejected in August 1942. 17 Damousi, Freud in Australia, 51. See also Mark S. Micale and Paul Lerner, eds., Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 18 Farrall, undated notes (circa 1978), Veterans Affairs Tribunal Box, Series 1987.0418, Farrall Papers; Farrall 1, p. 37; Case Sheet, Repatriation General Hospital Heidelberg (RGHH), 27 July 1944, H101649; Case Sheet, 6 July 1950, RGHH, H101649. See Sebastian Gurciullo, "Ellery, Reginald Spencer (Reg) (1897–1955)," Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ellery-reginald-spencer-reg-10110/text17847, accessed 10 January 2013. On Ellery's "homespun psychotherapy," see also Damousi, Freud in Australia, 70-73. 19 Dr. Freedman, 23 September 1949, M101649. Medical convention in the 2000s is that duodenal ulcers are caused by bacteria and not by stress, though the link between ulcers and stress has had a strong popular purchase and was likely believed by Fred (Frank Bowden, Professor of Medicine at the Australian National University and Senior Staff Specialist, Infectious Diseases, ACT Health, e-mail to the author, April 13, 2013). 20 Case Sheet, RGHH, 6 July 1950, H101649; Case Sheets, RGHH, 1 June 1961 and 8 June 1961, H101649; Mr Godley, Medical Report 24 March 1983, H101649; Farrall, letter to 'John, Margie and Helen' (in England), 7 June 1987, Personal Letters Box, Series 1987.0418, Farrall Papers. Fred's correspondence with family and friends in the 1980s often mentioned his nerves, which were assumed to be war-caused. 21 Dr. May, Report, 25 May 1950, M101649. Several publications, and new online and paper archives, offer a detailed picture of Fred's peacetime activism: Maureen Bang, "Toorak's Pensioner Mayor," Australian Woman's Weekly, October 3, 1973, 4-5; Lois Farrall, The File on Fred: A Biography of Fred Farrall, (Carrum: High Leigh Publishing, 1992); Dorothy Farrall, "Autobiography," unpublished transcript of an interview by Wendy Lowenstein, transcribed by Fred Farrall, no date, Manuscript Collection, State Library of Victoria; Hill, et al. Celebration of Fred Farrall's 90th Birthday; Series 1983.0113 and 1987.0148, Farrall Papers. 22 Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma: An Inquiry into the Condition of Victimhood, trans. Rachel Gomme, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 23 Case Sheet, RGHH, 6 July 1950, H101649; Farrall, Claim, 1 December 1977, M101649; Farrall 1, p. 27. 24 For an overview of trauma and memory theory, see Katherine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone, eds., Memory History Nation: Contested Pasts (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007), 97-167. See also, for this approach to trauma, Micale and Lerner, Traumatic Pasts; and for histories of the notion of trauma as a post- World War Two creation, Fassin and Rechtman, The Empire of Trauma, and Christina Twomey, "Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: An Argument," History Australia 10, no. 3 (2013), available at http://journals.publishing.monash.edu/ojs/index.php/ha/article/view/988/1520. Accessed January 27, 2014. 25 Janet Walker, "The Traumatic Paradox: Autobiographical Documentation and the Psychology of Memory," in Hodgkin and Radstone, Memory History Nation, 114. See also Christopher J. Colvin, "'Brothers and Sisters, Do Not Be Afraid of Me': Trauma, History and the Therapeutic Imagination in the New South Africa," in Hodgkin and Radstone, Memory History Nation, 156-7. 26 Lois Farrall, The File on Fred. 27 For a fine example where there is sufficient evidence for a psychoanalytically informed reading of war trauma, see Michael Roper, "Re-remembering the Soldier Heroes: The Psychic and Social Construction of Memory in Personal Narratives of the Great War," History Workshop Journal 50 (Autumn 2000): 181-204. 28 Medical Officer's Report, 12 October 1971, M101649; Dr. Freed, Notes, 4 May 1972, H101649. 29 See Anzac Memories, 1994, 8-12 and 225-39. For Popular Memory Group understandings of composure, see Graham Dawson, "Trauma, Place and the Politics of Memory: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972-2004," History Workshop Journal 59 (2005), 151-178; Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 30 Michael Roper, "Review of Anzac Memories," Oral History, 22, no. 2 (1994): 92. Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality," Critical Inquiry, 18, no. 1 (1991): 16. On memory, healing and composure, see Charlotte Linde, Life Stories: The Creation of Coherence, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Sean Field, "Beyond 'Healing': Trauma, Oral History and Regeneration," Oral History, 34, no.1 (2006): 31-42. 31 See Saul Friedlander, "Trauma, Memory, and Transference," in Geoffrey H. Hartman, ed., Holocaust Remembrance: The Shapes of Memory (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994), 260-61. 32 See for example: Roper, "Re-remembering the Soldier Heroes"; Mark Roseman, "Surviving Memory: Truth and Inaccuracy in Holocaust Testimony," The Journal of Holocaust Education, 8, no. 1 (1999): 1-20; and Alistair Thomson, Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women Across Two Countries (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2011). Of course sometimes oral history is the main available source and we have to work with what we've got—as for example Christopher Browning does, magnificently, in his oral history of a Nazi slave labor camp: Christopher R. Browning, Remembering Survival: Inside a Nazi Slave-Labor Camp (New York: W.W. Norton, 2010). 33 Fred Farrall, undated notes (circa 1982), Veterans Affairs Tribunal Box, Series 1987.0418, Farrall Papers. 34 Alessandro Portelli, "The Peculiarities of Oral History," History Workshop Journal, 12 (Autumn 1981): 96–107. See also: Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991); Alessandro Portelli, The Order Has been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). For examples of other oral history books that take a similar approach, see: Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Natalie Nguyen, Memory Is Another Country: Women of the Vietnamese Diaspora (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2009). Recent texts on oral history theory and method that explore such approaches include: Lynn Abrams, Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010); Donald A. Ritchie, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Oral History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Valerie Raleigh Yow, Recording Oral History. A Guide for the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2nd ed., (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2005); Thomas L. Charlton, Lois E. Myers and Rebecca Sharpless, eds., Handbook of Oral History, (Lanham, MD: Altamira Press, 2006); Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, eds., Oral History and Photography, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Perks and Thomson, The Oral History Reader. For developments over the past twenty years in my own understandings of and approaches to oral history, see Alistair Thomson, "Four Paradigm Transformations in Oral History," Oral History Review, 34, no. 1 (2007): 49-70; Alistair Thomson, "Memory and Remembering in Oral History," in Ritchie, The Oxford Handbook of Oral History, 77-95; Thomson, Moving Stories. 35 For overviews about memory and oral history, see Abrams, Oral History Theory, 78-105; Thomson, "Memory and Remembering in Oral History"; Yow, Recording Oral History, 35-67. 36 On "particular publics," see Thomson, Anzac Memories, 2013, 12-15. On communicative memory see: Jan Assman, "Collective Memory and Cultural identity," New German Critique, 65 (1995): 125-33; Alexander Freund, "A Canadian Family Talks about Oma's Life in Nazi Germany: Three-Generational Interviews and Communicative Memory," Oral History Forum, 29 (2009): 1-26; Graham Smith, "Beyond Individual / Collective Memory: Women's Transactive Memories of Food, Family and Conflict," Oral History 35, no. 2 (2007): 77-90. 37 See Lynn Abrams, "Subjectivity and Intersubjectivity," in Oral History Theory (London: Routledge, 2010): 54-77; Valerie Raleigh Yow, "'Do I Like Them Too Much?': Effects of the Oral History Interview on the Interviewer and Vice-Versa," Oral History Review 24, no. 1 (1997): 55-79. 38 Thomson, Anzac Memories, 1994, 229-34. See also Alistair Thomson, "Memory as a Battlefield: Personal and Political Investments in the National Past," Oral History Review 22, no. 2 (Winter 1995): 55-73. 39 The best oral history interviews affirm the value of the life story told whilst at the same time encouraging the narrator to elaborate and stretch his or her story in less well-rehearsed directions. On the communicative relationship of the oral history interview, see Valerie Raleigh Yow, "'Do I Like Them Too Much?'"; Michael Roper, "Analysing the Analysed: Transference and Counter-transference in the Oral History Encounter," Oral History 31, no. 2 (2003): 20-32; Daniel James, Dona María's Story: Life History, Memory and Political Identity, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000; Della Pollock, ed., Remembering: Oral History as Performance, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Abrams, Oral History Theory, 54-77. 40 Fred Farrall, letter to Alistair Thomson, September 1985, in the author 's possession; Alistair Thomson, "The Forgotten Anzacs: Radical Diggers Challenge an Australian Legend," unpublished manuscript, 1986, Australian War Memorial MS1180. For another early use of the interview with Fred, see Alistair Thomson, "The Return of the Soldier," Meanjin 47, no.4 (1988): 709-716. 41 On sharing authority, see Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority. Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990); Thomson, "Moving Stories."Additional informationNotes on contributorsAlistair Thomson Alistair Thomson is professor of history at Monash University and a former president of the International Oral History Association. His books include: Anzac Memories (1994 and 2013), The Oral History Reader (1998, 2006, and 2015 with Rob Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries (2011) and Oral History and Photography (2011, with Alexander Freund). Website: http://arts.monash.edu.au/history/staff/athomson.php. E-mail: alistair.thomson@monash.edu
Referência(s)