Homefront Hostilities : The First World War and Domestic Violence [1 ed.] 9781922454300, 9781925003512

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HOMEFRONT HOSTILITIES

Dr Elizabeth Nelson is an historian and artist who lives in Melbourne. This book is based on her PhD which she completed in the History Department at The University of Melbourne.

HOMEFRONT HOSTILITIES  THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND DOMESTIC  VIOLENCE ELIZABETH NELSON

A U S T R A L I A N S C H O L A R LY

© Elizabeth Nelson 2014, 2020 First published 2014, reprinted 2020 by Australian Scholarly Publishing Pty Ltd 7 Lt Lothian St Nth, North Melbourne, Vic 3051 tel: 03 9329 6963 fax: 03 9329 5452 email: [email protected] web: scholarly.info isbn 978-1-925003-51-2

all rights reserved Design and typesetting Art Rowlands Cover image Drawing of gun sent by Roy Bilney to his wife Ivy. Inquest into the death of Alfred Roy Bilney, 27 April 1922. Public Record Office of Victoria, VPRS 24/P0, unit 1021, item 396. The main chapters of this book are typeset in Book Antiqua 11/23pt

Contents

Acknowledgements vii Author’s note

viii

Introduction ix 1. ‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’ Domestic Violence in Victoria before the First World War

3

2. Domestic Violence on the Homefront Civilian Marriages

34

3. Domestic Violence on the Homefront Soldier Marriages

59

4. Disturbed and Dangerous? Returned Soldiers and Domestic Violence

83

5. Social Responses to Returned-Soldier



Wife Abuse

112

6. Post-war Battles 141 Overview of Domestic Violence in Victoria after the First World War Conclusion 175 Appendix 184 Notes 186 Bibliography 220 Index 241

Acknowledgements

Numerous people and institutions were of great help in my research for this book. The Public Record Office of Victoria, National Archives of Australia, Australian War Memorial, State Library of Victoria, and the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia provided rich sources. I would like to thank them, as well as the Army History Unit, Department of Defence, for approval to cite or reproduce material from their collections. I am also grateful to B. W., Mrs C., and May Nelson for sharing their family histories with me. This book is based on my PhD thesis that I completed in the History Department at The University of Melbourne. There I had a wonderful supervisor in Patricia Grimshaw. I am very grateful to Pat for her positive and motivating encouragement, without which this book would never have been published. John and Janet Nelson also provided important support for the original thesis. Janet Nelson read numerous drafts and gave valuable assistance with the figures. More recently, Mark Dober has been essential in helping me to get this project completed.

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Author’s note

Throughout this book I refer to many people who experienced or perpetrated domestic violence in the early twentieth century. I give the full names of individuals when discussing cases that are already available to the general public in libraries and archives. However, where I have obtained special access to sources that are not open to the public, I have maintained the anonymity of individuals. In these cases I have abbreviated names (eg. S. N. or Samuel N.) and de-identified any potentially identifying references in the endnotes by using an ‘X’ in place of dates, page numbers and archival numbers.

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Introduction

Domestic violence has a long history in Australia. It was prevalent in colonial society and was an ingrained feature of social life at the beginning of the twentieth century. This violence would be in some measure shaped by the pivotal event of the new century: the war of 1914 to 1918. This book is about the impact of the First World War on men’s violence within marriage in Victoria. Although a great distance from the war zones of Europe and the Middle East, Victoria was deeply affected by the war. Nearly 40 per cent of men of military age enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).1 One fifth of this force never returned home. Many of those men who did return were forever changed by the physical and psychological traumas that they had endured on the battlefields. Returned soldiers and their families often had to deal with a range of problems such as reintegration, disablement, psychological illness, and unemployment. Conflict and violence also erupted in numerous returned-soldier marriages. Historians have told of how some disturbed veterans literally brought the war home with them, their mental torment leading them to attack their wives. Surprisingly, the phenomenon of returned-soldier domestic violence has not been closely studied. Few actual cases have been discussed. In fact, there has been little in-depth investigation into the relationship between the First World War and domestic violence in general. There is much we do not know, and therefore much to discover, about how the war shaped domestic violence in Australia. Drawing largely on the records of court cases, this book aims to identify how the war shaped experiences of domestic violence and the ways in which society understood and viewed this behaviour. To trace war-related changes to domestic violence, I consider men’s violence

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towards their wives before 1914, during the war, and after 1918. Unlike most historical discussions to-date, this account does not discuss the post-war violence of returned soldiers in isolation. Instead, it places that phenomenon within the wider context of domestic violence in the early twentieth century. The impact of the war on the violence of both returned soldiers and civilian men is considered. This wider view enables new insights into the war’s influence on domestic violence and the responses of society. My investigation contributes to the historiography of the First World War’s impact on Australian society and culture. Knowing how the war shaped men’s violence towards their wives and how the community reacted to this violence is important if we are to more fully understand what the war did to Australian society. In uncovering previously untold stories of intimate violence and social indifference, this book provides further evidence of the war’s destructive effect on many individuals and families. It supports a view that the war was a brutalising force in those societies that took part, and that women were among the victims caught up in its damaging processes. However, this book also offers a new perspective on how the war related to men’s violence in marriage. It argues that the relationship was more complex than has previously been represented in the historical literature. The war affected domestic violence in a range of ways that defy any simplistic account. This study also adds to our historical understanding of domestic violence and gender relations in Australia. In the case of Victoria, particularly, there has been little historical research into domestic violence in the early to mid-twentieth century.2 Decades of silence and forgetting, and a lack of historical enquiry, have obscured the experiences of most women who encountered violence at the hands of their husbands. The many cases of domestic violence revealed here indicate that physical mistreatment of women was rife. We see an underlying culture of domestic brutality and a society that was often unwilling, and always unable, to adequately confront the problem. Arguably, the main reason that early twentieth-century Australian society made little effort to prevent domestic violence was the same reason it occurred in the first place: the general subordination of women in society. A fundamental proposition of this book is that most male violence towards wives is, at its core, about power. Violent husbands usually feel entitled to control their wives. When they sense that their control is threatened, they use violence to try to reassert their authority. Likewise, a society x

Introduction

that does little to prevent or punish violence towards women is one that undermines women’s power. The relationship between the First World War and domestic violence is an important chapter in the history of gender relations in Australia. The war did not radically displace the central reasons for, or the functions of, domestic violence. But, as will be contended in this book, the war exacerbated conditions conducive to wife abuse, both during and after the war. Many reported acts of domestic assault in the period 1915–1925 suggest the influence of the war. The war stimulated typical individual, social and cultural factors contributing to domestic violence. The disruptive and traumatic nature of the war also shaped cultural understandings of, and responses to, wife abuse over the war and post-war decade.3 These changes tended to hamper, rather than help, women’s struggle to avoid subjection to violence, and they tended to reinforce, rather than curtail, tolerance for men’s use of violence to assert their authority.

The historiography of the First World War and domestic violence in Australia The possibility that the First World War had repercussions for domestic violence in Australia has only been publicly acknowledged since the 1980s. In the decades immediately following the war, Australian historians eschewed any discussion of community distress wrought by the war experience, let alone domestic violence. Instead, these early and mainly official accounts generally framed the war as a positive and formative experience for the young nation, despite the deaths of many of its best men.4 For instance, Ernest Scott’s official volume on the Australian homefront during the war, published in 1936, portrayed a harmonious society united by a common goal to win the war.5 Silence about the negative outcomes of the war reflected the war’s prestigious place within Australia’s history and the narrow focus of history-writing at the time which treated war as primarily about battles and campaigns, politics and economics, and important men. Historians were not concerned to examine the war in relation to the personal lives of soldiers and their families, or to the wider culture and society. It was not until the mid-1960s onwards that Australian historians, influenced by the experience of the Vietnam War and the emerging fields of social, labour, and women’s history, began to ask new xi

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questions about the First World War.6 Their accounts were vastly less positive than the earlier official texts. Now some Australian historians argued that the war had been a horrifying experience for frontline soldiers.7 In the 1970s a number of groundbreaking histories of soldiers’ experiences of the First World War also appeared in Britain, France and America. These texts pointed to the terrible violence inflicted on soldiers by the machinery of war, and to combatants’ feelings of ambivalence and anger towards the societies for whom they were fighting.8 The war as a brutal and alienating experience for soldiers now came into historical view. Since the 1980s, Australian historians have continued to research the war’s impact on soldiers. The scope of enquiry has also greatly widened to include the effects of the war on families, women, society and culture.9 One theme to emerge from these studies is that of conflict. It is now apparent that the war was as much a divisive force for Australian society as it was a unifying one. Studies of the Australian homefront during 1914–1918 have shown that there were violent confrontations between soldiers and civilians, and between civilians themselves. Soldiers were involved in street riots, violence against pacifists and socialists, fights with civilian police, and assaults on individual civilians. Violence also erupted between civilians due to tensions over high food prices, ethnicity, patriotism, and the issue of military conscription. Further, the aftermath of war saw labour strikes, right-wing attacks on unionists and communists, and a spate of crimes against the person, many of which involved returned-soldier perpetrators.10 Gerhard Fischer summed up the picture of homefront conflict by concluding that the war had provoked an ‘extraordinary conversion’ of Australia from a peaceful and homogeneous society, to a violent and angst-ridden one.11 In casting the net wider to investigate how the First World War affected Australian society, historians discovered that soldiers could be not only victims but victimisers. Since the early 1980s, historians have pointed out that a number of returned soldiers were violent, sometimes fatally, towards their wives.12 Judith Allen, who has provided the most significant commentary on this issue, found that veterans were overrepresented amongst men who killed women in New South Wales during the interwar period.13 There is no consensus among historians as to the proportion of returned-soldier marriages damaged by domestic violence. In some studies we read that ‘a few’ veterans were violent; in xii

Introduction

other studies it appears that ‘many’ were. Of course, it is not possible to know exactly how many returned soldiers were violent towards their wives. But the picture is made all the more vague by the lack of in-depth research on this subject. For this reason, discussions of returned-soldier wife abuse tend to be brief and impressionistic. Most historical references to veterans’ domestic violence after the First World War present the violence as a flow-on effect of the men’s traumatic wartime experiences. Consider the following: Experience of the organised violence of war must also have spilled over into relations between men and women.14 Ex-diggers, so often, it appears, carried the war home in combatravaged minds and battle-hardened bodies to inflict it as a private hell upon their wives and children.15 In almost every Australian home, the horror of war intruded. Men became strangers to wives and children…loving husbands became paranoid and violent.16 [The veterans] suffered in silence or saw their marriages or families broken up in a ghastly melange of recurrent nightmares, domestic violence, alcoholism, or suicide.17 A few found that the trauma of war pushed them into dark deeds, of violence, rape and murder.18

An assumption that the violence of returned men arose from their subjection to the horrors of trench warfare dominates the historiography. Other potential factors leading to such violence have been proposed, such as financial strain, women’s increased sense of independence, and fears of infidelity, but these have been overshadowed by the more dramatic battle trauma explanation.19 Judith Allen was initially one of the few historians to reject the battle trauma explanation. Her early commentary on the subject (in 1982 and 1986) cast war service as an excuse for men’s violence that really arose in response to young women’s post-war assertiveness, particularly those women who had the ‘temerity to leave a battering returned soldier’.20 Yet, by the time of her later discussion in Sex and Secrets (1990), she too had come to see warrelated psychological illness as underlying men’s violence, making her oft-quoted comment that ‘[W]omen’s bodies and minds absorbed much of the shock, pain and craziness unleashed by the war experience’.21 Stephen Garton’s The Cost of War (1996) has taken the most cautious line. Garton suggested that there was a connection between soldiers’ xiii

Homefront Hostilities

psychological problems and their post-war violence, but that a range of other factors also appeared to contribute to such violence, such as alcoholism, ill-health, financial hardship, and marital incompatibility. These problems, he pointed out, were not unique to veterans.22 Garton thus acknowledged that there was a lack of certainty about the causes of returned men’s violence towards their wives. Like the Australian historiography, the writing on returned-soldier domestic violence in other countries that fought in the First World War is brief. Overseas scholars have not dwelled on the subject for long. Some historians have attributed soldiers’ violence to war trauma. For example, Michael Roper has explained British veterans’ aggression towards their wives thus: ‘the violence that had been put into the soldier during the war, in the form of shells and bullets, was being projected into those around him afterwards’.23 However, more so than Australian historians, overseas scholars have interpreted veterans’ domestic violence as being not just about trauma, but about issues of gender conflict, such as men’s resentment at loss of authority over their wives and families.24 For instance, Reinhard Sieder described violent returned soldiers in Vienna as ‘disabled patriarchs’ who, traumatised and often drunk, ‘tried to compensate for their damaged authority by trying to dominate their wives and children’.25 Have Australian historians been right to so closely tie returned soldiers’ acts of domestic violence to battle trauma? Or, in an effort to catalogue the distressing effects of the war, to both soldiers and their families, have they inadvertently included violent behaviour that had little to do with men’s experiences in the trenches? For all the passing references to traumatised violent veterans in the historical literature, there has been no investigation into whether the First World War was actually to blame for making these men violent towards their wives. There has been little scrutiny of actual cases to see if there are plausible links between war service and domestic violence. There has been no consideration of the possibility that some veterans who abused their wives might have also done so before they enlisted.26 Furthermore, historians have not researched the war’s effect on the incidence of domestic violence.27 If the war provoked unprecedented violent behaviour on the part of many returned soldiers, this could have been reflected in official crime figures. By exploring these issues, this book aims to clarify our understanding of how much returned soldiers’ violence towards their wives can be attributed to the war and its after-effects. xiv

Introduction

The tendency to portray First World War veterans’ violence towards their wives as a reaction to the traumas of battle has not been the preserve of historians. Contemporaries themselves often regarded these men’s violence as caused by the brutalising influence of the war.28 Judith Allen found that returned soldiers charged with murdering their estranged wives in New South Wales consistently drew on battle injuries, shell shock, and war service to explain, and excuse, their actions. Jurors and judges were often sympathetic to the men’s accounts. The result was judicial leniency towards veterans and a readiness to shift blame to the dead wives for apparently having provoked their husbands’ wrath.29 Wife killing, of course, was the most extreme form of domestic violence. The gruesomeness of these acts may have made it seem obvious to people that the war had unbalanced the perpetrators. But what about returned soldiers’ acts of domestic violence that did not result in their wives dying? There is little discussion of these cases in the historiography. Was war service submitted as an explanation for nonfatal attacks on wives as well? How did the people who attended court hearings in these cases (returned soldiers, their wives, lawyers, judges and journalists) conceptualise the violence? Did women who had been abused or attacked accept that the war had affected their husbands, or did they offer a different interpretation? If courts were lenient towards violent veterans, what evidence relating to the men’s war service did they consider? Historians have made no attempt to probe the validity of individual men’s claims that their war service was responsible for ‘pushing them over the edge’. By valid I do not mean that the violence could be excusable but rather that the reasons offered made sense. This book inquires into these questions and enlarges our understanding of how returned-soldier domestic violence was explained and dealt with in the post-war years. It would be apparent by now that returned soldiers have been the focus of historical discussion about the First World War and domestic violence in Australia. Civilian men have hardly figured at all. By civilian men I mean those men who did not serve in the AIF during the war and who remained on the homefront. There is a need for a broader perspective here, as domestic violence is not only a potential result of individual soldiers’ trauma. Men’s violence against wives results from a context of particular social, economic, political, cultural and individual conditions. The First World War, large-scale and prolonged, impacted upon all these types of conditions, affecting the xv

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lives of both soldiers and civilians. It could therefore have potentially influenced the perpetration of domestic violence in a range of ways. This account looks beyond the obvious (veterans) to include the not so obvious (civilian men) when exploring the war’s impact on male intimate violence.30 There is also more to learn about the First World War’s effect on social responses to civilian men’s domestic violence. Did attitudes towards abusive civilian husbands change during the war or did they remain constant throughout the upheaval of wartime? It appears that, after 1918, New South Wales’ juries were lenient not only to returned-soldier wife murderers but to civilian men who killed their wives as well. Judith Allen made the interesting observation that: ‘If in their fragile state, the nation’s heroes were being provoked to kill their ungrateful, unfaithful wives, juries seemed inclined to extend the same reading to men whose only experience of war was confined to their private life’.31 Allen attributed the cause of this diminished support for murdered wives in general to men’s anger at women who left their husbands and behaved in an independent fashion.32 Both ex-soldiers and civilian men could be abandoned by women. Did leniency towards violent civilian husbands also occur in Victoria, and if so, what part did the war play? By looking at court cases in Victoria during and after the war, this book further explores the war’s impact on social responses to civilian men’s domestic violence, noting different or similar treatment of civilian and ex-military cases. During the early to mid-twentieth century, the cultural understanding of domestic violence underwent a significant change in Australia. The interwar years saw the emergence of the idea that violent husbands were psychologically ill. This contrasted with the model of the violent husband as a brutal backward type, which had been prevalent at the beginning of the century. As a result, from the interwar years onwards, domestic violence was increasingly likely to be seen as a medical rather than a criminal problem, requiring a medical rather than punitive response.33 The role of the First World War in this conceptual shift has not been touched on in the historical literature. Yet it was the devastating experience of the war that helped to crack apart old ways of thinking and to allow new theories of human behaviour focused on individual psychology to arise. My account aims to show that the war helped to drive a wedge between the old and new ways of understanding domestic violence in Australia. xvi

Introduction

Sources and approach This book investigates the impact of the First World War on domestic violence in Victoria by looking at a range of historical material from the period 1900 to 1930. The key sources for this book—court cases involving domestic violence—are mainly from the period 1910–1925, the immediate pre-war, war, and post-war years.34 Other important sources are government records (military, repatriation, institutional and parliamentary) and the public commentary and reporting of journalists, politicians, reformers and medical experts. A small number of oral histories have also been used to offer further insight. Within the constraints of these historical sources, I have considered the effect of the First World War on various individual, social and cultural conditions likely to contribute to domestic violence. In particular, I have sought to ascertain what actual recorded cases of domestic violence reveal about the influence of the war. Individuals’ experiences are the cornerstone of this account. Throughout the text, numerous case studies allow the voices of particular persons at the time to be brought to light and heard. It is at this individual level that we can best see how the war impacted on men’s behaviour within marriage and on the response of the community and justice system. There is much surviving evidence of domestic violence in Victoria in the early 1900s, mainly in the form of court records and reports. Many criminal, civil and coronial cases concerned physically abusive marriages. The local courts of petty sessions (today’s magistrates’ courts) were where all criminal cases were heard in the first instance and where most were determined. Individuals charged with the more serious indictable offences could be committed to stand trial in the higher courts (the Court of General Sessions or the Supreme Court of Victoria). The local courts also dealt with civil law suits relating to domestic violence such as applications for maintenance and applications to keep the peace. Divorce cases, however, were heard only in the Supreme Court—an indication of just how seriously divorce was viewed at the time. Inquests were heard in the Coroner’s Court. Records of these legal proceedings exist in the form of criminal trial briefs, divorce case files, law reports, and inquest files, all of which can contain detailed accounts of violence. Newspapers are also an important source of information about court cases. The press regularly reported on court hearings, often reproducing verbatim transcripts of parts of the proceedings. In fact, newspaper

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reports are a crucial source for the local courts of petty sessions because these courts only recorded minimal information in their registers. This study uses reports of court cases published in the main metropolitan newspapers in Victoria: the Argus, The Age, Herald, and Truth, and in a few local newspapers such as the South Melbourne Record and the Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser. Since there were many other local newspapers at the time, the domestic assault cases discussed in this book are just a portion of those that came before the courts in Victoria in the early twentieth century. By taking us straight to the people who suffered, enacted, and judged marital violence, court records allow us to see domestic violence at the coalface. Court hearings were poignant moments in women’s lives when distressing details of their private lives were made public, and when any pretence at marital happiness was abandoned. The women were often fearful or angry, bearing physical injuries, and desperate to prevent any further violence. We hear them tell of the violence and abuse they have experienced and their concern for their safety. We also hear the voices of husbands, witnesses, medical experts, lawyers, the judiciary, juries, and press reporters. It was, of course, the all-male judiciary who adjudicated these cases and determined what punishment, if any, should be imposed on violent husbands. The statements and decisions of the various participants in these cases reveal common, and sometimes conflicting, responses to domestic violence. It should be noted that the cases in this book appear to have overwhelmingly involved people of Anglo-Celtic or other European ancestry. There is no indication that any of the cases involved Aboriginal people. While court records take us close to the lives of individual men and women, we cannot assume that they tell us the exact truth about every case of alleged domestic violence. In the first place, it is impossible to know for sure the cause of any one act of violence, as relevant information may not have been recorded. Secondly, the adversarial format of legal contest could potentially result in the distortion of real situations. On the one hand, husbands often sought to trivialise the acts they were accused of committing; on the other hand, in divorce or maintenance proceedings, it is possible that some wives’ claims about their husbands’ behaviour could have been exaggerated to meet the requisite legislative definition of cruelty. But, that said, legal accusations of domestic violence were often compelling, supported by witness testimony and evidence of physical injuries. Claims of violence had to be robust, for xviii

Introduction

the courts frequently required allegations to be proven. Indeed, the difficulty of proving acts of cruelty or violence was probably one reason that numerous abused women never reported their husbands’ violence. As well as examining individual cases of domestic violence, a key approach of this book is to link information gleaned from multiple sources. To study the question of returned soldiers and domestic violence, I have used court records in conjunction with military and repatriation records. Records of the various Departments of Army, Defence, and Repatriation contain information and policy on matters relating to soldiers’ health, medical treatment, and return to civilian life. Individual soldiers’ repatriation case files are a particularly useful source. I looked at 132 randomly selected Victorian veterans’ files to get a sense of the issues these men experienced after returning from the war. Additionally, I looked at the repatriation case files and military service records of 52 ex-soldiers who were accused of behaving violently towards their wives after their return home. By comparing the information in these military and repatriation files with court records, I have noticed a more complex connection between the war and individual men’s violence than historians have previously recognised. For the most part this book takes a qualitative approach, drawing meaning from numerous cases of domestic violence preserved in the historical record. However, it also considers quantitative evidence about the impact of the First World War on domestic violence in Victoria. One reason for the lack of research on the incidence of domestic violence in the early twentieth century is that there are no official figures for wife abuse cases in this period. Authorities responsible for compiling criminal figures did not distinguish those crimes against the person that involved married couples. Figures have to be laboriously gathered case by case from original court registers. It would be an enormous undertaking to extract figures from every court register in Victoria. Therefore, as part of my investigation, I have compiled figures for wife abuse cases from the registers of one Victorian local court, the South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions, from 1905 to 1929. We cannot know exactly how these figures relate to actual behaviour because chronic non-reporting of domestic violence meant that the number of cases that reached the courts was probably far below the actual number of violent incidents.35 Nevertheless, it is likely that changes in the reported incidence of domestic violence over

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this period may reflect changes in the actual incidence of domestic violence, and may therefore register the impact of the war.

Understanding the causes of domestic violence Historical research into the impact of the First World War on domestic violence is aided considerably by an understanding of recent theories of men’s violence against their wives. Indeed, it would be impossible to write this book without some assumption about the causes of wife abuse. The following explanations for domestic violence have alerted me to the multiplicity of ways in which the war may have impacted on domestic violence in Victoria. Since the 1970s, when second-wave feminism focused public attention on male violence within marriage, an extensive literature on domestic violence has grown in western societies. Various theories have been proposed from sociological, feminist, cultural, psychological, and even biological perspectives. While there has been disagreement across these fields of inquiry, investigators have increasingly recognised that wife abuse is a complex phenomenon with complex causes. Most recent researchers support a multi-disciplinary approach and emphasise that wife abuse is caused by various interrelated cultural, social and individual factors.36 Here I set out the basic premises about domestic violence which inform this book. In the first place it is helpful to distinguish between triggering and predisposing factors of wife abuse. Triggering factors are the immediate events which inspire violence, while predisposing factors are those background conditions which increase the likelihood that a particular man will commit violence. Triggering factors commonly involve unemployment, job changes, parenting, friends, in-laws, jealousy, affairs, division of labour, use of money, religion, a threat of separation or divorce, and sexual difficulties.37 A man’s use of violence against his wife can be understood in this immediate sense as an act aimed at gaining control in response to his feelings of powerlessness over a certain situation. Acts of violence thus always have a purpose, although this may not be apparent to others, even the wife herself. As Rebecca and Russell Dobash have pointed out, violence is ‘functional, intentional, and patterned’.38 The majority of researchers agree that societies which encourage male dominance over women, and aggression as a positive male attribute,

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Introduction

predispose men to use violence within marriage.39 Domestic violence is common in societies in which men wield power over women in public and familial life, where men control resources, and where sanctions against such violence are absent or slight. Domestic violence appears to be most pervasive in male-dominated societies at periods when the status of women is changing, such as when women begin to assume non-traditional roles.40 Societal expectations of male dominance encourage individual men to view control over their wives as proof of their masculinity. Most violent husbands believe that their wives should be subordinate to them and completely fulfil their physical, sexual and emotional needs. They perceive their wives’ failure to comply with their wishes as an insult to their manhood and as behaviour which requires punishment.41 While a broad social and cultural context of male dominance nourishes men’s violence in marriage, personal factors are important in predisposing particular men to use violence.42 Domestic violence may reflect men’s dominance in general, but the individual men who turn to violence do not feel powerful personally.43 Indeed, their lack of self-assurance leads them to cling to social ideals of male power. Harry Brod has argued that ‘violent men are over conformists, men who have responded all too fully to a particular aspect of male socialisation’.44 Abusive men tend to have low self-esteem, an infantile dependency on their wives, and a fear of abandonment. They are, commonly, paranoid about their wives being unfaithful. They have been found to lack empathy and an ability to express their feelings verbally, and are subject to depression and feelings of victimisation.45 Such personal characteristics can result from experiences of trauma in childhood or adult life.46 Traumatic experiences are commonly productive of symptoms identified as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which can severely affect an individual’s relationship to others. Feelings of helplessness, victimisation, anxiety, and extreme reactions to stress often lead to acts of aggression. Bessel Van Der Kolk has observed that ‘Trauma consistently seems to be followed by increased rage, but men tend to vent this rage on their social surroundings, while women are more prone to turn it upon themselves’.47 The connection between men’s past traumas and violence against their wives is supported by Donald Dutton’s finding that many abusive husbands have psychological profiles similar to Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD.48

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Men’s individual feelings of power can be adversely affected by a range of demographic and societal factors. Men are more likely to be predisposed to violence if they are aged under 30, if they experience low occupational or class status, unemployment, poverty, racism, or other forms of oppression.49 There is also a correlation between wife abuse and men’s use of alcohol and drugs (such as cocaine, heroin, marijuana and LSD). Research has consistently shown that alcohol is involved in about half of all incidents of domestic violence.50 It is thought that alcohol and drug use contribute to wife abuse by facilitating the physical expression of aggression, though they do not cause aggressive feelings in the first place.51 It is when a man’s substance-taking is combined with his belief in men’s right to exercise power over women that a wife is especially endangered. These current explanations for domestic violence can be seen to be applicable to the experience of Victoria in the early twentieth century. Assaults on wives that took place in those decades manifest many of the triggering and predisposing elements of domestic violence noted above. Victoria was then a society of significant gender inequality. Male domination – socially, politically, culturally and economically – was the norm and had been entrenched since the start of the colonial period. But there were changes afoot. Female liberation from nineteenthcentury constraints and discrimination was noticeably occurring, with women increasingly questioning their expected role in society. Added to this gender dynamic, the First World War upended society and traumatised many individuals. This context would prove conducive to male intimate violence.

Chapter outline This book begins by surveying domestic violence in Victoria before the First World War. In the years between the turn of the century and 1914, women’s opportunities for self-fulfilment were expanding. They gained greater personal freedom, rights and increasingly participated in the public world of work. Yet, at the same time, numerous married women found that their husbands were prepared to rule households as brutal tyrants. Chapter One explores the pre-war nature of wife abuse and the ways in which it was framed in public discourse by authorities, journalists, reform groups, abused women and violent men themselves. How did the Victorian community regard and comprehend men’s

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violence within marriage? In what ways did social, cultural, economic and legal structures shape outcomes for abused women and their violent partners? Chapter Two examines domestic violence in Victoria from the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, to its end in November 1918. The Australian government’s commitment of troops to the conflict caused deep disruptions within Victoria. Those four years saw a mass mobilisation of the state’s young men into the much lauded AIF. The chapter concentrates on violence committed by civilian men—those men who did not undertake military service. It considers the ways in which wartime changes to marital and personal arrangements, and to gender ideology, affected incidents of and attitudes towards domestic violence. How was the violence of those men who remained at home during the war expressed and viewed? Chapter Three continues the examination of domestic violence on the homefront during the war, but shifts the focus to soldiers’ marriages. The war drastically disrupted married life for soldiers and their wives. New patterns of domestic violence can be detected as soldiers enlisted, departed for overseas service and, then later, began to return home. Cases of returned-soldier violence during the war years indicate new problems affecting soldiers, the ramifications of which would multiply when the war ended and the rest of the AIF returned home. This chapter unearths incidents of soldiers’ violence towards their wives while the war was still being waged and considers how the culture of war influenced public responses to these acts of violence. The new masculine hierarchy of wartime would shape official determination of who was, and who was not, accountable for acts of violence. The phenomenon of returned soldiers’ violence against their wives is more fully investigated in Chapter Four, which moves to the post-war world. Were veterans’ attacks on their wives mirrors to the horrors of war these men had witnessed? I discuss the role that military service appears to have played in generating domestic violence, tracing possible connections between men’s war trauma and their acts of violence at home. Psychological illness and substance abuse are prominent in this discussion. In addition, I consider aspects of war apart from battle that may have impinged upon veterans’ resort to violence. Should historians rethink current conceptions of the relationship between the First World War and returned-soldier domestic violence?

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Chapter Five deals with the responses of Victorians to veterans’ wife abuse in the immediate post-war years. Returned soldiers’ reintegration into the community was a public priority at this time. So how did the community make sense of and react to domestic violence perpetrated by ex-members of the AIF? I discuss how ‘the war’ explanation for domestic violence became part of the cultural landscape in Victoria. Court reports demonstrate that this interpretation was applied not just in the most serious cases before the higher courts but also in the local courts where the majority of domestic violence cases were heard. The war explanation would dominate the community’s understanding of veterans’ violence even if it was not always clear or true, and despite a few stray voices questioning the link. If seeing violent returned soldiers as victims of war was one common community response, purposeful silence was another. This chapter looks at the various responses of the judicial system, press, government, and wives themselves, to veterans’ intimate violence. Chapter Six broadens the picture of post-war domestic violence. It contemplates the impact of the First World War on the incidence of domestic violence in Victoria in light of official criminal figures. The resulting statistical profile of wife abuse charges in South Melbourne provides new evidence relating to the war’s possible effect on domestic violence. The chapter then discusses war-related social and cultural developments which appear to have affected experiences of, and social responses to, wife abuse in the post-war decade. This was a time when young women increasingly pursued personal freedom, pleasure, and economic independence, and men were concerned to not lose their prewar gender ascendancy. Did the war extend its shadow over civilian men’s violence, as well as that of returned soldiers, in the post-war decade? In what ways were post-war social conceptions of and responses to domestic violence different from those before the war? Did the war aid or impede women’s freedom from domestic violence?

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1

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’ Domestic Violence in Victoria before the First World War

In December 1901, a 19-year-old Melbourne woman named Marguerite made the biggest mistake of her life. She married a young man, W.O. On their summer wedding day, Marguerite could not have foreseen the violence and distress that this union would bring. For their marriage would end in appalling circumstances: a gunshot to Marguerite’s face, a prison sentence, and finally, a divorce. But this would not be until twenty years had passed. The newly married couple rented a house in the Melbourne suburb of Balaclava. Within several weeks W.O.’s behaviour seriously troubled and frightened Marguerite. A tall, stoutly built man, he drank excessively and refused to work to support their livelihood. He knocked her about, hitting and kicking her all over her body. One night he grabbed her throat and squeezed his fingers in an attempt to strangle her. He tipped buckets of water over her while she lay in bed; other times he locked her outside when she was wearing only her nightdress. Months of such treatment passed. As her body was battered and bruised Marguerite’s health broke down. Finally, she later recalled, ‘a constable rescued me and took me to my grandmother’. She obtained work as a cook in another suburb. W.O. was reluctant to let his wife go her separate way. Over the next decade the couple reunited several times, each time W.O. promising to treat Marguerite better. Marguerite forgave her husband repeatedly, for despite his past cruelty she hoped that he would change and support 3

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her as a proper husband. Her long working hours and low wages as a domestic servant were barely enough to support herself and pay rent. But W.O. never did fulfil his promises, and always resumed his drunken and violent habits. The death of Marguerite’s grandmother provoked a particularly violent reaction in him. On the day before the funeral he beat and kicked Marguerite so severely that she required hospital treatment and needed a stick to lean on at the service. By the age of 30, Marguerite decided to take extreme measures. In 1912 she filed for divorce, citing as grounds her husband’s habitual drunkenness, cruelty, desertion, and adultery. She stated in her petition that: ‘it is quite hopeless to expect any reformation from the Respondent who has repeatedly broken his promises and being afraid he will do me serious bodily injury I have instituted these proceedings’. However, her divorce suit did not proceed any further. Her case was adjourned four times over the next two years and was finally struck out in August 1914. It is not clear why Marguerite decided to abandon proceedings. By mid1914 she was still working as a cook and had little or no contact with W.O.1

A new century and new hopes for women Marguerite and W.O. had married in 1901, the year that the Australian colonies federated to become states of the Commonwealth of Australia. A new nation, a new century, and an improved economic outlook after the depression of the 1890s led many Australians to hope that this was the dawn of a progressive civilised era. For some women especially, the new century seemed in step with their aspirations. The ‘New Woman’, a model of femininity emphasising personal autonomy and physical activity, became a common cultural theme in the 1890s and was much discussed in the newspapers of the time.2 This new model of womanhood provided an alternative to the more dependent, passive, and frail nineteenth-century feminine ideal.3 Although the ‘New Woman’ was a cultural stereotype that may have had little relevance to the actual lives of some women, it nevertheless encouraged a view that women in general were becoming more powerful and liberated. The ‘New Woman’ sign-posted the direction towards self-fulfilment in which more and more Australian women would head in the decades to come. In the twentieth century, they would increasingly claim a right to move beyond the confines of the domestic sphere, to participate in the public world of work and politics, and to enjoy personal liberty. 4

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

In Victoria, women made important gains in the decades either side of 1900. White women’s struggle for the suffrage, begun in the 1880s, paid off when they finally won the right to vote for federal parliamentary elections in 1902 and state elections in 1908.4 Women’s legal rights were also enlarged in relation to divorce, maintenance, and child guardianship. Occupational opportunities for women significantly expanded. There was now a gradual admission of women to the University of Melbourne and there was a small but growing number of women entering professions such as teaching, science, medicine and nursing.5 Economic expansion resulted in a dramatic increase in female employment in the waged workforce so that, by 1901, one in three industrial workers in Victoria was female. By 1910, nearly one quarter of all Australian wage earners were female.6 As the economy diversified, young women increasingly rejected traditional domestic service (the occupation of Marguerite O.) which involved long hours and isolation. Instead, they took up work in factories and businesses that allowed for greater personal autonomy, socialising and leisure time.7 Women’s real wages rose considerably, although these were still lower than male wages for similar work.8 Finally, smaller families became the norm as contraception was more widely practised. In the 1870s, a married woman had born an average of eight children; by 1900, this average had fallen to about three.9 This lessened the heavy burden of child-bearing and child-rearing on women. The start of the twentieth century was therefore a time of improvement in female rights, life opportunities and living conditions. This improvement, in turn, had a psychological impact by changing the way that some women regarded themselves. Their increased status and participation in the public world encouraged them to think that their opinions mattered. In 1913, Jessie Ackermann, a visiting American social reformer who had promoted the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in the Australian colonies in the early 1890s10, formed an impression that Australian women had become more independent in recent years. ‘Women are now more given to thought, and consequently have views and opinions’, she wrote.11 But as well as inspiring hope and ambition in some women, this female progress provoked anxiety in those who felt their interests to be threatened. Women’s advancement challenged traditional male prerogatives of freedom in the public sphere and support and comfort in the domestic sphere, because these prerogatives depended on women’s 5

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acceptance of their ‘proper’ roles as wives and mothers. Upper-class women also worried about the dwindling supply of domestic servants. After 1900, the Age newspaper became more critical of women’s increasing public participation even though it supported women’s suffrage. It insisted that women’s natural role was in the family.12 In the years leading up to 1914, male journalists, educators and administrators all stressed that girls should be directed towards a domestic role in life.13 In March 1914, an article in Melbourne’s Truth newspaper complained that the smaller size of families and women’s apparent increasing rejection of marriage was due to the ‘high-flying and amorous females of present conditions’.14 Such attitudes constructed women’s desire for more fulfilling and less burdened lives as a selfish and unnatural striving.15 The result was that women were heavily pressured to define themselves in relation to the family in this period.16 Even those feminists in the vanguard of the women’s movement supported domesticity as a central role for women.17 The fears provoked by female gains were an overreaction. Women’s progress altered but did not destabilise the overarching gender order of society. Most women were still marrying and became economically dependent on men. Young women often worked for a number of years before marrying, but thereafter their employment generally ended. Some married women worked in family-run businesses, but most did not work outside of the home.18 Men’s patriarchal role in the family was also largely undisturbed by women’s gains. During her visit to Australia shortly before the onset of the First World War, Jessie Ackermann observed that: The first striking feature of the husband in Australia is his assured position as head of the home…There is no mistake about that. Women may vote, have political views, as they sometimes have, and may speak in public; but, as a rule, when affairs of domestic interest are in question, the husband certainly is head of the home. Not the arbitrary, stern, dominating, all-wise, ‘rule or ruin’ sort, but the one who is consulted ‘because he knows’.19

Most women steadily pursued a purposeful life at the start of the new century. However, the strong social expectation that men should govern the public world and their families and women should play a subservient role in both, cast a shadow over many women’s potential

6

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

for freedom and fulfilment. That shadow was darker for some than others. For, despite Jessie Ackermann’s assertion to the contrary, there were in fact many ‘rule or ruin’ types of husbands in Victoria.

The violent underside Domestic violence was a common phenomenon in Victoria at the beginning of the twentieth century. This behaviour had been widespread amongst European settlers in the colony in the nineteenth century and showed no signs of abating at the start of the twentieth.20 The female gains that took place around the turn of the century did not prevent male violence in the home. In March 1902—the same year that women were granted the right to vote for the federal parliament—the Australian Women’s Sphere alerted its readers to what appeared to be an ‘increasing number of murders and attempted murders of women through Australia by husbands and suitors. Not a week passes but cases are reported in the papers’.21 In Victoria, newspapers regularly reported incidents of wife abuse before the local courts and the Supreme Court. Reports of divorce cases, many of which involved accounts of violence, were regular features of the Argus, the Age, and particularly the Truth, a sensationalist newspaper which revelled in the salacious details these cases could afford. Of course, newspaper reports represented only a portion of the actual violence occurring. Many incidents never came before the public eye. Nevertheless, the frequent newspaper reportage shows that wife abuse was taking place in homes across Melbourne’s inner-city and suburbs, in Victorian country towns and on rural farms. The evidence of wife abuse in Victoria in the years 1900 to 1914 forms a shocking archive. Violent husbands variously kicked, punched, bit, slapped, stabbed, pinched, spat on, burnt, throttled or raped their wives. They dragged their wives by the hair, bent them back over tables, drenched them with water, locked them outside at night, held blades to their throats and guns to their heads, tore their clothes and forced them to perform offensive acts. Weapons of choice were fists and boots, guns, razors, knives, axes, and whatever else happened to be at hand: fence palings, oil lamps, bottles, and cutlery. The bodies of abused women bore the marks of violence recent and old: bruises, cuts, burn marks, abscesses, and broken bones. Men’s violence invariably coincided with psychological abuse, in the form of insults, humiliation, withholding of money, strict surveillance, social isolation, cruelty to children and

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animals, and threats to kill or harm. Women subjected to such behaviour over long periods of time often became traumatised. They were likely to experience miscarriages and poor physical and mental health. Men who became violent usually acted in response to their immediate feelings of anger about the insufficient compliance of their wives. This sense of threatened power appears as a common thread through each case of violence. In the eyes of these men, wives’ lack of compliance could take a multitude of forms, including insufficient obedience, requesting a husband to do something himself, and challenging a husband’s behaviour. Some men seem to have perceived insult and insubordination in their wives’ every move, and their eruptions of rage could take their wives by surprise. As Ellen Worland stated in her divorce petition of 1910, ‘the respondent often lost his temper and used abusive and threatening language to me without any reason so far as I am aware’.22 The most common trigger for domestic violence seems to have been a wife’s refusal to obey an order. Sarah Ruddell told of an incident which occurred one summer’s day in 1911 at her Carnegie home: I swept some tacks which were lying on the floor of the second bedroom into the yard. He ordered me to go and pick them up. I refused to do so. He became angry and taking me by the shoulders threw me heavily against the copper and kicked me.

Reginald Ruddell gave orders but was outraged when Sarah made a request of him. On his arrival home from work one afternoon she asked him to wipe his boots. He growled at her: ‘A bloody man cannot come into the house without being nagged at’. He thrust his fist in her face and threatened to disfigure her for life.23 Men such as Reginald were furious when their wives failed to be a servant to their wishes. Albert Hocking claimed that any cruelty or assaults his wife complained of were brought about by her ‘quarrelsome, irritating, defiant and provoking disposition and conduct…and by the neglect of her duty as a wife’. He explained that his wife had habitually neglected her household duties which included providing him with meals, paying tradesmen, and looking after their child and his bicycle shop.24 Edith Knight of Eaglehawk recalled one occasion in 1907 when her husband ordered her to leave the tea table and mend one of his shirts. Then, ‘simply because I said I would mend it after tea, he got up[,] caught me by the arm and the back of the neck[,]…

8

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

kicked me out of the door[,] and threw my plate of food after me.’25 In 1911, Margaret Woods petitioned for divorce from her husband. She testified that he had knocked her down, forced her to have sex with him, spat on her body after having sex, refused to let her friends or relatives visit, and kept her short of money even though he was welloff. In answer to these charges, James Woods stated that his wife had neglected her household duties. He produced an extraordinarily long and detailed list of his wife’s failings, including one ‘offence’ of 29 June 1908, when ‘Petitioner objected and refused to darn the children’s socks and told Respondent to do them in the presence of the children’.26 Some men responded violently to their wives’ questioning their right to have sexual relations with other women. Alice Maddox’s husband began beating her in March 1907 when she found out that he was committing adultery.27 John Mangan jumped on his wife’s chest and kicked her into unconsciousness after she asked him about putting his hand on a girl’s shoulder.28 Florence Van Nooten’s husband regularly left their St Kilda home to go out late at night. ‘If I remonstrated, he would insult me,’ she explained. ‘One morning at breakfast time he struck me on the head with his open hand’. As a result of his philandering she contracted venereal disease from him.29 Florence McNamara’s husband arrived late one evening to his Clifton Hill home. ‘I asked the Respondent where he had been. He replied “it is none of your business.” He became very violent[,] pulled me out of bed[,]…kicked me[,] and injured both my eyes which necessitated the attention of a medical man’. She later discovered that he had infected her with syphilis.30 While abusive men often felt entitled to engage in sex outside of marriage, they felt very threatened if their wives gave any attention to other people, including relatives and friends. Elizabeth Bishop explained: ‘I could speak to nobody. My husband was jealous of my own brother or my own cousins’.31 After their marriage in 1907, Robert Wakefield forbade his wife to leave their Middle Park house alone, or to speak to anyone when they went out. When he left their house he locked her in the bedroom, becoming violent if she objected.32 When Milford Saddington discovered that his wife’s family had visited his home during his absence, he was enraged and threw a knife into his wife’s leg.33 Reginald Ruddell took offence when his wife invited some friends for tea and started removing furniture from the sitting room. When she protested, he threw her against a couch, and just as her friends were to arrive he threw her against a door. Her body narrowly missed 9

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going through a glass panel.34 James Walsh took an axe to his wife in the front yard of their Flemington home because he had heard her mention another man in her dreams the previous night. Catherine Walsh was seriously wounded but survived the attack. From her hospital bed she explained to police: ‘He is a very jealous or suspicious husband. I have never given him any cause to be jealous or suspicious…It was all nonsense and madness on my husband’s part to make any suggestion about me’.35 Violent men could be especially angered by their wives’ attempts to interfere, as they saw it, with their control over children. One night in 1910, at their Colac home, James and Emily McTaggart’s two-year-old son began crying. Instead of comforting the child, James got out of bed and thrashed him. When Emily rushed to intervene he grabbed a whip and stood over her, threatening to thrash her too.36 Mary Hearson told of how, when she objected to her husband’s ill-treatment of her children, ‘he threw a bucket of water over me and used filthy language to me and spat in my face’.37 Abusive husbands were likely to become extremely dangerous when their wives reported the violence to police or decided to leave. Such action annihilated any semblance of a man’s control over his wife. Men who regarded their wives as their property experienced their wives’ assertion of independence as an unbearable insult. In October 1911, as punishment for taking him to court, Frederick Hearson used his wife as a moving target in the kitchen of their North Fitzroy home, throwing cups of boiling liquid, plates, knives and bottles at her.38 Abandoned husbands were prepared to take more lethal action. Caroline Hart left her husband Harry after he had treated her badly. Seven months later he shot and killed her at her father’s Collingwood house.39 In October 1913, Beatrice Williamson refused to return to her husband because he had been unfaithful. So he shot her, wounding her in the head, in broad daylight on a busy Richmond street.40 In May 1914, Theresa Brack left her husband and obtained a maintenance order against him at the Camberwell court. He attacked her as she left the court, knocking her to the ground and kicking her in the face and head. As police wrestled him away, he shouted: ‘You’ve beat me today, but I’ll do for you… I’ve bought a revolver’.41 The previous month, in April 1914, Thomas Paterson attempted to shoot his wife at her Yarraville residence. She had sued him for maintenance and refused to take him back unless he gave up drink, attended church, and gave her a reasonable proportion of his 10

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

wages. While Thomas awaited trial for the attempted shooting, the local Presbyterian minister wrote a letter to the Crown Prosecutor explaining that the accused had been ‘greatly distressed and disappointed’ by his wife’s conditions. Thomas found his wife’s assumption of control over their relationship to be intolerable.42 The Argus reported that when Thomas Paterson drank he became ‘quarrelsome’.43 Alcohol was a common factor in cases of domestic violence. Men’s drunkenness seems to have made their reactions towards their wives more extreme. Florence McNamara stated that her husband ‘frequently came home in a state of intoxication and without any provocation on my part would hit me, knock me about and kick me’.44 Before the Ballarat court in March 1913, Emma Stevens addressed her husband who had brutally assaulted her in a drunken rage: ‘You are a kind husband and father when you are not drinking but you are always drinking.’45 In March 1914, Barbara Swain described life at her Clifton Hill home for the past three years as ‘hell upon earth’. She ‘put down all her misery to her husband’s fondness for pints of beer and his blasphemous tongue’.46 Mr B, a butcher, became a chronic drinker soon after his marriage in May 1907. Thereafter he treated his wife cruelly. He spat at her, knocked her about (on one occasion fracturing her cheek bone), tried to choke her, twisted her arms and pulled her earrings out of her ears.47 Chronic drunkenness often coincided with delusional and paranoid thoughts. Men suffering from what doctors called ‘alcoholic insanity’ were often convinced that their wives were unfaithful or trying to harm them. The violence of such men towards their wives was recorded in the admission registers of asylums such as the Kew Asylum (from 1905 called the Kew Hospital for the Insane). In May 1904, for example, police brought Thomas Alexander to Kew. The examining doctor noted that Thomas, who was in an incoherent and delusional state, had broken two of his wife’s ribs and threatened to murder her. In December 1908, the Kew authorities received David Pearson, an alcoholic who had tried to kill his wife several times because he believed that she was unfaithful and wanted to get rid of him. The Kew medical officer diagnosed Pearson as delusional, with the prognosis that he could be discharged in time, but that another attack would recur with any further drinking episodes. Pearson was discharged in February 1909, only to be readmitted several months later, as he felt unable to control his impulses to harm his wife. A similar case was that of William Connal, a grocer’s 11

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assistant from Frankston and certified ‘alcoholic’. He was admitted to Kew in December 1909 after experiencing ‘uncontrollable impulses of suspicion about his wife for no reason’, during which he had taken her by the throat.48 Numerous men who appeared to be psychotic or demented, but with no alcohol trigger, also held deluded beliefs that their wives were unfaithful. In July 1903, William Lusty attempted to throttle his wife when she would not sign a confession of her infidelity. His delusions about his wife persisted while he was at Kew and in February 1905 the medical officer noted on his file: ‘sphere of delusions extending to warders and patients’.49 Thomas Dudley, a Fitzroy carpenter, was admitted to Kew in April 1909 after he too had caught his wife by the throat to make her confess her unfaithfulness.50 An account of the Kew Asylum by Dr Paul Farmer, published in 1900, provides insight into the thinking of such men. Farmer himself was admitted to Kew after his wife expressed her fear of him to friends, and doctors found that he held false suspicions about her fidelity. Farmer maintained in his account that neither he nor the other men placed at Kew were delusional, and that any ‘trouble’ they had caused with respect to their wives was understandable. The whole problem, Farmer argued, was that women were getting out of their sphere and dominating men. If women were devoted and true to their husbands there would be very little ‘trouble’.51 Farmer’s conclusion revealed what was at the heart of men’s violent and threatening behaviour, or ‘trouble’ as he preferred to call it: their concern to maintain control over their wives. Married men committed to asylums in this period typically feared that they did not have control over their wives.52 Such fear could be a source of anxiety and violence. The crux of the violence of both mentally ill and sane men was the same: these men believed that their wives were their subordinates, and that violence was justified in order to assert their authority. Violent men consistently presumed that, as husbands, they were entitled to wield power over their wives. Whether sober or drunk, clear-minded or delusional, men who resorted to violence felt entitled to take brutal steps to punish their wives for perceived misdemeanours. The more obsessively a man tried to control and subdue his wife, the more likely he was to interpret her words or behaviour as undermining his authority. When women struggled against such men’s expectations and regimes they risked vicious reprisals.53

12

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

It is not surprising that abusive husbands’ urge to exert power over their wives appears as a central cause of domestic violence before the First World War. Current-day studies of domestic violence have shown that men’s desire to control their wives is common in societies that are male-dominated—and even more likely when women start to claim new power within these societies.54 Victoria fitted this scenario at the start of the twentieth century. Men were in power: they held the influential positions in government, politics, business, administration, journalism, education, health care, policing and justice. In contrast, women possessed little formal power, were mostly economically dependent on their husbands or fathers, and were pressured to play a subservient role in relation to men in both public and private. Added to this situation was the tension caused by women’s improved rights and opportunities, and the emergence of the New Woman.

The struggle over men’s right to use violence against their wives On the eve of the First World War, many men in Victoria thought that they should be able to use violence in the home if they felt it was required. These men had no time for women’s progression towards equality with men, for women’s human desire for fulfilment, or for women’s legal rights against assault. In June 1914, the Woman Voter commented on the prevalence of such attitudes: the frequency with which men still assert their right to knock their wives about proves that it [women’s personal liberty] has not yet taken possession of all men’s minds. The descendants of the men who used the scold’s bridle have still a general feeling of sympathy for the man who breaks the jaw of a ‘nagging’ wife.55

Violent husbands believed that they had the right to rule the domestic sphere without interference from the wider community. In their eyes, violence, if they chose to employ it, was simply a private matter. In November 1910, before the Divorce Court, Albert Hocking described his alleged acts of violence against his wife as ‘matrimonial quarrels’. His lawyer also downplayed the incidents as ‘merely domestic quarrels’.56 But the views of such men were not uniform and did not go unchallenged. Also in November 1910, Elizabeth Edwards of Moorabbin told a neighbour that it was a ‘shame’ for her husband to knock her about.57 These contrasting attitudes towards men’s violence against 13

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their wives came at the end of a period of increased community concern about wife abuse in Victoria. In the late nineteenth century there had been collective criticism of the brutality with which many men in Victoria treated their wives. Those who publicly voiced disapproval of brutal husbands were the abused wives themselves who dared bring individual men before the courts, influential men such as journalists, politicians, social reformers and judges, and some early feminist organisations.58 Wife abuse was a barbaric practice, these critics maintained, and the ‘wife-beater’ a degraded specimen amongst the ‘civilised’ men in the community. Public commentary on wife-beating increasingly rejected the old colonial ideal of male aggressiveness in favour of a more self-restrained and chivalrous model of manliness.59 This late-nineteenth-century critique of wife-beating in Victoria (which also occurred in Britain and America at this time) was part of a wider rejection of unchecked male aggression in western societies.60 Over the nineteenth century, western governments and law enforcers gradually rejected and placed checks on forms of male violence that had once been accepted.61 Domestic violence was one of the male behaviours that ceased to be seen as civilised or indeed ‘manly’ by the turn of the century. Wifely obedience was still expected but men’s use of brutal means to enforce it was no longer respectable.62 Manly self-control was increasingly emphasised as an ideal masculine quality in the years 1900 to 1914 as Australian society became militarised.63 After the Australian colonies’ participation in the Boer War (1899–1902), to which Victoria sent 3,500 men, the new federal government sought to build Australia’s military prowess.64 Young men were encouraged to adopt a soldier identity through military activities in schools, scouts, cadets and rifle clubs, and in 1911 the government implemented compulsory military training for males aged 12 to 25.65 By 1913 the soldier had come to represent ultimate manliness.66 This meant that self-containment, chivalry and the courage to fight a brutal enemy if required were regarded as signs of manliness. Attacking one’s defenceless wife in a drunken rage was not. Criticism of wife abuse reflected not only a concern for the plight of beaten wives but also broader ideas about evolution and racial progress.67 The stereotype of the animalistic ‘wife-beater’ positioned violent husbands as belonging in the past or to non-western, primitive societies. The idea that violent men—including violent husbands—were less evolved than civilised men was given pseudo-scientific support 14

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

in the well-known work The Criminal Man (1876) by Cesare Lombroso. Influenced by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, Lombroso posited that male criminals were biological throwbacks to an earlier evolutionary stage. He identified the physical characteristics of criminals as closer to apes than those of civilised men. Whilst criticised for their crudeness, Lombroso’s ideas gained popular currency in western societies at the end of the nineteenth century.68 In turn of the century Australia, European settlers were concerned to build a civilised white society that was further evolved than the Old World and undoubtedly further evolved, so they thought, than nonwhite societies. A desire to leave behind the nation’s rough colonial beginnings was also part of the impetus to condemn violence against women. Thus wife-beating was portrayed as a feature of barbaric peoples that was at odds with the image of the new progressive nation.69 In 1900, for instance, a Victorian MP referred to cases of wife abuse as ‘relics of the barbaric ages’.70 In 1902, another MP, Mr Hirsch, explained to the Legislative Assembly that wife-killing had been tolerated by the ancestors of civilised nations, and was still allowed by present-day ‘savages and barbarians’.71 A ‘monster’ and ‘worse than barbarous’ were terms used by the Truth to describe two men’s vicious attacks on their wives in 1906 and 1909 respectively.72 In 1913, Justice Hodges discharged a violent husband on an assault charge because the wife would not give evidence. In doing so he commented: ‘If he is a man and not a beast it will be a lesson to him’.73 The idea that wife-beating was a problem of old or primitive societies encouraged many people to assume that this brutal practice would die out soon enough as civilisation progressed.74 In particular, feminists assumed that women’s enfranchisement would hasten its end.75 This evolutionary view of domestic violence coincided with a recognition on the part of social reformers and public commentators that degraded living conditions were productive of human brutality.76 They regarded impoverished and disorderly environments, typified by the urban slums, as places where barbarism still lingered. In particular, alcohol consumption was identified as a powerful agent of violence, a view supported by abundant evidence that drunkenness and violence frequently coincided.77 Explanations for violence offered by both violent men and their wives in court proceedings—‘it was the drink’—as well as official figures showing the strong association of alcohol and crime, pointed to a definite link between alcohol and wife abuse.78 The drunken 15

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brute who beat his wife was a well-established stereotype in this period. ‘It was the old story of marital misery’, reported a journalist in January 1914, about a case before the Richmond court involving a drunken, violent husband and a wife who was afraid to live with him.79 Temperance workers, such as the members of the Salvation Army, regarded wife-beating as clearly linked to drinking and they saw firsthand some of the results of men’s violence.80 In Melbourne, the Salvation Army ran a ‘Home for Women’ which provided temporary accommodation for 80 women at a time. Women fleeing from violence probably stayed there.81 In 1900, John Hendy, a Salvation Army Brigadier, wrote that his experiences had led him to look ‘with feelings very near akin to contempt’ upon wife-beaters. His contempt was formed not after visiting the men in prison but after visiting women whose faces were ‘almost beaten beyond recognition’.82 Temperance activists believed that men’s violence in the home could be prevented by stopping men’s drinking. They strove to show drinkers the benefits of abstinence and argued for greater restrictions to be placed on the operating hours of hotels.83 The Salvation Army’s journal, War Cry, often gave examples of wife-beaters who had supposedly become loving husbands through giving up drink. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Victoria’s journal, White Ribbon Signal, also portrayed men’s violence in the home as a destructive effect of alcohol, though it focused far less on domestic violence than did the War Cry.84 Public discussion and representation of domestic violence in Victoria generally framed it as a feature of the impoverished working class.85 In 1899, the War Cry published an illustration of domestic violence, entitled ‘Salvation Army Mercy League worker intervenes in a drunkard’s attack on his wife’ [Illustration 1]. The image showed a man holding an axe over his wife as she lies on the floor in fear, clutching their baby. A female Salvation Army worker has improbably entered the room through the window to try to stop the violence. The links between brutality, poverty, alcohol and disorder are made clear by the wild-haired ‘drunkard’ and his axe, the couple’s worn clothes, the broken blinds and the up-ended chair. An ‘afterwards’ picture shows that the Salvation Army worker has managed to banish the drunkard and his violence and has restored domestic order, lighting a fire in the hearth and making the wife a cup of tea. The working-class wife-beater was a persistent stereotype. In 1913, a silent Australian film, The Reprieve, opened in Melbourne. The film told the story of a working-class man who kills his wife after 16

Illustration 1: ‘A Tragedy of Today’, War Cry, 15 July 1899, p. 1. State Library of Victoria.

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discovering that she has been unfaithful.86 A still from the film depicts the man towering over and strangling his wife [Illustration 2]. He has a wild, neanderthal appearance, with large shoulders, hunched-back, and prominent brow. These two images show how the ideology of domestic violence associated savagery with the working-class man.

Illustration 2: Working-class man strangling his wife. Photographic still from The Reprieve, silent film, Lincoln-Cass Films, Australia, 1913. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, No. 357895.

There may indeed have been more physical abuse in working-class marriages than in the unions of middle or upper-class couples. Alcohol consumption and reports of crime in general were most prevalent in working-class areas—particularly the inner-city suburbs of Melbourne.87 For instance, in the working-class suburb of Richmond there was on average one arrest for every 40 residents in the period 1900–1914, whereas in the middle-class suburb of Camberwell, there was on average only one arrest for every 265 residents in the same period.88 Critics of domestic violence, who were mostly middle-class, thus had some valid grounds for addressing the prevalence of domestic violence amongst the working class. However, in confining the problem to the working class, commentators ignored the reality that domestic violence occurred across the class spectrum—as could be seen by reading the divorce 18

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

columns in the newspapers. Perhaps not surprisingly, middle-class commentators did not associate domestic violence with the men of their own milieu, who were more likely to figure as the respectable protectors of women than their abusers. This was why Joseph Fraser could assert with confidence in his marriage guidance book of 1900: ‘The women of the great middle class…have not to trouble themselves much about the morality…of their masculine friends’. So long as there was harmony of temperament and taste, he thought, ‘they cannot go far wrong’.89 The understanding that wife-beating was a symptom of primitive and degraded communities was conceptually limited because it overlooked a driving factor for such violence: sexual inequality.90 Before 1902, some feminists had argued that wife-beating would only be properly punished when women gained the vote. But once women were enfranchised, there was little feminist discussion of domestic violence itself, let alone the sexual inequality that underlay it.91 Public critics of domestic violence—mainly the men who dealt with or commented on cases, temperance workers, and the wives themselves—did not draw links between the patriarchal nature of society (which applied to all social classes) and the violence of some husbands. As the arenas of public discussion about domestic violence were themselves male institutions—the courtroom and jury, the press, and parliament—it was hardly conceivable for anyone to raise the issue of patriarchy as a cause. Instead, in the years leading up to the First World War, public explanations for domestic violence drew on ideas about evolution, racial progress, social environment and class.92

The restraining arm of the State Accompanying the understanding that wife-beaters were brutal degenerates was the assumption that the State should flex its muscles and punish these men. Numerous officers of the State dealt with or commented on violent husbands: police officers and prosecutors, the judiciary, Members of Parliament, and the officials of asylums and inebriate institutions. These were mainly middle-class or wellto-do men who often expressed a desire to protect women and to punish those brutes who fell below the standards of respectability. Thus violent husbands were sometimes arrested, admonished, fined or imprisoned. If they were obviously delusional due to psychosis or serious alcoholism they could be placed in institutional care. The 19

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State’s response varied for individual cases, depending on how officials viewed the accused and his wife, the alleged violence, officials’ respect for male authority in the home, and their knowledge of the economic realities of life for families. Police were usually the first line of officialdom that dealt with violent husbands. Sometimes wives applied to a magistrate for a summons and sometimes police arrested men on their own initiative if they had evidence he had used violence. However, even if there was evidence of violence, police often did not make an arrest because they knew that if a man was fined or imprisoned his financially dependent wife and children would suffer further hardship.93 Robert Smith, a Victorian policeman, recalled that he took the law into his own hands to protect a woman from her violent husband. Instead of arresting the husband, as that would only deprive the wife of income, he gave the man some of his own medicine: Having gone through his money this brute would go home and brutally attack his wife and children. The poor wife, a decent hard-working woman, would rush to the police station in her night attire, often bruised and bleeding…On many occasions I entered this man’s house, without warrant, and gave him a sound thrashing.94

Other officers failed to arrest violent husbands because they did not take women’s complaints seriously or were reluctant to interfere with other men’s private lives. Women thus sometimes found that their reports of violence and threats fell on deaf ears unless a series of incidents or an extreme act of violence prompted police to act.95 In her petition for divorce in 1910, Ethel Maddock stated that ‘I had to get police protection at different times owing to respondent’s cruelty to me and the police at last threatened to arrest him’ [my emphasis].96 Around 1906, Margaret Swift went to police in the early hours of the morning in a Gippsland country town to complain about her husband Albert’s violence. The police did nothing. Albert continued to abuse her, often throwing things at her, including a fork and a chair leg. It was not until January 1912, when Albert killed Margaret by hitting her on the head with a piece of wood, that the police finally arrested him.97 Following arrest, charges against wife abusers were heard before the local courts. In the most serious cases the local courts committed

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the accused to stand trial before the Supreme Court. The Justices of the Peace (JPs) who presided over the local courts often expressed contempt for the violent men who appeared before them. In June 1914, Mr Burgess JP, of the Richmond court, denounced John Brown’s assault on his wife as ‘the most cowardly thing that has come under my notice’.98 Mr Hester JP of the Port Melbourne court heard an assault charge against Alfred Moon, whom the Argus described as a ‘wife-beater’, in February 1911. Alfred’s wife testified that for the past 15 years her husband had beaten her every time he was drunk and also at intervals in between. A neighbour testified that one morning he had seen Alfred holding an axe blade to his wife’s throat in their backyard, and he asked the court for permission to give Alfred a thrashing if it happened again. Mr Hester JP replied that he could not advise him to break the law, ‘but I know what I would do’.99 Courts’ criticism of violent husbands often targeted their ‘unmanly’ behaviour in attacking women. The general attitude of the judiciary was that a man’s brutal treatment of his wife was incompatible with standards of decency. However, punishment of violent husbands was not only a response to the violence suffered by a woman; it was also influenced by the class hierarchy.100 The stereotype of the wife-beater as working-class brute allowed middle-class men, especially those who filled the ranks of officers of the state, to assume in contrast a chivalrous and civilised position.101 Comments about the cowardliness of brutes were easy to make because they reinforced the social hierarchy. Yet these authorities may have been reluctant to punish fellow middle-class men because they did not want to see men like themselves as wife-beaters.102 In November 1910, James Walsh, an ex-policeman, was tried before the Supreme Court after having attacked his wife with an axe in the front yard of their Flemington home. James appeared to the public as a noble man, the Argus reporter describing him as having ‘the build of an athlete’. Although there was conclusive evidence that James had carried out this savage assault on his wife, the Chief Justice expressed his reluctance to punish him: He supposed that there was no one who was not sorry for a man who was so highly spoken of, and who had won distinction for valour in the police force, but at the same time the safety of a man’s wife had also to be taken into consideration.103

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The Chief Justice’s comments reflect a mixed emotional and logical response to James’ attack. On the one hand he appears to have felt more for James than James’ wife, perhaps because he could more closely identify with another male authority figure. On the other hand, he knew that such violence was not acceptable and therefore a punishment was required. In the early 1900s the judiciary’s condemnation of or sympathy for violent husbands was influenced by the extent to which they felt solidarity with those men. In this, the social status, occupation, and appearance of accused men were important factors.104 While Justices of the Peace were generally willing to discipline men who appeared to be callous wife-beaters, their punitive measures were often mild. Violent husbands typically received low fines, short imprisonments, or simply a requirement to sign a bond to keep the peace or a pledge to abstain from alcohol. If a violent husband appeared to be insane, the court could order his removal to a lunatic asylum. Sometimes courts discharged violent husbands due to a lack of evidence (the wife would not testify) or because they did not wish to impose further hardship on the wife by imprisoning or fining her breadwinner husband. The lenient punishment of violent husbands attracted occasional criticism from politicians in Victoria. In September 1900, the Honourable T. Dowling of the Legislative Council expressed his outrage that ‘We hear of men half-killing their wives, and, perhaps, being fined only £1 by the magistrates on the bench’.105 In 1901 and 1903, Vida Goldstein, who would become the first woman to stand for the federal parliament, pointed to the inadequate punishments for wife-beating. She believed that only women’s suffrage would change the situation.106 In August 1906, Mr Gaunson MP declared to the Legislative Assembly that he would have the ‘roughs and scoundrels’ who ill-treated their wives ‘flogged until there was no breath in them’.107 Two months later, in October 1906, Mr Lemmon MP drew the Legislative Assembly’s attention to a ‘scandalous’ case: the Footscray court had fined a man just £1 after he had attacked his pregnant wife when she was sick and lying in bed. Four days later, the same man was back before the court for another assault on his wife. This time the court simply dismissed the charge. Mr Prendergast, Leader of the Opposition, supported Mr Lemmon MP, but explained that ‘magistrates very frequently inflict low fines to allow the bread-winner to support his family’.108 22

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

Politicians and the judiciary had no quarrel with a man’s expectation that his wife be his subordinate; they simply thought that he should be restrained in how he asserted his authority. Although not ideal, more mild forms of violence, such as slapping or shaking, were permitted as the domain of the husband.109 Violent men sometimes admitted in court to committing isolated minor acts of violence, hoping to portray themselves not as vicious wife-beaters but as righteous men who had been forced to discipline their exasperating wives. At the Fitzroy court in April 1904, Leonard Attwood stated: ‘I admit I threw a tin at my wife. If I get drunk there is nothing in that. Hundreds of others do the same. My wife won’t go away from me’.110 Richard Rogers claimed that ‘I never struck my wife, except to give her a slap on the face when she called my mother a vile name’.111 Albert Hocking remembered that ‘he might have given his wife a “tap” on the face’.112 Reginald Ruddell recalled taking his wife by the shoulders and shaking her on one occasion.113 John Mangan estimated that he had slapped his wife ‘about 30 times altogether’. He also admitted kicking her with the ‘flat side’ of his boot.114 Such men’s preparedness to openly acknowledge their ‘minor’ acts of violence in a courtroom reflected the general attitude of male authorities that only severe violence required punishment before the law. When a violent man was clearly delusional due to insanity or chronic alcoholism, authorities could arrange for him to go to a lunatic asylum or inebriate home. Authorities usually took such steps when a man’s behaviour became publicly disruptive or obviously extreme.115 In December 1902, a doctor certified John Moffatt after it became apparent that he ‘thinks his wife is the devil and says he will kill her’. In November 1903, a South Melbourne magistrate made an order for Thomas Williams to be admitted to Kew Lunatic Asylum after Thomas bit a piece of flesh out of his wife’s cheek. In February 1905, the doctor who certified James Kelly noted on his file ‘assaults wife, uses bad language, yells at top of voice, refuses food, irrational answers, apt to be violent’.116 In February 1906, the Kew medical officers asked the wife of William Ward if she would take William home. Mrs Ward explained that she was worried that she would not be able to manage her husband if he began drinking again as he became very cruel and unreasonable when drunk. Several months later the Kew authorities noted that Ward was now rational but should not be discharged on account of his wife’s objections.117 23

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Alcoholic men who were violent but judged as amenable to recovery could be sent to an inebriate asylum.118 The Victorian government had responded to community concern about male drinking in 1904 by providing for the establishment of a new inebriate institution.119 Lara Inebriate Retreat opened in July 1907 in the countryside south-west of Melbourne. Lara provided housing and treatment for male drunkards who either came voluntarily or on the order of a magistrate or police officer.120 A man could be sent to Lara for up to one year. Many of the married men admitted had histories of domestic violence. One such patient was Alfred Bates, sent to Lara on a doctor’s certificate in 1912 for six months’ treatment. Alfred was an estate agent who had drunk heavily since his marriage in 1895. According to his wife Rosella, he had been cruel to the children, on one occasion caning their child who was in bed with a broken arm and a temperature. During 1912 Rosella slept in a separate room with the door locked because Alfred had threatened to kill her. Finally, in June 1912, Alfred was sent to Lara.121 Asylums and inebriate institutions brought definite relief to some abused wives by removing abusive husbands for months or years. However, most wives had no power to have an abusive partner removed from the family home because violent husbands were usually not insane and many were not chronic alcoholics. As laying assault charges remained ineffective for dealing with domestic violence, an increasing number of abused women turned to the idea of their own escape from marriage—through separation or divorce.

Fighting for freedom from violence At the turn of the twentieth century, new laws made separation and divorce real options for some women in Victoria. During the 1880s and 1890s, the colonial government had responded to public concern about the plight of abused and deserted wives by reforming laws relating to divorce, child guardianship, and maintenance of women and children.122 The Divorce Amendment Act 1890 considerably extended the previous law of 1861 under which a woman could obtain a divorce only if her husband had committed adultery and either cruelty, desertion or bigamy.123 The new law allowed a woman to obtain a divorce if in the previous year her husband had committed a serious assault on her, or, if for three years or more, he was guilty of habitual drunkenness, habitual cruelty, adultery 24

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

with ‘aggravation’, or desertion.124 Domestic violence was a prominent theme amongst the steadily increasing number of divorce petitions that followed the passage of the act.125 Very few women, however, petitioned for divorce on the ground of their husbands’ cruelty within the previous year, as this was a very difficult ground to satisfy.126 The Supreme Court, which heard all divorce cases, construed this ground ‘most cautiously’, as Justice A’Beckett put it in 1910. A’Beckett explained that the ground of cruelty within the previous year ‘refers to acts of gravity, and not such as a mere passing slap or push’.127 Later in 1910 A’Beckett restated the court’s position: ‘A mere trivial assault clearly could not constitute an offence under this part of the subsection’.128 A’Beckett’s comments highlight the toleration with which many authorities regarded acts of violence that were less than extreme.129 It was the ground of desertion, rather than cruelty, which constituted the most radical challenge to men’s violence. In the years 1907 to 1913, around three quarters of all divorces were granted on the ground of desertion.130 The Supreme Court had adopted a liberal interpretation of desertion during the early 1890s and officially set out the principle of ‘constructive desertion’ in 1896. This principle held that where a wife was forced to leave her husband on account of his cruelty, the court would regard the husband as guilty of deserting his wife.131 The level of cruelty required for constructive desertion was less than for the ground of cruelty alone. For instance, threats of violence could be enough to justify a wife leaving. As Justices Madden, Hodges, and Hood stated in 1913: It makes no difference…whether the husband has thrust her out with violence or whether she has left because she apprehends violence. She is not bound to wait till he knocks her down or shoots her. If she believes, on reasonable grounds, that he will treat her with cruelty, she is justified in going.132

Cruelty in desertion cases needed to be such that a woman could not reasonably be expected to live with her husband.133 Whether a woman had acted reasonably was a question for the judge to determine, not the woman herself. This allowed judges much discretion. In 1912, Justice A’Beckett rejected Ruby Beeton’s claim that her husband’s cruelty justified her leaving him. A’Beckett told her that although she was not prepared to return to her husband, that did not constitute desertion by

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him. ‘He could not grant her a divorce, because she was, perhaps justly, angry with her husband.’134 A further obstacle was the requirement that women needed to have corroborative proof of their allegations of cruelty, which entailed furnishing witness evidence. Despite these difficulties, constructive desertion proved the most popular means by which abused wives sought to escape from intolerable domestic lives.135 The principle was not just applicable in divorce cases; it also bore on maintenance claims. A woman who left her husband on account of abuse, but who was unable or unwilling to seek divorce, could still sue her husband for maintenance on the ground of desertion. The number of women initiating such suits gradually rose in Victoria in the years 1900 to 1914.136 The increased accessibility of divorce also reflected the improved material and economic situation of women in Victoria. The ability to earn an income was an important factor in a woman’s decision to leave her husband, as she could not rely on a court making an order for maintenance of herself as well as of her children. Divorce was thus more viable for women already in the waged workforce—mainly workingclass women, as few married middle-class women worked outside of the home.137 This view is supported by a sample of 52 petitions for divorce which listed cruelty as a ground during the period 1910 to 1914. The vast majority of petitioners lived in working-class suburbs of Melbourne and around half of them listed an occupational position that they had held before or during marriage, such as domestic servant, saleswoman, tailoress, laundress, and boarding house keeper. Earning an income was very difficult if a woman had many children to care for, and thus separation was a greater option for women with few or no children. Of the 52 petitioners in the sample, 61.5 per cent had either no children or just one child. Only 3.8 per cent had six or more children.138 The declining birthrate enhanced women’s ability to separate from violent men. The cases mounted by abused wives in seeking legal separation from their husbands were in effect public protests against domestic violence. Such protests were only possible when women envisaged a viable life for themselves beyond the confines of their particular marriage. As Linda Gordon has observed in the case of American women in this period, women’s assertions of their right not to be subjected to violence were proportionate to their social and economic opportunities.139 One reason that married women in Victoria were increasingly taking steps to claim 26

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

their freedom from violence was that they had more social and economic options than ever before. In August 1911, Elsie Daly, mother of a baby, made a statement before the Preston court which clearly expressed her sense of a right not to be ill-treated in marriage: ‘I have been married a year three months and during the last few months my husband has taken to drink. I told him I would leave him. I did so.’140 Despite the improvements to women’s legal and material position around the turn of the century which made separation more possible, there remained serious impediments to women’s fight against violence: women’s economic vulnerability, the risk that an abandoned abusive husband would seek violent revenge, and the pervasive social belief that women should lead lives of dependency and servitude within the family. Married women’s economic dependence on men was cemented in the first decade of the century through state regulation of wages. In 1907 the Commonwealth Arbitration Court laid down ‘the living wage’ principle that male workers should be paid enough to support a man, his wife and three children, while female workers were to be paid enough to keep a single woman. The living wage principle meant that in practice women earned much lower wages than men.141 Thus, while opportunities for women in the paid workforce were greater than ever, low wages meant that it was extremely difficult for separated women with children to survive on their own. Many women who sought release from violent husbands thus went through the court system in the hope of securing an order for their own and/or their children’s maintenance. Some women were forced to ask for material assistance from local women’s benevolent societies. Both the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Women’s Political Association recognised that women needed sufficient income to support a family. In 1912, the Women’s Political Association’s journal maintained: ‘It is a grave error to suppose that women wage-earners are not responsible for the support of home and dependents’. These feminists advocated equal pay for women, and the Women’s Political Association even proposed that the State pay wives a separate income to give them economic independence from their husbands. Such agitation was unsuccessful.142 The State was unwilling to allow women economic equality or the right to determine their own freedom from violent marriages. In an effort to stall the flow of marital separations, courts sometimes tried to persuade women intent on leaving violent husbands to return home. In January 1914, the bench of the Brunswick court pressured 27

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Florence Lincoln to return to her husband Harold. Florence had left Harold on account of his cruelty towards her and their child, and his threatening to kill her. He had subsequently attempted suicide. Mr Allard JP asked the parties: ‘Is there any chance of this young couple coming together again?’ Florence replied that she would not return to her husband because she was too frightened of him. Mr Lord JP persisted: ‘Cannot you come to an agreement for the sake of your home and child?’ Florence stood her ground: ‘No, your Worships. He has nearly beaten the life out of the child.’143 The same month, a young woman, Isabella Heath, stood before the Richmond court and stated that she would no longer live with her husband. She explained that during the two years that she had been married her husband had been out with other women, had treated her cruelly and had knocked her about. She was afraid of him and sought a maintenance order for the support of their two children. The Justice of the Peace declined to make an order and adjourned the case for six weeks to enable the parties to become ‘reconciled’. No such reconciliation took place. In March 1914, Isabella, described in a patronising way by a Truth reporter as a ‘defiantly-determined young matron’, told the Justice once more that she would never return to her husband. She could not live with his brutal treatment and stressed that ‘he had promised to provide a home for her but had failed to do so satisfactorily’.144 In both of these cases the Justices appear to have been reluctant to treat seriously the women’s experiences of violence and abuse. They regarded the maintenance of ‘family life’ as more important than the personal happiness or safety of the young women. Community attitudes supported women’s confinement within violent marriages. Most sections of the Victorian community viewed marriage as a permanent union between husband and wife, and divorce as shameful. The major churches reinforced this message. In March 1913, the Anglican Bishop of Ballarat stated that ‘Every Christian woman ought to regard the extension of divorce with abhorrence’. The Church did not recognise divorce for desertion ‘or any other minor cause’.145 The Catholic Church upheld its doctrine of no divorce. The Melbourne Truth, which took a more pragmatic approach to social issues, criticised this doctrine in January 1914, pointing out that ‘Under existing conditions it would seem that many marriages are not made in heaven, but in hell’.146 Instead of recognising domestic violence, the churches encouraged women to fulfil their wifely duties by supporting their husbands and raising children. 28

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

Women’s loving and self-sacrificial behaviour would permeate the family atmosphere, and help men become loving husbands.147 If a woman’s home life was unhappy it could be deduced that she had failed in her sacred role as wife and mother. In his marriage guidance book, Joseph Fraser exhorted women to deal gently and lovingly with their husbands: ‘If your husband is not all you expected to begin with, make the best of him. Tact and mutual concessions will smooth over many a difficulty.’148 These attitudes discouraged women from publicising their experience of violence and bred unrealistic hopes that submission to a husband would make him more caring. Myrtle Hocking explained that ‘I did not let other people know how he was treating me’.149 ‘I tried to hide my life from the neighbours,’ Eileen Rogers told the Divorce Court.150 In the 1980s, a woman who spent the early 1900s growing up in a Richmond boarding house, recalled that ‘you would hear they were being belted up—we heard it in our let rooms—but if you said anything they would always stick up for the husband and they’d be knocked about hellishly’.151 Like Marguerite O., whose story introduced this chapter, most of the women who resorted to divorce had forgiven their husbands numerous times in the hope that the men would reform themselves. Newspaper report headings such as ‘Wife’s Loyalty’ and ‘The Forgiving Wife Again’ underscored both the recurrent and ineffective nature of such behaviour.152 The pressure on women to deny their right to freedom from violence was so strong that some even drew criticism for being too passive. In May 1913, Justice Hood commented in the case of Mangan v Mangan, that ‘The only thing said against the wife was that she did not complain. She had put up with a great deal more than she should have done’.153 Joseph Fraser, having advised women to make the best of their husbands, went on to criticise the woman who accepted too much bad behaviour: He may have almost battered the life out of her with his brutal fists and heavy shoes, and she will say, ‘It was the drink; he is one of the best of men when sober’. And when he has done his worst in all ways to show how vile a man can be, she still has faith in some lingering good at the bottom of his character—a good that will show out some time.154

Such comments betrayed a lack of understanding of the link between social expectations of women’s subordination to their husbands, and

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women’s attempts to accommodate their husbands’ violent behaviour as best they could. Wives who forgave their husbands were adhering to the dominant cultural script of the subordinate wife. In the context of a violent marriage such forgiveness often simply paved the way for more serious acts of harm. A woman who realised the perniciousness of female self-subjugation in this period was Louisa Lawson, editor of Dawn, a feminist magazine. Lawson argued that ‘Women have to learn that they owe something to themselves and the world’; ‘[w]omen’s passivity destroys their own and their children’s happiness’.155 Generally the courts did not criticise women for lack of selfassertion. They were sympathetic towards wives who appeared helpless and vulnerable, and who had borne their trials quietly until ‘forced’ to seek police protection or separation. Numerous historians have found that, over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, courts consistently favoured women who conformed to ideal womanhood. When women transgressed the bounds of ideal femininity, such as by acting aggressively, drinking alcohol, or failing to perform housework, they were often judged as having caused their own victimisation.156 Women who showed themselves to be strong and pro-active tended to alienate judges because their behaviour deviated from conventional expectations of female gentleness and dependency. Christina Wilson may have been one such case. She refused to live with her violent husband and sued him for maintenance at the Prahran court. The Truth reporter described her as a ‘determined-looking woman, with a large pair of specs, and the jaw of a prize fighter’. The court dismissed her case.157 The Court of General Sessions reduced a fine against William Tatham, whom police found at his Fitzroy home throttling and hitting his wife, after police described the wife as ‘troublesome’.158 Violent husbands often cast their wives in a negative light to suggest that the women had brought the violence upon themselves. They claimed that their wives’ nagging or inappropriate behaviour had justly provoked their violent response. Alfred Swift, mentioned earlier, gave as his reason for hitting his wife with a piece of wood: ‘It was only because she was milking in a careless way with one hand, and you know that spoils the cows’.159 The most negative stereotype that could taint a woman was the unfaithful seductress. Evidence of a woman’s extra-marital sexual behaviour was almost certain to ruin any chance she had of successfully proceeding against a violent husband, even if her new relationship started 30

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’

after she had left him. Both the judiciary and the popular press regarded such behaviour as highly provocative and a husband’s violent response as understandable.160 The divorce law even explicitly provided that, if in the court’s opinion the petitioner’s own conduct had contributed to the wrong complained of, the petition could be dismissed.161 Defence lawyers thus repeatedly suggested that wives had been unfaithful to their husbands, often manipulating the flimsiest evidence in an attempt to prejudice judges and juries. Sympathy extended across class for those men who had been violent towards an unfaithful wife.162 In The Reprieve, the Australian film that opened in 1913, a working-class man kills his wife after discovering that she has been unfaithful. He is tried and sentenced to death. When the presiding judge asks the Home Secretary for a reprieve for the man, the Secretary refuses. However, soon afterwards, the Secretary comes to believe that his own wife is unfaithful. He finds that he is mistaken but realises how easily he could have murdered her. In a change of heart he grants a reprieve to the working-class man and decides to be more affectionate towards his wife.163 The Reprieve portrayed men’s violence in response to female infidelity as a natural instinct which was so strong that even civilised and respectable men could be led to harm their wives. The line that judges were willing to draw between acceptable and unacceptable violence varied from case to case. The nature of the violence committed was an important factor in determining whether to punish the perpetrator, but sexual and class hierarchies, and the apparent character of wives and husbands, strongly influenced decisions. Working-class men and assertive women seem to have been more likely to be admonished for their respective claims of entitlement to enact or resist violence. Middle-class men administered justice in ways that sometimes punished men for violence against women, and sometimes trivialised the violence. These contradictory responses make sense when it is recognised that, as Carolyn Ramsey puts it, an ‘unstable synthesis of paternalism, Victorian respectability, and early feminist concerns’ shaped attitudes to domestic violence in this period.164 At the start of the twentieth century, there was abhorrence towards extreme brutal behavior of violent men, but unless a woman had been seriously injured or beaten to a pulp, it was still common for some members of the judiciary to treat cases of domestic violence as minor issues.

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Conclusion Reported cases of domestic violence in Victoria before the First World War support a conclusion that such violence stemmed from men’s presumption of control over their wives. When abusive husbands perceived their wives as challenging or failing to live up to their rigid notions of a wife’s role of service and subordination, they often reacted with violence in order to assert their authority. Jealousy, fears of sexual infidelity, unsatisfied domestic demands, and resistance on the part of a wife, emerge as prominent themes in domestic violence during this period. In many cases alcohol and, to a lesser extent, mental problems, appear to have exacerbated men’s tendency to enact their power through violence. Although male domination of women was a central factor of marital violence, it remained dormant in cultural understandings of domestic violence in the years before 1914. Instead, a combination of ideas about racial evolution and social degradation informed Victorians’ view of the causes and culprits of wife abuse. Commentators typically perceived wife-beaters to be drunken brutes who inhabited the innercity slums of Melbourne and who were alien to respectable sections of society. The very term ‘wife-beater’, in common usage at this time, defined such men as a class apart from civilised men. Sustained criticism on the part of abused wives, journalists, judges, temperance activists, politicians and feminists encouraged social anathema towards male violence in marriage. In the early 1900s, many Victorians regarded wife-beating as a barbaric practice which no longer had a legitimate place in society. Wife-beating had become incompatible with the standards expected of civilised men. Some public figures voiced their disgust towards wife-beaters and called for greater punishments. Justices of the Peace, who often shared such sentiments, imposed fines, imprisoned, or institutionalised violent men, though these measures did little to stop the flow of violence. The reform of divorce and maintenance laws offered, at least in theory, relief for women from cruel husbands, and reflected the state’s view that brutal and degraded men had no right to treat their wives as their slaves, to do with as they liked.166 Women increasingly opted to use such laws to obtain freedom from violence, and the number of divorce and maintenance cases before the courts in Victoria gradually grew from the turn of the century.

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Legal remedies for domestic violence were, however, tempered by the inherent concerns of male authorities to restrict female independence. Men in power generally regarded wife abuse as undesirable, but were not inclined to tackle the fundamental social and economic inequalities and cultural ideologies that contributed to domestic violence. Authorities were interested to maintain male familial power, and were generally averse to allowing women to leave their husbands except in cases of extreme violence. The state gave no serious thought to reforms such as no-fault divorce or equal pay which would have allowed women to more easily separate from their husbands. Furthermore, the belief that wife-beating was a problem confined to the working class meant that middle-class authorities were willing to keep ‘beastly’ working-class men in check, but also to tolerate much behaviour that did not fall within the class paradigm of ‘wife-beating’. The state and its law enforcers thus regulated domestic violence to the extent that such regulation fitted their own political interests. In doing so these authorities allowed much violence to go unchecked and in many cases left abused women to suffer or fight violent treatment on their own.

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2

Domestic Violence on the Homefront Civilian Marriages

In early August 1914, the outbreak of war between the major European nations sparked a wave of patriotism and excitement in Victoria. Australia would aid Britain’s cause and, for the first time, have the opportunity to show itself as a proud and courageous young nation.1 Amidst the intensified social, political and personal climate of wartime, cases of domestic violence continued to appear frequently before the courts. Some of these cases suggest that the war exacerbated antagonism and violence in the homes of men who remained on the homefront. This chapter deals specifically with civilian men’s acts of wife abuse in Victoria during the years 1914 to 1918. It looks, firstly, at the relationship between wartime models of masculinity, civilian men’s identities, and acts of wife abuse. Secondly, it considers the impact on wife abuse of new efforts to reduce alcohol consumption on the homefront. The last section explores the ways in which the war experience—in particular the ideology that supported Australia’s military involvement—shaped social responses to civilian men’s domestic violence.

Wartime masculinity and civilian men’s domestic violence Masculinity is vital to an understanding of civilian men’s domestic violence during the First World War. In the first place, triggers for men’s violence continued to involve men’s concern for sustaining authority over their wives. Wives’ apparent insubordination, unfaithfulness, or failure to perform duties adequately, remained common themes. For

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Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

instance, in 1916 Francis O’Grady left his estranged wife with two black eyes, a lacerated skull and broken nose when he discovered that she had in her possession a letter and telegram ‘which she could not explain’.2 In 1917 William Simpson attacked his wife when he returned home from the pub to find his tea not made.3 And in 1918 Polly Lampard’s husband broke her nose because she did not have his breakfast ready.4 While there is little to distinguish such cases of violence from those before the war, a number of reports also suggest that wartime changes to ideas about masculinity had an impact on some husbands’ violence. When the Australian government announced that it would send troops to the war in Europe it heralded a celebration of virile masculinity throughout the country.5 The military socialisation of young men since the turn of the century had encouraged many people to understand war as the ultimate test of manhood, a notion reinforced by the analogy commonly made in implicit terms between men’s battle experience and sexual proficiency.6 When recruitment began on 10 August 1914, Victorian men flocked to enlist.7 Whatever personal reasons may have motivated individual men to enlist, masculine honour and a raised status in the masculine social ranks rewarded all who exchanged their civilian clothes for the khaki uniform of the AIF.8 The AIF’s initial policy of accepting only those men who satisfied minimum standards of measurement for height, weight, and chest size, and who were of ‘substantial’ European descent, ensured that soldiers fitted white Australians’ physical ideal of manliness—tall, strong and white [Illustration 3].9 ‘A man had to be a perfect specimen of manhood to pass the doctors’, wrote Ernest Scott of the early days of recruiting.10 The masculine primacy of the AIF was consolidated in May 1915 by media reports of the Australians’ landing at Gallipoli. Official press reports and publications from this time onwards proclaimed that the Anzacs, as the AIF now came to be known, showed great courage, strength and self-control under enemy fire, and that they were natural fighters.11 The ‘manly’ physique of Australian soldiers attracted much praise and attention.12 As the press, politicians, and general public glorified the AIF, recruitment offices overflowed with men wanting to join this prestigious army.13 The veneration of Australian soldiers may have reflected a proud community, but it also served to create new divisions between men. Since ideal masculinity only has meaning in relation to ‘inferior’ masculinity, the ideal must always be exclusive.14 The emergence of a masculine 35

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Illustration 3: Officer measuring the chest of a volunteer at Randwick Expeditionary Camp, NSW, c.1915. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Zenith Film Library, Selections, No. 9534.

hierarchy which exalted front line soldiers and ranked all other men below them was an integral element of war culture in all of the combatant nations.15 As members of the AIF became more ‘keenly aware of their masculinity’, many civilian men unable or unwilling to participate in the fighting experienced a sense of diminished masculine status.16 Just over 60 per cent of Victorian men of military age did not serve in the war.17 Some men declined to enlist, while others were rejected by the AIF because their bodies did not meet the physical or racial standards for enlistment. Some men who were initially accepted into the forces were later discharged as medically unfit while still in Australia. All of these categories of men, to varying degrees, fell short of the ideal of manhood: the battle-experienced soldier. The lowest category was the ‘shirker’, or as Stephen Garton has described him, the ‘non-man’—the man who made no attempt to enlist.18 The new physical and moral masculine hierarchy seems to have been extremely damaging to the self-esteem of many civilian men. Men on the homefront were forced to internalise public doubts about their masculinity. Even those who did not want to go to war 36

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

could not escape the unflattering comparisons made between their supposed weakness and ‘the boys’ in uniform. Historians have described rejected men as experiencing ‘untold mental agony’, leaving recruitment offices ‘in tears’, and expelling ‘cries of anguish’.19 ‘The small men are angry’, declared a sympathetic civilian reporter in January 1915. He argued that a man could not be too little for the army, ‘provided he is not exactly a dwarf and is capable of handling guns, firing a rifle, and driving a bayonet home’.20 ‘Fancy denying a man the privilege of being a hero for the sake of a quarter of an inch’, exclaimed the same journalist a week later.21 Some men who failed the minimum physical standards tried desperately to build up their bodies; some even attempted to increase their height.22 Quacks cashed in on men’s anxieties, selling products which promised to improve the male physique. ‘Make up your mind to be a power among the men you mix with’ ran one advertisement for Dr Rentell’s Vitality Pills, accompanied by a picture of a male torso rippling with muscles.23 Relief arrived for some men when the Defence Department reduced the minimum height of 5 feet 6 inches by two inches in February 1915 and then further still in mid-1915.24 But rejection of a significant proportion of volunteers continued, at least until events of the war precipitated an urgent need for more recruits.25 In March 1916 the AIF, having withdrawn from Gallipoli, arrived on the Western Front, where it would suffer casualties on an unprecedented scale. During the AIF’s first six weeks of fighting on the Somme in July and August 1916, 23,000 Australian soldiers died, which was three times the number of deaths for the entire Gallipoli campaign. The ever-growing casualty lists at home resulted in both a decrease in the number of men enlisting and the beginning of a strident recruitment campaign.26 The federal government and general community placed increasing pressure on men to enlist. While such pressure was directed foremost at single men, married men of military age also became a target as the war situation worsened. Newspapers denounced shirkers viciously with an array of derogatory terms such as ‘cowards’, ‘wastrels’, ‘bludgers’, ‘smoodgers’, ‘trash’, ‘tripe’, ‘curs’, ‘rotters’ and ‘parasites’.27 Recruiters, soldiers and loyalists confronted eligible men on the streets, sometimes in dramatic scenes. On 11 April 1918, ‘A tank, a big gun and 100 sturdy young soldiers from Broadmeadows invaded the busy centres of Melbourne…bent upon capture of as many military eligibles as could be induced to “play the man” and enlist.’28 A few days later, the 37

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government minister in charge of recruiting issued the following appeal to eligible men: I sincerely urge you to shed your indifference, shed your civilian clothes, and don khaki. You will be able to hold your head high in the air and look your fellow countrymen straight in the eye. You will feel better, your conscience will be clear and you will feel what you should feel—a man.29

The community attack on the masculine identity of civilian men had its desired impact. Shame of emasculated civilian status became a major motivation for men to enlist during the second half of the war.30 Brian Lewis recalled that young men ‘immediately regained their self-esteem’ after joining up. His older brother Ralph ‘felt that he could now be seen on the streets without feeling ashamed’.31 Such was the impact of the harassment of civilian men that, in 1916, men who had been rejected by the AIF sought permission from the Defence Department to wear a special identification badge.32 At the end of 1917, rejected volunteers formed an association which aimed to assist rejected men and their families, especially those ‘who had suffered from distress or loss of health’. By July 1918 the association had over 1,000 members.33 The masculine superiority of soldiers over civilian men was reinforced through explicit messages that women desired men in uniform and looked down upon shirkers. Official propaganda and the pro-war media encouraged women to reject civilian men in favour of soldiers, suggesting that the offspring of cowardly and characterless ‘stay-at-homes’ would be inferior to those of returned warriors.34 One such piece of propaganda was The Hero of the Dardanelles, a governmentsponsored film which opened in Melbourne in July 1915 to wide media acclaim. The film told the story of a young woman who discards her athlete boyfriend when he fails to enlist in the AIF.35 In the film’s sequel, A Soldier’s Reward, the young woman returns to her sweetheart who has become a soldier and has returned wounded from Gallipoli.36 Many women and men willingly adopted the gender roles prescribed by such ideology. The Hero of the Dardanelles was screened during the highest enlistment period of the war in Victoria. In July 1915 a massive 21,698 men enlisted, greatly exceeding enlistment figures for any other month of the war.37 Numerous young women attached themselves romantically to soldiers, giving civilian men the ‘cold shoulder’ or a white feather as

38

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

a symbol of cowardliness.38 Some wives disdained husbands who did not join up, believing, as one woman put it, ‘it were[sic] better to be soldier’s widow than a coward’s wife’.39 In February 1917 a group of young women in Healesville formed a patriotic league. Their slogan read: ‘If we are not good enough to fight for, we are not good enough to smoodge with’.40 The new masculine hierarchy and obvious female admiration for soldiers made some civilian men’s intimate relationships with women more vulnerable. Soldiers threatened civilian men’s access to women and, in turn, civilian men’s feelings of lower self-esteem and jealousy made their resort to personal violence more likely. Men’s personal insecurity and society’s promotion of aggressive masculinity as an ideal are a potent combination, increasing the likelihood that individual men will use violence to assert their authority over women. In the social context of the Victorian homefront, women’s abandonment of civilian men for soldiers could pierce the self-esteem of civilian men, and serve as a potent trigger for acts of violence. Indeed, as the number of soldiers proliferated in July 1915, the Truth noted that many young men were behaving violently towards their girlfriends: Man is a most arrogant animal, and never more so than when he labours under the impression that he is in love. The number of absurd individuals who have been lately arguing with their lady love, with a bullet through some vital spot, because she prefers some other chap’s arm round her lissom waist, is a staggerer. The fact that the girl happens to prefer some other chap seems to stab like a bayonet to their vanity, and the only panacea for it is to murder the girl…41

It is tempting to regard this commentary as a reference to civilian men’s reactions to abandonment by their girlfriends for soldiers. The individuals concerned are described as ‘absurd’ and are thus unlikely to be soldiers, while the metaphor of the bayonet suggests the masculine power of soldiers over civilian men. What the commentary makes clear is the prevailing atmosphere of male competition for women and angst at personal rejection. A number of recorded instances of men’s violence against women during the war years involved civilian men’s fears that their wives or girlfriends desired soldiers. Jealousy was a common trigger for domestic

39

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violence, and now, as civilian men experienced a heightened sense of inadequacy and awareness of female attraction to soldiers, their fears of losing control over their women were magnified. On 10 August 1915, James McGrath, a 28-year-old factory worker, attacked his wife Lily with a razor blade in their Fitzroy home and then slashed his own throat. Lily McGrath was admitted to St Vincent’s Hospital with cuts to her throat and neck, and her clothes were saturated with blood. In a state of shock, she explained to police that ‘it was all over jealousy[;] he accused my cousin and I of going out with soldiers on Sunday last’. ‘I’ll stop you from going about with them’, he had cried as he threw her to the floor and tried to cut her throat. Lily denied that she had been paying attention to soldiers, as her husband imagined.42 In the same month, William Brown, a labourer, assaulted and threatened to disfigure his wife for life. She had a tattoo on her arm which read ‘I love Leo’. It referred to Leo James, a soldier. On a charge of leaving his wife without means of support, William stated that he had come home unexpectedly one day and found his wife in bed with a soldier. He had kicked the soldier out and made him dress in the street. He had also once seen his wife arm-in-arm with a soldier in Little Lonsdale Street (an area of Melbourne frequented by prostitutes). Irene Brown admitted that she had been with other men but claimed that her husband’s cruelty had forced her to do so for support.43 In June 1916, William Poyner shot and injured his girlfriend in a city hotel after discovering that she was engaged to a soldier at the front. ‘I have nothing to live for. I am sick of everything’, he told her miserably several days before the shooting.44 Edward Smith pounded his estranged wife in the face, stuck a hatpin in her head, and threatened to kill her with a razor blade because she had spoken to some soldiers in the Edinburgh Gardens. His feeling of humiliation must have been all the more intense given that he himself had ‘been down to enlist, but was ordered home, as he was drunk’.45 In November 1918, Harry Emerson knocked his wife unconscious and then kicked her, leaving her with a broken nose, black eyes, lacerated lip and bruised arms. He pleaded not guilty to a charge of assault on the ground of ‘really great provocation’, as his wife had arranged to go to the theatre with a returned soldier who was staying at their house.46 Loss of masculine status, even without the prospect of female abandonment, may well have played a part in some civilian men’s acts of wife abuse during the war. Some men who were too old to enlist were depressed by their sense of diminished power. William Morris, 40

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

a Boer War veteran, wrote to the Truth in February 1915 to complain that although he had repeatedly offered his assistance to the Defence Department it had declined his services. Surely he could fill some position, he argued.47 Around January 1914, Joseph Sweeny, a man in his early fifties, was discharged from his position as officer in the Royal Navy. It seems that Joseph experienced his discharge from the navy as a deep personal loss, which he felt all the more when war broke out later that year. The masculine honour that could only be achieved by combat experience was now denied him. Depressed, he spent much time drinking and made a number of threats to kill his wife. On one occasion he attempted to strangle her. In January 1915, Joseph wrote to the Truth, bitterly criticising the wartime construction of male honour: ‘to gain honor and glory you have got to kill 100 Germans…to gain notoriety you have only to kill an exploiter or robber at home. For the one you are proclaimed a hero, for the other you are denounced as a menace to society’. On the evening of 20 January 1915, at his Ascot Vale home, Joseph took a revolver and fired two bullets at his wife, and then shot himself through the mouth. At the inquest into Joseph’s death, the coroner found that Joseph’s discharge from the navy had preyed on his mind, and that his drinking bout had led to an attempt to kill his wife.48 Joseph Sweeny’s enforced civilian status seems to have promoted thoughts of failure, despondency, and in turn, violence against his wife. Unlike many recorded cases of domestic violence which do not allow insight into the psychological state of men, the Sweeny case offers a glimpse of the way in which wartime constructions of masculinity shaped individual men’s behaviour on the homefront. While some civilian men’s violence arose from personal fear and dejection, the violence of others was inspired by the cultural glorification of battle and weaponry that emerged during the war. Historians have commented that homefront societies tended to display as great or even greater desire for military action than did front line soldiers who discovered the awful reality of combat.49 ‘Every citizen, male or female, has a share in the spirit of war’, argued the American psychiatrist John MacCurdy in 1917; ‘[a]ll feel satisfaction of bloodlust, whether by jabbing a bayonet or devouring descriptions of carnage in enemy trenches’.50 Victoria was no exception in developing a martial appetite. ‘The military spirit is awakening in Australia’, proclaimed editors of the Melbourne Punch in February 1915.51 Many civilian men sought to display soldier-like behaviour on the homefront, purchasing guns, joining rifle clubs or the 41

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Home Guard, and vesting themselves with military glamour by dressing like, or actually pretending to be, members of the AIF.52 Such behaviour drew criticism from those who believed that the men ‘playing at soldiers’ on the homefront should be helping to fight the real war overseas.53 Some incidents of domestic violence occurred through apparent accidents involving weapons. On 4 January 1916, at a Fitzroy house, 25-year-old Raymond Dawson spun a pistol around in his hand to impress his girlfriend. When she teased him, ‘Oh you cannot shoot a maggot’, he put the pistol in her mouth and fired, killing her instantly. He claimed not to have known the gun was loaded.54 ‘Fatal Honeymoon: Bride Accidentally Shot’ read an Argus headline in another shooting mishap in October 1916.55 In February 1917 Edric McIntosh came off second best after he suggested to his de facto wife that they play a duel like ‘in the pictures’. He mistakenly gave her a loaded revolver to use.56 The military prestige of the bayonet gave a particularly vicious impulse to an intentional act of domestic violence in November 1915. On 19 November, Letitia McNamara took out a summons for assault against her estranged husband John, from whom she had lived apart for five years. On the evening of the following day, John McNamara, bayonet in hand, travelled to his wife’s home in Preston, stopping to tell a boy he knew, ‘I am going to Mrs Mac’s place. I am going to kill her’, and to another man, ‘I am going to enlist myself on Monday. I am going to take this to have revenge at the war’. When John arrived at his wife’s home, Letitia’s aunt, Ann Johnston, answered the door. ‘Send Let out here’, John demanded. Letitia and her uncle came outside. ‘Now Jack what you have to say[,] say it’, Letitia told her husband. Ann Johnston added, ‘Yes say it all out and let us hear it’. ‘What I have got to say is this’…John drew the bayonet from behind his back and thrust its blade into Ann’s body. He pulled the blade out and then struck Letitia’s uncle on the head. Before John had a chance to attack his wife, the uncle managed to wrest the bayonet from him and he ran away. Ann Johnston died from the bayonet wound.57 John McNamara’s attack on his wife’s family demonstrates the way in which the wartime glorification of soldierly violence could mobilise violence on the homefront as well as in ‘proper’ theatres of combat. His expressed desire for revenge against his wife and revenge at the war seem almost to be the same emotion. War culture thrived on people’s unsatisfied desires, such as McNamara’s anger towards his wife, and at the same time encouraged individuals to give martial expression to their anger and frustration. 42

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

Civilian men’s right to drink If the new masculine hierarchy of wartime frustrated civilian men, there were more disruptions to come. By early 1915, the traditional drinking habits of working-class men were under threat, as alcohol consumption became the subject of heated public debate. Soldiers’ drinking sessions during their period of training, and the growing number of soldiers and volunteers discharged or rejected on account of drunkenness, sparked official concern about the effect of alcohol on military efficiency.58 Temperance organisations and churches seized the opportunity to push for reform of the liquor trade, opposing alcohol in military camps and advocating the early closure of hotels. Others in the community were against any restrictions. Military concerns caused the state to weigh in on the side of reform and in July 1915 the Victorian government restricted opening hours of hotels from nine o’clock in the morning to nine o’clock at night. Then, in November 1916, following several other Australian states, and as enlistment figures continued to fall, the government brought in six o’clock closing for the duration of the war.59 Although domestic violence was not a specific social reform issue during the war, both proponents and opponents of early closing referred implicitly to domestic violence in their arguments for or against the reform. Advocates argued that while early closing would improve military efficiency, it would also reduce crime and domestic ‘unhappiness’ or ‘misery’.60 In June 1915, the Woman Voter quoted Justice Hodges of the Supreme Court: ‘After close upon nineteen years’ experience in the Criminal and Divorce Courts, I can repeat what I said publicly some years ago, that drink is either directly or indirectly responsible for more crime, more sin, more domestic misery, than all other causes put together.’61 Hon. W. E. Gladstone described drink as ‘the enemy of homes’ at a temperance meeting in Box Hill in September 1915. According to eminent judges, he explained, 90 per cent of crime was due to strong drink.62 In November 1915 Rev. Henry Worrall stated his view that ‘thousands of young fellows were…drinking to their loss, and the undoing of their home’s happiness’.63 A correspondent to the Age, by the name of ‘The Woman At Home’, asserted that ‘the liquor business is a greater menace to [our] lives and…homes than is the foreign foe’. ‘Woman’s justice asks that our best citizens, men and women, vote 6 o’clock in the interests of the people’s investments in their homes and families.’64

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Conversely, at a public meeting at South Melbourne in June 1915, Mr James Sheehan, a ‘representative of the boozers’, addressed the women in the audience: let me give you a bit of advice ladies—if a referendum is taken you vote for 9:30 pm, and not 6 o’clock, because if you don’t your hubbies will never go home sober. You believe me, he will go straight to the pub, and will pour as many pints into himself as he can between then and 6 o’clock, because he will know that he will not get any more for that night.65

Victorians never voted on the question of six o’clock closing. The government took matters into its own hands and passed legislation providing for the reform. Did six o’clock closing increase men’s drunkenness in the home, as Sheehan maintained, or were temperance activists right in their predictions that the reform would help curb domestic problems? The evidence here is mixed. On the one hand there appears to have been less public drunkenness after 1916. The Salvation Army noted a considerable decrease in drinking during 1917.66 Criminal statistics also indicate a decline in drinking in Victoria, as the rate of arrests for drunkenness between 1915 and 1918 more than halved.67 To some extent this decrease can be accounted for by the absence of men on active service who constituted 38.6 per cent of Victorian men aged 18 to 44.68 But, even if absent soldiers are taken into account, the figures would still have shown a decline. Fewer police arrests for drunkenness, of course, did not necessarily reflect an actual decrease in drinking. The earlier hours of hotel closing may simply have meant that men became drunk at home rather than in pubs where they were more likely to attract the attention of authorities. In January 1918, Senior Constable Samuel Hallett testified that early closing had led to increased sales of bottled beer.69 By November 1918 the editors of the Salvation Army War Cry were less positive than previously about the results of early closing, noting that ‘It would appear that the six o’clock closing bill has resulted in increased drinking at home’.70 Many men adapted to the new law by drinking as much beer as possible until closing time. What was once a leisurely activity became, as Walter Phillips puts it, the ‘revolting’ spectacle of the ‘six o’clock swill’.71 As six o’clock approached, hoards of working men descended on hotel

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bars in pursuit of beer. John Rickard explains that ‘drinking…became primarily an after-work social activity for men who, after frantically drinking against the clock in pubs which resembled large urinals, then surrendered themselves to home, family and evening tea.’72 Despite some historians’ suggestions that early closing reduced domestic violence, the pattern of binge drinking that grew from the reform seems more likely to have exacerbated drink-related domestic disputes and violence.73 Chris McConville was right to assert that ‘there is not much to show that the victory saved females from domestic violence’.74 Men returned home intoxicated and perhaps frustrated, and no doubt some women wished that the old law was still in place. One such woman was Annie Clifford of South Melbourne, who sought an order to keep the peace against her husband Ernest in February 1917. She explained that ever since six o’clock closing had begun, her husband, a coal yard worker, had been drinking heavily and would get drunk very quickly. He had threatened to kill her.75 Sarah Noble returned to her Fitzroy home one evening in February 1917 to find her husband ‘in a drunken condition, with a couple of beers alongside him’. After arguing about money, he abused her, struck her with his fist, then grabbed her hair and dragged her along to the top of the staircase. Before the local court on a charge of assault, William Noble explained his view of the incident: ‘As soon as I gets[sic] home with a few in the wife starts nagging me. When a bloke’s boozed he don’t want to be nagged by a woman about money matters.’76 Six o’clock closing was certainly unlikely to have turned longtime wife abusers into courteous husbands. Alfred Moon (mentioned in Chapter One) whose drunkenness had frequently combined with violence towards his wife before the war, was arrested for being drunk and disorderly in a South Melbourne street in October 1918.77 Mr K. of Hawthorn, who had drunk constantly and been violent towards his wife since their marriage in January 1914, was ‘seldom sober’ during 1917 and 1918.78 In October 1918, Mary C. sued for divorce from her husband John whom, she claimed, had been quarrelsome because of drink ever since their marriage in 1907. During the past year he had drunk ‘very heavily’ and had ill-treated her.79 Once a man became an habitual drunkard he was likely to continue on that path regardless of the early closing law. Six o’clock closing of hotels appears to have been, as Joan Beaumont puts it, of ‘dubious value’, in terms of both military and social benefits.80 In 1917 alcoholism was still responsible for between 5 and 25 per cent 45

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of rejections at Victorian AIF recruiting stations.81 Temperance workers welcomed early closing but believed that further reform of drinking laws, and ultimately prohibition, were needed to properly combat ‘the social evils’ of drink.82 Far from having resolved the issue of alcohol consumption on the homefront, the Victorian government was soon faced with a new problem: alcoholic returned soldiers. As the war neared an end, and as official attention shifted towards soldier repatriation, the issue of civilian men’s drinking faded from the government agenda. Temperance activists were left once more to pursue their fight against alcohol in the general community. In September 1918, the Salvation Army urged that possible new drinking restrictions for returned soldiers should apply to civilians as well: We are quite sure that booze is no good for the soldier…and we are equally sure that it is quite as harmful to the civilian population. There must be no differentiation in this matter. The slacker must have no greater freedom to obtain drink than the men who…endured incredible hardships and braved death a thousand times for us.83

By the end of the war alcohol remained a formidable challenge to those who had already worked tirelessly for its limitation and abolition in Victoria.

Attitudes towards civilian domestic violence on the homefront Just as the First World War helped to create new patterns of domestic violence, so too did it shape particular responses towards wife abuse. In the years before the war, many people had regarded men who beat their wives as uncivilised beasts. Middle-class male authorities often assumed a chivalrous position in criticising the brutality of those men who resembled the stereotypical wife-beater. The war gave male chivalry renewed vigour as a cultural value. Films, posters and newspaper items typically portrayed the AIF as fighting valiantly for the protection of women from the clutches of the evil Germans. In May 1915, the Truth published a fanciful cartoon entitled ‘The Modern St George’. The image depicted an Australian Light Horseman as St George (the ultimate symbol of chivalry), rescuing a fair maiden from a fire-breathing German dragon [Illustration 4].84

46

Illustration 4: ‘The Modern St George’, Truth, 29 May 1915, p. 1. State Library of Victoria.

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The heavy emphasis on chivalry during the war lent an edge to judicial criticism of violent husbands. Shortly after the war began, in mid-August 1914, Mr Read Murphy of the South Melbourne bench described Humphrey Duke’s assault on his wife, which consisted of pulling her out of bed by her hair and kicking her viciously, as ‘an outrageous, unmanly and shocking assault’.85 ‘No provocation justifies a man striking a woman with his clenched fist’, declared Mr Clarebrough JP, of the same court, in March 1915.86 Later in 1915, the chairman of the Fitzroy court fined Frederick Nixon the hefty sum of £10 for thrashing and threatening to kill his ‘lady love’ with whom he was living. He commented: ‘Perhaps that will keep a bully like him away from the woman. If he wants to fight let him have a go at a man and not at a woman’.87 In January 1916, Mr Gross JP commented on a man who had brutally kicked his wife when he was drunk, causing her serious injury: ‘he must be a contemptible man to attack a woman in such an outrageous manner. I have no hesitation in imposing the maximum penalty’.88 According to the chivalrous ideology of wartime, civilian eligibles who failed to enlist showed themselves as indifferent to the safety of their womenfolk. ‘The shirker’, wrote one enlisted soldier in 1916, ‘is too cowardly…to raise his hand in the defence of the honour of a woman’.89 Civilian men of military age became tainted as men who treated women badly, who would rather fight a woman than protect her.90 In October 1916, a speaker at a rally organised by the Australian Women’s National League warned young women against marrying civilian men. There would be no happiness in store for these women, the speaker cautioned, as they would have no respect for their husbands and ‘He, on his side, will have no respect for you’.91 Both military and civilian authorities were concerned to maintain an ideological divide between ‘chivalrous’ soldiers and ‘degraded’ types of manhood. It was the policy of the Defence Department to not allow men who had been in gaol to go to the front. The AIF enlistment form asked volunteers to state whether they had ever been convicted by a civil power. Those who had criminal records were unlikely to admit it and numerous men with criminal histories did enlist.92 In 1915, realising that numerous undesirables had got through the net, the Chief Secretary expressed his willingness to send detectives to military camps to identify any men who had prior criminal convictions.93 ‘The discharge of this man is recommended with a view 48

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

to eliminating undesirables’, noted an official on the record of one enlister who had a history of drinking and violent behaviour.94 The stereotypical ‘wife-beater’ was clearly at odds with the AIF image. In some cases authorities were unwilling to allow convicted violent husbands to become soldiers. In March 1916, an AIF official discharged a soldier after he had been sentenced to two months’ imprisonment for breaking the jaw of his female partner. The official stated that the man was unlikely to become an efficient soldier.95 In February 1916, William Hinchcliffe appeared before the South Melbourne court on a charge of wife assault. A wharf labourer, William had recently enlisted in the AIF and he wore his new uniform. The police prosecutor told the bench that this was one of the worst cases that had come under his notice. On the evening of 21 January, Margaret Hinchcliffe had left her house to purchase groceries. When she returned home her husband had knocked her down and beaten her mercilessly. She had a severe abrasion on her left hip where he had kicked her. William, who had prior convictions for assaulting his wife, received the maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. In handing down sentence, Mr Baragwanath JP remarked that ‘It is blackguards of this class that disgrace the King’s uniform’. The police prosecutor assured Baragwanath that he would do his best to have William thrown out of the army.96 It would seem that the police did indeed arrange for William to be discharged from the AIF. In March 1917, William appeared yet again before the court on a charge of wife assault. This time the court imposed a heavy fine of £10. He also faced a charge of wearing an AIF uniform when he was not a member of such forces.97 Another enlister who incurred the ire of the judiciary was Frank Brogan, who appeared before the Prahran court in September 1915 on a charge of behaving in an offensive manner in a public place. According to his mother-in-law, Emma Corby, Frank had caused a disturbance at her house because his wife, whom he had treated very badly, refused to see him. Frank wore a military overcoat to the court hearing even though, as the prosecutor quickly pointed out, he had been discharged from the AIF. When asked why he had been discharged, Frank joked to the bench that he had been kicked in the head by a horse and that when he took drink he was ‘gone’. He had, however, recently rejoined. Upon hearing this news the presiding JP expressed his displeasure and his intention to notify the military authorities that this man should not be allowed in the forces.98 49

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Ideas about racial progress reinforced a public perception that the soldiers who left Australia’s shores were of superior character to those men of military age who remained at home. Soldiers were seen as ideal whereas men who were unable to join up, who avoided enlistment, or who were discharged early from the forces were deemed defective— mentally, morally, and/or physically. In August 1917 the InspectorGeneral of the Insane, Dr W. E. Jones, told the Victorian Parliament that men who proved unable to stand the strain of military training were often ‘imbecile or degenerate weaklings’.99 W. A. T. Lind, also of the Victorian Lunacy Department, thought that men who were ‘entirely normal’ were naturally averse to crime, whereas men ‘below mental and physical standard’ tended to be criminals. Some of the typical characteristics of a criminal, which Lind thought could be verified by a visit to the courts, were a ‘weak heart’, ‘prognathic jaw’, ‘defective chest measurement’, ‘prehensile toes’, and ‘dental anomalies’.100 Such ‘expert’ opinion encouraged the association of civilian status with degeneracy in the public imagination. Aware that their non-soldier status showed themselves in an unfavourable light, some violent civilian husbands of military age attempted to gain sympathy in a courtroom by showing that they had attempted to become soldiers. In November 1918, Charlotte Blair charged her husband William with leaving her without means of support. She testified that he had left her in August and given her no money since. He had frequently abused her and had once threatened her with an axe. William Blair protested that his wife had told him either to go to the war or to get out of her mother’s house where they were living. He had ‘previously enlisted but had been discharged subsequently as being medically unfit so he had no alternative but to leave’. The bench made an order for maintenance but declined to make an order for costs.101 In October 1917, Horace Caston, a 25-year-old electrician, was charged with attempted murder of his estranged wife. He told the Supreme Court that he had enlisted but had been discharged from camp due to a defective left arm. Despite solid evidence against Horace Caston, the jury acquitted him.102 Alfred Whitaker, whose wife refused to live with him on account of his drunkenness and cruelty, told the Collingwood court that he was an Imperial Reservist and was currently in camp.103 In contrast, women emphasised to courts their violent husbands’ lack of moral character by falling short of the masculine military ideal. In February 1916, Veronia Watts charged her husband William with 50

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

leaving her and their two young children without means of support. She told the St Kilda court that William had recently been discharged from his position in the military police on account of drunkenness. He had treated her cruelly, cursing and hitting her when he returned home drunk, and it was impossible for her to continue to live with him. Their child was disfigured because of his violence towards her during her pregnancy. She was now working and her mother was looking after the children. Veronia Watts’ sister corroborated the evidence. She accused William of joining the military police because he did not want to go to the front. ‘Why didn’t you go to the front like my poor fellow? Why should he fight for rotters like you?’, she demanded to know. The bench ordered William to pay maintenance for his children and court costs.104 In addition to civilian status, German ancestry also influenced judicial responses to violent husbands on the homefront. In July 1917, Louis Mulihan appeared before the St Kilda court charged with leaving his wife and children without means of support. He was, according to the prosecutor, a German and, as his conduct would prove, a ‘typical Hun’. Louis had allegedly tied his son to a post for three days, flogged his daughter with a buggy whip, and beaten his wife, leaving her with black eyes and a cut to the head. His wife and children were afraid of him. Louis was also a taskmaster. He had worked his wife to the bone. When she protested at being made to work so hard Louis told her it was a pity that the rules of Germany did not apply in Australia, for in Germany women had to pull the plough while men steered. The defence lawyer protested that Louis Mulihan was actually Australian born and that it was his parents who were German. But the bench was not interested. In making an order for maintenance, the chairman of the court expressed his hope that once the evidence of this case was read throughout Victoria there would be no need for the introduction of military conscription.105 Louis Mulihan was most probably a violent husband. But the court’s decision in favour of his wife was cemented by his German ethnicity. Early in the war, reports of the German army’s brutal treatment of women in Belgium and France, and its execution of English nurse Edith Cavell in October 1915, had framed German men as cowardly and unchivalrous violators of women.106 At the time of the Mulihan case, the Australian government was preparing a second campaign for military conscription after failing to gain enough public support for conscription in a referendum held in October 1916. Since 1916, the pro-conscriptionists had disseminated propaganda stereotyping the typical German man, or 51

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‘Hun’, as a cruel beast who preyed upon women, a creation not unlike the pre-war stereotype of the wife-beater: animalistic, uncivilised, and violent [Illustration 5]. In October 1916, Prime Minister Billy Hughes had appealed to Australian women to vote for conscription, warning them of brutal treatment if the Germans were to win the war. ‘In Germany the women…are regarded as mere household chattels’, he explained. ‘The German nature is coarse and brutal, and it shows…in the treatment of German women’.107 Propaganda films such as If the Huns Came to Melbourne (June 1916) and Australia’s Peril (May 1917) depicted the likely abuse of Australian women in the event of a German invasion [Illustration 6].108 The Mulihan case provided some more timely propaganda material for the second conscription effort.

Illustration 5: Menacing Hun. Harry Julius animated cartoon, ‘Today the German Monster Threatens the World’, c. 1916. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Zenith Film Library, Selections, No. 9534.

The threat of male violence against women figured prominently as a theme in political and cultural representations of the war [Illustration 7]. The Bulletin even published an image that portrayed America’s attempts at diplomacy between the warring nations as akin to a judge’s 52

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

Illustration 6: Poster advertising Australia’s Peril, silent film, 1917. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, No. 356101.

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Illustration 7: ‘God bless dear Daddy who is fighting the Hun and send him Help’, W. E. Smith Printer, Sydney, 1918. Australian War Memorial.

deluded attempts to reconcile an abused wife with her brutal husband [Illustration 8]. The dichotomy of AIF chivalry and German brutality towards women may have increased the level of criticism of violent husbands on the homefront who appeared to be unchivalrous cowards. But, generally, public objection to violence against women was directed towards the male enemy. Brian Lewis recalled that in the early stages of the war ‘we believed in the…brutal bestiality of Germany; even to hint at

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Illustration 8: ‘The Peacemaker’, The Bulletin, 1 February 1917, p. 1. State Library of Victoria.

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doubts would have been blasphemous’.109 Most women’s organisations believed that Australian men should fight to ensure women’s safety from the enemy yet they were silent about the domestic violence that already victimised many Victorian women. After Australian women obtained the vote, feminists assumed that domestic violence would soon be a thing of the past and they made almost no mention of it.110 They were, however, ready to recognise the obvious sufferings of women in the context of war. In April 1917, the National Council of Women, an umbrella organisation to which many women’s organisations were affiliated, made a resolution of protest against the German treatment of women and children.111 War propaganda depicted abuse and suffering as the unhappy lot of the women of Germany and of German-occupied Belgium and France. It ignored the existence of violence against women on the Australian homefront and instead portrayed Australian women as well treated by their menfolk. In early October 1916, Prime Minister Hughes pronounced that: ‘In Australia the emancipation of women is complete’. ‘Women in this Commonwealth are endowed with the full rights of citizenship; they are the equals of men’. He warned that Australian women needed to vote yes to conscription in order to preserve their ‘liberties and privileges’.112 In contrast to Hughes’ rhetoric, the records of Victorian newspapers and law courts during the war indicate that if women needed protection, it was foremost from their own husbands. While the AIF was facing the dreadful reality of trench warfare, many married women were fighting their own battles on the homefront. One such woman was Mary Wright, who lived with her husband George, a municipal employee, and their seven children in Collingwood. From mid-1915 George’s behaviour towards Mary became unbearable. On a daily basis he called her a ‘German’ and accused her of immorality with nearly every man who called at their house. Such behaviour continued until October 1916 when George attacked Mary after she returned home from a conscription meeting. He believed that she had been out with another man. Mary then left George and sued him for maintenance. Mocking pro-conscription rhetoric about women’s liberties in Australia, a reporter for the Truth observed that: Little did Billie Hughes imagine what was in store for one of his fair and fat listeners at that packed meeting of Conscriptionists held in the Melbourne Town Hall when she returned to her unhappy domicile in the democratic Collingwood.113

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Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Civilian Marriages

The Truth report was not particularly sympathetic to Mary Wright, but it made a valid point. The working-class suburb of Collingwood, like other inner-city suburbs of Melbourne, was hardly a free haven for women. From 1916 there was growing cynicism towards conscription propaganda amongst some sections of the Victorian community. Billie Hughes’ attempt to frighten women into voting for conscription was not entirely successful. Many working-class women demonstrated against conscription, some even setting fire to an effigy of the Prime Minister at Port Melbourne in October 1916.114 War propaganda that glorified the AIF enlister’s chivalrous protection of women may have made women’s independent and assertive resistance to domestic violence even more problematic than it had been before the war. The ideal of women as passive and weak dependents of men was particularly strong during the war because it was an integral element of chivalry. As Annabel Cooper puts it, ‘Heroes…could best be made if they fought in defence of the vulnerable, the helpless, and the pure’.115 The government propaganda poster, ‘God Bless dear Daddy who is fighting the Hun’, shows a soldier’s wife looking appropriately frightened and vulnerable (Illustration 7). Unfortunately, women who did not present themselves as vulnerable were less likely to be seen as worthy of protection. In January 1918, Alice Anderson sought a maintenance order against her husband at the South Melbourne court, alleging that her husband had constantly abused and insulted her. The bench adjourned the case in the hope that the couple could become ‘reconciled’. When the hearing resumed two months later, Alice told how her husband had abused her again after she had commented that their home was as much hers as it was his. On hearing this evidence, Mr Baragwanath JP told the courtroom: ‘the bench had a lot of sympathy for Mrs Anderson at the start, but none at all now. She is too aggressive, and no man with any spirit could stand it’. In his eyes, Alice’s standing up for herself was objectionable and outweighed any abuse she had suffered. The bench dismissed the case.116

Conclusion The First World War shaped civilian men’s domestic violence in Victoria in several ways. The new masculine hierarchy which instated soldiers as prime men and ranked all other men below, and the community antagonism towards ‘shirkers’, damaged the self-esteem of many

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civilian men. Joy Damousi’s and Marilyn Lake’s argument that wars can ‘profoundly upset gender and sexual identities’ certainly applies to civilian men on the Victorian homefront during the war.117 At the same time that such ideology diminished the status of civilian men, it promoted the desirability of masculine aggression and martial attitudes. This combination seems to have encouraged some civilian men to deal violently with their female partners, as they attempted to reassert their masculine status and authority. Legislative efforts to improve military efficiency through restrictions on liquor trading hours would seem at best to have reduced the level of public drunkenness. Early closing of hotels initiated new patterns of drinking amongst civilian men, rather than, as temperance workers hoped, a new sobriety. It is difficult to measure, but there is scant evidence that drink-related domestic violence was any less frequent as a result of early closing. The need to protect women from the violence of bad men was a major theme of wartime culture. According to the government and popular media, members of the AIF had chivalrously enlisted themselves to fight the German foe who threatened the safety of Australian women. The effect of this ideology in the courts in Victoria was to encourage more stringent judicial criticism of men who attacked their wives, particularly those men who appeared to be cowards, shirkers or of German ethnicity. In attempts to ward off such criticism, violent civilian husbands strove to align themselves with soldiering, sometimes successfully and sometimes pathetically. At a broader social level, however, there was no increased level of public concern about wife abuse experienced by Australian women during the war. Instead, anti-German propaganda, specifically the construction of the enemy as a brutal abuser of women, required silence about Australian men’s own violence towards women. As far as the state was concerned, Australian men treated their women as liberated equals. This black and white ideology had little concern for the complexities or realities of life in Victoria.

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3

Domestic Violence on the Homefront Soldier Marriages

‘[W]ar crystallizes contradictions between ideology and actual experience’, argued Margaret and Patrice Higonnet in their insightful work on the relationship between war and gender relations.1 Records of the lives of some married women on the Victorian homefront of 1914 to 1918 support such a statement. At the same time that war propaganda portrayed the AIF as chivalrously fighting for the protection of women from a brutal German enemy, the actual departure of soldiers for overseas combat meant that numbers of wives experienced a release from domestic violence. And at the same time that newspapers, films, speeches, posters and pageants glorified the bravery of the AIF, some soldiers on the homefront resorted to violence in their relationships with their wives. This chapter looks beyond the wartime rhetoric of male chivalry to explore domestic violence within soldier marriages during the First World War. It examines experiences of domestic violence in light of soldiers’ enlistment, departure for the front, and return to Australia before the war’s end. It then gauges social responses to violence occurring within soldiers’ marriages while the war was being waged. Were authorities concerned about soldiers’ wife abuse? To what extent were soldiers’ wives able to resist domestic violence in the heated atmosphere of wartime?

Women’s wartime freedom The protracted and devastating nature of the First World War resulted in married men’s enlistment in the AIF on a scale initially unforeseen by

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the Australian government. Married men were not the prime focus of government recruiters because, unlike single men, they came burdened by financial dependants. But as casualties rose steeply and the need for soldiers became urgent, the government appealed to married men of military age to join up alongside single men. According to official documentation married men constituted 17.4 per cent of the AIF, a proportion which indicates that around 15,500 married Victorian men served overseas during the war.2 This is probably an underestimate, however, because some married volunteers enlisted as single men in an attempt to avoid the responsibility of providing for their families. Military regulations stipulated that a married soldier had to allocate to his wife at least two-fifths of his pay, and three-fifths if he had children. Wives were to receive a fortnightly pay packet from the Defence Department, an office which was at times ‘besieged’ by women reporting that they had seen nothing of their allotment.3 The mobilisation of married men meant that soldiers’ wives effectively, though not officially, became heads of households in their husbands’ absence, a position which offered them a new level of independence and personal authority. They managed their households, made decisions which had previously been the responsibility of their husbands, and had full control over their regular allotment. The allotment system reflected the state’s view that men should provide for their wives and that women should be dependent upon their husbands, but in fact it contributed to women’s unprecedented autonomy within marriage.4 Soldiers’ wives could choose to spend or save their income as they saw fit without deference to their husbands. This disruption of established gender arrangements generated community unease on the homefront, with the press quick to comment on any ‘inappropriate’ spending of money by soldiers’ wives.5 In July 1917 the Truth reported that although many soldiers’ wives were saving money, some ‘giddy, mercenary girls’ were frittering away ‘their husbands’ pay’ on fur coats and finery, and forgetting about the future. ‘The war to these women, and thousands like them,’ lamented the Truth report, ‘simply means freedom from restraint and the opportunity to waste money as they please’.6 Freedom from husbands’ restraint was exactly the situation of soldiers’ wives during the war, but many of these women had more serious matters than fur coats on their minds, namely physical and mental well-being. Divorce petitions lodged during and after the war show that numerous men who had histories of domestic violence enlisted in the AIF. Despite 60

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the Secretary of the Defence Department’s opinion that ‘drunkards and chronic alcoholics do not often offer for military service’, they were men who abused their wives when intoxicated who did join up.7 Initially, whilst in training in Victoria, some enlisted men continued to intimidate their wives, intent on reminding them that they were still in command. Military authorities allowed married soldiers regular leave from camp to visit their families so these men were still able to exert a direct control over their wives. On one evening in June 1916, for instance, William S., an enlisted soldier, returned to his Elwood home in a drunken state. He caught his wife roughly by the throat and used ‘the most abominable and abusive language’ towards her.8 In particular, enlisted abusive husbands resented the compulsory allotment system because it entailed relinquishing their control over their wives’ access to money. Men who were abusive were used to spending much of their pay on drink or gambling, or withholding money from their wives as a means of enforcing a domestic dictatorship. The allotment system took away from individual men the ability to decide what portion of their pay, if any, their wives should receive. So some tried to avoid making the allotment in the first place by enlisting as single men. Others, in their anger, used violence to try to wrest back control over their pay. G. D., a 22-year-old driver, enlisted in the AIF as soon as the war began, in August 1914. He gave his wife, Doris, £2 at the end of his first week in Broadmeadows camp but then managed to stop her allotment. In response, Doris took out a maintenance suit against G. D., which was deliberated by the Prahran court in late 1914, just four days before he embarked for overseas service. When the bench asked Doris what had happened to her allotment order, she explained: He signed it because he was forced to by the officers. He afterwards came to the shop where I am employed and asked me to allow him to cancel the order, saying that I could work for myself. When I refused, he knocked me down in the shop. The police were called in, and when they spoke to him, he told them to mind their own business.

The Chairman of the court ruled that G. D. had to make provision for his wife while he was on active service and ordered him to assign to her £1 per week. He added that military authorities were bound to recognise maintenance orders decided by the courts. Doris received her allotment

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for the remainder of the war.9 Stephen G., who enlisted in March 1917, also found his wife’s military allotment an intolerable arrangement. Like G. D., on signing up he agreed to pay his wife an allotment—three pounds and ten shillings each fortnight. Yet, each payday during the time that he was in camp, he visited his wife in Carlton and demanded that she hand over her allotment money, threatening to shoot her unless she complied. She gave him the money.10 Once abusive husbands embarked for overseas service, however, their wives experienced a new freedom from ill-treatment and violence, often for the first time since early in their married lives. Most Australian soldiers had no contact with their wives other than through letter-writing for the entirety of their service abroad, on account of the great distance between Australia and the battle zones of the Middle East and Europe. Soldiers on active service were absent from home for periods ranging from half a year at the least to five years at the most, and of course permanently in the case of those who died. The degree of private relief felt by many abused wives as their husbands departed can only be imagined; in divorce petitions women provided details of abuse suffered but rarely revealed their personal feelings. Still, the bare facts of the following cases give some indication of the liberation that the war brought to such women. From August 1914 until August 1918 Rosetta M. of Fitzroy was relieved of her husband’s drunkenness and cruelty from which she had suffered since her marriage in 1910. Between January 1915 and May 1917, Mary Y. of Auburn was safe from her husband, a drunkard who had hit her, thrown things at her, and threatened her life ‘scores of times’ since 1905. From 1909 Bertha D. of Glenhuntly was beaten every week by her husband who was drunk nearly every day. ‘This treatment continued until he enlisted in July 1915 and went into camp’, she later stated. He was away for the next five years. From August 1915 to the beginning of 1918, Elsie H. of Auburn lived free of her husband’s drunkenness and violence to which she had often been subjected since 1907. The period May 1916 to July 1918 was the first time since 1909 that Maud H. was spared the beatings of her husband. From May 1917 to the end of the war, Ethel H. of South Melbourne was spared the violence of her drunken husband that had marred her life since 1899. During 1917 and 1918, Florence H. did not have to consult a doctor on account of her husband’s brutality ‘in sexual matters’, which she had had to do many times since their marriage in 1907. During 1918, Emily S. of East Malvern 62

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did not have to suffer the ill treatment that her husband, a butcher, had dealt her for two decades.11 For women previously subjected to their husbands’ tyranny, the military allotment was often the first dependable income they had received during their married lives. Although their enlisted husbands still tried to avoid responsibility, there was now action these women could take to enforce the compulsory provision. In mid-1916 Marguerite O. was living apart from her husband W. O. on account of his brutal behaviour and his unwillingness to support her. When she learned that he had enlisted in the AIF as a single man she reported the falsehood to the Defence Department and thereafter received 2 shillings per day.12 Alice Porter’s husband had been drunk and violent towards her two or three times a week since their marriage in 1913. He had also been an unreliable breadwinner, having lost his job on account of drunkenness. After he became a sergeant in the AIF she sued him for maintenance at the Flemington court in January 1916. The court ordered William Porter to pay her 25 shillings a week.13 Catherine D. had become ill through lack of nourishment since her marriage in 1912 because her husband gambled. He had also assaulted her frequently. Her life improved dramatically after he enlisted in August 1915. For the next three and a half years she was spared his violence and received a military allowance.14 Inadvertently, in order to fulfil its military goals, the Australian government put into practice a policy akin to what some feminists had advocated before the war as a way of providing economic independence for wives—that the state should pay them a separate income. The combination of physical safety and a regular income must have alleviated the usual distress felt by abused wives. While their husbands were on the other side of the world they could live without the old fear of abuse or of going hungry. Of course, economic provision did not mean luxury. Some women found that their allotment was barely enough to cover basic needs, especially when the cost of living rose during the war, and many went out to work to subsidise their income or to save money.15 But the fact that for the first time many of these women had control over household resources was significant. A survey conducted in England at the end of the war found that the more regular income and greater economic independence of soldiers’ wives had led to better living conditions, especially among the poor. The Victorian Salvation Army’s journal War Cry commented on this and added: ‘No doubt if such an inquiry were made in Australia, the wives of the AIF 63

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would make as good a showing as their English sisters’.16 Wives’ new experience of autonomy allowed them a fresh perspective on their lives and, for some, the chance to discover that they would be better off without their husbands. Nearly all of the women mentioned above would sue for divorce after their husbands returned home. The rate of suits for divorce and maintenance in Victoria fell during the war (see Figures 3 and 4 in Chapter 6). For those soldiers’ wives who had already made the decision to leave their husbands and to sue for divorce or maintenance, the war made such action unnecessary for the present time. In November 1914, the Editor of the Truth advised a correspondent who wanted to apply for a divorce from her violent soldier husband, ‘why not wait until the war is over?’17 Beatrice Flinn of Buchan filed a divorce suit against her husband on the ground of habitual cruelty in June 1915 but abandoned it after he enlisted in August 1915. He was away for the rest of the war.18 In July 1916 Priscilla Simkin sought divorce from her husband, an habitual drunkard, who had beaten her since their marriage in 1911. She too abandoned proceedings when he left for overseas service some months later.19 There was now time for these women to consider their options and, as some may have secretly hoped, it was possible that their husbands might not return home. Annie Porter left her husband in January 1915 because, as she stated, ‘I could not put up with his cruelty and drinking any longer’. After their marriage in January 1911 he had been drunk nearly every night, he had gambled and made her pawn her clothes, wedding presents and ring, and he had beaten her. Annie obtained work as a waitress and lodged a divorce petition in June 1915, but did not proceed with the suit after her husband enlisted. By the end of the war there was no longer any need to seek a legal separation: her husband had died of wounds on the Western Front in May 1918.20 Some abused wives disregarded their marital bonds completely and embraced their freedom from illtreatment by engaging in new relationships with men. In 1915 the tables were turned on Samuel G. An habitual drinker, he was now negotiating his daily survival at Gallipoli, while his wife began living with another man back home in Melbourne.21 Despite their relief from ill treatment, not all abused wives of soldiers saw the war as an opportunity to leave their husbands. In fact, for some women, the period of their husbands’ war service was a time of renewed hope about their relationship. Rather than contemplate life without their husbands, they invested energy in the vision of a happier 64

Domestic Violence on the Homefront: Soldier Marriages

future together, hoping that their husbands would return from the war as better men. Robert C. wrote from overseas to his wife Janet that he was a changed man. She believed him and spent her savings furnishing a cottage in Fitzroy for his return.22 Annie M. saved 19 pounds while her husband was on active service. He had often been drunk and cruel towards her but she hoped that when he returned he would support her in the manner of a proper husband.23 Mrs B., still nursing an ulcerous leg as the result of being kicked by her husband, corresponded ‘in friendly terms’ with him while he was at the front.24 In 1915, Janet Taylor of Kyneton agreed to be friendly to her enlisted husband and to forgive him for the past, ‘on the condition he remain a teetotaller’ while he was on service.25 Marguerite O., whose story began this book, also wanted to believe that her marriage to husband W. O. had a future. She later recalled: ‘I saved for him 2 shillings a day [the entirely of her allotment] by banking it in his name. I saved all my money and…furnished a four roomed cottage to wait his return.’26

Returned-soldier violence on the homefront In July 1915, eleven months after the war began, the first wounded AIF soldiers returned to Victoria from the Dardanelles. Over the next three years a steady stream of maimed and sick soldiers disembarked from hospital ships at Port Melbourne, often welcomed by cheering crowds. By the war’s end, in November 1918, nearly one third of the AIF had already returned to Australia, a figure which would indicate that around 5,000 married Victorian men returned home during the war.27 The reunions of some of these soldiers and their wives were marked by conflict and violence. From 1915, reports of returned soldiers’ violence against their wives began to appear in newspapers, although these were far fewer than reports of civilian men’s acts of wife abuse during the war. Married civilian men, of course, greatly outnumbered married returned soldiers in the period 1915–1918. But evidence of returned soldiers’ wife abuse during the war is interesting to investigate because it foreshadowed much ex-soldier wife abuse in the post-war decade and drew responses that took a particular wartime shape. In the first place, many of the men who had ill-treated their wives before enlistment continued on that path of behaviour after they returned home. The freedom from violence experienced by Marguerite O. and other wives of abusive men, was limited by the period of their 65

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husbands’ service abroad. Most of these women were subjected to further violence after their husbands returned home. A lot of these men had drinking habits. After his return to Australia in 1916, Robert F. of Carlton resumed his pre-war tendency to drink and use violence against his wife. Throughout 1917 he often came home drunk, kicked his wife in the stomach, knocked her down, and threatened to cut her throat.28 During the months of August to October, 1916, which immediately followed his return to Australia, John M. of Fitzroy came home drunk every night and punched his wife on many occasions.29 Frank Taylor, a chronic drinker before the war, took up drinking again several months after his return home in January 1917, and once again he became abusive towards his wife. In one attack he tore her clothes, dragged her to a couch and smeared vaseline and pepper over her. The next day he locked her in a room with him, caught her by the throat and forced her down on the bed.30 The long-suffering wife of Sydney Y. recalled that ‘About a month after [Sydney] returned from the front [in May 1917] he recommenced drinking to excess as aforesaid but his intervals of sobriety shortened’.31 A. H. arrived home after two and a half years’ absence and almost immediately recommenced drinking and hitting his wife. ‘I do not think he is temperate, distinct signs of alcohol’, noted a doctor on A. H.’s medical file in March 1918.32 Likewise, John M. resumed his drunkenness and cruelty towards his wife after his return home in August 1918.33 These men once again had control over their wives’ access to money, and many preferred to spend their income—whether it be deferred military pay, pensions, grants or sustenance—on drink. Some, like John M., refused to do any work to support their wives, and others simply could not hold down work on account of their ‘unsteadiness’.34 The unwillingness or inability of some returned men to resume domestic responsibilities, and their spending of money on drink, were predictable causes of conflict between couples. On 31 January 1918, Police Sergeant Sims of Port Melbourne told a parliamentary inquiry into soldiers’ consumption of alcohol, that: Only this morning, a returned soldier [who was addicted to alcohol before enlisting] was before the Court for having used threatening words to his wife. The State War Council had put this man into a greengrocer’s business, and gave him the opportunity of making a good living. His wife complained of

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his conduct through indulgence in drink. She gave him money to purchase vegetables, which he spent with undesirable companions upon drink.35

Returned soldiers’ heavy drinking drove many despairing women to the offices of the State War Council and (after April 1918) to the Victorian branch of the Repatriation Department. Albert Bramwell, officer in charge of the employment section of the State War Council, believed that returned soldiers would stop drinking if they were employed. He reported that many concerned wives had approached him and that an officer in the section was dealing exclusively with them.36 One such worried wife was Millie D. of Geelong. In May 1918 she wrote to the Repatriation Department to ask whether her husband, who was spending all of his time and money in Melbourne, could be made to give her 1 pound per week out of his pension: ‘I would be grateful if you would reply…with as little delay as possible also to treat this letter as confidential for if my husband found out that I had written about his money he would make things very unpleasant.’37 Men who had drunk to excess before the war were not the only returned soldiers consuming copious amounts of alcohol on the Victorian homefront. After 1915, civilians became increasingly aware of the existence of a ‘soldier problem’ with respect to alcohol, which extended beyond those who had been hard drinkers before their enlistment. In January 1916 the Age reported that ‘it is an indisputable fact that very many of the [return-ed] men are spending their time lounging about city streets, and undermining their strength by excessive drinking. They are to be seen in and around Melbourne any day of the week’.38 ‘We did not talk about it, but there were a lot of men in uniform lying in the gutters of Melbourne’, recalled Brian Lewis.39 A growing number of alcoholic returned soldiers were treated at Lara Inebriate Retreat, ‘Brightside’ (the Salvation Army’s home for alcoholics), military hospitals, and various receiving houses. By the end of 1917, Major Godfrey, stationed at the recently established Military Mental Hospital at Royal Park, had seen ‘many cases of alcoholism in returned soldiers producing temporary mental disorders’.40 Throughout 1918, members of the Young Men’s Christian Association worked tirelessly to try to help large numbers of drunken soldiers on the streets of Melbourne.41 In November 1918 an Australian physician, Dr Aberdeen, summed up the situation: returned soldiers’ drinking now constituted ‘a

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very large problem’. ‘Some of these men were heavy drinkers in pre-war days, but the great majority were not.’42 It appears that a considerable number of soldiers learned to drink during their active service. In the early stages of the war, some people considered drinking to be indicative of the manliness of the troops and encouraged soldiers to partake of beer.43 The extent of drinking among newly enlisted men concerned both social reformers and the state government, whose proposals for restrictive drinking laws in turn provoked defiance among some sections of the community. ‘The soldier does not want to feel he is being reformed’, protested the editors of the South Melbourne Record in March 1915. ‘We must have some faith in the manliness of our soldiers.’44 In June 1915, Mr G. Elmslie MP protested that: ‘it is very well for the Chief Secretary to say we want sober men. We do want sober men on the battlefield, but the drinking they do in Victoria does not survive for long after they go to the front’.45 Elmslie was wrong. There was ‘a great deal of drinking’ amongst the AIF when it was stationed in Egypt in 1915 and alcohol served an important psychological function for front line troops, fortifying and relieving men in highly stressful situations.46 Private Stan Hiskins wrote home that: ‘Rum is issued to us about three times a week…In the mess I am in, out of about 20 there were only about ten or a dozen of us sober last night’.47 In his official medical history of the war, Arthur Butler wrote that ‘Alcohol…like sex, [was] some men’s only means of “flight from reality”. Without some such “hobby” not a few men would fall into fear and neurosis’.48 In February 1918, Captain Charles Brewis, in charge of all troopships, stated that he had seen entire crews, with the exception of officers, incapacitated through drink.49 As returned-soldier drunkenness became commonplace, medical experts and military officials came to believe that the battle-weakened state of returned men made them more vulnerable to drink and drunkenness. This view was supported by the fact that nearly all of the men who returned home during the war were medically unfit. As the Victorian Repatriation Board observed in June 1918, most returned men had ‘broken down in their physical or mental condition’.50 The Australian government was concerned enough to establish a Senate Inquiry into the intoxicating effects of liquor on soldiers. In early 1918, the Senate Committee interviewed 13 Victorian officials on the subject of soldiers and drink. All of them agreed that the unstable nervous condition of many returned soldiers made them more susceptible than 68

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civilians to the effects of alcohol. William Vance, Commanding Officer of the Caulfield Military Hospital, thought that the men most affected by drink were those who had ‘done something’ in the war.51 Captain Brewis believed that the problem was noticeable mainly amongst the men suffering from ‘shell shock’ and other nerve trouble.52 From late 1915, soldiers suffering from mental disorder—often termed ‘shell shock’ or ‘neurasthenia’—were among the returning wounded and sick.53 Soldiers’ mental disorder will be discussed more fully in the next chapter so it will suffice here to say that such soldiers displayed strange behaviour: they were nervous, paranoid and highly excitable. ‘The sight of these men and their behaviour at times shocks the sense of the people’, noted a Defence Department minute paper in mid-1918.54 In February 1918, the Secretary of the Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Association stated that ‘there are many who have been affected by shell shock and…active service who are temporarily anything but normal’.55 It is likely that alcohol addiction and mental disorder amongst returned soldiers contributed to social disturbance on the homefront. In early 1916, soldiers were involved in riots and street fights against military police. In late 1916 and 1917, groups of returned men joined in the violent disruption of anti-conscription meetings.56 As soldiers appeared before the courts on charges of assault of civilians and policemen, people began to perceive that many men had lost their sense of ‘proper’ moral conduct.57 A Melbourne woman wrote of her friend’s son in May 1918: ‘Jack has nerves and wants to fight everyone he meets’.58 Dr Aberdeen explained that most of the soldiers who were drinking to excess were ‘not bad enough to be classed insane…[but] certainly not well enough to count as normal citizens’. What they all had in common, he thought, was a ‘loss of control’.59 The President of the Returned Soldiers’ Association believed that shell-shocked men became ‘mad’ when they drank spirits undiluted (a particular habit of returned soldiers), and the Senior Inspector of Liquor thought that returned men’s drinking of methylated spirits was responsible for inciting ‘violence of all kinds’.60 While press reports referred mainly to returned soldiers’ acts of violence in public spaces, some married returned men were causing distress in their homes. Many cases of returned-soldier domestic violence involved men who had been heavy drinkers before the war. But in some cases, men’s fragile mental state that may have been due to battle experience appears to have predisposed them to drinking and aggressive behaviour towards their wives. 69

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Elizabeth Davies met and married her husband Harry in September 1915. At the time of their marriage Harry was on leave from hospital. Just a few months prior he had been at Gallipoli where he had been wounded by a bullet that was now lodged in his head. Harry was not in a fit state to marry and their relationship fared badly. Elizabeth left Harry in March 1917 and several months later sued him for maintenance at the Hawthorn court. She testified that he had not supported her since their marriage, and that he had arrived home late every evening. On 4 March 1917 she had asked him why he was coming home so late. He had responded by trying to choke her. She discovered a letter from a young lady in his pocket and consequently left him a week later. Harry Davies’ lawyer explained to the court that as a result of war injuries his client was ‘shaken and unfit to control his actions’.61 In August 1914, Donald Bain, a 34-year-old stock and station agent, enlisted in the AIF. In October 1914 he bade farewell to his wife Lillian and his young daughter as he embarked for overseas service. Donald served as a lieutenant at Gallipoli from July to October 1915 before he was hospitalised in Alexandria for ‘nervous debility’. The following year, in July 1916, Donald rejoined his battalion in France. After a shell exploded near to him he was again hospitalised, this time for ‘neurasthenia’. A medical board at the Australian Military Offices in London found that Donald had a rapid heartbeat and was ‘very tremulous and generally nervous’. The board concluded that Donald was ‘profoundly neurasthenic’ and should be sent home for discharge. Thus, in late 1916, after two years’ absence, he arrived back in Melbourne [Illustration 9]. Donald Bain did not immediately resume civilian life with his family. He was initially admitted to Caulfield Military Hospital, then moved to a mental hospital in Burwood for further treatment. In 1917, authorities deemed him well enough to become a commander in the Home Guard and he moved into barracks at Domain Camp. Donald’s psychological state seems to have been far from stable, however, as he drank heavily and consequently spent a period of time at Lara Inebriate Retreat. While in the Home Guard, Donald was in regular contact with his wife Lillian, visiting her frequently at her apartment in St Kilda. Many of these visits were fraught with his drunken and brutal behaviour. One evening in 1918, Lillian’s landlady heard Donald yelling abuse in the hallway of the apartment block. The landlady investigated and found him ‘in a terrible rage’, trying to prise open Lillian’s door with an axe and swearing that 70

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Illustration 9: Donald Bain returning to Australia on the hospital ship Marama, in 1916. State Library of Victoria, Manuscripts Collection MS 12541, John Lindsay Ross, Papers, 1915-1932, box 4364/2.

he would kill her. The circumstances underlying this incident seem to have been Donald’s excessive drinking, his increasingly violent insistence on having sex with Lillian when he visited her, and her growing fear of and objection to his rough behaviour. As Chief Justice Irvine would later recount when presiding over Lillian Bain’s post-war divorce suit, ‘[Donald’s] drunkenness and almost brutal assertion, especially when 71

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intoxicated, of his so-called rights, had destroyed any affection which she had for him and left her with no feeling other than disgust towards him’.62 In 1918 Ivy S. was also struggling to cope with her husband H. S. who, like Donald Bain, had been invalided home on account of neurasthenia. He had developed this condition after nine days in the firing line in France during 1917. H. S.’s wife Ivy, whom he had married a month before leaving for overseas, testified that trouble arose soon after H. S. returned home in March 1918. ‘I was treated right enough for a week or two’, she recalled, ‘but after going to see a cousin, who had returned from the war, my husband blackened both my eyes, in addition to punching me from side to side’. H.S . came home drunk nearly every day, refused to give her any of his deferred pay, and knocked her around ‘if things were not satisfactory’ in the house. He got ‘so wild’, she stated, that in June 1918 she left their rented home and sought an order for maintenance against him.63 The immediate situations that triggered H. S.’s, Donald Bain’s and Harry Davies’ violence against their wives were the kind that angered many husbands in the early twentieth century. Wives’ questioning their husbands’ fidelity, wives’ lack of attention or submission to their husbands, wives’ inadequate housekeeping, and men’s own heavy drinking, were incidents likely to spark domestic conflict. But what was new in these cases, compared to domestic violence cases before the war or those perpetrated by civilian men during the war, is the role that soldiers’ mental disorder appears to have played in their violent conduct. From late 1915 to late 1918, some soldiers who returned home in a fragile state of mind turned violently against their wives in anger and, perhaps, distress. But with so many AIF soldiers still abroad, the full impact of the problem of returned-soldier violence was yet to be felt.

Social responses to soldiers’ wife abuse Soldiers’ acts of violence towards their wives on the Victorian homefront took place in a context of glorification of the AIF. The social order of wartime positioned soldiers as the highest ranking and most privileged members of the community. Photos and reports honouring individual soldiers killed or invalided home filled the daily presses. ‘Newspapers and public men constantly tell us that the soldiers are heroes’, reflected an article in the Truth in September 1915.64 John Horne’s comment in regard to France during the war applies equally to Australia: ‘the entire 72

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homefront was morally subordinated to the male authority embodied in the warrior’.65 Social honouring of returned soldiers—the ‘wounded brave’—became an important focus of recruitment campaigns during the second half of the war and such was the status of the Anzacs that political parties vied for their support.66 ‘If there is any person in Australia who is entitled to the consideration and respect of the public, it is the returned soldier’, asserted the editors of the Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser in February 1917.67 Official responses to soldier offenders were affected by this political and social climate. In early 1918, in the course of the parliamentary inquiry into soldiers’ consumption of alcohol, Senator Lt-Colonel Bolton asked one Victorian police witness: ‘I presume that the police were kindly disposed towards the soldiers generally, and did not unnecessarily harass them?’ Constable Hallett, who patrolled Melbourne’s city streets, told the Senate committee of inquiry that ‘The police do not care to arrest [returned solders], and if any charges are laid against them they are withdrawn…As a rule, the police are satisfied to get the men off the streets and out of the way’.68 Sergeant Sims of Port Melbourne freely admitted a similarly tolerant attitude towards returned men in his prosecution of charges before the local court: ‘I conducted the cases, and in the majority of instances submitted [that] the fact that the men were returned soldiers should be considered, and that having been locked up for the night they had been sufficiently punished, and the bench [should] deal leniently with them.’69 Constable Hallett acknowledged that police latitude towards returned men meant that official statistics were an unreliable indicator of the number of returned soldiers drinking to excess.70 Before the war, police sometimes turned a blind eye to evidence of domestic violence, whether out of indifference or knowledge that arresting a husband would simply cause further hardship for a wife. The leeway that authorities allowed returned soldiers during the war presented an additional reason to ignore signs of wife abuse. Getting drunk men ‘off the streets and out of the way’, as Constable Hallett put it, may have meant inducing them to return to their homes where their behaviour would not disturb public peace. Whereas previously, drunk husbands may have been apprehended and put in jail for the night, now, because they were returned soldiers, they were allowed home. The testaments of wives indicate that some returned soldiers were constantly returning home drunk, spitting abuse and throwing punches. Returned 73

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men who had been violent before their enlistment now found that they had even greater freedom to behave as tyrants at home. The potential for intoxicated returned soldiers to use violence against their wives and children seems not to have been a conscious consideration of police, even though they were aware that soldiers’ drinking was contributing to public disturbances. When the Senate committee asked Constable Sims: ‘Of your own knowledge, can you say that the drinking habit has been productive of a certain amount of crime and distress amongst soldiers and their dependents?’, Sims replied, ‘Not of my own knowledge.’ Yet earlier in his evidence he had presented an example of a returned man who had threatened his wife that very day.71 When soldiers did appear before the courts, the judiciary, like the police, generally treated them with lenience, recognising both the honoured status of the AIF and the continuing need for more recruits.72 Judges tended to be unwilling to inflict penalties that would interfere with men’s military service.73 In February 1916, George Goldsmith, a tall, well-built man in AIF uniform, appeared before the Carlton court for using threatening words to his estranged wife. He had assaulted her a week beforehand and then, several days later, had broken into her house and threatened to ‘do for’ her before he went overseas. When the Chairman of the court heard that George was soon to go to the front he told him: ‘We will adjourn the case for four weeks so that you can get away.’74 In mid-1917 the Richmond court dismissed a maintenance suit against F. K. who appeared before the bench ‘wearing the colours of a returned warrior’. F. K. had enlisted in the AIF in October 1914 and sailed with the troops to Egypt, but had returned to Australia in March 1915 on account of a foot deformity. He had since become a quartermaster sergeant in the home service. The prosecution’s case was that before the war F. K. had spent much of his time drinking and assaulting his wife Margaret. Since his return from Egypt he had refused to give her any money and had knocked her down. A nurse gave evidence that in April 1915 Margaret had been badly bruised about the body and had required medical treatment. The bench disregarded this evidence and instead focused on the importance of F. K.’s military position. The Chairman rationalised the bench’s decision to dismiss the case thus: ‘Had the allegations made by the wife against her husband been proved, he would probably have lost his employment, so it was only right for the Bench to express the opinion that nothing had been proved against him’. So much for justice.75 74

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The high esteem in which the community held returned soldiers served individual men well when they came before the courts. Aware that their comments would appear in the press, judges were often explicit in their favour towards returned men. ‘Were it not that defendant had fought for his country the penalty would have been much higher’, commented one judge in 1915.76 Another judge remarked that his bench was ‘always leniently disposed towards men who had gone and fought for their country’.77 ‘[N]o person has a better right to consideration than you’, one JP told a returned soldier charged with assaulting a man in October 1916.78 ‘We have a warm spot in our hearts for men who have served their country’, the same JP reminded his court in January 1918.79 The pro-soldier climate of wartime did not mean that soldiers were completely beyond the strictures of the law. Husbands’ roles as breadwinners had been increasingly emphasised from the turn of the century and during the war the government and the courts insisted that married soldiers continue to support their families. Wartime gender ideology dictated that men’s proper role was to defend and provide for their families through action in the public world, and that women’s proper role in society was as passive and dependent wives and mothers in the home. Thus, in cases of non-support brought by wives, judges often ordered enlisted and returned soldiers to maintain their families. But these decisions did not necessarily reflect concern about such men’s alleged use of violence against their wives. Authorities disapproved of soldiers’ financial neglect of their wives, but were not always so worried by their use of violence. Official leniency towards soldiers on the homefront was so obvious that as early as 1916 some civilians began to protest at the rights allowed soldiers but denied to the rest of the community.80 Calls for unbiased judgement of soldier offenders came from some sections of the press and judiciary.81 In September 1916, an article in the Truth argued that judicial leniency towards soldiers was resulting in ‘grave miscarriages of justice’ which people would not have believed possible in pre-war times. ‘That any guilty person should be allowed to escape punishment by reason of belonging to a privileged class is foreign to all democratic ideas’, the writer insisted, proposing that soldiers should be prohibited from wearing khaki in the dock.82 Justice Wasley of the Court of General Sessions protested that the AIF uniform was being ‘besmirched by the habit of permitting men charged with criminal offences to appear in dock wearing it’. The intention of those wearing uniform was to influence the 75

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minds of the jurymen, he pointed out.83 In mid-1916 military authorities responded to such protests by issuing an order that soldiers were not to wear uniform when appearing as accused persons in civilian courts.84 This order appears to have been ineffective, however, as soldier defendants continued to present in uniform during 1917 and 1918. The protests also seem to have had little success in lessening authorities’ generous attitude to returned men, especially as after mid-1916 every enticement was offered men to encourage them to enlist. The social and political power of the AIF took a particular shape in relation to women on the homefront. Female vulnerability was crucial to the ‘wartime gender contract’—as Penny Summerfield terms it—whereby men fought to protect women from the brutality of the male enemy and, in return, women supported and subordinated themselves to the authority of their protectors.85 Politicians and the media promulgated expectations of female cooperation within such a system. ‘Quite properly and patriotically, the men in khaki are regarded by most of the girls and women in the community as admirable beings who are risking their lives to protect us from a hateful foe’, reported the Truth in September 1915.86 In October 1916 Prime Minister Hughes asked the women of Australia to remember the outrages committed by the Germans upon the women of Belgium and to bear in mind that if not for the bravery of the Allies—in particular the AIF—‘their lot would have been yours’.87 In 1917 Colonel Fitzpatrick of the Repatriation Commission asked: ‘Is there a woman in Australia…who does not wish to show her gratitude to the brave men who [risked their lives so] that she…might live here in security and freedom?’88 Those in the community who challenged the established gender system of war were opposed and frustrated.89 The Australian government repeatedly dismissed women’s requests to be allowed to form paramilitary units to provide support at the front and in munitions. Highranking officials held that nursing was the only appropriate role for women in the theatre of war.90 Meanwhile, pro-war public figures and media condemned as disloyal those radicals such as socialists, pacifists, and feminists who rejected the dichotomy of AIF chivalry versus enemy brutality and who instead insisted that military training threatened to brutalise men of all armies. In May 1915, the Women’s Political Association pointed to recent cases of rape committed by Australian soldiers and the following month it asked the Minister of Defence to remove from the forces all men convicted of sexual offences.91 In 76

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December 1915, the Socialist warned that military training ‘exercises no curb on men’s brute instinct and evil passions, but stimulates them’.92 The recognition of AIF soldiers’ violence against women threatened the dominant paradigm of the war. As Monica McWilliams has argued, warring societies have traditionally expected women ‘to internalize or to submit to the ideology of their men protecting them ‘even when this is far from reality’; women who name local heroes as wife abusers assume a subversive role.93 The gender ideology of wartime was extremely powerful, supported as it was by social leaders, law enforcers, and the mainstream media. It was for this reason that, as Carmel Shute has observed, most Australian women accepted the prescribed ideal of womanhood during the war: ‘Women, rather than seeking their own independent and meaningful modes of existence now paid “honour… and homage” to the soldier, to the “demi-god in khaki”.’94 Military and civilian authorities were interested to dissociate the AIF from men who ill-treated women. This could be achieved through denial of soldiers’ violence, or through dismissing violent soldiers as ‘blackguards’ who had slipped undetected into the army and who were an exception to the courageous, manly majority. Arthur Butler reiterated this idea in his medical history of the AIF when he stated that morally unfit men had not been systematically eliminated during the enlistment process.95 One magistrate referred to a soldier who had attacked a young woman as a ‘drunken blackguard in His Majesty’s uniform’.96 Some soldier offenders were clear-cut ‘blackguards’, such as Arthur Oldring, an escaped criminal from Western Australia who killed his de facto wife with a tomahawk near Seymour military camp in 1917. His criminal background and the horrific nature of his crime meant that unlike many other soldier-defendants he did not receive lenient treatment. He was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.97 The understanding that returned soldiers were unwell and that many had unwittingly become addicted to drink encouraged the community to overlook their bad behaviour. ‘[W]hen you see a returned soldier who happens to be a bit weak when he gets back to civilisation, do not condemn him too quickly, but make…allowances for what he has probably been through’. So urged Lieutenant C. T. M. Husband, then in France, in a letter published in the Herald in June 1918. He thought that those who criticised the intemperance of Australian soldiers should realise that ‘the boys’ had been through terrible experiences.98

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The Victorian community seems to have been prepared to extend clemency towards returned men who succumbed to drink. In March 1918, an Australian film, The Woman Suffers, depicted a potentially subversive scenario of wife abuse [Illustration 10]. In the opening scenes of the film, a decorated hero of the Boer War, now a farmer in northern Victoria, is shown drinking at his local pub and treating his family with great cruelty. On one occasion he becomes enraged at the sight of his son playing with his war medal. When his wife throws his liquor flask into the fire he knocks her to the ground and turns to kick his crying son. His wife and son flee into the bush and he pursues them, wielding a knife with ‘murderous intent’.99 By portraying a war hero as a wife abuser, The Woman Suffers could have been viewed as making an unpatriotic slur against Australian soldiers. Yet, as Marilyn Dooley found, the domestic violence scenes in the film drew no public comment, apart from praise for the acting skills of Boyd Irwin in the role of the ‘alcoholic victim’ and ‘poor drunken farmer’.100 The prestige of the AIF placed soldiers’ wives in a particularly difficult situation if they sought legal redress for domestic violence. In drawing public attention to their husbands’ violence they were likely to be seen

Illustration 10: Returned soldier threatens his wife and child. Photographic still from The Woman Suffers, silent film, Southern Cross Feature Film Company, 1918. National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, No. 355533. 78

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as challenging the social and political status quo. Yet, by working within rather than challenging the prevailing wartime ideology, a number of women were able to take action against abuse. These women sought to challenge their husbands’ claims to true Anzac manhood and, by implication, the rights accorded such status, while at the same time showing respect for the ‘real’ Australian soldiers. In July 1916, for instance, Claudina O’Neill proceeded against her husband John at the South Melbourne court. She alleged that he had regularly beaten her when drunk, which was nearly every week since their marriage in 1909. She had left him and now claimed maintenance for herself and their child. John O’Neill, who belonged to the Army Service Corps, appeared confident that his military identity would protect him, even though he had not served overseas with the AIF. During the court hearing he asked his wife: ‘You know I am a regular soldier?’ ‘Yes, I am sorry to say you are’, replied Claudina. ‘Do you hear that your worships? She is sorry that I am a soldier!’ exclaimed John. Continuing his defence, John O’Neill stated that he could show a record of nine years’ good service with the army. ‘You might be able to show a record of fifty years’ good service’, retorted the JP, ‘but that does not entitle you to ill-treat your wife.’ The court made an order for maintenance.101 Claudina O’Neill’s solemn judgement that her husband, a violent drunkard, was unworthy of being a soldier and John O’Neill’s arrogant assumption of immunity from the law, even though he was an Army Service Corps soldier, turned the court against a military man on this occasion.102 Other abused wives also emphasised their husbands’ failure to show the courage and moral fibre that, according to media reports, typified the Anzacs. In May 1917, a woman sued her returned-soldier husband for maintenance. At the court hearing her husband argued that his money in the bank represented part of his deferred pay—‘what I got for fighting & shedding my blood at Gallipoli’. The wife countered that ‘My husband was only an officer’s orderly and has never been near the front’.103 In September 1917 Mrs B. wrote to the Defence Department seeking financial help because she had been sick for the past year and was unable to meet her expenses. She had not heard from her husband at the front for nine months. She explained that ‘he is a bad husband towards me since we have been married[;] that took place on the 14 March 1914…his jailour[sic] is drink’.104 In March 1918 Lavina G. applied for divorce from her husband whom, she claimed, had enlisted but ‘only stayed in camp six weeks and then deserted’.105 Two months 79

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earlier, Sarah Q. also petitioned for divorce from her husband, stating that ‘About August 1915 respondent enlisted but after being in camp for a short time he begged me to write to the Defence Department for his discharge’. Sarah revealed also that she had contracted a severe form of syphilis from him.106 Revelations that returned soldiers had venereal disease or had given it to their wives reflected badly on them. Soldiers who had caught venereal disease in Egypt were amongst the first troops to arrive home in mid-1915 but unlike the wounded Gallipoli heroes only condemnation and shame awaited them.107 During the war newspapers framed the mounting number of infected soldiers’ wives, many of whom were ‘respectable’ women, as ‘the army of innocent wives’.108 Violet Ireland successfully sued her returned husband for maintenance at the Box Hill court in September 1917, revealing that he had been discharged from the AIF after six months because he had contracted a ‘congenital disease’.109 Such shaming strategies were often successful, but nothing was certain before the courts. If a magistrate perceived a wife to be attacking an honourable returned man, his sympathy could quickly swing against her. In August 1916 Frederick Harty, a returned soldier, appeared before the Prahran court charged with having assaulted his mother-in-law, Rose Worrall. Rose stated that, on the evening of 5 August, Frederick had hit her in the face, breaking her glasses, after she had refused to allow him to live in her house again because she believed that he would beat his wife. The lawyer for the defence countered that on the night of the alleged assault Rose had accused Frederick of having tricked the medical authorities into giving him a discharge from the AIF, and had taunted him with the words ‘cold feet’. Under cross-examination Rose admitted as much: ‘I said his feet were so cold that it would take a ton of coal to warm them’. The defence stated that the accused, in fact, bore an excellent character. He had joined the forces but had been forced to return home from camp in Egypt on account of poor eyesight. He had not ‘worked a dodge’ to get a discharge as his mother-in-law claimed. After hearing this evidence the Chairman commented that it would be ‘sad for the wife to give evidence against her husband’. He found the assault not proven and dismissed the case.110 Women who were suspected of infidelity, or who had in fact transgressed the prescribed role of faithful soldier’s wife by committing adultery, could not expect to be viewed as victims of their returned husbands’ violence. Pre-war social mores had cast female adultery as .

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a serious humiliation of a husband. Now, during the war, many in the community viewed such behaviour on the part of soldiers’ wives as tantamount to treason, a betrayal not only of their husbands but also of the nation at war, as such disloyalty undermined the morale of the troops.111 Soldiers’ wives, as indeed soldiers themselves, had unusual opportunities for pursuing extra-marital relationships during the war. During the second half of the war the Truth made repeated references to the ‘Wanton Warriors’ Wives’ who were supposedly betraying their soldier husbands.112 In February 1917 the Truth noted that ‘in quite an astonishing number of instances’ returned soldiers had discovered that their wives or fiancées had been unfaithful. ‘Domestic disruption’ was the result, but ‘only a comparatively small proportion’ of such cases were finding their way to the courts.113 In March 1916 Eunice Z. charged her husband Benjamin with leaving her without means of support. A labourer, Benjmain had served at Gallipoli and returned to Australia around October 1915 on account of deafness. Eunice alleged that since her husband’s return home he had treated her very cruelly. ‘Owing to the many hidings he had given her she had been black and blue all over’. He had refused to support her and was now living with another woman. Eunice’s case for support at the Collingwood court failed, however, because the bench believed there was ‘not the slightest doubt’ that she had committed adultery while her husband was away fighting for his country. Evidence in Benjamin’s military record that he himself had committed adultery and had suffered from ‘a severe gonorrhoeal infection’ before he left for the front was never raised during the case. In the eyes of the justices, Eunice’s sexual infidelity absolved her husband from any acts of non-support or violence. Her infidelity, rather than Benjamin’s violence, was the focus of the Truth report of the case entitled: ‘Soldier’s Sinful Spouse’.114 Soldiers’ wives who established relationships with other men during their husbands’ absence were likewise in a difficult position if their new partners became violent. In May 1916, Stella Nolan, a soldier’s wife, charged Joseph Kearney with assaulting her at her Fitzroy home. She told the local court that she was renting a room to Joseph but he maintained that he ‘kept’ her and had lived with her for three months, while she was also receiving her husband’s military allowance. The bench discharged him.115 Such decisions highlighted the conditional nature of officials’ protection of women and the double standards that applied to men and women. In practice, women’s ‘right’ to be free from violence depended 81

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on their sexual fidelity, whereas men’s right to protection under the law was never compromised by their adulterous behaviour.116

Conclusion The enlistment of married men in the AIF during the First World War impacted on domestic violence in Victoria in both positive and negative ways. While community leaders and the general public lauded the AIF as the cream of Australian manhood, it is clear that some soldiers had regularly abused their wives before their enlistment. The active service abroad of these husbands created a new experience of freedom from violence for their wives, lasting between half a year and five years if the men returned, or forever if the men died in action. The war thus created space for some women’s bruised bodies and nervous minds to rest and recover, and offered them the chance to live with greater autonomy and to gain a new perspective on their lives. The war opened up room for these women to move and to act in their own interests. Many abused wives’ new-found freedom ended, however, and some wives’ previously tolerable relationships deteriorated, when their husbands returned from overseas service during the war on account of medical unfitness. Excessive alcohol consumption, combined in some cases with an unstable nervous state, led numerous men to act out feelings of aggression towards their wives. Public responses to soldiers’ acts of domestic violence on the homefront were influenced by the political order of wartime. Patriotic adulation of the AIF as manly and chivalrous protectors enhanced the social status of individual soldiers and in effect created a new privileged class of citizens. Despite community awareness that many returned soldiers were drinking to excess and behaving in anti-social ways, Victorian law enforcers generally practised a policy of leniency towards soldiers who committed offences. The general warmth of community feeling towards the AIF meant that individuals who criticised soldiers during the war risked hostility of an emotionally invested people whose sons, brothers, and husbands were fighting at the front. Abused wives who took legal measures against their soldier husbands during the war thus couched their complaints in terms of dubious versus authentic soldiers. They themselves needed to maintain a spotless reputation. In a climate of concern about women’s personal, economic and sexual autonomy, the Victorian community regarded soldiers’ wives who strayed from the marital bed as deserving any rough treatment their returned husbands dealt them. 82

4

Disturbed and Dangerous? Returned Soldiers and Domestic Violence

At long last, in November 1918, the war in Europe ended. Victorians celebrated, relieved that this horrendous conflict which had caused so much distress within the community was finally over. Some civilians had already begun reacquainting themselves with soldier-relatives who had returned during the war. Now many anticipated the homecoming over the coming months of some 52,000 Victorian men still overseas at the time of the armistice.1 By September 1919 the vast majority of the surviving AIF had arrived home.2 Most returned soldiers were single men who soon looked to marry. Consequently the marriage rate soared during 1919 and 1920.3 Around one-fifth of returned men were already married and they took up life again with their wives and children.4 Several thousand soldiers had married or become engaged in Britain and returned to Victoria with their new partners.5 Beyond the enthusiastic flurry of weddings and emotional family reunions immediately following the war, problems loomed. Newspapers, court records, repatriation files and personal recollections make it clear that some returned-soldier marriages quickly deteriorated into bonds of unhappiness and brutality. The violence of returned soldiers towards their wives in post-war Victoria is the subject of this chapter. Specifically, it addresses the question: did the war lead these men to abuse their wives?

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The survivors of war Much has been written about the appalling conditions of trench warfare during the First World War. On the hard steep slopes of Gallipoli and amongst the pulverised earth and slush of the Western Front, Australian soldiers were subjected to shellfire, deafening bombardments and machine-gun fire. Under artillery bombardment soldiers were blown to pieces, buried under collapsed trenches or maimed by shell fragments. Attacks on enemy trenches on the Western Front were inhibited by barbed wire. When caught in the wire soldiers were slaughtered by enemy machine-guns and their torn bodies hung for days in full view of their friends. Chemical warfare, especially the blistering mustard gas, added to soldiers’ fears and torments. Frontline soldiers often lived amidst rotting bodies, excrement, rats, lice and flies, in the wet and mud, and in temperatures of numbing cold and expiring heat. And at any moment they were vulnerable to the possibility of their own violent injury or death. Early predictions of the war’s impact on men had been optimistic. Belief in the ennobling force of battle was commonplace in Australia during the idealistic days of 1914 and 1915, and even persisted after the real nature of the war became apparent. Official war correspondent Charles Bean set the tone when he claimed that the Australians’ ‘baptism of fire’ at Gallipoli had forged strong and true men who were unflinching under gunfire.6 In 1917, John Sandes predicted that the soldiers of the AIF would return home ‘in the prime of their manhood’, having ‘passed through the fire of battle, and…emerged purified by the ordeal’.7 Lieutenant C. T. M. Husband wrote to his parents from France in 1918: ‘We are passing through the fire here, and each one who comes out will, I think, be a better man in consequence. Of course some are not morally strong enough for the life and go under but they are very few compared with the mighty number out here.’8 This glorifying rhetoric of war asserted that the rigour and challenge of battle made men more manly, with the exception of some who were not strong enough to meet the test. The war undoubtedly presented countless occasions for men to display personal courage and selflessness. Yet it is unlikely that the extraordinarily stressful conditions of warfare benefited many individuals. Men who had expected to prove their manliness through displays of aggression were to be disappointed. At Gallipoli most attacks were

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of a suicidal nature. Enforced immobility typified the Western Front during 1916 and 1917, by which time ‘combat’ had largely become a defensive war of attrition. In 1918 the introduction of the tank allowed for a more attacking form of warfare and many reports praised the AIF for its fighting qualities during this period.9 But for much of the war the AIF, like the infantry of other armies, was frustrated and subordinate to artillery.10 As Fred Kelly, a member of the First AIF Battalion put it: ‘You had to just stand there and take whatever came’.11 In practice, the war was less an assertion of the masculine self through combat with other men, than the forced recognition of one’s own fragility in the face of the terrifying force of machine warfare.12 Soldiers became ‘conscious of one’s own personal impotence and individual unimportance’, thought the British psychologist William Maxwell.13 In the words of Henri Massis, a French soldier, the war was a ‘dreadful resignation, a renunciation, a humiliation’.14 The reality was that the war stripped many men of a sense of potency, if not literally though death, injury or sickness, then mentally, through fear and helplessness. Eric Leed has described the process as one of psychological and physical abuse.15 Eighteen per cent of the AIF were killed in action or died of wounds before discharge, and 43 per cent of returned soldiers were deemed medically unfit on discharge. Of course, not all returned men were so badly affected. Some soldiers had spent little or no time in the frontline, or had been stationed on parts of the front that were quiet.16 But the numbers of damaged men were compelling. By 1920, 90,389 ex-soldiers Australia-wide were receiving a pension for some type of incapacity.17 Returned soldiers suffered from a wide range of physical disabilities such as shell and gunshot wounds, loss of limbs or limb function, lung and heart problems, tuberculosis, deafness, blindness, arthritis, and venereal disease.18 In many cases these were long-term and deteriorating conditions. In 1934 the Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) estimated that more than 75,000 returned soldiers were still suffering from ‘shattered health or broken bodies’.19 The 1933 Commonwealth census found that the mortality rate for returned soldiers was 13 per cent higher than for civilian men of the same age group. Ex-soldiers could expect to die four years earlier than their civilian counterparts.20 Apart from the physical wounds of war, ‘shell shock’, or ‘war neurosis’, was a common affliction among the AIF, accounting for around one-quarter of all casualties during the war.21 Soldiers were admitted 85

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to clearing stations in all manner of disordered states, exhibiting uncontrollable shaking, fits, muteness, blindness, paralysis, amnesia and extreme fears. Mental disorder on such a large scale among soldiers took the Australian military, medical profession, and government by surprise, as it did those of other nations.22 Even though mental disturbance in soldiers had been observed for centuries, it had never before constituted such a major military problem.23 The sheer number of combatants involved in this conflict, as well as advances in neurology and psychiatry, resulted in official recognition of the problem. The term ‘shell shock’, first coined by British army physicians at the end of 1914, reflected the medical profession’s early belief that such bizarre behaviour was caused by tiny lesions to the brain as a result of close proximity to shell explosions. However, after it became apparent that soldiers who had not been near shell explosions also exhibited these symptoms, doctors generally came to regard shell shock not as an actual injury but as a psychological or ‘functional’ disorder with no obvious physical cause.24 By the end of the war Australian psychiatrists and neurologists preferred to use the general term ‘war neurosis’ to refer to mental illness in soldiers, and specific sub-categories depending on whether the symptoms were, according to their categorisations, somatic (‘hysteria’) or mental (‘neurasthenia’ or ‘psychasthenia’).25 ‘Shell shock’ stuck in popular parlance, however, and many doctors themselves continued to use this term to refer to all sorts of mental abnormality in soldiers.26 In many cases men’s symptoms of shell shock did not fade with the cessation of hostilities but persisted and sometimes emerged only after the war. Of a random sample of 132 Victorian soldiers’ repatriation case files that I surveyed, 44 men (33 per cent) appear to have suffered from some form of psychological illness—labelled variously as ‘neurosis’, ‘neurasthenia’, ‘nerves’ or ‘shell shock’—during the interwar years.27 It became obvious even to those who wanted to believe in the invulnerability of the Anzacs’ morale that mental disorder in returned soldiers constituted a significant problem.28 In October 1919, John Springthorpe, a Melbourne physician who had treated war neuroses in the AIF overseas, wrote: ‘It would astonish the public, just as it astonished the military authorities, and even the medical profession generally, to find how deeply the psychological factor has bitten into the disability framework’.29 Over the period 1922 to 1939 the federal government’s Repatriation Commission would provide 12,562 courses of treatment for ‘mentals’ and 50,715 courses of treatment for men suffering from ‘war 86

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neurosis’.30 ‘The peace following a war is worse than the war’, wrote G. I. Adcock, ex-soldier, in a letter in 1931. In his view many returned soldiers were still suffering from the war’s ‘legacy of madness’.31 The treatment of mentally-disturbed returned soldiers in Victoria was far from perfect. In the first three years of the war there was confusion about the nature of shell shock. By the time doctors generally came to accept that it was a psychological illness, many men had already been discharged into the community, their mental problems unrecognised and untreated.32 Many ex-soldiers who had been discharged with no disability only began to experience symptoms of mental disorder in the years after the war. Some veterans were unaware even that their disturbed mental state was a form of neurosis.33 The psychological casualties of the war encouraged an interest in psychology and Freudian theories amongst Australian doctors. Yet as few were specifically trained in psychotherapy—a proven form of therapy for war neuroses—only some returned men received effective treatment.34 Many received standard asylum care which could include electric shock therapy or, as one army critic put it, leaving patients alone to ‘recover by accident’. After a certain period of time these patients were either certified or discharged, many of them still in a very unstable mental condition.35 Thus many men suffering from psychological problems slipped through a very loose net of adequate diagnosis and treatment. Some returned soldiers were reluctant to seek outside help. One man who eventually had a nervous breakdown refused to seek medical attention for his nervous and depressed condition, despite the pleas of his wife to do so.36 The idea of talking at length about one’s feelings with a doctor, which was what psychoanalysis entailed, would have been alien to men who had been brought up to be the stoic manly type.37 It seems likely that many men tried to treat their nervous problems on their own, turning to commercial drugs and tonics. Drug companies advised people suffering from nerve problems to take products such as ‘Hean’s Tonic Nerve Nuts’ and ‘Dr William’s Pink Pills’, rather than harmful substances such as alcohol and narcotics. Returned soldiers were a prime target of these companies. In November 1918 one advertisement for ‘nerve nuts’ featured the comments of a Mr Les Gumley. A machine-gunner of the Second Light Horse, he had been wounded twice and had suffered from bad nerves, but he had felt better since taking the ‘nerve nuts’.38 Despite the cheerful outlook promised in such advertisements, the extent and longevity of veterans’ 87

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mental problems suggest that such products offered traumatised exsoldiers little or no benefit. Veterans’ mental disorder inevitably made itself felt most severely on those closest to them. Mental illness could be hidden from the outside world but it inevitably became apparent within intimate relationships.39 Distant from the battlefields during the war, the families of mentally disturbed returned soldiers now witnessed up close the impact of traumatic experiences on men’s minds and behaviour. In April 1919, the Melbourne psychiatrist W. R. Regnell, who had worked at Seale Hayne Hospital in England, outlined the typical characteristics of the ‘psychasthenic’ returned soldier to the South Australian branch of the British Medical Association: you all know the type of patient I refer to – the man whose whole character seems to have been changed…he is miserable and depressed; he can take no pleasure in anything; he sleeps badly and is tormented by nightmares. His head aches continually. He tells you that he has lost interest in things, he cannot concentrate his mind, even on a newspaper, for five minutes at a time. He is absent minded and his memory is defective. He has no confidence in himself and he shrinks from association with his fellows… These patients are acutely aware of the change that has taken place in them. They know that they are irritable, that they are unable to interest themselves or give sustained attention to any subject. Instead of being jovial, social and good-tempered, they are morose, solitary and ill-natured and find great difficulty in controlling themselves…they live in a state of expectancy which causes them to exaggerate the trifles of every day life. Small incidents, slight psychic or physical disturbances, which would have passed unheeded before their illness, now assume a quite abnormal interest and importance for them.40

Regnell’s words aptly portrayed the situation of many unfortunate returned soldiers in early 1919 and foretold the difficulties that many men and their families would experience. The irritability, depression, headaches, insomnia and nervousness that Regnell described as typical of shell-shocked men, were noted repeatedly in repatriation case files of Victorian veterans, not just in the immediate aftermath but for decades following the war. One returned soldier who had suffered continually from nerves since his discharge had a complete nervous breakdown in

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1925, at which time he ‘saw all the old war scenes’ again in his mind. After his breakdown he was always shaky, irritable and upset by noise.41 In July 1926 the mother of a returned soldier informed the Repatriation Department that her son was suffering very much from shell shock and nerves and seemed to be getting worse. ‘He is causing us great anxiety, as the way he goes on, it may come to something worse any moment.’42 Another ex-soldier had survived a shell explosion in May 1915 at Rest Gully, Gallipoli, in which two men were killed, one ‘blown to unrecognisable fragments’. In 1938 he told doctors that he was sleeping badly, feeling very irritable and restless, and that his hands trembled.43 In 1939 a veteran who had experienced nerve trouble from 1920 onwards stated that he lacked energy, was irritable, sleepless, shaky, and ‘upset by excitement and noise’.44 ‘Ex-member has been subject to fits of temper and depression ever since return from First World War’, recorded a doctor on the file of another veteran as late as 1948.45 The son of a deceased veteran informed the Repatriation Department in 1977 that ‘My father became a severely introverted man, subject to long bouts of depression and nerves. He became irritable and nervous over minor things and at times for no apparent reason’.46 Terrifying nightmares about the war were the cause of many soldiers’ insomnia, and left both men and their families distressed and exhausted. In 1974 a widow of a veteran recalled that: ‘At night we were frequently disturbed by him having terrible nightmares causing him to shout and kick.’47 In 1983 another widow wrote of her husband: ‘His nerves were very tense and he suffered great periods of depression. He had nightmares right up until his death and always the same nightmare of ‘having to go up the line again’.48 A doctor at the Ballarat Hospital noted in 1936 that one veteran patient was suffering from nightmares about trying to kill people. ‘On several occasions his wife has had to wake him because he has been attempting to throttle her’. This man had been concussed by a shell explosion at Pozières in 1916 and later burned on the face, neck and crutch by mustard gas near Hazebrouck in 1918.49 James Murray, born in 1927, recalled that his veteran father had suffered from nightmares ‘of great ferocity’ and had been given to angry outbursts.50 After his return from the war Frederick Curley experienced ‘terrifying dreams and hallucinations’, sometimes believing that Germans were attacking him. Over two weeks in early 1922 he displayed extraordinary fits of crying and, in an apparently delusional state, fatally shot his stepmother with a rifle at his family’s Upper Plenty farm.51 89

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These men were suffering from the after-effects of trauma. Their symptoms, variously diagnosed as ‘neurasthenia’, ‘psychasthenia’, ‘nerves’ or ‘shell shock’, would today be recognised as signs of posttraumatic stress which, when chronic, can last a lifetime.52 Post-traumatic stress arises from a person’s experience of an event which threatens death or serious injury, to the self or others, and which involves intense fear and an inability to have any control over the situation.53 Persistent feelings of helplessness and victimisation are a common response in those who have experienced trauma. These feelings often lead to extreme emotional reactions to normal daily life, adversely affecting their social relationships.54 The behaviour of men suffering from such conditions at the very least made life difficult for family members and at worst endangered their safety.55 In all of the fighting nations, mentally-disordered returned soldiers risked being viewed by army officials, doctors, and civilians as lacking sufficient manliness to withstand the trials of battle.56 Fear and helplessness were simply not acceptable responses to warfare for soldiers of the Anzac mould. No open expression of distress could be tolerated. The Australian soldier ‘does not know fear’, boasted Captain E. J. F. Deakin in February 1916.57 The Anzac legend gave returned soldiers high social status, but this outer power could not heal deep psychological wounds. Indeed, as Alistair Thomson has argued, the discrepancy between legend and personal experience exacerbated many returned soldiers’ sense of inferiority and personal impotence.58 Thus many men paid dearly for their war service, suffering a prolonged angst that few non-soldiers could understand or acknowledge.

War trauma and domestic violence Returned soldiers were not the only ones to suffer in the aftermath of war. Reports of court proceedings in Victorian newspapers make it clear that many women experienced violence at the hands of their returnedsoldier husbands. One such woman was Gladys K. of Abbotsford. In May 1922 she married a man who had served four years in the AIF. In November of that year she needed an operation on the base of her spine after her husband kicked her in the back. The following year, in October 1923, she was hospitalised again after her husband bashed her, leaving her concussed, her nasal and molar bones fractured, and her left eye injured.59 Given the horrific conditions of the First World War and the

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widespread incidence of mental disorder amongst its survivors, it seems reasonable to suppose that many veterans’ violence against their wives was a product of their trauma. This is the assumption, whether explicit or implied, in most historical references to returned-soldier wife abuse in the interwar years. But was the violent behaviour of ex-soldiers really a reflection of their war experiences? After all, men had not needed the trials of battle in order to be violent towards their wives before the war. What light does the historical record shed on this question? In some cases sources simply do not afford adequate clues as to the likely causes of returned men’s violence. Newspaper reports of court cases involving wife abuse often do not provide enough background history of the parties involved, while repatriation case files rarely contain references to domestic violence, even for those veterans who, as other sources make clear, were violent towards their wives. Nevertheless, in many cases the combined use of these sources allows for a more detailed picture of returned-soldier wife abuse. Although the more closely one looks the more complex the situation appears, some conclusions can be drawn about the relationship between the war and soldiers’ wife abuse. In mid-1924 Elizabeth H. applied for a protection order against her son-in-law, F. M., at the Hawthorn court. She explained that, recently, F. M. and her daughter, who both lived with her, had been arguing in their room. When she heard her son-in-law assaulting her daughter she had gone to their room and intervened. F. M. had yelled at her: ‘If you don’t get out of this I’ll choke you too’. Elizabeth stated that she and her daughter had forgiven F. M. but that he had repeated the threat later in the evening and had also struck her husband in the face. It was then that they had called the police. Elizabeth told the bench that she did not want to have F. M. fined but that she sought an order for the protection of the family against him. In his defence, F. M. denied having put his hands on his wife but admitted that he was a ‘nervous wreck’ and also a consumptive, not long out of McLeod Sanatorium. He stated that he had served five years at the war. Recalled to the stand, Elizabeth acknowledged that her son-in-law was ‘a very sick man’. The chairman of the court believed that F. M. had acted violently but adjourned the case for a month in order to give him a chance to redeem himself. He pointed out the necessity for F. M. to exercise self-control, assuring him that ‘we only want to see peace’.60 The immediate source of conflict between F. M. and his wife in early September 1924 is unclear, but F. M.’s mental disturbance and 91

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poor physical health may well have predisposed him to react violently towards her and other members of her family. His repatriation case file reveals that at the time of the above incident he was very unwell, both psychologically and physically. Indeed, within a year of the court hearing he would die of tuberculosis, a disease that involved the wasting away of his body. F. M. had enlisted in the AIF exactly 10 years previously, in September 1914. He had served at Gallipoli from April to August 1915, until he became sick, and then in France from mid-1916 until the end of 1917. During this period he was hospitalised at various times for trench fever, influenza and gonorrhoea. During 1918 he was invalided to England suffering from syphilis and returned to Melbourne in December 1918. F. M. never regained his health after returning home. In May 1919 he was a patient in Caulfield Military Hospital for neurasthenia and bronchitis. Over the next three years he suffered from nerves, depression, shakiness, insomnia, shortness of breath and sweaty hands. In January 1923 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis—accepted as due to war service—and entered Macleod Sanatorium for six months. It was after his discharge from the sanatorium that F. M. went to live with his wife’s family at Hawthorn. Irritability, anxiety and unhappiness were likely consequences of F. M.’s miserable condition and almost certainly contributed to his aggression towards his wife.62 The case of G. W. also supports a link between war trauma and domestic violence. Like F. M., G. W. joined the AIF in the early days of the war. He was 24, a hydraulic engineer, and married with two children. G. W. would later claim that he was in ‘perfect health and physical condition’ at the time of his enlistment. His repatriation file indicates that he served at Gallipoli from April to July 1915, when a gunshot wound to his left forearm caused his evacuation to Egypt. In May 1916, apparently recovered, he rejoined his unit on the Western Front. In March 1918 he was severely injured in Belgium, sustaining multiple gunshot or shell wounds to his jaw, hands, back and left knee. He later stated that he ‘suffered severely from shock’ after being wounded, and within hours underwent an operation to remove several large pieces of wood from his knee. He was invalided to England where he spent the next couple of months lying on his back with his leg in a splint. He then returned to Australia in September 1918 after three and a half years’ absence. On his arrival home, G. W. was taken directly to Caulfield Military Hospital where he was visited by his wife Emily. In October 1918 he was 92

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discharged with a pension for 75 per cent incapacity due to the fact that he had lost the use of his left leg. Life was very difficult for G. W. over the following months. An attempt at dairy farming in the country failed on account of his poor health. In May 1919 he told doctors that he was suffering from nerves, insomnia, loss of appetite and a rapid heart rate. He was taking tonics to treat his nervous condition. In January 1920 he reported that his arm was weak and his left knee stiff, so that he could neither run nor kneel down. Consequently his left thigh had wasted to a couple of inches thinner than his right thigh. He was still suffering from insomnia and nervousness.63 At this point trouble in G. W.’s home life became apparent to the outside world. In early 1920 his wife Emily sued him for maintenance at the South Melbourne court. She explained to the bench that G. W. had left their Albert Park home and moved to Fitzroy in order to begin running a fruit shop. Because she refused to join him, he had given her no pension money over the past eight weeks, had ‘abducted’ their nine-year-old daughter in a taxi, and had taken furniture that she had bought with her own earnings as a cleaner. Emily explained that she and her husband had lived happily before the war, but that she could no longer live with him on account of his behaviour towards her over the past year and a half: In 1914 he went to the war, and returned in 1918. Since he came back I have noticed a marked change in him. He has been cruel to me; he has kicked and punched me. My body is all bruised. He has endeavoured to misuse me. When I refused he threatened to take my life. In my company in the street he used vile language.

Not surprisingly, G. W. denied that he had been cruel to his wife. He told the bench that he was a returned soldier who had been badly wounded at the war, but did not mention that he was also suffering from insomnia and nerves. The bench had no access to G. W.’s medical records which would have shown a correlation between his disturbed psychological state and his alleged use of violence against his wife. The bench dismissed the case. No one asked to see Emily’s bruises. If we are to believe that G. W. was violent towards his wife after his return from the war, his mental condition surely played a significant role in that violence.64 In numerous other cases returned soldiers’ apparent acts of wife abuse correspond to war-related psychological problems. W. D. of

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Albert Park, who had received a gunshot wound to his arm in France, experienced headaches, fainting attacks, giddiness and insomnia, and was easily upset by noise after his discharge from the AIF. His wife sued him for maintenance in mid-1923, testifying that he had begun illtreating her soon after they were married in February 1922.65 In another case, in June 1921, G. R. shot both his wife and himself at their Albert Park apartment. Both survived. Before the shooting, G. R.’s wife Edith had told other lodgers that her husband was suffering from shell shock. Afterwards she explained to police that her husband was a returned soldier and that they had not had a whole night’s sleep since their marriage in March 1921. When interviewed by police immediately after the shooting, G. R. stated: ‘I shot the wife and then myself. I cannot sleep at night. I have not had any sleep for months’. He muttered that his wife was ‘at the back of it all’ as she had been too friendly with one of the neighbours. G. R. had served on the Western Front in 1917 and had been hospitalised for influenza, bronchitis, knee problems and attacks of dizziness. After his return home, G. R. had become increasingly morose and had withdrawn from the outside world. He was unable to work because of his poor health. His insomnia, depression, social detachment, and paranoid attitude towards his wife were typical characteristics of men psychologically affected by the war.66 B. W. grew up in Melbourne with a veteran father who was violent towards her mother. She believed that his violence was a result of his wartime experiences. Her father joined the AIF when he was 18 and served on the Somme and at Villers Brettoneux. He lost two fingers during his service. When the war ended he married a young woman in England and brought her out to Australia. Their daughter, B. W., was born in 1921 and grew up in Moonee Ponds. Her father rarely discussed his war experiences, except for sometimes mentioning that fellow soldiers caught on barbed wire had often begged to be shot. On one occasion he said that he had cried for his mother many a time when he was at the front. He wanted nothing to do with the war. He burned his discharge papers, threw away his medals and never saw other returned men. Mr W. received psychiatric treatment for a period of time during the interwar years but this seems to have had little beneficial effect on his personal happiness or relationships with others. B. W. described her father as a ‘very bitter’ man. ‘He had no affection whatsoever for us, none at all, and he used to knock my mother about a lot. She always had a black eye’. Her father was violent towards her mother for as long 94

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as she could remember. ‘You’d go to school and you’d be hoping like mad that they’d be speaking and everything would be all right when you went home. Terrible, terrible, this violence.’ The only time she could remember her father showing any feeling was when her brother was shot down in a plane during the Second World War. He had cried, ‘I know what the poor little bugger’s going through’. He died at the age of 50, an angry, unhappy man.67 In some cases a link between husbands’ disturbing war experiences and domestic violence seems likely, even without official medical reports of mental disturbance. Many men did not report their symptoms, suffering in silence or attempting to calm themselves with commercially available ‘nerve tonics’ or, much worse, alcohol or drugs. Henry H. of Fitzroy, married for ten years and a father of three, enlisted in the AIF in early 1917. He served in France over the bitterly cold winter of 1917 to 1918, until he was hospitalised with trench fever in March 1918. He continued to have attacks of fever and pains in his back and limbs after his return home. Henry’s wife, Florence, petitioned for a divorce in February 1923, stating in her petition that: ‘Respondent and I lived fairly happily together until Respondent went away on active service’. In November 1919, the month he was discharged, she left him ‘on account of his violently assaulting me on several occasions’. ‘On one occasion he produced a revolver and I was in fear of my life and I sought police protection. I returned to respondent a fortnight later but he continued the same and I was again compelled to leave him.’68 Dorothy C. of Prahran sought divorce from her husband Glen in July 1922, claiming that from April 1920 to September 1921 he frequently assaulted her, tried to choke her, knocked her down, threatened her with a razor and a carving knife and was guilty of acts of ‘gross indecency’. Dorothy had married Glen just a couple of months after his return home from the war. It is unlikely that Glen was in a robust mental condition at the time of his marriage. He had served in France in 1916 before being wounded and captured by the Germans. He spent 1917 and 1918 as a prisoner of war, during which time he suffered from frostbitten feet as a result of the harsh conditions.69 Given our historical distance from these events it is impossible to prove, in any scientific sense, that a returned soldier’s act of violence was directly related to his traumatic wartime experiences. Some of the men who married after the war were perhaps already predisposed to use violence against an intimate partner. But it is likely that the 95

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distressing psychological residue of war produced symptoms that were conducive to aggressive behaviour. Most of the men discussed above spent considerable time in the trenches which made them more vulnerable to developing post-traumatic stress. The more drawn-out and intense the fighting experienced by a soldier, the more likely he was to develop emotional problems which remained after the combat was over.70 We know now that traumatised people often become violent or, alternatively, withdraw from others and constrict their lives. Either way, their emotional functioning is altered from what it was before their traumatic experience.71 Irritability as a result of nerves and insomnia, hyper-sensitivity to their surroundings, paranoia and extreme emotional states predisposed traumatised men to act violently in situations of stress, both towards others and themselves. To make matters worse, psychological and physical ill-health meant that returned soldiers often had difficulty holding down a job. In June 1918 Major Sewell, a medical officer in the AIF, stated: ‘I am constantly seeing men, after three years coming up almost as bad as when they were discharged. They went into ordinary civil life and attempted to do work but couldn’t hold a job for long’.72 In May 1922 the South Melbourne Record estimated that three-quarters of unemployed ex-soldiers were unable to earn full wages or perform strenuous manual labour because of their war disabilities.73 The federal Repatriation Department assisted returned soldiers through to their first six months of employment but subsequent periods of unemployment were deemed a civilian matter.74 By the late 1920s, as problems of a depressed economy intensified, many returned soldiers were living in appalling conditions.75 Unemployment further undermined returned soldiers’ identities as strong and resilient men. Work and productivity were central facets of post-war masculinity, for returned soldiers and civilian men alike.76 ‘A man’s share of married life is primarily to earn the money for the upkeep of the home—to be an efficient wage-earner’, decreed an article in the Herald in February 1925.77 Pensions and sustenance could assist in a material way but they were not substitutes for the self-esteem gained through individual industry. Public appeals for charity towards exsoldiers in the early 1920s, such as the ‘Warriors’ Day Appeal’ in May 1922, were well-meant but humiliating for men who preferred strident independence.78 At its annual meeting in January 1923 the Returned Soldiers’ Association stressed that: ‘The returned soldier wants work, not sustenance, which in time will sap the soldier’s independence and, 96

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if continued, will have a demoralising effect on him.’79 In a society which extolled the working man, men who could not work and who spent their days at home, dependent on their wives for basic care, companionship, and sometimes an income, were likely to feel frustrated, depressed that they had failed yet another test of manliness. In December 1918 the Truth warned that if many newly-married soldiers were unable to obtain work, the outlook would be ‘decidedly ominous as regards such youthful husbands, whose struggle to keep a family…must mean hardship and anxiety in the recently-formed home’.80 The prospect of life with a damaged, unemployed veteran certainly seems to have been ominous for wives. F. M., G. W. and G. R., mentioned above, were all unable to sustain employment in the years following their discharge. Jean Hayes’ husband was similarly affected. In the 1970s, Jean remembered her husband’s reaction to his unemployment after returning from the war: For the first few months he used to be just angry, then he was violent, but after that time he just got…he cried sometimes. If he cried in front of the boys he took it out on all of us, me and the kids. He was ashamed of not being a proper man with a job. That’s the way he saw it. He was so angry with the world he had to take it out on someone, and we were nearest him, so we copped it.81

The most obvious signs of distress and disturbance amongst returned soldiers surfaced in public. Veterans’ drinking habits and violent behaviour in the streets were impossible to deny, such as in July 1919 when soldiers went on a rampage in Melbourne, clashing with police.82 But it was the private sphere that allowed the greatest scope for men to act out their anger because here there were fewer controls on their behaviour. Personally shattered and often unemployed, returned soldiers were still, at least nominally, the heads of their households. The gender structure of society and common tolerance of wife abuse facilitated men’s victimisation of their wives as a way of relieving and disowning their own feelings of helplessness in the wake of war. In these cases domestic violence may be understood as an attempt by men to reverse their experiences of powerlessness in the trenches and in post-war society.

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Alcohol and drugs The burden of post-traumatic stress and unemployment propelled many ex-soldiers towards alcohol.83 Excessive drinking among invalided returned soldiers had first become apparent during the war. In the aftermath of the war it became obvious that alcohol problems were not confined to those soldiers who had sustained physical injuries. The later recollections of relatives and friends suggest that drink was a refuge, albeit a destructive one, for many men. Jean Brett, who grew up in South Melbourne during the 1920s, said of her returned-soldier father and his friends, ‘they nearly all drank’.84 George Aldersley, also of South Melbourne, recalled that after returning from the war his uncle was often drunk.85 Kathleen Fitzpatrick wrote of her uncle who had served at Gallipoli and in France: ‘he could never join in the life and as the years went on he drank to shut out his memories of the horrors and the carnage he had been unlucky enough to live through’.86 Fred Farrall, a returned soldier himself, remembered that many returned men ‘lost control over themselves’ and drank themselves to death.87 Divorce petitions of the 1920s include cases where veterans abused alcohol and were violent towards their wives. Mary D. of Richmond petitioned for divorce from her husband Stanley in April 1924. They had married in August 1914, had a child, and then Stanley had enlisted in the AIF. He was away from the end of 1917 to mid-1919, serving in France for most of 1918. After his discharge he became a member of the police force. Mary stated that Stanley began treating her cruelly in July 1920, three months before their youngest child was born, and that from this time on he frequently knocked her about when he was drunk. In January 1923 he struck her face with a bottle and dragged her about by her hair. He was convicted and imprisoned for assault, and she obtained a divorce.88 Helen G. also divorced her husband Alexander in 1924. He had served as a lieutenant in a Field Artillery Brigade in France throughout 1916 and 1917. Since his return home in 1919 he had gone on heavy drinking bouts and had ill-treated her. She had been forced to sell their dairy farm in Dandenong in 1922 because he would not do any work. In her petition for divorce she stated that: Almost immediately I noticed that he was drinking more than he did prior to going to the war and after a lapse of about two months I came to the conclusion that the respondent was drinking to excess, as a matter of fact, he was under the influence of drink 98

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three and four days in every week and as time went on his habits became worse. He would come home at all hours of the night, abuse me[,] threaten me with a revolver which on more than one occasion was loaded, and he nearly shot me…89

One night in January 1924, several months before Helen G. and Mary D. were granted divorces, Annie B. of Fitzroy was admitted to Melbourne Hospital with severe burns to her face and body. She told police that her husband, W. B., had hit her with a kerosene lamp which had then broken and ignited her hair. W. B., a returned soldier, was committed to trial and later in 1924 he appeared before the Supreme Court on a charge of assault occasioning bodily harm. He explained his version of events to the jury: ‘I said to my wife “lay over”. I wanted to have connection with her. The wife replied “No, you’re too drunk”’. When she continued to refuse he had struggled with her and it was then that he had noticed her hair was on fire. He had wrapped his military coat around her to put the fire out, called the neighbours, and then gone back to bed. Taking the stand, W. B.’s and Annie’s young son testified that he had seen his father throw the lamp at his mother. Despite the obvious conclusion that W. B. had caused his wife’s injuries in a drunken rage, the jury found him not guilty. As the Truth reported: ‘The case seemed clear as daylight to most people, but the light failed, and the husband went out of court. He was a lucky man to have escaped’.90 The immediate trigger for W. B.’s violence towards his wife was her refusal to oblige his ‘conjugal’ demands and his apparent belief that she should obey him. The extremity of his reaction was fuelled by his drunkenness. W. B.’s repatriation file suggests that, like many returned soldiers, his drinking was exacerbated by his war experiences. He had been buried by a shell at Fleurbaix in July 1916 which left him unconscious and dazed for three days. He was diagnosed with shell shock in February 1917 and discharged from the AIF. W. B.’s mental problems continued in the decade after his discharge. He received hospital treatment for shell shock seven months after the above trial in 1924, and later in the 1920s. During all of this time he seems to have drunk heavily. In the 1930s he applied to the Repatriation Department to have his alcoholism accepted as due to war service.91 In April 1922 an article published in the Medical Journal of Australia explained that many returned soldiers were suffering from ‘alcoholic insanity’. One category of alcoholic insanity was ‘alcoholic paranoia’, a

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state of mind in which men harboured delusions, frequently about their wives’ infidelity. Another category was ‘acute transitory mania’, where a ‘furious, raging delirium’ lasting several hours could be brought on by just a few drinks.92 When men in these conditions felt angry with their female partners, violence was a likely outcome. On 29 January 1920, Angelo Lembo, a shell-shocked Gallipoli veteran, shot his fiancée in her back and arm in a city boarding house after she refused to go out with him. When police found Angelo he was dead, dressed in his pyjamas and slippers with a bullet in his head. Friends of Angelo said that since his return from the war he had become a very heavy drinker and that, whilst he used only to drink wine, lately he had drunk anything. He had become very jealous of his fiancée.93 G. Q., another returned soldier, shot his ex-partner in the arm at North Carlton in April 1922 after she left him. G. Q. had become a heavy drinker after spending two years on the Western Front, during which time he had suffered from shell shock, trench feet, bronchitis, diarrhoea, gastroenteritis and a shell wound to his left foot.94 Alcohol was not the only substance to which ex-soldiers became addicted; some men developed addictions to morphine, heroin or cocaine. In February 1919, the Victorian Commandant, Brigadier General R. E. Williams, stated that some returned soldiers were using drugs to their detriment.95 Later in 1919, Constance Laver, an employee of the Melbourne Young Men’s Christian Association, emphasised ‘the urgent necessity of rousing people to…the amount of drinking and drugging among the returned soldiers’.96 A black market in drugs operated in the inner-city areas of Melbourne such as Fitzroy, where many sly-grog shops did a secondary trade in cocaine.97 There is evidence that many soldiers were first introduced to drugs at the front, where some army doctors supplied cocaine and morphine to soldiers in order to help them sleep and settle their nerves.98 In August 1916 Major Woollard, a medical officer in the 48th Battalion stationed in France, reported that morphine had been ‘most useful’ in the treatment of shell shock cases during a recent battle, as men were able to return to the line after a couple of doses of the drug.99 A chemist’s assistant, arrested in Melbourne in February 1920 for selling cocaine, told police that he had been at Gallipoli and Lemnos Island where he had administered cocaine to the troops with the permission of his Commanding Officer.100 Like alcohol, drugs offered returned soldiers a temporary escape from painful memories and disturbing mental symptoms. Vincent J. 100

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was one soldier who became reliant on both morphine and alcohol in the post-war decade. He had served three years at the war, during which time he had been near a shell explosion at Villers Brettoneux. Diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia, he drank and took drugs to deal with his nervousness and insomnia. In 1924 he told a repatriation doctor that he had been unable to sleep properly since his return home because he had persistent memories of having bayoneted a surrendering German soldier.101 Drug addiction seems to have been less prevalent than alcoholism in returned soldiers, but women married to men with either or both forms of addiction were likely to be endangered. Vincent J.’s wife left him on account of his uncontrollable behaviour. On one occasion, when she went into labour with their child, he needed to be forcibly restrained by authorities because he became extremely agitated.102 In April 1928 Olive Dempster of Kangaroo Flat was granted a divorce from her husband Charles whom she had married several months before the war began, in April 1914. She testified that after her husband returned home at the end of 1920 he drank to excess and threatened to take her life. He told her that he had developed a drug habit at the war and gave that as the explanation for an incident in which he seized a knife and threatened to ‘do for her’. He had since left her without any warning and she had not seen him since.103 Kathleen Price fared even worse in her relationship with a returned soldier drug addict. In the early hours of the morning of 2 December 1923, two policemen knocked on the door of a boarding house in Carlton. The door was opened by a man whose hands and clothes were covered in blood and who appeared to be drunk. He led the policemen upstairs to a room where a woman was lying face down in a pool of blood, her throat ‘horribly gashed’. ‘There she is; she is dead alright’, said the drunk man. ‘Everything pointed to a violent struggle’, reported Constable Murray. The heel of the woman’s right shoe had come off and a set of artificial teeth was lying three yards from her body. The man in the blood-stained suit was Charles Johnson, a returned soldier, and the dead woman was his de facto partner, Kathleen Price. The police took Charles into custody and charged him with murder. While Charles was awaiting trial, the Crown Solicitor sought details of his military service. He found that Charles, a groom, had enlisted in the AIF in July 1915 at the age of 23. He had served at the front in France for two weeks in July 1916 until he sustained a gunshot wound to the left leg and was 101

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invalided to England. In December 1918 he had been court-martialed for assaulting two soldiers and had received six months’ hard labour. Charles Johnson stood trial for murder in February 1924. Kathleen Price’s eleven-year-old daughter Doris testified that on the night of the killing Charles had been drunk and in a bad temper when he arrived home with her mother. She had later awoken to the sound of her mother screaming. Running into the bedroom she had seen Charles grasping her mother by the hair and wielding a large knife. Her mother had managed to struggle free and roll under the bed but Charles had dragged her out, kicked her face, then held her down and hacked away at her throat.

Illustration 11: ‘Exhibit D’, evidence in the case of R v Johnson. The Carlton boarding house where Charles Johnson killed Kathleen Price in December 1923. Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 30/P0, R. v Charles Johnson, unit 2029, item 5.

The case for the defence was that Charles Johnson was a ‘cocaine fiend’ as a result of his war service, and that he had unwittingly killed Kathleen Price when under the influence of the drug. Several witnesses testified that Charles was a cocaine addict. Clara Aumont, the landlady, stated that on the night of the tragedy she had seen Charles sniffing a white substance up his nose and that after the killing ‘his eyes were jerking upwards and he looked like a madman’. John Andrews, a fellow returned soldier who had been with Charles at Sutton Veny camp in England, stated that soldiers took cocaine ‘to make them a bit game for 102

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going into the trenches’. Charles would go mad after he took the drug and want to fight everyone; ‘he struck me for no reason…He was my best friend. It was the dope and he couldn’t help it’. Joseph Johnson, brother of the accused, said that Charles sniffed cocaine. ‘He used to go mad sometimes and laugh. He wouldn’t remember anything.’ Dr Springthorpe, giving expert testimony for the defence, agreed that cocaine could have led Charles to kill Kathleen Price without knowing what he was doing. He explained that one manifestation of cocaine addiction was violence of a delusional nature, which could be committed against people one had no feeling against. On taking the stand, Charles Johnson told the jury that he had not known about the crime until the following morning. He had always been friends with Kathleen but he had taken cocaine at the war and had continued to use it ever since. He was sorry for what he had done. The jury found Johnson guilty with a strong recommendation to mercy.104

Failing to fight It is easier to rule out than to establish connections. While a link between returned-soldier wife abuse and war trauma—with its related problems of unemployment and substance abuse—seems probable, it can be said conclusively that in many cases such a link did not exist. In the first place, some of the veterans who were violent towards their wives had not actually served in frontline areas. Of my sample of 52 returned soldiers, identified from various sources as being violent towards their wives after the war, 10 men had not seen battle at all.105 Some of these 10 men never made it to Gallipoli or the Western Front because they were discharged early as medically unfit. Yet these men’s lack of battle experience did not mean that the war had no impact on their subsequent violence. In fact, their very failure to fight may have been a contributing factor in their acts of domestic violence. L. W., a young man of ‘splendid physique’, enlisted in the AIF at the outbreak of the war in August 1914. He already had some citizen military training, having served four years as a school cadet and five months as a senior cadet. Keen to prove himself a true soldier, L. W. was to be greatly disappointed. In March 1915, while training with the AIF in Egypt, he developed a sore throat and began experiencing pains in his shoulders, elbows, hands, legs and hips. The diagnosis was ‘Gon. Rheumatism’— in other words, gonorrhoea.106 Like numerous other soldiers, L. W. may 103

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have contracted this disease in an Egyptian brothel.107 Doctors deemed L. W. to be permanently unfit for service and sent him home—a heavy blow to his ambitions. He arrived back in Melbourne in July 1915. He was thin, leaning on crutches, and unable to bend his right knee without pain. Unable to face the shame of his discharge, L. W. lied and told his fiancée and family that he had been at the landing of Gallipoli but that the onset of rheumatism had forced his evacuation. Despite his physical debility, L. W. was determined to remain in the armed forces. He joined the Home Service in January 1916. In August 1916 he re-enlisted in the AIF, later admitting that: ‘I was not medically examined. I evaded that because I did not tell them the true cause of my incapacitation’. For the remainder of 1916 he trained as a corporal at Duntroon Military College. By January 1917 his body could no longer stand the rigour of army training and he was discharged once again as medically unfit. He then obtained a position in the Home Service at Sale in south-eastern Victoria.108 L. W. moved to Sale with his young wife Fanny, whom he had married in March 1916, and their new baby Jean. The marriage was not a happy one. Differences quickly arose between the couple over their expectations of married life. L. W. criticised Fanny for being without ‘aspiration or ambition’ and she resisted his attempts to transform her into a model wife. On numerous occasions he threatened to kill her if she disobeyed him and on one occasion smacked her across the face. He slept with a razor blade under his pillow, sometimes muttering that he would do for them both before morning. Fanny later recalled that: I was under Dr M…of Sale at this time and I mentioned my husband’s behaviour to him. The Doctor told [L. W.] that he would have to control himself and prescribed for him. After about eight months my nervous condition as the result of my husband’s behaviour, was such that [in February 1918] I left him and went to live with my people at Rosedale. My weight was then seven stone whereas normally it was nine. He came to see me but my people would not allow him in the house and he sometimes stood outside and uttered threats…My father remarked that my husband was a military lunatic.

L. W.’s version of events was that Fanny had severely wronged him by leaving. When he asked her to return she told him to ‘Bloody well get

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out and never come again’. He wrote to his mother: ‘I am just a broken man’. ‘I am receiving sympathy from all sides and the lady opposite sincerely hopes my baby will be restored to me and considers that my wife is a wicked woman’. At the end of the letter he reflected: ‘Although I am not a perfect or model man I have strived hard to try and make my wife [give up] all her silly ways. It has been of no avail’. Soon afterwards, L. W. entered Caulfield Military Hospital for treatment and, perhaps in a change of heart or out of financial need, Fanny visited him and agreed to return. By the war’s end, in November 1918, they were renting a room in a boarding house in the Melbourne suburb of Albert Park. But it was not long before conflict resurfaced. In one fit of rage L. W. burnt all of their clothes. Finally, in February 1919, Fanny told L. W. that she would no longer live with him and their landlady, Mrs Bentley, refused to allow him to stay. L. W. moved to a local coffee palace and from there once more began efforts to induce Fanny to return to him. When she refused to see him he sought a duel with the landlord, Mr Bentley, with whom he believed he had been unfavourably compared by Mrs Bentley and Fanny. On 12 February, L. W. issued a written challenge to Mr Bentley: I am led to believe that your wife thinks you a better man than I and if you wish, it will give me much pleasure in [dis]proving it, my incaperation [incapacity] thrown in…12 noon on Saturday will suit me or Sunday morning at the park or if you wish I might arrange Albert Park clubrooms.

L. W.’s jumbled letter reflected his desperation to assert his military identity and thus rescue his damaged sense of masculinity. On the homefront the war had often been portrayed as involving heroic handto-hand combat. While the reality of trench warfare quickly disabused soldiers of such romantic notions, those who had not fought were more likely to retain this vision of warfare.109 L. W. was out of touch with reality, especially given that duelling had disappeared in Englishspeaking societies since the middle of the nineteenth century.110 Not surprisingly, Mr Bentley was bemused by the challenge and made no response. He would later state: ‘I know no reason for the letter. I never had any disagreement with him’. Meanwhile, L. W. was contemptuous at what he considered to be Mr Bentley’s cowardice, concluding that Mr Bentley was ‘as much a man as his wife is a woman’.

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Now, more frustrated than ever, L. W. intensified his campaign to convince Fanny to live with him again. In a letter dated 17 February 1919 he wrote a ‘final appeal’ to her, for the sake of their child, to make another effort. He ended the letter with a warning of dire consequences in case she refused to return: ‘God’ help you and Jean because I am beginning to feel this awful mental strain…Refuse this final appeal of mine and I shall see you this time because my spirit has nearly run its race of exhaustion. So dearie to save yourself and myself a most terrible public scandal give me a chance to show you that I am sorry for the past quarrel and I am fully convinced that two obstinate natures as a rule end tragitically [sic]. So my dear wife take a big hug and goodnight kiss from a repentant and loving husband.

Fanny was unmoved. Several days later, on the evening of 21 February 1919, L. W. entered the boarding house, a .38 calibre field service revolver in hand. He met Mr Bentley and fired a shot at him, then wildly fired another four bullets as the injured man lay on the ground. L. W. reloaded his gun and headed upstairs to his wife’s bedroom. Fanny, who had heard the shots below, managed to climb from her balcony around a stone partition onto an adjoining balcony, so that when L. W. opened the bedroom door she was nowhere to be seen. His two-year-old daughter, however, was lying on the bed. L. W. pointed the gun at her and shot her, then placed the barrel of the revolver in his mouth and fired. The shooting was reported in the press in terms that suggested that L. W. was a disturbed, war-crazy soldier: ‘Returned Soldier’s Mad Act’ and ‘Soldier Runs Amok’.111 But L. W. had not been traumatised by any experience of battle. Rather, he was ‘traumatised’ by his failure to prove himself a soldier and thus a man. Having enlisted soon after the outbreak of war he had attained initial success in the manly stakes, but the breakdown of his body through venereal disease and his subsequent discharge from the army left him shamed and unproven on the battlefield. At an inquest into the deaths of L. W. and his daughter Jean, held several days after the shooting, L. W.’s father William stated that: ‘I last saw my son a week before. He was then depressed. He had been at the front but did no fighting. He was sick and weak.’ William W.’s comment linked L. W.’s miserable state to his failure to fight. Neither

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L. W. nor his parents could have helped comparing his inability to fight with the honour achieved by his brother who had died a heroic death at Gallipoli in August 1915, a month after L. W. had returned home. The disempowerment that L. W. felt due to his early discharge became more acute when he discovered that he could not ‘handle’ his wife. His efforts to control her, to the extent that he resorted to violence and threats, may well have flowed from a feeling of inability to determine his own fortunes as he would have liked. F. D. was another returned soldier whose career in the AIF ended prematurely in Egypt after he became ill with what was almost certainly venereal disease. F. D., a 33-year-old draper with six months’ experience in the citizen military forces, enlisted in June 1915. In camp at Ismalia in February 1916 he reported sick with pain and stiffness in his joints and skin peeling from his hands. As in many venereal disease cases, doctors diagnosed his illness as ‘rheumatism’, and he was invalided back to Australia. Once home F. D. resumed life with Emily, his wife of 15 years, in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick. Like L. W., F. D. did not cope well with his early return home. In mid-1916, two months after being discharged, he viciously attacked his wife, landing himself in the Coburg court on a charge of assault. According to Emily, he had struck her in the face, broken her glasses, punched, kicked and trampled on her, and dragged her by her hair outside their house. During the attack he had told her: ‘I don’t know why I let you live. I ought to kill you now’. A reporter covering the case for the Truth explained that ‘[F.D.] had been to Egypt, and since his return he had developed a very bad temper’.112 F. D.’s repatriation case file indicates that at the time of the assault— which was not mentioned in the file—he was unemployed because he did not feel well enough to work. He had not applied for a pension (the Repatriation Department did not classify venereal disease as a war disability) and nor had he consulted a doctor. Instead, he was treating himself with tonics. It was only years later, in November 1931, after having to leave his work because of illness, that F. D. eventually tried to obtain a pension from the Repatriation Department. In his application, F. D. explained that he had always been in good health before his enlistment. He did not mention venereal disease but rather explained that his illness in Egypt was the result of a cold that he had caught in camp before embarking for overseas service. He included the testimony of a friend, who stated: ‘I knew him to be a healthy man, and not suffering from any disease, but since his return he has not been the 107

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same, he has been a sick man for a long time’. F. D. was still married to Emily at this time, and she also wrote in support of his claim: As the wife of the claimant for 30 years, I feel I can speak for the greater part of his life. During the years before the war, he was a hale and hearty fellow and reviewing his physical condition prior to enlisting, I will say without any hesitation, that he has never been a normal man since his discharge. I found him dull, forgetful and [he] took little interest in everyday life.113

Emily omitted to mention that F. D. had behaved violently towards her soon after his return from the war. Such information would not have helped his case. Her testimony, along with that of F. D. and the friend, does however suggest that F. D.’s violence towards her was out of character and related to his sickness. His anger, which he took out on his wife, was likely the product of a sudden and dramatic loss of self-esteem. He was healthy and capable before the war, but after his return he bore a double burden of shame: he had failed as a soldier and he had been discharged for the dishonourable reason that he had contracted venereal disease. Volunteers for the AIF had expected to take part in a war that would confirm high individual status by marking them as true and brave men. Like civilian men rejected at the enlistment offices, the sense of humiliation experienced by soldiers who were discharged before they even got to the battle front could have destructive consequences.114

Pre-existing tendencies to violence The trauma of battle, men’s escape into addiction, and the humiliation of failing to fight, were circumstances which seem to have predisposed some men to behave violently towards their wives upon their return to Australia. In many cases, however, returned-soldier domestic violence was perpetrated by men who already had histories of wife abuse. As discussed in the previous chapter, it is clear that a number of married men who joined the AIF had been violent to their wives before enlistment. In fact, their war service was a period of relief for their wives. Of the 35 violent returned soldiers identified in this study who were married at the time of their enlistment, 18 had been violent towards their wives prior to their war service. There was no mention of prior wife abuse in the case of the other 17 men who had been married before the war. With 108

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regard to the violent returned soldiers in this study who were single at the time of their enlistment, it is impossible to know whether they were already predisposed to violence because they only married after their return home.115 War service does not appear to have improved the behaviour of men with histories of domestic violence. Many of the men who were violent to their wives before enlistment proved to be undisciplined soldiers. Their service records show that they committed offences such as assaults, absence without leave, and failure to obey orders. Some were court-martialled and placed in military detention. Most of them caught venereal disease and were heavy drinkers. If anything, these married men with prior histories of violence were even more aggressive towards their wives when they returned home. Women who had hoped that war service would reform their husbands were to be disappointed. James S., a butcher, returned to Victoria in mid-1919 after a year away with the AIF. He had arrived in Europe too late to take part in action on the Western Front but had nevertheless developed ‘rheumatism’—again, probably a euphemism for venereal disease—in Belgium after the war ended. In 1920 his wife Emily sought a judicial separation on the ground of his ill-treatment of her since their marriage in 1899, which she stated she had endured for the sake of their five children. It seems that James’ behaviour towards her became even worse after his return. In January 1923 an officer in the pensions section of the Repatriation Department wrote to his Officer in Charge: ‘Mrs S[…] states that on account of the violent temper of her husband, which was worse after his return from the war, than before, she was forced for her own protection to leave him’.116 Another ex-soldier, P. S., who had been an habitual drinker and violent towards his wife since 1909, also seems to have become more aggressive after his return from the war. He had been gassed at Paschendale in August 1917 and had suffered from trench fever. After his return home in 1918, doctors noted that he had a high pulse rate, was short of breath and was unable to sleep properly. P. S.’s behaviour towards his wife Maud in the months immediately after his return reached new depths. Maud left him in January 1919 and applied for divorce, stating that ‘his drunkenness and cruelty during the past five months towards me were so bad as to render his reformation hopeless and further cohabitation unsafe.’117

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Conclusion In the aftermath of the First World War, many returned-soldier marriages in Victoria were abusive. Investigation into the circumstances underlying such violence reveals that any understanding of the causes of returned-soldier violence should be complex. Many cases of returned-soldier domestic violence support a connection between war trauma and wife abuse. The distressing experiences of warfare resulted in mental disorder on a significant scale among the AIF. Mental symptoms of ‘shell shock’ or ‘war neurosis’, such as nervous irritability, paranoia, insomnia and extreme emotional responses, lowered men’s threshold of self-control and diminished their self-esteem. Further, psychological and physical injuries hampered many mens’ ability to perform a ‘manly’ role once back in civilian life. Warrelated alcohol and drug addiction reduced men’s inhibitions towards violence and caused some to act out violence when in a delusional state. Thus, as a result of their war experiences, numerous returned soldiers do appear to have been both disturbed and dangerous. It is therefore reasonable to suppose that the personal traumas caused by participation in warfare yielded an increased incidence of domestic violence within the Victorian community in the post-war decade. Yet war trauma does not explain all returned-soldier wife abuse. Examination of the military and repatriation records of violent ex-soldiers demonstrates that some men who were violent had never experienced battle, while others were already well-versed in cruelty towards their wives. This finding argues against any automatic assumption that returned-soldier violence was carried out by deranged battle-scarred veterans, and should not be surprising, given that domestic violence was prevalent in Victoria before the war. Historians should not too quickly infer a connection between the horror of war and the perpetration of domestic violence. My finding is that such a connection seems likely in some cases, but not in others. It would seem helpful to understand returned-soldier domestic violence in a broader sense, as being a reflection of subjective powerlessness. The fact that some husbands who became violent after their return home had seen battle and others had not, is less significant than the likelihood that the experiences of all of these men had shaken their self-esteem. The war could damage men’s sense of personal power in a range of ways, whether it be through the terrifying conditions

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of trench warfare or failure to reach the battle front. Those men who were violent towards their wives before enlistment can be viewed as already accustomed to a feeling of personal impotence. Whatever the origin, feelings of powerlessness made domestic violence more likely when husbands encountered situations which triggered their anger or disappointment towards their wives. The experience of Jack Young, my great-grandfather, may provide a comparative case. Jack enlisted in the AIF in April 1916, aged 33; he was married with one child. He served on the Western Front over 1917 and 1918 until he sustained a gunshot wound to his chest and was invalided to England. After his arrival home at the end of 1918 he returned to his family in South Melbourne. He was able to resume his previous job as a carrier, despite some problems with the movement of his right arm, and did not require a pension. A man of few words, he did not appear to dwell morosely on his wartime experiences. He would polish his medals, attend Anzac Day parades and meet his friends from the Battalion. Discomfort with memories of battle is perhaps reflected in the fact that his only spoken recollections of the war concerned French villages and his time in England, but he did not display obvious symptoms of mental disorder and nor did he drink to excess. Jack had already established himself as a man in the community when he went to the war, with a job and a family, and this identity was not damaged by his war service. He was able to return to civilian life with his self intact. It is thus not surprising that he had no inclination to behave violently towards others.118 Jack had succeeded, in the sense that success meant productivity and self-containment. As G. I. Adcock wrote in 1931, for veterans in the post-war years ‘[t]he greatest prize was escape from failure’.119 Many ex-soldiers felt that they had indeed failed, and it was among these men that the violent veterans were to be found.

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5

Social Responses to Returned-Soldier Wife Abuse

In the decade after the First World War, returned soldiers formed a noticeable group of defendants in cases of domestic violence in Victoria. This chapter explores how society responded to these men’s violence. It is apparent that there were various underlying causes of such violence. The aggression of some ex-soldiers seems to have flowed from their traumatic battlefield experiences, the violence of others was fuelled by their failure as soldiers, and the violence of yet others had little or nothing to do with their war service. How did the Victorian community understand veterans’ wife abuse and to what extent did it tolerate such behaviour? This chapter begins by looking at how the community made sense of this violence. It then deals with the responses of the judicial system, those in charge of repatriating soldiers, and, lastly, the women in the line of fire.

Shattered nerves Late one evening in autumn 1922, W. O. slouched against a tree on a street in the Melbourne suburb of Elsternwick. He was drunk. He was waiting for his estranged wife, Marguerite, to return to the house where she worked as a cook. After a while she appeared out of the darkness, walking along the footpath. She saw him and was startled: ‘What are you doing here?’, she asked. ‘I wanted to see you…for God’s sake give me another chance’, pleaded W. O. ‘You’ve been drinking’, she said. ‘Well, what if I have? I have no one to care for me’, drawled W. O. self-

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pityingly. Marguerite took no notice. ‘I intend to divorce you as soon as I can’, she told him. W. O. begged her to give him another chance, but she refused. Realising his wife’s determination, W. O. drew a revolver and pointed it at her face. The revolver was a .38 calibre, capable of penetrating four inches of pinewood when fired from 15 feet. W. O. was now standing only several feet from his wife. He pulled the trigger and a bullet rocketed into her face. Her head jerked violently and she fell to the ground. W. O. lowered the gun and hurried away. Seconds passed. Marguerite, lying with her head in the gutter, in a growing pool of blood, was still alive. The bullet had entered her face just below the nostril, ricocheted downwards along the palate and lodged at the back of her throat. Her set of false teeth lay shattered on the ground beside her. Soon there were footsteps and voices; this time it was nearby residents who had heard the revolver shot. They found Marguerite lying on the ground and rushed her to the Alfred Hospital. Over the next six weeks Marguerite lay in a hospital bed suffering from ‘intense pain’ and nervous shock. Surgeons performed an operation to remove the bullet. Meanwhile, the police located and arrested her husband. In early June, at the St Kilda court, W. O. pleaded guilty to shooting his wife with intent to cause her grievous bodily harm. The Crown attorney accepted his plea and withdrew its original charge of attempted murder. The court ordered W. O. to appear before the Supreme Court for sentencing. The sentencing hearing took place in mid-1922. Mr Shelton for the defence explained that W. O. had been very drunk on the night of the shooting. He said W. O. had served three years at the war and was suffering from nerve and chest trouble. Mr Shelton implied that this condition had contributed to W. O.’s actions. Surprisingly, Marguerite gave evidence for the defence. As she entered the witness box, her face, with its bullet wound and still-discernible gunpowder marks, bore evidence of the horrible injury that she had sustained. Nevertheless, she asked the judge to extend clemency to her husband. She thought that W. O. had acted strangely since his return from the war and that he would not have shot her if he had been sober. She hinted that she had been too cold-hearted towards him. Over the past nine months W. O. had pleaded with her to live with him again but she had refused. The defence’s submissions worked wonders. Justice Macfarlan sentenced W. O. to just two years’ imprisonment.

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If W. O. was suffering from war-related problems, they were not the result of any experience of battle. His military record shows that he had never been near the trenches. He had not even stepped foot on French soil. After enlisting in the AIF in March 1916, he promptly deserted for several weeks and contracted gonorrhoea. He then spent four months interned at Langwarrin, a venereal disease camp for soldiers in the countryside south-east of Melbourne. Eventually, W. O. embarked for overseas service in October 1916. He was stationed at a training camp in England until August 1917 when he was sent home, diagnosed as unfit for active service due to varicose veins. Thus W. O. was certainly not suffering from any battle-related trauma when he assailed his wife in 1922. Furthermore, as related in Chapter One, W. O. had frequently drunk to excess and inflicted physical and emotional damage upon his wife ever since their marriage in 1901, long before his enlistment. In 1912 Marguerite had initiated divorce proceedings against W. O. on the grounds of desertion, adultery, habitual drunkenness and cruelty, but had later abandoned the suit. The 1922 shooting was simply the last and most serious of many brutal attacks.1 Marguerite’s silence about her husband’s long history of violence helped the defence to construct W. O. as a nerve-shattered and sick veteran. It is unclear, however, whether she knew that he had never seen battle and her statement that he had acted strangely since his return from the war may have been a reference to his sexual assault of a young girl in 1919. In mid-1919 the Supreme Court had sentenced W. O. to three years’ hard labour for the sexual assault of a 10-yearold girl whom he had infected with gonorrhoea.2 It was while he was serving this sentence that Marguerite had taken the position as a cook in Elsternwick. Marguerite’s decision to give evidence in favour of her husband may have been influenced by a fear that he would enact further violence against her after he was released. She knew that any sentence he received was unlikely to be longer than a few years. Six months after the trial, however, she presented a far less sympathetic view of W. O.. In 1923 she lodged a petition for divorce on the ground that in the past year he had been convicted of assaulting her with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. This time she detailed his violence towards her since early in their married life. Recounting the shooting of the previous year, she stated that he had left her lying ‘in pools of blood’ and that she was still suffering from the effect of the revolver wound. The Supreme Court awarded her a divorce.3 114

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While Marguerite failed to give a wholly accurate account of her marital history at the 1922 trial, the Crown’s prosecution of the case was certainly lax. It appears that the Crown Solicitor did not request a copy of W. O.’s military record from the Defence Department. Had he done so he would have discovered that W. O. had never been to the front. Nor did he make arrangements for a medical examination of the accused. And there is no indication that he took into account W. O.’s conviction for sexual assault by the Supreme Court just three years earlier. Newspaper reports of the trial give the impression that, having secured a guilty plea, the Crown was not particularly concerned about the level of punishment dealt to W. O. The defence’s portrayal of W.O. as a nerve-shattered returned soldier was not an isolated incident. In the post-war decade, and particularly during the early 1920s, returned soldiers who were accused of violent crimes commonly claimed that nervous imbalance as a result of shell shock and other war injuries was responsible for their behaviour.4 The proliferation of such public testimonies created a new cultural stereotype— the disturbed and dangerous returned soldier.5 With respect to domestic violence, this new cultural construct overlaid the old stereotype of the animalistic wife-beater. Unlike the wife-beater, the disturbed veteran was more often than not a figure of pity rather than righteous condemnation. When returned soldiers appeared in the dock, terms such as ‘wife-beater’, ‘brute’ and ‘savage’ were neither uttered nor reported. Instead, terms such as ‘victim’, ‘nervous wreck’, and ‘injured’ became the order of the day. The figure of the disturbed returned soldier ushered in new ways of understanding domestic violence and indeed violent behaviour in general. The sheer number of soldiers mentally affected by their participation in the war had forced the Western medical profession to recognise that shell shock, with its range of somatic and neurotic symptoms, was a psychological illness.6 This, in turn, produced a new awareness of the power of mental processes in determining human behaviour. In the two decades prior to the First World War, some European physicians had pointed to the psychological origin of certain nervous disorders such as ‘hysteria’ and ‘neurasthenia’, but their theories had made little headway within the Australian psychiatric profession.7 The war and shell shock changed this situation. ‘The war has taught the physician…as never before how immense is the influence of the mind upon the body’, reflected the psychiatrist W. R. Regnell in April 1919.8 115

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By the end of the war, many Australian doctors, like their international colleagues, had come to regard abnormal behaviour in soldiers as a symptom of disturbed mental functioning. Some insisted that soldiers who broke down were inherently weak of mind.9 Others held that the tremendous strain of modern warfare could damage any man’s mental functioning, a point supported by the fact that many officers and men who had won awards for bravery were among the soldiers suffering from war neurosis. Psychiatrists who favoured psychotherapy as a cure for war neurosis believed that soldiers repressed emotions such as fear, anger, and grief in order to perform their duties during prolonged exposure to battle. Such repression, these experts thought, led to the unconscious expression of emotion through somatic disorders or neurotic symptoms such as irritability, paranoia, and nightmares.10 Some psychiatrists and psychologists in Britain and America discussed the common occurrence of anger in returned soldiers. They saw a direct link between soldiers’ forced repression of anger during frontline service and their later aggressive behaviour in civilian society.11 The defensive nature of trench warfare which forced soldiers to submit themselves to artillery bombardment allowed little room for personal aggression towards the enemy. As one American psychologist wrote in August 1919: ‘the individual seldom has the privilege of giving physical vent to anger…one cannot be enraged at the unseen line of men or… guns miles away—at least not with any amount of satisfaction’.12 The British psychologist William Maxwell thought that soldiers’ lack of opportunity to express anger in battle led them to turn their hostility towards ‘improper’ targets such as officers, staff, or people at home.13 Dr Millais Culpin, a psychoanalyst who treated shell-shocked men in England, thought likewise. He dealt with a number of patients whose repression of anger in battle seemed to have translated into violence against their families. Of one patient he wrote: [A] man with a very good record complained bitterly that when home on leave he had thrown things at his children for what he knew were inadequate reasons; I succeeded in recalling an occasion when he was under bombardment for a long time with a strong feeling of rage at being unable to retaliate, and this feeling he recognised as being identical with that which led him to assault his children.

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Another patient, who had been near a shell explosion in 1916 and sent back to England, only to re-enlist in 1918, told Culpin that: Nobody could do anything for me; I could strike anybody. I knocked my wife about and they had to hold me down. I reenlisted because I could not carry on. After I was blown up I was fighting mad. I hit the sergeant, and got four months’ field punishment. I think I was going mad after this. I was always hitting someone and in trouble. I have hit my own sister and mother. I was always a good soldier before this.

Culpin discovered ‘many horrible repressions’ in this patient. He explained that returned soldiers suffering from ‘pathological irritability’ invariably told him that they were trying to forget the war; most had repressed highly emotional experiences. Culpin perceived that there were many such cases requiring help.14 Few Victorians were acquainted with such expert literature on war neuroses but they were nevertheless ready to accept the explanation that shell shock caused men to act in violent and disturbing ways. Over the course of the war, newspaper and journal articles such as ‘The Strain of War: Shattered Nerves’ and ‘What is Shell Shock?’ had promoted an awareness amongst the general community of this disorder that afflicted a growing number of men in the AIF.15 The public was led to understand that the nature of modern warfare had resulted in a new type of war injury which affected the mind. In October 1917 the Victorian InspectorGeneral of the Insane explained that: Our previous wars cannot be compared with this one. Never has human nature been subjected to the same continuous strain, never before has the nervous system been called upon to stand such concussion and shock, and never has the mind been required to sustain such terrifying sights and sounds.16

Shell shock captured the public’s imagination, perhaps because it was a simple concept through which the distant horrors of the war could be grasped. While psychiatrists theorised about the role of unconscious mental processes such as repression and sublimation in the aetiology of shell shock, or ‘war neuroses’—the term they preferred, the general public could envisage the condition as resulting from the impact of massive shell explosions. Such an understanding could easily be applied 117

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to make sense of incidents where returned soldiers displayed aggressive and bizarre behaviour.17 In October 1919 Dr John Springthorpe, the Melbourne physician and expert on war neurosis, noted that the popular understanding of shell shock included symptoms such as abnormal irritability, restlessness, discontent, and subjective fears and worries.18 The public also came to see that alcohol was a problem for many returned men. Government, medical and social welfare publications, as well as the popular press, had familiarised Victorians with the notion that shell-shocked returned soldiers were easily affected by alcohol. In March 1918 the Salvation Army War Cry commented on the ‘terrible effect’ of drink upon victims of shell shock.19 ‘The severely toxic effects of alcohol on the nerve-shattered soldier has…frequently [been] noted’, stated the Victorian Inspector-General of the Insane in his report for 1919.20 In June 1919 the Repatriation Department’s official journal explained that: One visible result of the stress and hardship of war service is that the majority of returned men are not normal as to nerves, and consequently a number of them are easily affected by drink. They may have only acquired the habit since they enlisted, but, whether or not, the fact remains that certain of them are prone to drink, and it hits them harder than it does the normal man.21

Of course, individuals also drew on their own experiences with returned soldiers to form their opinion as to the effects of the war on men’s behaviour. ‘I think the soldiers are to be pitied[;] there must be something wrong somewhere or they would not be like they are’, wrote the wife of an alcoholic ex-soldier living in the Western District, in March 1926.22 In the early 1980s Nellie Walsh recalled that: ‘My father went to the First World War and when they came back they can’t adjust. My mother…didn’t have time to look after this shell-shocked husband or whatever was wrong with him.’23 In the case of violent veterans, many wives and families realised that these men had changed for the worse as a result of war service. In marriages that had taken place before the war, it was often obvious that the war had played a part in such change. Helen G. took steps to find out what was wrong with her husband who went on drinking bouts and was abusive towards her after his return home. ‘I interviewed doctors and other people about his conduct’, she stated in her subsequent

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divorce petition.24 On the other hand, there were many wives who knew only too well that their husbands had been drunkards or bullies before enlistment and that the war was not a significant factor in such men’s post-war violence. In November 1919, 25-year-old Annie M. of West Brunswick lodged a petition for divorce from her husband John, whom she had married in 1912. He had drunk to excess ever since their marriage and had been habitually cruel towards her. He had been away on active service for six months in 1916 but on his return he told her that he had not gone into the fighting line. After his return home he recommenced his drunken and abusive conduct, but Annie knew that the war was not the cause.25 With regard to marriages that took place after 1918, the contributing role of the war in veterans’ violence was less clear. Yet even though the wives of these men could not compare their husbands’ post-war and prewar behaviour, they often attributed their husbands’ violence to the war. In October 1921 a young woman named Mary Bailey appeared before the South Melbourne court with a baby in her arms. She sought an order to keep the peace against her returned-soldier husband whom she had married after the war. Since their marriage he had acted ‘like a lunatic’ and had threatened to kill her. She was afraid for her safety and went to a neighbour’s place for protection every night. She believed that wounds which he had received at the war were seriously affecting him.26 Mrs C., a 103-year-old widow when I interviewed her, explained to me that her violent ex-soldier husband had taken to drink at the war and was one of a number of returned men ‘who weren’t strong in the head’.27 B. W., the daughter of a violent ex-soldier, told me that she used to discuss her father’s violence towards her mother with other girls at her work. Their fathers, also veterans, hit their wives too. All the girls thought that their fathers’ violence was caused by war service.28 In some cases such interpretations were no doubt accurate; in others the war simply provided an explanation for violence that was not really war-related.29

Gentle reproofs In February 1925, Lilian Young sued her husband Charles, a returned soldier, for maintenance at the Hawthorn court. Lilian told the court that she had left her husband the previous year because she was afraid of him. Six months after their marriage in June 1918 his behaviour had begun to frighten her. He had thrown a knife at her which had

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narrowly missed her arm; he had brought an axe into the house and threatened to ‘do for’ her and their child; he had pointed a revolver at her and threatened to shoot her; and he had used a razor strap on their daughter. She had already given him three chances to reform and could not possibly live with him again. Lilian’s sister testified that Charles had frequently shown signs of temper and that the child had complained of being sore as a result of her father striking her with the razor strap. Charles Young denied having been cruel to his wife and claimed that up until January 1924, when she left him, they had lived on very good terms. As a result of war injuries, however, for which he had recently been in hospital, he was a ‘nervous wreck’.30 In cases such as these, where ex-soldiers claimed to be suffering from war nerves, there was usually no way for the public, or for police, jurymen, magistrates and judges, to distinguish between those men who had really been adversely affected by their war experiences and those who were merely fabricating an explanation for their misdeeds. The general public had no access to soldiers’ military or repatriation files which could have provided clarity in a number of cases. For some cases which proceeded to trial, the Crown Solicitor requested a copy of the accused’s military record from the Defence Department and sought expert advice on the accused’s mental condition. At the local court level, however, where all crimes against the person were heard in the first instance, and where most were decided, police prosecutors do not seem to have conducted such enquiry. Where information was lacking, officials were likely to grant returned men the benefit of the doubt. After all, during 1918 and 1919 the federal government, returned-soldier associations, and churches urged the community to be sympathetic and tolerant in its attitude towards men suffering from shell shock or nerves. ‘[T]he condition induced by war experience has, in many instances, admittedly baffled the best medical skill of the world…It is obvious that the greatest care must be given in dealing with these men’, cautioned the Victorian Repatriation Board in June 1918.31 In June 1919 an article in Repatriation declared that: ‘The invisibly wounded…are entitled to full consideration at the hands of their families, their friends, and employers’.32 The Victorian Presbyterian Church’s Repatriation Committee stressed that the community should show a ‘quickened sense of responsibility and gratitude to the returned soldier’, especially to those men who had been ‘weakened by warfare on our behalf’.33 In May 1919 a conference of AIF chaplains urged the 120

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churches in Australia to recognise the need for ‘unfailing sympathy’ towards returned men who had inevitably been ‘roughened’ by their war experiences.34 The popular understanding that many returned men had been damaged by their war experiences shaped views of the anti-social and criminal behaviour that some of these men enacted, and dominated responses to returned soldiers in the courts. Many ex-soldiers, including both those who were indeed battle-scarred, and those who, like W. O., had not been traumatised by any experience of battle, were able to avoid culpability for post-war violence.35 Leniency towards soldiers had been common in courts across Victoria during the war, out of concern to recognise the status of the AIF and to not discourage civilian men from joining up. Now, in the aftermath of war, leniency continued out of sympathy for men who had been subjected to the appalling conditions of modern warfare.36 Some magistrates had been AIF officers and therefore may have felt even greater sympathy or solidarity with those men who appeared before them.37 Herbert Moran, an Australian doctor, described magistrates as ‘indulgent and sympathetic’ towards returned soldiers after the war.38 Soft treatment of returned-soldier offenders may also have reflected political and social elites’ concern to prevent an organised insurgence of these men who had been well-drilled in armed warfare.39 General John Monash, who directed the demobilisation of the AIF, warned civilians to treat returned men with care or else risk returned-soldier disaffection and insubordination.40 In a climate of sympathy towards returned-soldier defendants, wives’ own injuries tended to be bypassed. In some cases the damage that women sustained, such as bullet wounds and shock, was little different to that sustained by soldiers. But the injuries of veterans, whether actual or fictional, had far greater cultural value than those of their wives. It was not possible or permissible, it seems, to have viewed civilian suffering as equal to the suffering of soldiers. Nicoletta Gullace argues that that this ‘imperative to acknowledge masculine suffering after the war shaped—perhaps unconsciously—the will to disbelieve wartime acts of violence against women and children’.41 This emphasis on male suffering also seems to have encouraged officials to turn a blind eye to the violence committed against wives after the war, as the following cases demonstrate. G. R. shot his wife and then himself (non-fatally) at their Albert Park apartment in June 1921 (see Chapter Four). The connection between G. 121

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R.’s war service and the shooting became the focal point of the defence case when he stood trial for attempted murder of his wife in mid-1921. G. R.’s lawyer, Mr Maxwell, argued that G. R. had been suffering from insomnia, ‘which very often arose as a result of military experiences abroad’, and from chest trouble. He had consequently attempted suicide, in the process of which he had accidentally shot his wife. He had ‘no recollection of the actual occurrence’. Despite police evidence that immediately after the shooting G. R. had admitted an intention to kill his wife, the Crown Prosecutor made little effort to pursue this line of argument. He seemed reluctant to challenge the case made out by the defence. Sensing that justice was not being rigorously pursued, Justice Mann reminded the court that the accused was on trial for attempted murder. In his summation to the jury, Justice Mann said that the defence had suggested that the accused might have shot his wife in the process of trying to shoot himself. ‘Suffering from insomnia was no excuse for shooting one’s wife’, he stressed. His words went unheeded, however, as the jury returned a not guilty verdict.42 Another couple, Martha and George Brown, had married in England in December 1918 when George, a member of the AIF, had been recovering from war injuries. He had been seriously wounded by gunshots to the spine, head, legs and arms during the Spring Offensive on the Western Front in April 1918. After returning to Australia with his wife, George was in constant poor health. He spent numerous months in Caulfield Military Hospital during 1921 and 1923, and required further hospitalisation in mid-1925. On 4 August 1925, not long after his discharge from hospital, he attacked Martha at their West Melbourne home. According to Martha, on the day of the attack George had been getting ready to attend the Repatriation Department for medical treatment. Around one o’clock he asked her to hang up a wet bed sheet. When she approached the bed he pinned her down, put two fingers into her ‘private parts’ and tried to get his whole hand inside her body. She struggled away from him but he followed close behind and hit her repeatedly over the head with an 18-inch file, inflicting a wound which penetrated to her skull. George then returned to his room where he cut his wrist, nearly severing it, in an attempt to commit suicide. Martha, still conscious, managed to seek help from neighbours. A local policeman who attended her found that she had lost a lot of blood from her head wound and had lumps and bruises all over her head and arms. Both Martha and George were admitted to hospital. 122

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George Brown was committed to stand trial for unlawfully wounding his wife. In the meantime the Crown Prosecutor sought further information about the Browns. Local police reported that the couple was living apart, although in the same house, on account of George’s brutality and his insistence on having ‘connection’ with his wife almost every day and night. At the trial before the Supreme Court on 2 September 1925, Martha Brown recounted her husband’s assault upon her, modestly forgoing the sexual detail. The defence lawyer cross-examined Martha, eliciting details of her husband’s war service and injuries. When he asked about a boarder who was living in the house with them, she stated that her husband wanted the boarder to leave because he could not assault her while anyone else was around. George Brown then stepped into the dock and pleaded not guilty. A court reporter for the Geelong Advertiser wrote: ‘In a touching appeal, Brown, whose left arm was heavily bandaged, said the trouble was all caused by a boarder’. When his wife had refused to send the boarder away he had grabbed the file and ‘lost his head’. The sympathetic reporter added: ‘With a catch in his voice and tears in his eyes, Brown said while he was in hospital his wife had never been near him, and had told police she did not want to see him any more.’ After a short retirement, the jury found George Brown guilty of the lesser offence of causing actual bodily harm, with a strong recommendation to mercy on account of his war service. Justice Woinarski said he would give the recommendation every consideration. Several days later, at the sentence hearing, Justice Woinarski held that under the circumstances justice would be met by a suspended sentence of 12 months, with a three year good behaviour bond to not ‘interfere’ further with his wife.43 Like the trial of G. R., the trial of George Brown focused on the defendant’s own injuries, both those that he had sustained at the war and those that were self-inflicted. It was his suffering and not that of his wife that touched the jury, judge and reporters. Courts were tolerant, too, of returned men who had committed offences when intoxicated.44 In January 1920 George Illes appeared before the Box Hill court charged with carrying a firearm without a permit. He had gone to the home of a woman named Mrs Kydd and demanded to see his wife whom he believed was at the house. When Mrs Kydd denied that George’s wife was at her home, he verbally abused her then wrenched the front gate off its hinges, swung a revolver around his head and fired bullets into the air. The lawyer for the defence 123

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explained that the defendant had been on a drinking bout ‘which had led to a disturbance in his home’. His wife would not stay in the house, and he believed that she had gone to Mrs Kydd’s place. The defence submitted George’s military discharge which showed that he had seen considerable service abroad. The bench decided to adjourn the case for six months to give George an opportunity to redeem himself.45 On the night of 7 December 1922, William Charles stabbed his wife Amelia with a table knife after an argument at their Fitzroy lodgings. On hearing screams emanating from the couple’s room, Margaret Saxton, the boarding-house keeper, opened their door and saw William standing over his wife with a knife in his hand. ‘Stop this[!] [A]re you mad?’ she cried. William was in a drunken state. He got into bed while the housekeeper gave Amelia a towel to stop blood flowing from the numerous stab wounds on her neck and shoulders. Four of the wounds required stitches. When police arrived William told them that he was a returned soldier, having served with the Second Division Field Artillery. William stood trial at the Supreme Court in February 1923 on a charge of causing actual bodily harm to his wife. The defence’s case was that William and Amelia had been happily married for two and a half years and that there had never been any ‘trouble’ before the stabbing. The accused was a returned soldier who had been gassed three times at the war and could not stand much drink. ‘If I have a few drinks I lose control of myself’, William told the jury. Despite the fact that Amelia Charles bore multiple knife wounds and that there was a witness to the stabbing, the jury found William not guilty.46 Community sympathy towards wounded warriors was a tide against which women had to struggle in order to gain a fair hearing before the courts. Wives were often hard-pressed to keep the attention of a court focused on the violence that they had suffered rather than on the illhealth of their husbands. In early 1921, at the South Melbourne court, Rosalie D. proceeded against her husband T. D., a returned soldier, for leaving her without means of support. She testified that T. D. had become a heavy drinker soon after their marriage in 1912. From then on he had knocked her about, accused her of infidelity and denied that he was the father of her children. On Christmas Eve, 1920, in front of another married couple, he had struck her in the mouth, smashing her artificial teeth. He then threw her out of their Oakleigh house, telling her that he would no longer keep her. When a policeman asked him to readmit her he said that she could stay the night but, after the policeman 124

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left, he threw her to the floor and tried to throttle her. She left the house at 4:30 a.m. and went to her mother’s place in South Melbourne. Predictably, the defence lawyer raised the subject of T. D.’s war service. Was it not the case, he asked Rosalie, that her husband had been away on war service? ‘[O]nly six months!’, she exclaimed. She stressed that T. D. had been invalided on account of sickness, not battle injuries. This was true. T. D.’s repatriation file shows that only a couple of months after embarking for overseas service he was hospitalised with pneumonia and emphysema in Egypt, and then returned to Australia. The fact that T. D. had been violent before his enlistment and that he had not actually fought in the war may have weighed on Rosalie’s side. The court ordered T. D. to pay her maintenance.47 In addition to emphasising their own war injuries, returned-soldier defendants in domestic violence cases tended to make allegations of infidelity against their wives. Such claims were not unique to veterans as both civilian and returned-soldier husbands who were abusive commonly believed that their wives were unfaithful. Sociological studies have found that this is one of the trademarks of violent husbands who, ironically, are often unfaithful themselves. Returned soldiers were additionally armed, however, with the common wartime stereotype of the disloyal wife who played around while her husband did his duty at the front.48 There were certainly some soldiers’ wives who engaged in adulterous relationships during the war, just as there were numerous married soldiers who had sex with prostitutes and other women during their active service. However, cases of domestic violence involving clear-cut infidelity on the part of wives rarely found their way to the courts. It is not clear why this was the case. There may have been few such cases which led to violence, wives may have been protected by their new partners, or wives may simply have realised that the courts would dismiss any claim brought by an adulterous wife against her violent husband. Elizabeth H.’s attempt to sue her husband C. H. for maintenance of herself and her 11-year-old son in March 1919 was hopeless. Not only was it clear that she had committed adultery during the war, but her husband bore obvious war wounds. In September 1915 C. H. had sustained a gunshot wound to his face at Lone Pine, Gallipoli, which had necessitated plastic surgery to rebuild his nose. After recovering from this ordeal he had gone on to the Western Front. In April 1918 he had been injured by a gunshot wound to his back and wrist. He 125

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returned to Australia in January 1919, not long before his wife sued him for maintenance. Elizabeth H. told the Hawthorn court that she had married the defendant in 1907 and that he had left her without support before enlisting in 1914. He had joined up as a single man and she had had to earn her livelihood as a seamstress. On his return from the war four years later he had written to her that he liked another woman better so she had not gone to meet him when he disembarked at Port Melbourne. He came to her mother’s house to see her married sister whose portrait he had been carrying around, but he did not speak to her. He was now living at her mother’s house and had threatened to murder her if she did not leave. Elizabeth’s mother and sister testified that she had behaved very badly while her husband was away and had had an abortion. C. H., dressed in AIF uniform and wearing the blue armbands of a hospital patient, stated that he was still under medical treatment for war wounds. The bench stated that it was in no doubt as to the conduct of the petitioner and dismissed the case.49 Returned soldiers who appeared before the courts on charges relating to domestic violence often portrayed their wives as having strayed from appropriate feminine roles. Like infidelity, a wife’s failure to adequately perform her duties was an old theme in the testimonies of violent husbands. Such complaints were now more acute in the broader context of social concern that soldiers’ wives, having tasted greater independence during the war, should resume housewifely and nurturing roles. Adding to this tension, women’s friendships with other women had intensified while their husbands were absent. Their activities together, sometimes encroaching on the traditional prerogatives of men, could threaten the husbandly authority of returned men. In June 1923, Lilian Bain sought a divorce from her husband Donald on the ground of desertion. She had been forced to leave him in July 1919 on account of his drunken and abusive conduct towards her— for instance, his forcing her to have sexual intercourse had caused her ulcers. As discussed in Chapter Three, Donald Bain had drunk to excess since his return from the war in late 1916, having at one point been a patient at Lara Inebriate Retreat. At the hearing before the Divorce Court, Donald denied that he was an excessive drinker and instead made out that Lilian’s wayward behaviour was to blame for their marital difficulties: she had gambled, attended race meetings, and been too much under the bad influence of certain friends, in particular a Mrs Sharp. The lawyer for the defence focused on Lilian’s 126

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wifely failings. He asked Lilian’s landlady, a witness in the case: ‘Is it true that when Captain Bain came home on leave on Saturdays he washed his tunics and equipment in the back of the house while his wife entertained visitors in the front?’50 G. W., an injured ex-soldier also discussed in the previous chapter, was likewise unhappy about his wife’s new friendships. In particular he took exception to a Mrs Fisher with whom his wife drank and smoked cigarettes.51 Courts were likely to tolerate men’s violence against women who refused to return to subordinate and thus ‘proper’ marital relations. In March 1922, a returned soldier named Albert Marr appeared before the South Melbourne court on a charge of wife desertion. Mrs Marr told the court that her husband had frequently come home drunk and beaten her. She refused to live with him again because he was too cruel, besides which he had contributed nothing to their support since the previous September. Albert explained to the bench that: Since the fifth day after I returned from the war there has been trouble. Trying to keep the home as it should have been kept, I often went down on my hands and knees and scrubbed the floor. I did the washing and ironing times without number.

The ‘trouble’, as far as Albert was concerned, was not his drunkenness nor his violence towards his wife, but her neglect of her domestic duties. The bench seemed to agree. It dismissed Mrs Marr’s claim for maintenance for herself, although it ordered Albert to pay maintenance for his children.52 Not everyone, however, was sympathetic towards returned men who appeared before the courts as a result of violent behaviour. In his official medical history of the war, Arthur Butler maintained that by 1920 the Australian community, no longer engaged in military effort, began to view returned soldiers more circumspectly. ‘[H]ero worship was replaced by critical suspicion’, he recalled.53 As many court cases demonstrate, this process did not occur overnight; sympathy towards returned men persisted throughout the 1920s. But compassion for damaged warriors was countered by public expression of concern about the number of returned-soldier offenders. Returned-soldier riots in Melbourne during 1919 did not help the veterans’ cause. The media tried to contain social alarm by blaming such violence on a certain ‘Bolshevik’ attitude among the most recalcitrant and thus atypical members of the

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AIF, but some people were not convinced.54 In August 1919 one social commentator was decidedly pessimistic in his outlook on the violent tendencies of returned soldiers: ‘A feeling of disregard for human life has been implanted in their souls, and it won’t be blotted out in a hurry’, he warned. ‘You can’t train a man to homicide, and then teach him that murder is unlawful’.55 The growing number of returned soldiers before the courts seemed to confirm such fears. In January 1922 an article in the Melbourne Truth reflected that returned-soldier offenders were now ‘far too numerous to be pleasant’. The journalist acknowledged the connection between soldiers’ war experiences and their tendency to personal violence: The horrors of war have…affected their nervous systems and, as a consequence, the brain, and many, due to nervous disorders, are apt to become homicidal maniacs, to see red, at any moment…in the wake of war has followed hideous crime, the perpetrators of which at any rate before the war were sane, normal beings.

Despite the connection he saw between the war and these men’s violence, the journalist called on returned-soldier defendants and their lawyers to ‘cut out the war stuff’. He maintained that the judges of the Victorian Supreme Court believed that an accused’s good war record should not be set off against his crime.56 Such appeals seem to have reflected a minority point of view, however. Returned soldiers continued to point to their war service as either an explanation or mitigating factor for their commission of crimes. Members of the judiciary were uneasily placed between administering justice impartially and to the letter of the law, and responding to calls for sympathy for returned-soldier defendants. In some cases judges pointed out the irrelevance of war service to the question of a man’s guilt; in other cases judges were quite prepared to accept a jury’s determination that allowed war service to excuse domestic violence. Perhaps the most common approach was to impose moderate punishments and restrictions on returned men who had behaved wrongly. These mild measures were certainly not commensurate with some of these men’s violent acts. A moderate approach to dealing with returned men also afforded little protection for wives. In July 1919, for instance, the Box Hill court fined a married returned soldier for carrying around a German officer’s revolver that he had brought back from the war. Instead of

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confiscating the weapon, the bench allowed him to have possession of the revolver so long as he did not carry it in public. The bench expressed no concern about his possible use of the gun in his own home.57

Turning a blind eye Despite a growing number of wife abuse cases before the courts which involved drunken and apparently nerve-shattered ex-soldiers, authorities in charge of soldier repatriation remained silent on the issue of domestic violence. Given the community’s understanding that alcohol was a major cause of domestic violence and that mental disorder underlay much ex-soldier aggression, authorities must have suspected that there was an increased risk of domestic violence in many returnedsoldier households. Yet they took no steps to specifically address this problem. This was a subject that could not be broached. As the war neared an end, Australian military authorities realised that many soldiers were suffering from mental disorder manifested in a loss of self-control and an inability to know right from wrong. On the advice of its senior medical officers, among whom were the leading Australian experts on war neuroses, the Army decided that firm but kind control needed to be exercised over these men. In the interests of both soldiers and the general public, men suffering from neurasthenia and shell shock would remain under military discipline as long as required. They would receive restorative treatment and psychotherapy—the latest and most successful treatment for war neuroses—in special hospitals away from city areas and apart from civilian mental patients. In Victoria they would go to Mont Park and Bundoora military hospitals, both located in the countryside north-east of Melbourne.58 Wartime legislation already provided for the treatment and restraint of such soldiers in hospitals without the need for their certification, which was required procedure in civilian cases of insanity.59 But despite any good intentions of the military, many disturbed ex-soldiers were not, in fact, held under military control until they were cured. By June 1920 only 2,037 soldiers remained on the AIF rolls and yet the number of men experiencing mental problems was still great.60 In the end, families, especially mothers and wives, were the main carers for returned men suffering from mental illness. When the behaviour of such men became unmanageable, some families requested that they be admitted to a military mental hospital.61 Some of these requests were

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related to domestic violence when wives believed that their husbands’ violence was a result of shell shock.62 Ruth M. was one woman who took this action. She had met and married her husband Charles in 1917 when he was a member of the AIF stationed in England. At the end of the war she came out to Australia with him. Soon after their arrival in Melbourne in January 1919, Charles began treating Ruth with great cruelty. She recounted that he would hit her, pinch her, pull her hair, and bend her fingers until they almost broke. He caused her to haemorrhage and nearly miscarry with their first child by forcing her backwards over a table. After their daughter was born he began to abuse the baby by pinching her all over until she was a ‘mass of bruises’. When the baby was seven weeks old Ruth took her to a local doctor for treatment. With the doctor’s support, she wrote to the Repatriation Department, the government body in charge of discharged soldiers, asking it to place her husband in Mont Park Military Hospital to undergo observation for mental instability. The Department approved the request and arranged for Charles’ admission to Mont Park. Unfortunately, the hospital allowed him out on weekend leave, on which occasions he returned home to resume his brutal conduct. ‘He threatened to murder me’, Ruth explained later, ‘because I was instrumental in having him sent to Mont Park. On one occasion I had to call the police for protection but before they could come to my assistance [Charles] left and returned to Mont Park’. Charles M. was discharged from Mont Park around May 1920 and he returned home. Any treatment that he had received failed to curb his violent tendencies. He treated his wife and daughter with even greater cruelty than before. He shook the child ‘until she was nearly dead’ and bit her nose. At the end of August 1920 Ruth obtained an order at the Cheltenham court to have Charles bound over to keep the peace for 12 months. This order, she stated, had no effect on him. On one occasion she found him sticking his tongue in their daughter’s mouth. When she tried to stop him he attacked her with a boot, bursting the side of her face and knocking out a tooth. She then came to discover that he had been ‘interfering’ with their daughter. Charles did not limit his abusive behaviour to his family. In November 1921 he was found guilty of an indecent assault upon a girl and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment. Ruth took the opportunity to seek a divorce, and was successful.63

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The case of Charles M. suggests that although the Repatriation Department was willing to place some violent returned soldiers under institutional control, it was ambivalent about the danger that these men posed to their families. In his report on Mont Park for 1919, the InspectorGeneral of the Insane observed that ‘the mental soldier is much more aggressive than the ordinary civil patient’.64 Yet, unlike civilian patients, ex-soldiers were not certified for their initial period of treatment. The policy of the military ward to allow men with histories of domestic violence to go home on weekends seems highly negligent of families’ welfare.65 But if a man appeared to have improved during his period of treatment there was nothing to prevent this. The goal of military mental hospitals was to restore men to health so they could return to their homes; it was not to detain them unnecessarily. Leave arrangements may have been more relaxed for returned soldiers because the Victoria community put pressure on the government to treat mentally-ill military patients as different from civilian mental patients.66 In May 1921 the Minister for Repatriation reassured federal parliament that the returned soldiers at Mont Park were treated ‘not as ordinary inmates, but as men afflicted by war service’. He was pleased to say that some 700 cases had been dealt with at Mont Park and that in the majority of cases treatment had been satisfactory; not more than 107 would remain there permanently.67 Charles M. was one of the ‘satisfactory’ cases. It would have been better for Ruth M. if her husband had been treated as an ‘ordinary inmate’, if that involved a higher level of restraint. It seems probable that during the early years of repatriation numbers of seriously mentally-ill men were not certified simply because they were returned soldiers.68 As the number of men needing treatment for mental illness rose rather than fell, the Repatriation Department became increasingly intolerant of soldiers who, after initial treatment, did not resume stoic self-control.69 Government ministers and repatriation doctors increasingly blamed the persistence of mental problems on defective heredity, drinking, malingering or plain laziness, rather than on war service.70 As early as 1920 the Minister for Repatriation reported to the federal parliament that: ‘Very chronic shell-shock cases become markedly fewer. Cases recently claiming attention are mostly consequent upon alcoholic or other personal abuses, mental instability or continued idleness’. He acknowledged, however, that some authentic cases might involve relapses due to ‘family or financial worry’.71 In March 1925, authorities at Bundoora and Mont Park told newspaper reporters that the percentage 131

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of shell shock cases among returned-soldier patients was now small: ‘In the majority of cases there is mental weakness from birth. The present condition of the patients was indirectly due to war service. Many of these would probably have developed mental derangement’.72 The Repatriation Department did not seek to monitor ex-soldiers’ violence against their wives. It did not keep records relating to domestic violence and rarely did its officers note details of criminal charges against returned soldiers. The leniency with which the courts treated returned men meant that committals of violent veteran husbands to hospitals were probably rare. Local medical officers had no directives to look out for signs of wife abuse even though they undoubtedly dealt with many wives affected by violence.73 Repatriation case files afford a general impression that the Department had little knowledge of returned soldiers’ abuse of their wives. Often the individual men concerned, and sometimes their wives as well, contributed to this situation by deliberately withholding or concealing evidence of violent behaviour. In 1929, W. O., mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, applied for a pension on account of ‘heart trouble’, allegedly caused by lifting a piano when on active service. In order to hide the fact that he had spent several years in prison during the early 1920s as a result of convictions for sexual assault of a girl and for shooting his wife, he stated that due to heart pains, giddy turns and varicose veins, ‘I just rested at home & did light jobs about the house’. The authorities seem to have been none the wiser, although at least they refused his application.74 Even when repatriation officers noted ex-soldiers’ violence, such information appeared incidental to the main concern of the Department—pension and employment arrangements for returned men. Evidence of domestic violence failed to give rise to any concern about wives’ well-being. The following excerpt from a minute paper in the case file for the returned soldier, G. R., demonstrates the priorities of the Department: Dr S[…] reported on 18/6/21 that ‘Wife reported that…[her husband] shot himself and her last week and is now in the Melbourne Hospital’. In view of this is his industrial training to be finalised or DC’s direction carried out? DC [Deputy Comptroller]: I recommend that VT application be finalised and that no further action be taken in respect to application for clearance to Land Department.75

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The Repatriation Department focused its efforts on material rather than personal aspects of repatriation.76 Its role was to facilitate returned men’s transition from soldiers to civilian wage-earners, through employment and medical, housing and financial assistance.77 The Department’s journal, Repatriation, portrayed returned men as individuals whose only function in family life was as responsible breadwinners. The Department was concerned that married returned soldiers should provide for their wives but it did not regard marital difficulties or personal relationships in general as relevant to its work. In late 1918 the Repatriation Commission decided that ‘the Department should not interfere in…cases of matrimonial difference as the aggrieved party can seek a remedy in the civil court’. Hence an officer informed one estranged couple that ‘private quarrels or differences could not enter into their dealings with this Department’.78 Another officer informed a wife of a violent returned soldier that the Department could not ‘interfere as far as her husband’s private life was concerned’.79 The Department regarded mental disorder and excessive drinking in discharged soldiers as problematic mainly to the extent that such conditions prevented men from becoming efficient and self-reliant members of the community. Alcohol-dependent returned soldiers were often unable or unwilling to hold down employment and typically spent their sustenance money on drink.80 At first the Department was patient. The Repatriation Commission ruled that sustenance applicants who were alcoholics should be placed on an employment register and given another chance to remain in employment, while orders for necessities would be given to their wives.81 But the Department soon became unwilling to give continued sustenance to men who showed themselves to be irredeemable.82 In late 1918 the Acting Victorian Deputy Comptroller (DC) of Repatriation sought direction from the Comptroller on the matter of an unemployed returned soldier who was ‘continually under the influence of liquor and causing disturbances’. The cost of detaining the man at Lara Inebriate Retreat and paying sustenance to his wife would be considerable, the Acting DC pointed out.83 The Repatriation Department was reluctant enough to spend its resources on the treatment of alcoholic ex-servicemen, let alone to consider how it might assist the abused wives of such men. By August 1918 the Department had made ‘no serious attempt’ to deal with alcoholic returned soldiers.84 In November 1918 a Dr Aberdeen protested that this was ‘not fair to the men, or to their relatives, or to the community 133

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in general’.85 But the Department continued to do little over 1919 and 1920, despite calls from returned-soldier groups, parliamentarians, church and welfare organisations, and local repatriation committees for the government to found special homes for inebriated ex-soldiers.86 In the case of Victoria, the Department regarded the pre-existing state institution, Lara, and the Salvation Army’s ‘Brightside’, as adequate facilities for returned-soldier victims of drink. The Repatriation Department instead made efforts to limit its responsibility for drink-addicted veterans. Early on, the Commission made a distinction between the ‘alcoholic’—who through excessive drinking lessened his capacity for work and recovery from war injuries—and the ‘inebriate’—who through continued indulgence in drink or narcotic drugs became constitutionally diseased, tending towards ‘moral and mental degeneracy’.87 The Department recognised that some men had become alcoholics through war service and it would give these men a chance to regain their normal condition over a six-month course of treatment, but it would not be responsible for cases of relapse. As for inebriate returned soldiers, the Department held that these men had usually been addicted to alcohol before they went to war and thus their condition was not a war disability. It would finance the first 12 months of their treatment in state institutions but thereafter it would accept no responsibility for such men.88 In December 1921 the Repatriation Commission informed the Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) that the Department’s responsibility for alcoholic and inebriate men was ‘rapidly diminishing’.89 From this time on the Department rarely arranged for or financed the treatment of alcoholic ex-soldiers, leaving state governments to deal with any further cases, of which there were many. During the period 1919–1925, returned soldiers accounted for around half of all admissions to Lara Inebriate Retreat and continued to constitute ‘a very considerable portion’ of admissions for the remainder of the 1920s.90 As expenses mounted, the Repatriation Department became preoccupied with administrating the tight criteria that it would provide pensions and free treatment only for soldiers whose disabilities were due to, or aggravated by, war service.91 This issue, rather than the kind of suffering experienced by returned men and their families, was the Department’s concern, as is illustrated by the case of Samuel G. In November 1924, W. E. Jones, the Victorian Inspector-General of the Insane, sent Samuel G., a returned soldier, to Bundoora military mental 134

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hospital for treatment. When the Repatriation Department asked Jones why he had done so without the authority of the Department, Jones replied that Samuel G. had come to see him ‘in a highly emotional condition; he was crying bitterly and afraid that he would either commit suicide or murder his wife’. Jones believed that Samuel G.’s condition was a result of war service. Repatriation disagreed. According to the knowledge of their doctors, Samuel G.’s emotional imbalance and marital unhappiness was caused by his intemperate habits—which had preceded his enlistment. He should not have been treated at Bundoora.92 Although it was true, as numerous domestic violence cases make clear, that many returned men had been heavy drinkers before their enlistment, the government had an opportunity to assist the families of veterans regardless of the point of origin of men’s drinking. In cases of mental disorder, psychotherapy and institutional care may have helped to prevent some cases of violence. But the reluctance of the Repatriation Department to assist alcoholic and disturbed returned soldiers beyond the immediate aftermath of the war and its failure to focus concern on violence in the homes of such men, had damaging implications for both returned soldiers and their families.93 Admittedly the Repatriation Department had a difficult task to please both the government and those concerned about the welfare of returned men. There was, however, no pressure group on behalf of abused wives of veterans and their plight remained officially unrecognised. As Stephen Garton has argued, much of the suffering experienced and caused by returned soldiers remained the ‘private burden of families and friends’.94

Loyalty, silence, anger and action The federal government and other organisations interested in repatriation did not attend to the needs of soldiers’ wives apart from bare material needs. They nevertheless expected wives to assume responsibility for the private aspects of soldier repatriation and to regard helping men to become strong again as a ‘labour of love’.95 This was especially the case with regard to soldiers suffering from mental disturbance. ‘To help him realise that he can get well, give him incentives to recover, and keep up his courage to make the effort…to be cured are pre-eminently the responsibilities of women’, declared the RSA Magazine in June 1919.96 Repatriation rhetoric reminded wives to be kind and patient towards shell-shocked husbands who were not always able to control

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themselves.97 Patience in wives was already a social virtue. In January 1918, Everylady’s Journal had advised wives to be tolerant when faced with a moody husband: ‘Make allowance for his being human’ and ‘whatever you do, don’t nag’.98 In February 1918, Fitzroy City Press had told its readers that a wife ‘must always avoid irritating’ her husband.99 Such advice was not specifically aimed at the wives of returned soldiers, but it demonstrates society’s expectation that women should deal gently with husbands who displayed irritability and other symptoms of shell shock. In November 1919, ‘Domina’, the personal problems columnist of Everylady’s Journal, replied to a correspondent who was worried about the irritability of her ‘patient’. Domina responded impatiently: Suffering frequently causes ill temper, and irritability on the part of a patient should have the effect described…Are you sure the patient is the only one who suffers from ill temper? Question seriously whether nursing is the vocation to which you are naturally adapted.100

Women who expressed their unhappiness at living with bad-tempered returned soldiers risked the charge of being uncaring and unwomanly. Veterans’ violence could be viewed as reflecting women’s failure to provide adequate feminine support and nurturing. The strength of community sympathy towards returned soldiers made the old chains bonding wives to violent men even heavier. It was difficult to take successful legal action against wounded warriors, even when some members of the community had begun to lose patience with lawless ex-soldiers. Nevertheless, some women were prepared to undergo the economic and social risks involved in ending their marriages to returned soldiers. A sample of 89 divorce petitions involving domestic violence lodged in Victoria in the years 1919–24 shows that 28 cases (31 per cent) involved returned soldiers.101 Just over half (57 per cent) of the returned-soldier cases involved men who had been violent before the war. It is possible that wives of men who had been violent before enlistment were more ready to seek separation than were women who married their veteranhusbands after the war or whose husbands became violent only after their return from the war. The former may have been less likely to feel guilt at abandoning their husbands because they knew their husbands were no war heroes. Also, their wartime window of freedom from violence had given them an opportunity to build strength and resources to make

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escape more possible. Increasingly, however, the women seeking divorce from returned-soldier husbands had married after the war or had not been subjected to violence before the war. By 1924 none of the divorce petitions involved men who had been violent prior to enlistment.102 Some women who left violent returned soldiers communicated with the Repatriation Department, but not out of an expectation that the Department would address the issue of domestic violence. They wrote regarding their entitlement to portions of their husbands’ sustenance or disability pensions. If they mentioned violence, it was to explain why they were no longer living with their husbands. In September 1922, Ada H. of Moonee Ponds wrote to the Department about her husband’s medical sustenance. A patient at Caulfield Military Hospital, he was spending funds intended for his family on drink. ‘[A]s for Caulfield saying that he does not drink to excess it is an absolute lie for he never comes home but he is more than half drunk’, wrote Ada.103 Around the middle of November 1922, apparently discharged from hospital, Mr H. began to knock Ada about. He would bang her head against a wall, punch and slap her, use ‘filthy language’ towards her and falsely accuse her of infidelity. She left him some time later.104 In September 1923 her husband was back in hospital. This time she wrote to the Department Matron concerning her entitlement to a portion of the sustenance payments that her husband was receiving: I am only working in a cafe & find it very hard paying my way & if I am entitled to the money it would be a great help to me. Through my husband’s cruelty & treatment I had to leave home & he has never given a penny towards the children’s keep & it is really too much for me.105

The Repatriation Department explained that it had paid sustenance on her behalf to her husband but that in future it would pay her portion separately.106 Similarly, in January 1923, Emily S. of Malvern asked the Department to send her own and her children’s sustenance money to her, rather than to her husband. For the past three months he had been drawing their portions, pretending that he was still supporting them, when in fact she had had to leave him a couple of years earlier on account of his violence.107 Women who left their husbands emphasised that they had been forced to leave. Loyalty to one’s husband, no matter what his character,

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was the socially acceptable standard. As B. W., daughter of a violent veteran, told me: ‘You were supposed to put up with it’; ‘If a woman left her husband she was a scarlet woman…and the saying was she’d made her bed, she had to lay on it.’ B. W. said that her mother never discussed the violence that her husband dealt her. ‘She was very loyal, very loyal indeed…I mean women were very loyal too…to the point that it was their lot’.108 The underside of ‘loyalty’ was powerlessness—social and economic. Women usually needed to be able to earn a sufficient income on their own, to enlist the assistance of family or friends, and win the sympathy of law enforcers. Without this, many women remained effectively locked in miserable marriages. B. W. believed that her mother would have left the marriage if she could have done so but she had no money of her own. In 2002, Mrs C., a 103-year-old widow of a First World War soldier related her own story. A small, chirpy woman, Mrs C.’s appearance belied the torments that she had endured in her early adult life. Soon after the war she was introduced to a returned soldier whom she married. ‘Things went wrong pretty quick’, she remembered. She discovered that her husband was an alcoholic, a habit she believed he had developed at the war. He also had a very bad temper and became physically abusive towards her: He just went from bad to worse with the drink and he would beat me up when he was in a temper, anything upset him at all. But against a wall I couldn’t escape…I just had to stand there and take it. Black eyes.

Her father did not help, her mother was not alive, and she had no one else to assist her. And soon she had two little sons to look after. Mrs C.’s response was to conceal the violence from the outside world. She often hid from people because she did not want them to see the bruises around her eyes, only taking the pram out in the streets when no one was around. She was wary of gossip. The family often moved house so that people would not know of their difficulties. But Mrs C. could not hide from everyone. One day when she was pregnant the doctor attended her at home. He told her husband that she would lose the unborn baby if he kept ‘upsetting’ her. She had two miscarriages. ‘I nearly cracked’, she recalled. But despite the strain she remained silent: I wasn’t one to go round gossiping. No, no. I still don’t. I’ve—no. I’ve kept it to myself all these years. Well, I think if you tell a few

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words sometimes like that, the one you tell it to adds some more wicked things to it and it makes it bad for the one who has been in trouble and trying to make good.109

It was true that women who made their troubles known publicly risked social disgrace and their husbands’ vengeful violence. Many women who experienced physical abuse at the hands of returned soldiers kept quiet, never reporting the assaults to which they were subjected.110 Women’s responses to domestic violence were shaped by their social and economic context. Silence was the expected and actual response of most soldiers’ wives. Eight decades on, no longer dependent on her husband who died long ago, and living in a society where women have a great deal more power, Mrs C. felt able to speak about her experiences and to allow herself the freedom to express her true feelings: ‘in the end I hated him. I really did’.111

Conclusion Victorians’ responses to returned-soldier domestic violence were characterised by indifference and sympathy for veterans. The only direct public challenge came from some of the wives of these men. During the war there had been relatively few court cases involving returned soldiers’ wife abuse. It had thus been possible for authorities and members of the public to not entertain the idea that AIF soldiers were the kind of men who beat their wives. But after the war, the return of the troops from overseas, the marriage of many single soldiers, and the progressive number of ex-soldiers before the courts, meant that the community could no longer deny that many returned soldiers posed a domestic danger. As a means of understanding this situation, many in the community accepted explanations that connected men’s nerve-shattering experiences at the war with their strange and violent actions back in civilian society. The wives of violent returned men sometimes accepted the war explanation too, but sometimes they rejected it, knowing more about their husbands’ personal histories than did officials or reporters. As shell shock joined alcohol as a popularly recognised cause of domestic violence, the figure of the deranged returned soldier provided a new model of violent husband. This revised construction of domestic violence was perhaps easily accommodated because it did not challenge the prevailing notion that domestic violence was an individual rather than a social problem. In no way did it threaten

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the sexual status quo. It did, however, help to shift the class-based discourse of domestic violence, as will be discussed in the next chapter. Leniency towards ex-soldiers charged with acts of violence against their wives persisted in the post-war years. Magistrates, judges, juries, and the media showed sympathy to men who appeared to be wounded warriors, but in the process tended to overlook the actual injuries that wives had sustained at the hands of these men. The protection of women had been an important justification for Australia’s military participation in the war. Ironically, the war was now used to excuse violence towards women. While many returned soldiers were disturbed by their war experiences, some of the men who walked free from court or who received light punishment had not even seen battle. There was some public concern about the prevalence of returned-soldier offenders and the leeway allowed them, but there was no specific concern about these men’s behaviour in the privacy of their own homes. The federal government recognised that it had a duty to provide care for soldiers who had become mentally disturbed or addicted to alcohol as a result of war service. Yet, despite both expert and popular awareness of a link between alcohol, shell shock and violence, the Repatriation Department never regarded mens’ violence in the home as within its province. Its concerns were largely the reintegration of soldiers as efficient and productive workers. In the early 1920s the Department quickly lost patience with returned men who failed to respond to treatment and who remained a drain on its resources. Reluctant to acknowledge that in many cases these were on-going rather than diminishing problems, the Repatriation Department sought to curtail its responsibility for alcoholic and mentally disturbed ex-soldiers. Alistair Thomson has commented that there was considerable public concern in Australia about veterans’ physical abuse of women, but I have not found this to be the case with respect to wife abuse.112 Judith Allen’s view, that ‘The sufferings of veterans’ women excited neither paternalism nor chivalry’, seems accurate.113 The community’s call for wives to be patient with returned men was at the cost of many women’s physical and mental welfare. Without any organised support, the wives of violent returned soldiers did it tough. Some sought separation or divorce, while many others struggled in silence. Like soldiers in the trenches, the wives of abusive returned men were often not in a position to resist the violence to which they were subjected.

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Post-war Battles Overview of Domestic Violence in Victoria after the First World War

One Saturday in February 1922, a Collingwood bootmaker named William Dunkley attacked his wife with a piece of timber after she remonstrated with him for drinking. A neighbour took Mary Dunkley to hospital to have the bloody wound to her head stitched.1 Several months later, in October 1922, Hannah Paulson of South Melbourne charged her 57-year-old husband with assault after he had dragged her about their house by her hair and clothes and tried to choke her. She stated that she had borne his cruelty for the past seven years. The police had no record of prior conviction against Mr Paulson.2 For many wives like Mary Dunkley and Hannah Paulson, the years after the First World War consisted of a weary struggle in the face of habitual domestic violence. Battered wives were among those women whom one Melbourne Methodist minister described in January 1919 as ‘fighting battles as heroic as any of those of our soldiers’.3 In many respects, the nature of wife abuse in Victoria changed little over the course of the pre-war, war and post-war periods. Some men’s concern to forcibly impose their authority over their wives, male drunkenness, conflict over household resources, wives’ dependence on their husbands’ incomes, and community expectations of wives’ submission to their husbands, were consistent factors contributing to incidents of domestic violence right throughout the early decades of the twentieth century. Yet while there was much that was seemingly unchanging in the occurrence of marital violence over this period, the First World War certainly left its mark. Indeed, the war imprinted itself on almost every facet of social interaction, such was the profundity of its impact for the 141

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Victorian community. In April 1922, a writer for the South Melbourne Record reflected that: ‘Here in Australia we have hardly begun to feel the aftermath of the war, yet the slightest ripple we have experienced is serious enough’.4 The most obvious way in which the war affected domestic violence was through the behaviour of traumatised returned soldiers. It is thus not surprising that historical references to the war’s effect on wife abuse have focused almost exclusively on ‘violent veterans’. However, historians have given scant consideration to the impact of the war more generally on domestic violence within Australian society. With the aim of addressing that gap, this chapter examines the war’s possible effect on the incidence of domestic violence in Victoria. It then looks at how the war shaped the nature of violence in civilian marriages and community responses to this violence.

Measuring the impact of war on domestic violence In February 1922 a Warrnambool solicitor wrote a letter to the editor of the Argus, expressing his concern about the ‘alarming increase of crime since the war’. He was particularly disturbed by the number of ‘brutal attacks on old men and women, and young women and children’, and by the ‘farcical leniency’ with which the courts treated the perpetrators of such acts.5 By the early 1920s, many Victorians believed that the aftermath of the war had seen an escalation of violence in the community. Most public commentators did not mention domestic violence but rather restricted their attention to violence taking place in public areas. J. F. E. of Elsternwick, for instance, was angry about ‘those fiends who assault little girls, and those who assail women and grown-up girls in public streets and on trains’.6 As for the culprits, it was clear to some that returned soldiers were behind much anti-social and offensive behaviour, and that these unstable men were preying on vulnerable members of the community.7 Official crime figures give credence to the perception that there was an increased level of interpersonal violence directly after the First World War. The rate of crimes against the person in Victoria (including assaults, shootings, manslaughter and murder) rose during 1919 and 1920, against a general downward trend in such crimes since 1900 and after a low point during the war. After 1921 the rate of crimes against the person resumed a steady descent, although this was less steep than over the period 1900–1914 (Figure 1).

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Cases per 10,000 population

16 14 12 10 8 6 4 2 0 1900

1905

1910

1915

1920

1925

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Figure 1. Offences against the person in Victoria per 10,000 population, 1900–1930

A certain proportion of offences against the person involved domestic violence but the actual proportion remains unknown because official statistics did not distinguish offences against wives as a separate category. Therefore, in order to investigate the impact of the war on the recorded incidence of domestic violence, I have turned to the original court registers for one Victorian local court—that of South Melbourne. South Melbourne was an industrial suburb, at one end bordering the Yarra River and the business centre of Melbourne, and at the other end bordering Port Phillip Bay. On the eve of the First World War the suburb was sizeable, home to 48,500 people, which made it one of the most populous suburbs in Melbourne.8 Its residents were mainly working-class, many of whom laboured on the nearby wharves or in the suburb’s several hundred factories, foundries and workshops.9 As domestic violence was more frequently reported in working-class suburbs than in middle-class suburbs or in country towns, the South Melbourne court presents a good case study for gauging the war’s influence on the recorded rate of wife abuse.

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Cases per 10,000 population

7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 1905

1910

1915

1920

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Figure 2. Explicit domestic violence cases before the South Melbourne Court per 10,000 population, 1905–29

Figure 2 displays the rate of domestic violence cases before the South Melbourne court for the period 1905–1929.10 Notably, the rate of cases between 1920 and 1924 was higher than before the war. The highest number of wife abuse cases for this period was in 1921, when the rate of cases rose to double the rate for 1913. The rate then remained higher than pre-war levels until it dropped back in the years 1925–29. A decrease in the rate of domestic violence cases during the war and a sudden increase shortly after the war mirrors the trajectory of crimes against the person in Victoria. The increased rate of domestic violence cases before the South Melbourne court after the war suggests that there may have been an increase in the actual incidence of such violence at this time.11 If this is true, what was the profile of the increase? A plausible theory is that the trough during the war reflects the absence of soldiers from the suburb (South Melbourne enlistments totalled 2,973, about six per cent of the suburb’s estimated population).12 The post-war increase may reflect the return of soldiers, some of whom were disturbed and thus more prone to behaving violently towards their wives. The fact that wife abuse cases reached a high point in 1921 rather than 1919 reinforces this supposition. In 1919 the majority of returned soldiers were still single or in the process of getting

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engaged and married. By 1921, many returned soldiers had married and enough time had passed for conflict to surface in such unions. Alternatively, could the post-war increase have involved a heightened level of violence on the part of civilian men? Unfortunately, it is difficult to know the proportion of defendants who were civilians and the proportion who were returned soldiers. As returned soldiers were not identified as such in the court registers, the only way to discover if a defendant served in the AIF is to check his name against the First World War Nominal Roll.13 Some defendants can be quickly identified or ruled out as returned soldiers but in the majority of cases defendants’ names are too common to allow such determination (the court register often failed to list middle names). For instance, of 27 husbands listed in the police/arrest register for wife abuse related charges in 1922, six were definitely returned soldiers, 10 were definitely civilian men, and the remaining 11 were possibly, but not definitely, returned soldiers.14 All that can be said with certainty is that both returned soldiers and civilian men made up the numbers of violent husbands who appeared before the South Melbourne court in the post-war decade. Court records thus reveal that in South Melbourne—and perhaps in Victoria as a whole—the war’s end was soon followed by an increase in the number of charges relating to wife abuse. Domestic violence cases were an element of the post-war rise in violence that many people in the community perceived. A spate of domestic violence cases before the courts may well have reflected an actual increase in such violence. Those men who used violence against their wives during this period of heightened aggression included both returned soldiers and civilians.

‘Things have got to change now’: female self-assertions In July 1921, in the country town of Mildura, Roy Bilney, a young grocer’s assistant, married his pregnant girlfriend Ivy, having threatened to shoot her if she did not agree to the union. After the marriage Roy and Ivy moved to the suburb of Northcote in Melbourne. Not surprisingly, given the circumstances of their marriage, their life together was unhappy. Roy, whom Ivy later described as ‘very morbid’, always carried a revolver and threatened to shoot her before their child was born. He did not carry out the threat and in February 1922 Ivy gave birth to a son. Soon afterwards conflict arose between the couple when Roy, unable to find work in the city, decided to return to Mildura and Ivy refused to go

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with him. She wanted him to find employment and show her that he could keep her and their child. He had given her just £5 since they were married and her mother had paid their rent for them. Roy returned to Mildura alone. He wrote to Ivy, professing his love for her but also threatening to kill her if she did not rejoin him immediately. Ivy held firm. She replied, explaining that both she and her family expected him to provide for her; there were things that she needed, such as a pram for the baby. She also expressed her unwillingness to return to a stressful marriage: Now you must understand that things have got to change now. There has got to be some money forthcoming or there will be a big change. It is all very well to talk of love but I can’t forget how you treated me in the past also just before you left & I can’t blind myself to the fact that the baby’s extreme nervousness is through you or rather through the nervous state you had me in. I can’t go on like this much longer. I haven’t got a thing to wear, so think it well over…

Roy was unwilling to take instructions from his young wife. At the top of her letter he drew a crude picture of a revolver sticking into a love heart. He wrote in capital letters: ‘THIS IS MY ANSWER. THERE WILL BE A BIG CHANGE ALL Right. Coming so Beware’. He sent the letter back to Ivy [Illustration 12]. Several weeks later Roy travelled to Melbourne to again demand that Ivy return to him. She reiterated her conditions. A few days later, at one o’clock on 22 March 1922, Roy forced his way into the Northcote house, shoving aside Ivy’s mother who was staying with her daughter and who tried to stop him from entering. He found Ivy fixing her hair. He fired his revolver at her and the bullet entered her side. She fled towards the front door but Roy shot her again, this time in the side of the head. She stumbled down the verandah steps and had reached the footpath when Roy, in pursuit, shot her once more. As she fell to the ground Roy said ‘goodbye’, rested the gun barrel on his eye, and pulled the trigger. He collapsed and died within an hour. Ivy, who was taken to hospital, survived the shooting.15 Within weeks another young man had also shot his estranged wife in Melbourne, but this time fatally. On the evening of 18 May 1922, 23-yearold Allan Fenton took his wife Audrey for a drive in his motor car. Allan drove along the Yarra River before parking the car on Batman Avenue. 146

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Illustration 12: Drawing of gun sent by Roy Bilney to his wife Ivy. Inquest into the death of Alfred Roy Bilney, 27 April 1922. Public Record Office Victoria, VPRS 24/P0, unit 1021, item 396.

Sometime afterwards he shot two bullets into his wife’s head with a .25 calibre revolver. He then shot himself through the temple and, that failing to kill him, drank the contents of a small bottle of poison. Early the next morning a man on his way to market found the bodies of Allan and Audrey lying by the side of the motor car. At the time of the shooting, Audrey and Allan were living apart, having married two and a half years earlier. Audrey, just 19 and a well-known ballerina before her marriage, had left Allan because he had treated her cruelly. Audrey’s mother told newspaper reporters that when the couple had first met they had fallen ‘violently in love with each other’ and had married just six months later. However, Allan had failed to financially support his young wife and baby, and then he had become violent. One night Audrey had arrived at her parents’ place with a swollen and 147

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bruised face. She had left him soon after this. Audrey’s mother defended her daughter’s decision to leave the marriage: ‘Everyone knows what sort of girl Audrey was, and how she stood loyally by her husband until she could not do so any longer…I urged her to leave him, when I was sure things were not as they should be’. A friend told the press that Audrey had ‘clung to her husband through thick and thin, until forced at last to leave him’. Other acquaintances described Allan as a ‘wild and irresponsible’ young man and Audrey as a ‘simple, well-behaved little lady’. Since leaving her husband Audrey had made arrangements to return to the stage in order to maintain herself. Allan had tried to induce her to return to him, first by offering her presents and later by threatening to shoot her. A coronial inquiry found that Allan Fenton had caused the death of his wife. Allan’s father, who gave evidence at the inquest, did not challenge this finding. He testified that before the shooting Allan had appeared ‘somewhat melancholy’ and had told him: ‘I am going to have my last interview with my wife[;] if she persists in keeping her engagement she will go out of my life’. Nevertheless, Mr Fenton could not believe that his son had treated Audrey cruelly during their married life: Allan had a charming personality and a good business career before him. It was true, though, that he had not wanted his wife to go back on the stage. Mr Fenton viewed the shooting not as a reflection of Allan’s abusive treatment of his wife but rather as a sign of his excessive affection for her: ‘in my mind it only shows how much he loved her’.16 There were similarities in the circumstances surrounding Roy Bilney’s and Allan Fenton’s violence. Both young men failed to support their wives financially and were violent or threatened violence towards their wives. In response, Ivy and Audrey refused to remain in marriages that had become miserable; they determined to live apart from their husbands rather than subject themselves to further abuse and lack of support. Both husbands attempted to induce their wives to return, initially through displays of affection but, increasingly, through threats to kill. As their aggression only alienated their wives further, Roy and Allan appear to have seen their options in extreme terms. In the end, unable to regain their wives’ obedience, each man resolved to kill his wife and commit suicide. The shootings were thus final points in escalating cycles of anger, contrition, desperation, and violence. Although these two marriages had unusually drastic endings, they exhibited dynamics of marital conflict which were played out in many other marriages after the First World War. 148

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In the first place, expectations of marital life were changing. In the post-war decade, romance assumed greater importance than previously in the popular understanding of marriage. At the turn of the twentieth century, Victorians had tended to view marriage as a necessary economic partnership in which a wife’s role was foremost as homemaker and child-bearer. Economic incentives for marrying were still a major practical consideration for both men and women after the war, given the entrenchment of men’s role as breadwinners and women’s role as housewives and mothers, but romantic love assumed greater importance in the cultural discourse of marriage. In Australia, as in other western countries, many people came to see marriage as a special and pleasurable union between a couple who bore a unique love for each other.17 Even the churches took on board the notion of romance in their conception of marriage. In 1925 the Melbourne minister Rev. Stephen Hart published a sermon on marriage that he had preached to an audience of young couples. The sermon began by pronouncing that twentieth-century Australians assumed that ‘a couple who married had first fallen in love’.18 Nowhere was the ideal of romance more evident than in the post-war cinema house. Film-going became a major popular pastime in Victoria during the 1920s, with most metropolitan suburbs and country towns running their own cinemas. Romantic films, often set in exotic locations and exuding glamour and excitement, were prolific. Most of these films came out of the flourishing Hollywood film industry but some were Australian-made.19 The post-war ideal of romantic marriage can be understood as a cultural balm for the widespread suffering and social upheaval of wartime. In particular, it reflected a call for a return to ‘normal’ relations between the sexes after a period of female independence and massive male casualties.20 Susan Kingsley Kent argues that ‘after the horrific events of the Great War, the spectre of conflict between men and women could hardly be tolerated’.21 The culture of romance offered an escape from the real tensions occurring in many post-war marriages.22 Romantic narratives typically portrayed courtship as an adventure over the course of which individuals found and united with their ‘destined’ love, almost by mystical processes. Such narratives ended at the point of union, with the implication that, once joined, lovers would live happily ever after. The focus on romance thus avoided the reality of inequality between husbands and wives or the possibility of marital conflict. The romantic ideal particularly served to make marriage more attractive to young single women. The widespread absence of single 149

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men during the war had afforded many young unmarried women an extended period of independence. By 1918 the Victorian marriage rate was 23 per cent lower than that of 1914, and the birth rate had also declined over the course of the war.23 Furthermore, the war years had presented new occupational possibilities for single women, especially for those of the middle class for whom opportunities to work outside of the home had been very limited before the war. Although there had been no mass wartime mobilisation of women into industry in Australia as there had been in Europe, women had nevertheless filled thousands of vacant male jobs. New areas of female employment had arisen such as in public service, banking, insurance, typing, stenography and telephony. There had also been an expansion of traditional female industries. The war thus gave further momentum to the flow of women into the paid workforce, an increasing trend from the turn of the century.24 However, unequal pay for women and men remained deeply entrenched after the war: in 1919 the rate of pay for women’s labour was set at 54 per cent of the rate for men’s labour.25 As the sphere of female occupations widened, economic independence became a more realistic option for unmarried women, although most could only hope to earn a low income. During the war the press had speculated that single women might be unwilling to enter lives of domestic drudgery and dependence when the war ended.26 The war had created conditions which threatened to propel even faster pre-war indications of women’s partial emancipation from male control. Many in the community feared that young women might be reluctant to marry, to become mothers and to bear their ‘proper’ domestic responsibilities. It seemed likely that their greater choices would at least allow them to exercise more power over the marriage process.27 Such fears intensified with the coming of peace, even though a stream of returned-soldier weddings over 1919 and 1920 quickly pushed the Victorian marriage rate above its pre-war level.28 In March 1919, Smith’s Weekly expressed concern about how women’s new ‘trained energy’ could be ‘absorbed’ by the community. It foresaw a difficult period of gender re-alignment ahead: ‘Already trouble brews, and the old hostility between the sexes increases’.29 The male-dominated press was at best ambivalent—but often hostile—towards the ‘modern girl’ who enjoyed greater economic autonomy than her female predecessors.30 ‘Do Wives Know their Job?’ asked the author of an Argus article in February 1925. He thought not. ‘What are girls doing? Are they learning the difficult arts of cooking and housewifery? You know they are not. Hundreds of 150

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thousands are fitting themselves for a career.’31 In light of such anxieties, it was no accident that post-war culture lent such weight to marriage as an exciting and happy enterprise.32 Many older women believed that women should not shy away from their ‘duty’ to marry but they lamented the emergence of what they perceived to be a rose-tinted view of marriage. In September 1926 Dulcie Deamer, a columnist for The Australian Woman’s Mirror, remarked that young women imagined that ‘Marriage meant someone to be “wonderful” to them all the time’. She pointed out that, inevitably, a certain ‘married look’ appeared on the faces of previously ‘smoothcheeked and smiling flappers’ a year into wedded life. She thought that such disenchantment was a new phenomenon: Their grandmothers and mothers did not bear that sad stigma— the typical ‘married look’ is as modern as the brief-skirted wife who wears it. But our mothers and grandmothers approached matrimony much as they approached Confirmation, or the dentist—with a determination to do their best under unfamiliar conditions and to be brave about it as females of British ancestry should be. Yes, strange as the notion may appear, they regarded marriage as a task not as a rest-cure. So they were spared the bitter disillusionment of their hapless descendants.33

Young women’s anticipation of husbands who were always ‘wonderful’ may indeed have been unrealistic and the cause of much disappointment. At the same time, the expectation of an affectionate and tender partner made new wives in the 1920s readier than women of previous generations to reject violence and abuse within marriage.34 ‘The modern woman [would] not stand for what her grandmother stood’, a Colac minister told his congregation in August 1925.35 In January 1920, a young woman by the name of Geraldine sought advice from ‘Domina’ of Everylady’s Journal as to whether she should call off her engagement. Since becoming engaged her fiancé had ceased to be caring and instead now attempted ‘to rule and direct’ her, not only on important points, but on ‘the simplest actions’. ‘What he calls “love”, I call tyranny’, she explained. ‘Domina’ advised Geraldine to break the engagement: ‘No man has a right to act as your lover is acting—controlling your life, directing you, and constraining you against your will.’ ‘Domina’ predicted that the fiancé’s coercive behaviour would only increase as

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the relationship progressed.36 Young women such as Geraldine felt that ‘love’ between husband and wife should entail care rather than control. As much as the lure of romance drew women to marriage, it was also an influential factor in their rejection of conditions which clearly violated their vision of conjugality. Young women’s higher expectations of marriage, dissatisfaction with aggressive husbands, and better opportunities in the workforce contributed to an unprecedented number of women leaving violent marriages in the decade following the First World War. After a slump during the war years, the rate of maintenance and divorce cases (many of which involved wife abuse) rose higher than pre-war levels in Victoria (Figures 3 and 4). It is impossible to know whether the rise in the rate of these cases after the war simply reflected women’s increasing preparedness to leave violent men, or whether it also reflected an increase in men’s violent behaviour, or both. The rate of offences against the person for Victoria (Figure 1), domestic violence cases in South Melbourne (Figure 2), and applications for maintenance and divorce (Figures 3 and 4) all increased in the immediate post-war years. This makes it likely that there was an increased incidence of men’s violence against wives at this time. 650 600

Cases per 100,000 married couples

550 500 450 400 350 300 250 200 150 100 50 0 1905

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Figure 3. Maintenance cases in Victoria per 100,000 married couples, 1905–1930

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Figure 4. Women’s petitions for divorce and judicial separation per 100,000 married couples in Victoria, 1912–1930

The more wives who turned their backs on unhappy marriages, the more examples there were for other women who found themselves in similar situations. In Victoria, as elsewhere in the English-speaking world, divorce gained new currency after the war, featuring often in literature and film.37 American films in particular helped to popularise divorce. Divorce laws were far more liberal in America than in Australia and the divorce rate had rapidly increased after the war: it was four times higher than in Australia.38 In May 1922 the front page of the Melbourne Herald covered the story of the American film actress Constance Talmadge who had accused her husband of ‘inhumane treatment’ and who was seeking divorce after just two years of marriage.39 Such celebrities—Audrey F. was a local case—provided new models for young women.40 Increasingly, it seemed to contemporaries, the women leaving their husbands were not the downtrodden, half-dead women common in the Victorian era, but were instead youthful, vibrant, and even glamorous. Divorce records support a view that post-war wives were seeking divorce from violent husbands earlier in married life than had pre-war wives. A sample of divorce petitions citing cruelty as a ground revealed that, in the period 1910–1914, 13.5 per cent of petitioners had been married for five years or less. In the period 1919–24, the percentage of petitioners who had

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been married for five years or less was now 30.4, more than double the proportion of such petitioners before the war.41 The advantages for women who left abusive marriages sooner rather than later were that they had a better chance of finding employment or a new husband, they were likely to have fewer children and, of course, the damage that they sustained was more limited. Dorothy Farrall obtained a divorce from her husband in 1920 after four years of unhappy marriage. Her husband was a heavy drinker and would come home drunk and do ‘the most outrageous things’. Many decades later, recounting her life, Dorothy felt that she was ‘terribly lucky’ to have obtained a divorce. Life was still very difficult afterwards because she had to support herself and her two children but she was much happier: ‘I had the freedom of not having a drunk man coming home every time, abusing me’.42 As Dorothy’s story suggests, earlier divorce benefited women but it was by no means an easy option. Many obstacles remained. It was still difficult to satisfy the legal grounds for divorce after the war for post-war courts were in no mood to be generous in their interpretation of divorce legislation. Although there were greater job possibilities for women in the 1920s, their wages were still based on the theory that female workers had no dependants. Divorced wives who obtained orders for permanent alimony risked further ‘provoking’ the ire and violence of their ex-husbands (Dorothy Farrall had not sought maintenance from her husband because she believed that ‘a lot of tragedies occur because of pressure being put on a man like that’).43 Finally, while divorce was becoming more common, it was still an expensive option and many people continued to regard marital separation as socially shameful.44

Men fighting back In the decade after the First World War, young men and women had both overlapping and conflicting views of marriage. Like women, men increasingly regarded ‘love’ as a desirable ingredient in married life, but their idea of what that meant was often at odds with the views of women. While many young men were willing to incorporate romance into their relationships, they also expected to exercise an authority similar to that of their fathers. ‘So many husbands, even nowadays—demand absolute subservience from their wives’, commented the labour activist Jean Daley in February 1925.45 Husbands shaped their ideas of love to fit their varying individual needs for control. Thus the fiancé of Geraldine— 154

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mentioned above—could see as ‘love’ behaviour which Geraldine found tyrannous. Roy B. and Allan F. purported to express their ‘love’ for their wives, seemingly blind to the fact that their messages of affection were unconvincing because interposed with threats of violence. As Ivy told Roy: ‘It is all very well to talk of love, but I can’t forget how you treated me’. Some men seem to have held a rather functional view of romance, as a mode of behaviour which could be invoked in order to seduce a woman or win her back. In May 1926 the Salvation Army War Cry contained an account of a female officer who had advised a man to write his estranged wife a love letter ‘because women will do anything for love’. The man followed the advice and, according to the account, it worked. His wife returned home.46 Men’s concern to exercise control over their wives was arguably more intense in the face of women’s stronger self-assertions in the 1920s. Numerous historians have labelled the interwar period as a time of ‘crisis of masculinity’.47 The war’s apparent unleashing of greater female ambition, self-expression and economic power seemed to an unprecedented extent to challenge men’s unassailable mastery of the world. ‘Woman’s place as a rival to man must be seriously considered, now more than ever’, warned the Truth as early as May 1916.48 In June 1919 the Age described women’s entrance into industry and commerce as ‘the greatest and perhaps the most threatening social change worked by the abnormal conditions of almost five years of war’.49 Such change in women’s life opportunities, whether actual or predicted, was framed as a challenge to male power.50 Thus, as young men forged marriage ties with young women, they found themselves at the interface between new female expectations and the heavy demands of masculine culture to ‘hold the line’. The masculine ‘crisis’ of the 1920s was not just a reaction to the new whims of women. Many men—both those who had served as soldiers and those who had not—had personal anxieties in relation to the war. The masculine hierarchy of wartime did not neatly disappear with the coming of peace. Community feeling against ‘shirkers’ persisted years after the official hostilities ceased.51 Some civilian men continued to wear their ‘rejected volunteer’ badges during 1919 and a few continued to pose as returned soldiers.52 For instance, in July 1921, Alfred Barber appeared before the South Melbourne court on a charge of falsely representing himself as a returned soldier.53 But though many people revered them, returned men had their own torments and insecurities. 155

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The war had accentuated aggression and physical toughness as manly ideals and, despite evidence all around of the dreadful carnage that the war had wreaked—or, indeed, because of the damage that the war had done to men—Australian culture continued to extol martial qualities in men.54 Compulsory military training for men aged 18 to 25 remained in force until the end of 1929.55 The Anzac legend thus bore heavily on the minds of men, many of whom had not been old enough to enlist. Young men felt a particular frustration on account of their inability to test out the heroic masculine role that had been inculcated into them.56 Paul Fussell has described the situation of these youths: ‘The Armistice found them fully prepared for adversary proceedings, but the accustomed outlet was now cut off.’ As a consequence, Fussell argues, many young men in the belligerent countries became obsessed with war.57 Many youths in Victoria were determined not to miss out on a combat experience. War was to them what romance was to many young women: a source of excitement that gave meaning to an otherwise mundane existence. The war over, the homefront became the only available theatre of ‘action’ for military-primed individuals. In the first place, one needed a gun. If a man was unable to go to war, the bulge of a revolver in his coat pocket at least offered some reassurance of his martial worthiness. Gun possession increased at the end of the war and so did the rate of firearm-related homicides in the community.58 Judges and reporters commented on what seemed to be a growing number of brazen shootings throughout Melbourne.59 In late 1921 the Victorian government enacted legislation aimed at regulating the sale and possession of guns. Major Matthew Baird, who introduced the bill in parliament, stated: ‘It is, perhaps, one of the results of the war that people are more handy with deadly weapons than they were previously, and are tempted to use them on occasions when they should not do so.’60 ‘[H]alf the young fellows knocking about the streets nowadays carry them [guns], and do not hesitate very long before using them’, commented another MP during the debate on the bill.61 The male gun craze had ominous implications for marital conflict. Easily concealable, revolvers could be carried about and produced at any given moment if ‘persuasion’ proved necessary. Men found that their wives were usually willing to acquiesce when they had a gun pointed at them. Around July 1923, four months before she was due to be married, Veronica Peters of Stawell told her mother that she had 156

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quarrelled with her fiancé John and that he had threatened to shoot her if she did not ‘make it up’ with him. Within a year, Veronica was dead. On the evening of 5 May 1924, she dared to ask John, now her husband, to come inside for his tea when he was outside talking to someone. ‘What the bloody hell do you want to call me for, I can come in and go out when I bloody well like. I am not going to be dictated to by you’, John shouted at her when he came inside. After dinner he ‘accidentally’ shot her in the head with his rifle.62 If wives were not willing to obey instructions or if they presumed to make their own decisions about the fate of a relationship, guns could deliver quick ‘justice’. Around May 1920, William Morris’s wife of 14 years left him on account of his violence towards her. He had threatened to cut her throat with a razor or blow her brains out and she had had to seek police protection four times in the past six months. Knowing that his wife had taken their four children to her mother’s house in Brighton, William went to the house. He shot and wounded both his wife and mother-in-law and then shot himself fatally.63 Guns enabled violent action to be taken at any locale. As the number of women leaving their husbands increased after the war, more and more ‘domestic’ incidents took place away from the marital home—in streets, parks or at wives’ new lodgings. This kind of violence against wives would become increasingly common as the twentieth century progressed.64 The likely increased incidence of wife abuse in the wake of the First World War may have been symptomatic of both returned soldiers’ and civilian men’s anxieties in response to their different experiences of the war.65 It may also have been part of an overflow of violence which occurred when a lid was put on ‘legitimate’ battlefield violence. A post-war increase in bellicose behaviour on the homefront was, in hindsight, extremely likely. Sociological studies have found repeatedly that the legitimation of official violence during wartime tends to create a powerful model for subsequent individual acts of interpersonal violence in civilian life.66 The culture of war placed enormous pressure on men to address their relationship dilemmas through aggression and ultimatums rather than through discussion or compromise. A society that rewarded martial men encouraged violent and swift repression of one’s challengers, be they other men or one’s own wife. Action, not words, was the expected response of ‘real’ men. Thus, when conflict arose in post-war marriages, women all too often became an ‘enemy’ to be defeated or destroyed. 157

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Losing their nerves: new conceptions of male violence On 16 July 1921, the Argus reported an incident that had occurred the previous day: Mrs Gladys Braid, of 17 Hutton street, Thornbury, a domestic servant, alighted at the Preston railway station early yesterday morning on her way to her work…A man who was on the railway station followed her, and when at the intersection of Mary and Cranmer streets, he walked rapidly towards her, placed a revolver against her left side, and fired. Mrs Braid fell to the ground, and the man fired another shot at her and fled. The second bullet entered her right cheek.

Several constables at the nearby Preston police station heard the shots and went quickly to the woman’s aid. They organised for her to be taken to the Melbourne Hospital and established that the assailant was the woman’s husband, from whom she was living apart. Later that day police arrested David Braid, a 37-year-old labourer, at a house in North Melbourne.67 David Braid was remanded over several weeks before appearing at the Preston court on a charge of having shot his wife with intent to kill her. According to a reporter for the Herald, he looked pale and thin and seemed to be in ‘a highly nervous condition’. Gladys Braid attended the hearing as well, having been released from hospital several days earlier. The bullets from her husband’s gun were still embedded in her face and back. She stated that she and her husband had been married for 10 years but had been separated for the last three and a half years due to an unhappy married life. On three occasions her husband had threatened to kill her. Cross-examined by her husband’s lawyer, she stated that her husband had suffered from consumption for the past five years. He had never asked to see their two children who were living with her. Dr Charles Brown, resident surgeon at the Melbourne Hospital, downplayed the gravity of Gladys Braid’s injuries. He stated ambiguously: ‘I did not at any time think that her condition was serious. I cannot say whether there will be any serious effects from the shooting but you can never be certain’. Clearly, though, the wounds were not superficial. The bullets would not be removed because of the danger involved in such a procedure; the bullet that had entered Gladys Braid’s right cheek had lodged in the left side of her face, while the bullet in

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her back was 1.5 inches from its point of entry. Next to take the stand was Constable Collier who had arrested David Braid. He testified that, at the time of the arrest, the accused was ‘shaking a lot’ and had said ‘my nerves are gone’. When he had asked the accused how many shots he had fired, the accused had answered: ‘Two, I think, I have had two reports drumming my head all day’. Asked why he had shot his wife, the accused had stated: ‘She drove me to it. I have two children who I have not seen for years. She will not let me see them’. The Preston bench committed David Braid to stand trial at the Supreme Court.68 At the trial, on 17 August 1921, Gladys Braid reiterated her account. She had left her husband because of his cruelty towards her. He had on numerous occasions threatened to kill her. Since leaving him she had supported herself and her two children through domestic work. Before he shot her, her husband had told her: ‘Now, I’ve come to the end of my tether. I’m going to shoot you, you bastard’. David Braid pleaded not guilty to the charge of attempted murder. Mr Shelton, for the defence, drew the jury’s attention to his client’s fragile physical and mental state. He explained that the accused was suffering from consumption and insomnia and that these complaints had had ‘a detrimental effect on his mentality’. David Braid then addressed the court. A reporter for the Argus recorded: ‘He spoke gaspingly, with long pauses, and the only words that were audible were: “I’d no intention…lung trouble for years…nerves went to pieces…couldn’t sleep…can’t remember what I did that day”’. After a brief retirement, the jury found the accused not guilty on the first count of attempted murder but guilty on a second count of wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. Justice McArthur commented that the jury had been lenient, given the nature of the offence. He too, however, was inclined to be sympathetic: ‘In view of your ill-health, and of the fact that you were probably suffering from some provocation, real or imaginary, I sentence you to two and a half years’ imprisonment, with hard labour.’69 A striking feature of the Braid trial was its similarity to trials involving returned soldiers. At this time, war service was being used as an excuse for veterans’ violence against their wives—irrespective of whether or not an accused’s war service actually bore a plausible relation to his post-war violence. The convincing value of ‘shell shock’ and ‘neurasthenia’, as well as ill-health in general, as explanations for returned soldiers’ violent behaviour seems to have influenced proceedings in civilian court cases. A strange phenomenon occurred 159

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whereby civilian defendants began to claim symptoms associated with shell shock or war service. Although the defence lawyer made no explicit mention of the war, his focus on David Braid’s consumption, insomnia and nervous state cleverly connected to a broader community knowledge that many returned soldiers were also suffering from these conditions. Tuberculosis affected many returned soldiers.70 Such cases suggest that the stereotype of the disturbed ex-soldier provided a new cultural model to which both returned-soldier and civilian behaviour could be moulded. The degree to which this process was a conscious one for those involved is difficult to judge. It is likely that defence lawyers such as Mr Shelton, who had both returned-soldier and civilian clients, were aware of the strategies that they employed. Additionally, civilian men may have drawn upon their own awareness of psychological problems. They could easily interpret the distress that they felt in relation to losing control over their wives as ‘shattered nerves’. The much-publicised experience of shell shock (or war neuroses) in soldiers encouraged both expert and popular recognition of the psychological element in human behaviour, not just in war but also in everyday life.71 Psychiatrists regarded war neuroses as essentially the same as the neuroses they saw in civilian society, different only in their precipitating causes.72 The fact that many of the most robust members of society had broken down on the battlefield suggested that vulnerability to mental disorder in the general population was far greater than physicians had previously thought.73 At the beginning of the twentieth century, the general community had regarded ‘mad’ people as a breed apart from the ‘civilised’ majority, and the mentally ill were stigmatised. In the 1920s the conceptual line between sanity and insanity was increasingly blurred. Victorians became more aware that mental problems short of insanity—whether they be ‘neuroses’, ‘nerves’ or ‘neurasthenia’—affected many people. In June 1925 the psychologist Rev. E. Kent addressed members of the Legacy Club at Anzac House in Melbourne. No man was sane, he explained, but rather all were striving toward complete sanity.74 By the end of the decade, Dr John Bostock could report that nearly everyone had worries of some sort, ‘many bordering on psychopathic’.75 Australians’ new awareness of psychology resulted in the establishment of psychology as a discipline in Australian universities and greater compassion for

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those people afflicted by mental problems, away from the pre-war attitude of disdain.76 Theories of the origin of mental disorder existed across a spectrum. Many psychiatrists believed that some people were inherently mentally defective, while others regarded neuroses, and even psychoses, as illnesses that anyone could suffer given sufficient environmental stress.77 Most experts took a combined hereditary and environmental approach. For example, in April 1922, Dr W. Lind of the Victorian Lunacy Department explained that mental disease derived from a combination of predisposing and exciting causes. The predisposing cause was an inherited ‘vulnerability of the neurone’ and the exciting cause was some kind of stress upon the neurone. Where neurone vulnerability was high, a little stress could be enough to upset an individual’s mental stability; where neurone vulnerability was low, stress would need to be severe in order to produce an imbalance. Typical stresses included worry, grief, fear, disease, malnutrition and consumption of alcohol.78 In the post-war period, many social commentators, writers and doctors worried that widespread vulnerability to mental instability reflected a general physiological decline among white Australians. In their eyes the war had revealed the seriousness of a problem which was only getting worse, due largely to the increasingly frantic and noisy form of modern urban life which exerted an unnatural strain upon the human nervous system. These male thinkers and ‘experts’ were especially concerned about mental weakness in men because they feared that it was allowing women (who until now had always been of more fragile constitution) to take unprecedented control over society.79 Such concerns fuelled a ‘mental hygiene’ movement in the 1920s which sought to prevent the onset of mental illness in individuals by the control of environmental stresses.80 New awareness of the powerful role that mental function played in determining human action encouraged a pathological interpretation of all types of social behaviour, including domestic violence.81 It was not just returned soldiers who were seen to be behaving violently towards their wives because of ‘nerves’ or mental disorder. Mental strain became prominent in explanations for the violence of both returned soldiers and civilian men. The war, therefore, must be seen as an important factor in the development of a psychological model of the abusive husband in the interwar years in Australia.82

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Despite its scientific guise, the new medical framework did not help to clarify the causes of wife abuse. Instead, it tended to validate vague and sometimes irrational explanations for violence because nearly anything could be posited as ‘the final straw’ that pushed a vulnerable man over the edge. The idea that violence was caused by a certain neurological state supported a view that violent acts were separate, extraordinary events rather than aspects of a larger pattern of abuse grounded in violent men’s struggle to feel powerful. The culture of masculine aggression, men’s insecurities stemming from their war experiences and female advancement, and the gender structure of society which facilitated male tyranny within marriage, did not figure in the post-war discourse of domestic violence. Where did alcohol fit in all this? Although many people continued to see drunkenness as a prominent cause of domestic violence, it was now, according to experts, a common stress among many possible stresses which could destabilise a man.83 This shift in expert opinion was assisted by the perception that drunkenness was less of a social problem than it had been before the war.84 In December 1919 the Victorian government made six o’clock closing of hotels permanent. Consequently, the rate of drunkenness charges remained considerably lower throughout the 1920s than it had been before the war.85 In 1925 the Inspector of Inebriate Institutions reported that, in his opinion, the general population was more temperate than ever before.86 It is unclear whether the drop in drunkenness charges reflected an actual decrease in alcohol consumption or simply a change in drinking habits. Walter Phillips has argued that Australians drank as much beer after the war as they had before the war, only now they drank at home.87 As in the case of nerve-shattered returned soldiers, emphasis on the mental instability of violent civilian men encouraged a view that they were victims who were not fully responsible for their actions. On 27 May 1919, a 30-year-old salesman, James Pullin, shot and wounded his wife, Ellen, after failing to convince her to return to him. She had left their Balaclava home the previous month and taken their two children to live at her mother’s house in Williamstown. On the evening of 27 May, James went to his mother-in-law’s house and asked Ellen to return home with him. When she refused, he pulled a revolver from his hip pocket. His wife grabbed the barrel of the gun and struggled with him, in the course of which the gun fired into her hand. As a male visitor to the house ran to her assistance, James fired another shot, this time hitting 162

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Ellen in the shoulder. She ran through the house to escape. Sometime later she found that her husband had shot himself in the forehead, but had not succeeded in killing himself.88 Appearing before the Williamstown court in July 1919, James Pullin was charged with having inflicted grievous bodily harm on his wife. Dr William Orchid provided expert medical evidence at the hearing. He testified that he had tended to Mrs Pullin’s wounds which were ‘not serious’, unlike the wound which the accused had sustained. He thought that the accused’s mentality was ‘not of a high order’ and, as if to support that contention, he had found a soft spot at the back of James’ head where he believed the bones were incompletely joined. From that ‘evidence’ he was able to deduce that ‘the accused is a man of high excitability and in a period of great excitement I think his balance would go over’. James Pullin was committed to stand trial in the Supreme Court several weeks later. At the trial, the defence lawyer, Mr Bryant, told the jury that the accused’s health was poor and that his ‘unhappy domestic life had preyed on his mind, rendering him subject to fits of uncontrollable excitement’. His wife had ‘cleared off’ and, even though he had paid her £2 a week, she refused to return to him. He had produced the revolver only to induce his wife to come home and had not meant to shoot her. The jury was sympathetic to James’ apparent plight and returned a not guilty verdict.89 One could be forgiven for suspecting that Ellen Pullin was the real aggressor behind the shooting. Instead of treating violent husbands as rational persons who were responsible for their own actions, post-war officials were likely to act on the premise that only a man who had become unhinged would attack his wife. Accordingly, violence itself could be ‘evidence’ of a man’s mental distress which, in turn, could mitigate the seriousness of his act. This kind of ‘logic’ can be seen at work in the trial of John Roddick, a labourer who fired five bullets at his estranged wife from short range in a Richmond park in March 1922. Despite the fact that Jessie Roddick was critically wounded in the neck, armpit, chin and left breast, the Supreme Court jury found that her husband had not intended to kill her. Rather, the jury’s verdict was that the accused had intended to cause his wife grievous bodily harm. It gave a strong recommendation to mercy because, as the defence had shown, the accused had been activated by a ‘jealous impulse’, believing that his wife might be seeing other men. The presiding judge, Mr Justice Schutt, said that it was ‘a matter of some difficulty’ to see how the jurymen had arrived at their conclusion but 163

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of course he accepted it. He too agreed with the defence’s suggestion that the accused had been actuated by jealousy, ‘as without some such motive the crime would have been inexplicable’. He decided that two years’ imprisonment would meet the ends of justice.90 Contrary to what one might expect, the pathologising of domestic violence actually served to make its perpetrators appear more normal. If, as psychiatrists came to believe, almost any man could become mentally unstable if placed under sufficient stress, and mental instability led men to behave violently, it followed that nearly any man could become violent. The idea that the potential for aggression and brutality was latent in all men was indeed the conclusion to which Sigmund Freud had come by the end of the war.91 The end of a clear-cut division between ‘brutal’ and ‘civilised’ men was reflected by the fading figure of the ‘wife-beater’ in the decade after the First World War. Taking its place was the stereotype of the violent husband as an ordinary sort of man whose mental faculties had become strained due to nervous depletion, ill-health and stress which, in turn, unfortunately led him to lose control of his actions. Post-war newspaper reports now referred to wife abusers in more neutral terms, as ‘husbands’ who had behaved violently. Some examples of this are: ‘Husband Acts on Threats’92, ‘Husband Sent for Trial’93, ‘Demented Husband’s Crime’94, ‘Fined for Assaulting his Wife’95, ‘Husband’s Attack on Wife’96, ‘Husband’s Drunken Frenzy’97, ‘Drunken Husband’s Caper’98, and in 1929 the rather mild heading: ‘Radio Listener Assaults Wife’.99

‘The lady cannot have it both ways’: post-war responses to domestic violence As the explanatory framework of domestic violence was pathologised, so too was the experience of such abuse. Before the First World War it was rare for women seeking divorce to detail psychological effects of violence other than their fear of their husbands. The popular acquaintance with psychology that arose out of the war experience afforded women a more specific language with which to describe the distressing impact of domestic violence. In the period 1919–24, many women cited nervous or mental problems as a result of sustained ill-treatment. Margaret T. of Collingwood applied for a divorce in February 1921 on the ground that her husband was habitually drunk and cruel. She stated that, on account of his behaviour, ‘my nervous system broke down and I was forced to 164

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go into a private hospital…My nerves got beyond control and I became hysterical.’100 Jessie S. of St Kilda also sought divorce in 1921. She stated that she had had three nervous breakdowns since her marriage to her abusive husband in 1915.101 Ilma T. was in ‘a continual state of terror’ in consequence of her husband’s violence.102 So too was Josephine K. whose husband had threatened to shoot her and who slept with a revolver under his pillow. ‘I became a nervous wreck’, she recalled.103 Florence Loft’s ‘nerves had been in a frightful state’ during her marriage but had improved in the two months since she had left her drunken and abusive husband.104 In December 1920, Mary B. of Langwarrin described her condition after years of subjection to beatings, being dragged around by her hair, and verbal abuse: ‘The strain told on my mental state and night after night I have lain awake from fear, until I thought I should go mad’.105 Abused wives’ recognition of their mental disturbance may have been one reason for the growing proportion of female psychiatric clients during the interwar years.106 Greater community awareness of psychological illness may have helped some abused wives to gain the sympathy of judges. On the other hand, wives’ disclosure of mental problems left them open to others’ interpretation that their testimonies were the product of their own mental defectiveness rather than the result of systematic terrorisation. In May 1919 a husband told the Box Hill court that his wife, who was claiming maintenance because she had left him on account of his cruelty and infidelity, was ‘mentally not right’ and suffered from delusions.107 In January 1924 another husband characterised his wife’s allegations of cruelty as ‘the distorted fantasies of a woman of unsound mind’.108 ‘Wife’s extraordinary allegations’, was a commonly-used heading in press reports of divorce and maintenance cases, which hinted at the lack of believability and craziness of wives’ claims of violence. Rather than show concern for the stress that violent husbands caused their wives, the men who commented on domestic violence were more likely to notice the stress experienced by husbands. In response to what seemed like an exodus of wives from marriage, judges, magistrates, juries and the media were inclined to show sympathy to abandoned husbands whose ‘heartless’ wives had not only deserted them but were also attempting to squeeze money out of them.109 The explanations offered in cases where men sought revenge against separated partners rarely included men’s initial violence within marriage. Instead, male officials and reporters were more likely to perceive a wife’s unseemly 165

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departure or a couple’s ‘unhappy life’ as stresses causing a man to become unbalanced. It was obvious to some in the community that the problem underlying so much marital discord was modern women’s lack of proper wifely conduct. In April 1924 an article in the Truth described the ‘new’ type of woman as ‘hard, cold, and selfish’. Instead of taking on the responsibility of wifehood, the new woman wanted ‘a real good time at someone else’s expense…She is the type who keeps the divorce courts busy, and fills the papers with sickening reports of marital unhappiness.’110 (The Truth, of course, reluctantly published such reports). The focus on women’s ‘selfishness’ in leaving marriages served to distract attention away from men’s continuing violence within homes. Defendants and their lawyers twisted accounts of marital breakdown so that women’s resort to legal remedies itself appeared as cruelty towards their husbands. In July 1923, Veronica B. sought a divorce from her husband, William, on the ground that within the previous year he had beaten and assaulted her. Having no means of support, she requested that her husband pay the costs of the legal investigation under section 159 of the Marriage Act 1915. William’s solicitor sent a letter to Veronica’s solicitor stating that his client was not in a position to pay anything. Because Veronica had taken their furniture, William had been ‘left with nothing[,] only his salary as a Railway Labourer’. The solicitor went on to blame Veronica for refusing to reconcile with her husband: ‘it appears impossible from your client’s demeanour for them to live happily together’. To avoid paying ‘unnecessary’ costs, his client would be prepared to enter into a mutual separation agreement according to which he would allow Veronica £1:2:6 a week. ‘If, as apparent, the wife wants a separation and he is prepared to agree to it[,] it seems unnecessarily wanton and cruel to put him to the expense of finding money for the wife’s and his own costs [in a divorce suit]’.111 In October 1923, Albert W., a man who had beaten his ex-wife, was imprisoned for failing to comply with a divorce alimony order. He lodged an affidavit from the Melbourne Gaol, stating that: ‘I am and always have been in poor health and am now and for years past have been nervously broken down’. He claimed that his health was being harmed by his imprisonment and that ‘if confinement be continued it will I fear have the effect of further injuring my health’.112 Magistrates sometimes regarded evidence of violence within marriage as reflective of a mutual problem of both husband and wife. In 166

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their eyes, the solution to the problem was frequently not separation or protection of the wife but rather greater conjugal sympathy. When Edith Dow brought a case of non-support before the South Melbourne court, she explained to the bench that her husband’s temper often got ‘beyond control’ and that he suspected that she was unfaithful without any reason at all. The husband denied that he had treated his wife cruelly and claimed that she taunted him about his German ancestry. Mr Baragwanath JP concluded that the problems were caused by a ‘misunderstanding’ and appealed to the couple to be more indulgent of each another. He adjourned the case in the hope that they would become reconciled.113 In January 1924, a young wife named Edith Billman sought a maintenance order at the same court. She stated that, a year after her marriage in 1921, her husband had begun to brutally ill-treat her. Several months ago he had thrown her through a glass door after a quarrel. Neighbours testified that they had seen marks of violence on Edith’s throat and heard her screams at night. Magistrate Mr Smith surmised that this was ‘a case of trouble arising out of domestic quarrels’. The youth of the parties led him to conclude that they would live happily with one another if they could only be induced to exercise ‘a little forbearance’. He did not think that the complainant was entitled to an order for maintenance.114 The rising number of divorce and maintenance cases following the war gave many the impression that separation had become too easy for women. In 1920 one disgruntled returned soldier claimed that ‘the greater number of the women you meet in Melbourne at the present time have the smell of divorce about them’.115 Some public figures expressed the view that divorce should be the sorry resort of seriously abused and injured wives rather than an option for any wife who felt dissatisfied with her lot. During discussion of a bill to amend marriage legislation in the Victorian parliament, in October 1923, the Hon. D. Harris proposed a measure that would allow couples who had been judicially separated for three years to automatically obtain a divorce. Sir Arthur Robinson opposed the proposal, arguing that the divorce reform of 1890 had already sufficiently liberalised divorce by allowing a woman who was ‘grossly and continuously maltreated’ to obtain a divorce. Others in the House agreed and the proposed measure was defeated.116 In January 1924, an article published in the Argus reported on the ‘alarming increase’ in divorce since the war: ‘Times have changed. The Divorce Court, which formerly was regarded as a place to go only as a last resort, 167

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is now the place to which the thoughts of discontented husbands and wives turn at the first hint of estrangement’. The Argus writer explained that when the divorce reform was introduced in 1890, women had not readily sought divorce because the ordeal was too shameful. They had done so only when worn out and overborne with suffering. ‘Probably a great many women would still regard with horror the necessity for seeking a divorce’, he reflected, ‘but it is to be feared that they are oldfashioned’.117 Modern women, he implied, needed to be reminded that the marriage tie was a serious undertaking, not to be entered into—or discarded—lightly. In particular, some men became antagonistic towards the process whereby women could leave their husbands, claim constructive desertion, and seek maintenance. In January 1919, Eileen Dalton sued her husband George, a tramway gripman, for leaving her without means of support. She stated before the South Melbourne court that since their marriage two years ago he had taken up with another ‘girl’ in the same street. When she had objected to his going with the ‘girl’ on a picnic he had punched her, torn her blouse and bruised her wrist. She refused to live with him any longer. For the defence, Mr Rogers put it to the court that there were ‘quite a number of wives in South Melbourne who preferred their husband’s money to their husband’s company. They seemed to think that all they had to do was to come to court and secure an order for maintenance.’ In his opinion, this practice should be discouraged. Wives needed to be shown that ‘the place of husband and wife was together’. The court made an order for maintenance, albeit reluctantly: Mr Wells JP ‘regretted that it was impossible to bring the couple together’.118 The doctrine of constructive desertion allowed a court to impute to a man who ill-treated his wife an intention to desert her. Victorian courts had adopted the principle at the end of the nineteenth century to better protect wives from domestic abuse. By the early 1920s, some members of the legal profession, such as Mr Rogers, believed that it was being applied too liberally.119 In the case of Bain v Bain, in June 1923, Chief Justice Irvine of the Victorian Supreme Court took the opportunity to clarify the essential requirements of the doctrine in the face of ‘an almost inevitable tendency’ to extend it. He held that the intention of a husband to desert his wife was crucial. There could be conduct on the part of a husband which afforded just cause for a wife to leave but which fell short of establishing constructive desertion because it could not be seen 168

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as reflecting an intention to desert.120 In an appeal hearing of Bain v Bain, the High Court of Australia upheld Irvine’s judgement. Justices Isaacs and Rich noted ‘the great and increasing number’ of petitions bearing on constructive desertion. There was a ‘danger’, they thought, of justices substituting ‘accidental circumstances’ for the requisite test of the intention of the husband. What wives thought intolerable was relevant but it was not the actual test.121 This was rather different from the earlier view of Justices Madden, Hodges and Hood of the Victorian Supreme Court in 1913, that to satisfy constructive desertion it was enough for a woman to believe on reasonable grounds that her husband would treat her with cruelty.122 Bain v Bain was a caution to judges to be stricter in their judgement of constructive desertion cases. It was also a reminder to everyone that men (represented by the judiciary)—and not women— were to be the ultimate arbiters of male behaviour within marriage. Many in the community were unwilling to recognise that, if men treated their wives well, the wives would not be able to obtain a divorce or maintenance order. Divorce was still an exacting as well as an embarrassing process. The statutory grounds for divorce were no more liberal in 1921 than they had been thirty years earlier.123 The ground of ‘cruelty’ alone remained an option only for women whose husbands had, within one year previously, repeatedly assaulted and cruelly beaten them, or who had been convicted of attempted murder or assault with intent to inflict grievous bodily harm.124 Malvenia M. was unsuccessful in her petition for divorce on this ground in March 1920, even though she testified that, in the past year, her husband had frequently come to the house where she was living and thrashed and threatened to shoot her. He had held a penknife to her throat, smashed her piano with a hammer and burnt her fur necklet under the copper. The Fitzroy court had bound him over to keep the peace towards her and had convicted him for illegally carrying a firearm. Bad as it was, such behaviour was not severe enough to satisfy the requisite level of cruelty in order to obtain a divorce.125 The chivalrous code embraced by much male officialdom at the turn of the century, and preached with renewed vigour during the First World War, faded after 1918. Some men perceived that the war had assisted young women to gain new power, and their attitude shifted from one of desire to fight for the safety of Australian womanhood to one of defence of their own privileges. The commonly espoused reason for the death of chivalry was that women effectively gave up any 169

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right to special treatment when they claimed a place in the world of men. In March 1919, Smith’s Weekly declared that the war had been a ‘home-destroyer’. Woman had ‘crossed the boundary’ to take her place beside the masculine worker. ‘She no longer makes preparation for the homecoming of the tired man of the house, for she is out in a mad race for freedom and independence’. As a result, ‘She finds herself jostled and hustled, and complains of men’s dying gallantry.’126 ‘The lady cannot have it both ways’, trumpeted a Herald writer in June 1922; ‘she cannot be a sovereign and expect the consideration given to the helpless subject’.127 An essential element of wartime chivalry had been the figure of a dastardly foe from whom Australian women needed to be protected. The stereotype of the bloodthirsty Hun had served such a purpose. With the war over and the chivalrous impulse in remission, the Hun no longer fulfilled any function. The wartime accounts of German violence towards women that had been used to motivate community support for the war lost their power to shape prejudices, including with respect to cases of wife abuse.128 In February 1919 Lilian Muller fled to Melbourne from her home on a farm near Wodonga in northern Victoria. She was desperate to leave her husband and sought a maintenance order at the South Melbourne court. She testified that her husband had knocked her down, beaten her with a strap, caused the loss of two babies, and threatened to take her to the ‘back blocks’ of Queensland where no one would hear her screams. Lilian’s lawyer told the court that: ‘The defendant is a German, and has German theories as to the treatment of women’. The court took exception to this approach. Mr Baragwanath JP warned the counsel: ‘You must stop that. We take pride in being Britishers, and we must accord British fair play all round—to Germans and everybody else alike.’129 ‘Fair play all round’ in practice tended to mean a more laissez-faire approach to male violence against women. In the case of a woman whose husband had bashed her, leaving her with a broken nose, five stitches in her bottom lip and extensive bruising, the Chairman of the Collingwood court stated: ‘I know we must protect the woman against the man…but at the same time, we do not want to make a criminal of him.’130 The Chairman’s barely concealed reluctance to ‘protect the woman’ reflected a more accentuated official ambivalence towards men’s abuse of their wives. Before the war, law enforcers had permitted the perpetration of much violence falling short of extreme injury to a 170

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wife but, at least in rhetoric, they had often conveyed their abhorrence of men’s brutal behaviour. Subsequent to the war, there seems to have been a general loss of interest in condemning violent husbands, even for the most serious acts of violence. Judicial leniency in domestic violence cases was not only reserved for returned soldiers.131 A man who shot his wife but failed to kill her could expect, at worst, to receive two or three years’ imprisonment. He had, of course, a good chance of being acquitted if he could show that his wife had ‘provoked’ him and that he was sick or mentally ill. Prior to the war, a man found guilty of such an offence could have expected to be gaoled for five years. Post-war sentencing of husbands convicted of indictable offences against their wives was generally more lenient than before the war.132 The move towards greater official toleration of domestic violence after the First World War is particularly noticeable with respect to the violence of working-class men. In the first decade of the century, middle-class officials had often saved their condemnation of wife abuse for those men who fitted the prevailing stereotype of the wifebeater (the working-class brute). After the war, the association of wife abuse with working-class men weakened. A range of factors underlay this change: the diminished emphasis on male chivalry in response to female occupational and economic gains; the rise of psychological theories of human behaviour which supported a view that violence was an inherent potential of all men; the greater visibility of violence in middle-class marriages due to the increase in divorce and the violence of disturbed middle-class soldiers; and working-class men’s significant participation as noble fighters in the war. As Jan Lambertz has argued in the case of Britain, ‘Old-style labels and slights about working-class “brutes” were difficult to maintain in the face of…working-class male contributions to the nation as veterans of the First World War’.133 The majority of Australian soldiers were of working-class background.134 They enjoyed the public prestige accorded to the AIF with the result that working-class men in general were shown greater respect in the middleclass dominated public arena.135 To some extent, this respect stemmed from middle-class fears of returned-soldier led revolt.136 War service may also have helped to break down class prejudices. In one instance, Ray Jones, a soldier of upper-middle-class background, wrote in a letter to his parents from France in May 1916:

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I will admit that there are a good number here whom I would not care to associate with in civil life, but for all that, after one has been side by side with them for over 15 months one soon finds out their good points, especially in the firing line.137

The softening official criticism of wife abusers reflected, too, the growing belief that men who acted violently towards intimates were not savage tyrants but rather unfortunate victims of neurological imbalance. Many members of the medical and legal profession came to see medical intervention rather than criminal prosecution as the appropriate way to deal with such cases.138 As before the war, psychotic men were candidates for certification in hospitals for the insane. Now, however, men who were not insane but who nevertheless suffered from mental disturbance—often referred to as borderline cases—were able to receive temporary treatment in mental hospitals or at private psychiatric clinics. Psychiatrists believed that early preventative treatment without certification was the best way to help such men. They could be kept under observation and prevented from doing injury to themselves or anyone else.139 In terms of dealing with domestic violence, it is extremely doubtful that the shift towards medical intervention was beneficial. This process relied on individuals voluntarily seeking help as no sane man could be forced to submit to medical treatment or hospitalisation. It is unlikely that many violent husbands willingly sought psychiatric treatment or that any treatment apart from temporary isolation from family would have helped to curb their violence. The psychiatric approach was not in any way concerned with the central issue of wife abuse—men’s desire for power over their wives.140 Furthermore, although claims of mental disturbance were frequently successful in persuading juries and judges to deal leniently with accused men, this did not mean that such men were required to submit to medical treatment. Only those defendants deemed insane were forcibly removed to asylums. James Pullin had simply walked free from court even though medical testimony that he was mentally defective had helped to negate his responsibility for shooting his wife. The pathologising of behaviour still within the realm of sanity was a real weapon for defendants in cases of domestic violence. The reverence accorded ‘expert’ evidence would seem in some cases to have overridden traditional judicial process. In July 1921 James Patterson was charged with inflicting grievous bodily harm on his wife.

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All the circumstantial evidence pointed to a conclusion that the 55-yearold ‘handy-man’ had hit his wife on the head with a hammer when they were sitting together on a bench in a Hawthorn park. The investigating detective thought that the accused was ‘a mental case’ despite the accused insisting that he was ‘as sane as yourself or any other man’. The Hawthorn court remanded James to be medically examined. On receipt of the medical report, which stated that the accused was ‘slightly peculiar in his mind, but not enough to be detained in a home’, the bench simply discharged him. There was no further prosecution for the crime that he almost certainly had committed.141 The war assisted a shift in official attitudes towards domestic violence. In the late nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth century, a number of journalists, judges, parliamentarians, and some feminists had focused the community’s attention on the need for wives to be better protected from brutal men. In the post-war years, the climate of public opinion was decidedly unfavourable to notions of female helplessness, even though inequality within marriage remained a reality. In December 1919, for instance, the Woman Voter, in one of its last issues, proclaimed that men and women were not equal economically, industrially, domestically or socially. ‘Woman is yet exploited as wife; in the home as well as a labourer in the factory’.142 But the approach taken around the turn of the century to try to protect women from domestic violence would not work now. As Linda Gordon has found for America during this period, ‘[o]ld feminist diatribes against drunken, brutal men came to be seen as moralistic and unscientific’.143 Consequently, the protection of wives became an abandoned theme. Feminists concentrated their efforts on equal pay for female and male workers, economic independence for married women, and state support of children. These measures could have enabled women to more easily leave abusive marriages.144 But it was hard-going pursuing these ideals in the 1920s and they were not achieved.145 In the aftermath of the war, the only people left combating domestic violence directly, and with great difficulty, were the wives of violent men.

Conclusion In the wake of the First World War there was a rise in the number of criminal charges involving domestic violence in South Melbourne, and probably in Victoria as a whole. It is likely that this rise reflected an 173

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increased incidence of domestic violence, part of an apparent post-war ‘crime wave’ observed by contemporaries. There are numerous factors that would have contributed to an increase in wife abuse cases after the war. Women were leaving abusive marriages in greater numbers after the war, the causes of which were their improved chances of gaining employment, higher expectations of domestic happiness, and the everincreasing phenomenon of marital separation itself. Masculine angst in response to female empowerment in general, and individual women’s assertions in particular, had some men reaching quickly for their guns. The shattering experience of the war, combined with an increased valuing of aggressive masculinity, bred both anxiety and aggression in some men—ex-soldiers and civilians alike. This was a recipe for intensified anger towards wives. Just at the time of what looks to be an increased level of violence against wives, the cultural understanding of domestic violence was undergoing significant change. Psychological theories which explained shell shock in soldiers were increasingly applied more generally to explain human behaviour in civilian society. Doctors, judicial practitioners and press reporters came to view men who used violence against their wives as victims of their own physiology and of external stresses, such as heartless wives or ‘domestic troubles’. These stresses were understood to impede the normal mental functioning and self control of such men. The changed stereotype of wife abuser from wife-beater to nervous victim was accompanied by a diminished level of official criticism of violent husbands’ behaviour. As more and more wives left violent husbands, the community’s attitude towards such women hardened. To some public commentators it even seemed that men’s acts of aggression were the lesser of the ‘crimes’ committed. As the protection of women ceased to be a fashionable cause, the nature of pre-war male chivalry was exposed for what it was: nominal protection contingent upon women’s acceptance of a dependent and passive role securely confined to the domestic sphere.

174

Conclusion

In 1929, a decade after the end of the First World War, an article in the Melbourne Argus claimed that the present generation was more prone to aggression than the pre-war generation. The author concluded that ‘the brutality from which war cannot be free spreads like a contagious disease to those who have never undergone its experiences’.1 Some Victorians believed that the war had given rise to a culture of brutality and that, by contrast, the pre-war years had been a time of greater social restraint. This was a common perception among the populations of other nations whose men had fought in the trenches, especially in those European countries where the 1920s saw the emergence of fascism, social revolution and ever more virulent forms of militarism.2 Even in liberal England, the writer C. E. Montague noted a ‘curious indifference to public wrongs and horrors’ in the aftermath of war.3 Although the immense scale of the First World War led to an inevitable tendency to blame it for all kinds of ills and to recall prewar society with nostalgia, perceptions of increased brutality in the decade after the war seem to have been grounded in reality. As far as Victoria was concerned, violence stemming from the war was not neatly confined to the battlefields of Gallipoli and the Western Front; nor were its soldiers the only victims. As a whole, the Victorian community was emotionally and physically damaged by its citizens’ experiences—both direct and indirect—of the extreme violence of the war. While there were perhaps many ways in which this damage brutalised the community, I have focused on men’s violence against their wives. The war experience encouraged the perpetration of domestic violence on the homefront, both during and after the official hostilities. It also appears to have given greater momentum to

175

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women’s struggle to escape from violent marriages and compounded public indifference to men’s abuse of their wives. Wife abuse was already common in the society that committed itself to war in 1914. Reported cases of domestic violence before the war reveal that violent husbands tended to regard their wives as personal servants who needed to be strictly controlled against outside influences. Men’s possessiveness, paranoid suspicion of their wives’ infidelity, and dissatisfaction with what they perceived to be their wives’ disobedience, were common triggers for beatings and assaults. Insanity and heavy consumption of alcohol strongly predisposed men to use violence in the home. Such circumstances were typically involved in cases of domestic violence throughout the whole period examined in this book. From 1914 onwards, however, war-related cultural, social and individual changes would seem to have predisposed greater numbers of men in the Victorian community to resort to violence against their wives. Cultural glorification of male aggression during and after the First World War encouraged individual men to use violence in situations of domestic conflict. Apart from their ostensible political motivations, Australian social leaders promoted the war as an opportunity for the youthful nation to prove its masculine mettle. The advent of war, for which the general community showed enthusiasm, sparked a celebration of martial masculinity, particularly following reports praising the feats of the Anzacs at Gallipoli in 1915. As the war progressed, a discernible military culture developed on the homefront which encouraged an interest in guns and combat-like experiences. At the centre of this war culture was the desirability of masculine aggression. War propaganda encouraged men to regard fighting ability as an indicator of their manliness and physical combat as a manly way to respond to conflict. In the post-war decade this ideology remained largely intact, even though the immediate need for soldiers ceased. The continuing cultural emphasis on masculine violence sprang from the war’s failure to truly empower men; if anything, the war magnified pre-war qualms about the virility of modern men in the face of female advancement. In addition to this martial culture, the war contributed to domestic violence by undermining men’s feelings of personal power. A particular culture may reward male aggression in general but the relative insecurity of certain individual men is a crucial factor in determining which men are likely to enact violence. Men who felt disempowered by their wartime experiences were arguably more prone than they would otherwise have 176

Conclusion

been to treat their wives with violence. Perhaps the most pervasive way in which the war damaged men’s self-esteem was by promoting the almost unattainable ideal of the strong and fearless soldier. This very idealisation made it difficult, at least by the end of the war, for many men to feel strong and proud. Alongside the ideal, the ‘weakness’ of real men became apparent, whether it was the cowardliness of the ‘shirker’, the physical inadequacy of the rejected volunteer, the shame of the enlisted man who failed to engage in battle, the damaged, frail bodies of mutilated and chronically-ill returned soldiers, or the lack of self-control of the shell-shock victim. Historians have focused almost entirely on shell-shocked returned soldiers in their mainly brief discussions of the impact of the First World War on domestic violence in Australia. They have been justified in portraying war trauma as a cause of returned-soldier violence. Warrelated mental disturbance meant that many men who had not previously been predisposed to violence were now more likely to act aggressively. The psychological symptoms of ‘shell shock’, such as insomnia, irritability, and paranoia could and did have an outlet in violence, and this was all the more probable when such problems were combined (as they often were) with alcohol or drug addiction, and unemployment. Yet the paradigm of the battle-scarred veteran who returned home to beat his wife has obscured what was in reality a more complex situation. By drawing on civilian court records in conjunction with military and repatriation records, I have been able to show that some violent returned soldiers never made it to the battlefront, and that a significant proportion of such men had been violent before their enlistment. Additionally, some civilian men seem to have become violent in response to their own war-related anxieties or aspirations. This underlines the need for historians to think more broadly about male power when considering the relationship between war and domestic violence. It also cautions against the automatic assumption of a connection between war trauma and returned-soldier wife abuse. My finding that many violent returned soldiers had pre-war histories of violence highlights the fact that the war had an impact on domestic violence right from its outbreak in 1914. As abusive husbands enlisted and departed for overseas service, their wives gained both freedom from violence and a regular income in the form of the compulsory military allotment. This was an extraordinary situation on which more than one wife was willing to capitalise. For some wives the freedom 177

Homefront Hostilities

was short-lived; for others, it was permanent. The relief of physical and psychological safety fired a determination in some abused wives not to return to the misery of an oppressive marriage, if and when their husbands returned. The experience of independence, even if for only six months, made life apart from one’s violent husband more imaginable. Thus, although in the main the war seems to have had an exacerbating effect on wife abuse, it was also, initially, a relieving intervention in the lives of some of the women who were already victims. The downside was that married soldiers’ anxieties about their wives’ new economic autonomy, possible infidelities, friendships and greater independence aroused feelings of loss of control. Especially in men prone to violence, such anxieties were likely to trigger acts of violence, either before they left for overseas or when they returned home. The reported incidence of domestic violence in one Victorian location—South Melbourne—fluctuated over the first three decades of the twentieth century. The varying rate of wife abuse charges before this local court supports a view that the First World War affected the experience of domestic violence in this specific community. A decline in wife abuse cases during the war may reflect the absence of married soldiers and single soldiers who would otherwise have married during the war. This overall wartime decline does not preclude the possibility that civilian men on the homefront were more violent towards their wives during the war years. A sharp rise in the rate of wife abuse cases in the wake of the war may reflect an increased incidence of wife abuse in the community at this time. The return home of soldiers, some of whom were traumatised, probably contributed to this rise. It is not clear, however, whether returned soldiers were disproportionately involved in these cases. What is certain is that both returned soldiers and civilian men were appearing before the court for domestic violence-related charges after the war. The war also impinged on official responses to domestic violence. During the years 1914 to 1918, a defendant’s soldier or civilian status (for men of military age) became an important factor in the determination of his guilt. Policemen and magistrates showed unprecedented leniency towards soldiers even when, as the war neared an end, it became apparent that many returned men were drinking heavily and behaving in disturbing ways. Official propaganda idealised the Australian soldier as a chivalrous and manly defender of women from the terrible Hun. The honourable status of soldiers contrasted with the shameful 178

Conclusion

position of men who failed to enlist. Now aligned to dishonourable masculinity, men seen to be shirking their duty, or those of German ethnicity, were more likely to be censured for acts of wife abuse than were men wearing AIF uniform. The success of an abused woman’s case often hinged on the degree to which the ideology of wartime supported or undermined the status of her husband. The war’s influence on the outcome of domestic violence cases underscores the political nature of the regulation of men’s violence against women. This regulation was always concerned with more than just the immediate facts of violence of any one case. Official leniency towards returned soldiers who committed acts of domestic violence persisted in the post-war decade. Apart from recognising the honoured status of returned Anzacs, the community realised that these men had undergone horrible trials over the four long years of war. Public awareness that many returned men were psychologically unbalanced due to shell shock and ‘nerves’, enabled acceptance of explanations that linked ex-soldiers’ violence to mental disorder. The emergent stereotype of the disturbed ex-soldier came to influence the outcome of many cases of returned-soldier wife abuse, both where it reflected reality and where it bore no relation to the truth. A telling case was that of W. O., a returned soldier who shot his wife in 1922. Despite the fact that W. O. had been violent towards his wife before his enlistment and that he had not seen battle during the war, the Supreme Court handed down a lenient sentence in light of the defence’s construction of William as a nerve-shattered veteran. When W. O. first began beating his wife Marguerite twenty years earlier, understandings of domestic violence were different. In the decade and a half before the First World War, Victorians’ ideas about racial evolution and social degradation shaped dominant perceptions of domestic violence. Those who commented publicly on ‘wifebeating’, such as journalists, social reformers, politicians, magistrates, and feminists regarded it as a behaviour located in the worst section of the working class. Here they believed vestiges of Western barbarism still remained. Brutal ‘wife-beaters’ were products of this supposedly backward community and of the socially-degenerative agents of alcohol and poverty which flourished there. By contrast, such commentators assumed that the men of the middle and upper classes had progressed beyond the need to behave in such a primitive fashion. Violence against wives was inherent to beasts, not civilised men. 179

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The war helped to alter this understanding of domestic violence, as it did theories of human behaviour more generally. The gross level of human destruction on the battlefields upset the belief in racial progress so dear to Western societies. It encouraged, instead, a view that civilisation was merely a thin veneer covering base and natural human impulses of aggression.4 ‘Civilised man’ was not as civilised as he thought himself to be; he shared with ‘less evolved’ peoples a common potential for violence. In December 1916, Carl Jung, then in Switzerland, wrote: ‘This war has pitilessly revealed to civilised man that he is still a barbarian’.5 Such disillusionment, together with the high prevalence of mental disturbance in soldiers, opened the way for both experts and the general public to see that not much separated sane, ‘normal’ men from those who acted in ‘crazy’, brutal ways. Psychiatrists came to believe that almost any individual could lose self-control if subjected to sufficient stress. It was in this new cultural context that a man’s shattered nerves became a common defence for charges relating to wife abuse, in both returned-soldier and civilian cases. Post-war representations of domestic violence were less concerned with class identity than were pre-war representations. In the 1920s the popular stereotype of the wife abuser shifted away from the workingclass ‘wife-beater’ towards the stressed, psychologically-ill husband who could be of any class background. It is interesting at this point to momentarily skip ahead to the end of the interwar period. In 1937 an advertisement for a mineral tonic appeared among the pages of the Official Year Book of the Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) [Illustration 13]. Featuring a photo of a businessman wearing a pained expression, the advertisement claimed that the tonic was a ‘cure for bad-tempered husbands’. ‘Nine times out of ten “nerves” are the cause of bad temper’, explained the product description. The ‘strain and stress of modern life’ caused ‘mineral starvation’, which in turn led to ‘nerves’, over-sensitivity and quick temper. Placed in the journal of the most prominent Australian returned soldiers’ organisation, did the advertisement seek to attract ex-soldiers struggling with post-traumatic stress and anger problems? The contrast between this image of the irritable businessman and the image of the drunken brute of the turn of the century demonstrates the extent to which understandings of wife abuse changed over the early twentieth century. This book has sought to show that the First World War was a significant factor in that change. 180

Conclusion

Illustration 13: ‘Cure for Bad-Tempered Husbands’. Official Year Book 1937, Returned Sailors and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia (NSW Branch), Sydney, 1937, p.188. State Library of Victoria. 181

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Despite what would seem to have been an intensification of domestic violence in the aftermath of the war, the war did not stimulate greater public concern to prevent such violence in Victoria. Although the community was aware of (and some people were concerned about) the apparent volatility of many returned soldiers, no one specifically pointed to the danger that disturbed veterans posed to their own wives. The federal government’s Repatriation Department completely ignored the issue of violence in returned-soldier households despite the fact that it was well aware that mental disorder and alcohol addiction were common problems among returned men. It assumed that the wives of these men bore a ‘natural’ responsibility for helping their husbands to regain health and resume normal civilian life. The wives of violent veterans found themselves in a particularly difficult situation given the weight of such expectations and of public sympathy for returned heroes. There was, it seems, less official criticism of domestic violence after the war. The courts generally treated both returned soldiers and civilian men leniently, and showed little interest in condemning defendants who had injured their wives. Thus a war that was often justified in terms of protecting women resulted in an actual decline in male sanctions against wife abusers, not to mention situations of greater danger for many women. Jill Roe’s comment, that the war ‘stripped the chivalric code of moral validity as well as practical content’, is certainly applicable in terms of domestic violence.6 Diminished sympathy for abused wives arose from a post-war climate of male resentment towards women. The male-dominated presses frequently reminded Victorians that, as a result of the war, women had advanced their own social and economic position. Although in reality women were by no means on an equal footing with men, they now had better employment opportunities and young wives seem to have held higher expectations of marriage than did their foremothers. These life improvements underpinned both the unprecedented number of wives leaving their husbands during the 1920s and the male anger that seeped through much commentary on domestic violence cases in the courts and in the press. Jurymen, lawyers, judges and reporters were likely to view men who used violence against their wives as victims of the war, of their own physiology, or of their uncaring wives who had left them. It was the injuries of men, and not those of women, that received most official sympathy after the war.

182

Conclusion

Investigation into the First World War’s impact on domestic violence in Victoria reveals as much about the ways in which people excused domestic violence as it does about the experience of such violence. Violent husbands rarely acknowledged their own concern for control or the structural inequalities that gave them power over their wives, as explanations for their behaviour. Instead, denial, minimisation, blaming the victim, and claiming victim status for oneself were typical strategies of those men who inflicted violence. Uncritical official acceptance of the alibis that men gave for their acts of violence, particularly after the war, ultimately supported the continuation of such violence. Male concern for power over women as a central facet of both the incidence and regulation of wife abuse remained deeply submerged in the community’s consciousness. Post-war wife abuse was to some extent a reflection of returned soldiers’ traumatic experiences of battle, but it was mainly a reflection of men’s fears of disempowerment.

183

Appendix Returned soldier violent towards wife

Battle trauma a factor in violence?

Alcohol a factor in violence ?

B., Edgar

Possibly

No

B., Donald

Possibly

Yes

B., A. J.

Possibly

No

B., George

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

B., Alfred

Possibly. Violent behaviour on service

Yes

B., George

Possibly

No

B., W.

Possibly

Yes

C., Robert

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

C., Glen

Possibly

No

C., William

Possibly. Violent behaviour on service

Yes

C., Daniel

No. Not at front

Yes

D., Clarence

No. Violent before enlistment

No

D., W.

Possibly

Yes

D., Harry

Possibly

No

D., F.

No. Not at front

No

D., Charles

Possibly

Yes

D., Henry

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

D., Stanley

Possibly

Yes

D., T.

No. Not at front. Violent before enlistment

Yes

F., Robert

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

H., A.

No. Not at front. Violent before enlistment

Yes

H., S.

No. Not at front

Yes

H., Henry

Possibly

No

H., Walter

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

H., C.

Possibly

Yes

I., George

Possibly

Yes

cont.

184

Appendix

J., Charles

Possibly

Yes

K., F.

No. Not at front

Yes

K., Arthur

Possibly. Violent behaviour on service

Yes

L., Angelo

Possibly

Yes

M., F.

Possibly

No

M., John

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

M., Albert

Possibly

Yes

M., John

No. Not at front. Violent before enlistment

Yes

M., Charles

Possibly

No

O., W.

No. Not at front. Violent before enlistment

Yes

P., Thomas

Possibly. Violent behaviour on service

Yes

Q., G.

Possibly

Yes

Q., Laurence

No. Not at front. Violent before enlistment

Yes

R., G.

Possibly

No

S., James

No. Violent before enlistment

No

S., William

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

S., P.

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

S., H.

Possibly

Yes

T., George

Possibly

No

T., Frank

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

T., Roden

Possibly

No

W., L.

No. Not at front

No

W., Claude

No. Violent before enlistment

No

W., G.

Possibly

No

Y., Sydney

No. Violent before enlistment

Yes

Z., Benjamin

Possibly

Yes

Total = 52

Possibly = 29

Not possible = 23

185

Yes = 35 No = 17

Notes

Introduction 1 2

3 4

5 6 7 8

Ernest Scott, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918. Volume XI: Australia During the War, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1936, p. 874. Margaret James and Jo Aitken appear to be the only historians to have undertaken research on domestic violence in Victoria in the early twentieth century. Margaret James discussed domestic violence as it related to divorce in the period 1860 to 1960, and Jo Aitken studied representations of wife-beating in the period 1870 to 1914. See Margaret James, ‘Double Standards in Divorce: Victoria, 1890–1960’ in Judy Mackinolty and Heather Radi (eds), In Pursuit of Justice: Australian Women and the Law 1788–1979, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 202–10; Margaret James, Marriage and Marital Breakdown in Victoria, 1860–1960, PhD thesis, La Trobe University, 1984; Joanne R. Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia 1880–1914, PhD thesis, Monash University, 2005; Jo Aitken, ‘“The Horrors of Matrimony Among the Masses”: Feminist Representations of Wife-Beating in England and Australia, 1870–1914’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007, pp. 107–31. Throughout this book I use the term ‘wife abuse’ interchangeably with ‘domestic violence’ and ‘marital violence’. C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 12 volumes, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1921–42; C. E. W. Bean, The Story of the Anzacs, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1942; C. E. W. Bean, Anzac to Amiens: A Shorter History of the Australian Fighting Services in the First World War, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1946; A. G. Butler, The Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the War of 1914–1918, Volume III: Special Problems and Services, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1943. See also B. Denholm, ‘Some Aspects of the Transitional Period from War to Peace, 1918–1921’, Australian Quarterly, vol. 16, no. 1, 1944, pp. 39–50. Scott, Official History of Australia in the War. Michael McKernan, ‘Writing about War’ in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, Australian War Memorial, Canberra, 1988, pp. 11–21. For accounts of the suffering endured by Australian soldiers, see Bill Gammage, The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War, Australian National University Press, Canberra, 1974, and Patsy Adam-Smith, The Anzacs, Nelson, Melbourne, 1978. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford University Press, New York, 1975; John Keegan, The Face of Battle, J. Cape, London, 1976; Antoine Prost, Les Anciens Combattants et La Société Française, Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, Paris, 1977; Denis Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War, Allen Lane, London, 1978; Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979.

186

Notes 9 10

11 12

Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson, ‘Introduction: The Many Faces of Return’, in Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds), Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War, Australian Scholarly Publishing, North Melbourne, 2010, pp. 1–11, p. 9. For discussion of social and political conflict in Australia during the First World War and in its aftermath, see: L. L. Robson, Australia and the Great War 1914–1918, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1970, pp. 11–19; Gammage, The Broken Years, pp. 19–24; Marilyn Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War I, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1975; K. Richmond, ‘Reaction to Radicalism: Non-Labour Movements, 1920–9’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 5, November 1979, pp. 50–63, pp. 52–6; Judith Smart, ‘Feminists, Food and the Fair Price: The Cost of Living Demonstrations in Melbourne, August-September 1917’, Labour History, no. 50, May 1986, pp. 113–31; Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront 1914–1918, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987; Marilyn Lake, The Limits of Hope: Soldier Settlement in Victoria 1915–38, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1987; Marilyn Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’ in McKernan and Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 194–222; Richard White, ‘War and Australian Society’ in McKernan and Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 391–423; Michael Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop: Australia’s Secret Army Intrigue of 1931, McPhee Gribble, Fitzroy, 1988; Raymond Evans, The Red Flag Riots: A Study of Intolerance, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 1988; Judith Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to be Heard: The Popular Disruption of Conscriptionist Meetings in Melbourne, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 23, no. 92, 1989, pp. 203–19; Judith Allen, Sex and Secrets: Crimes Involving Australian Women Since 1880, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1990, pp. 141–3; Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: The Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns of 1914–18’, Labour History, vol. 60, May 1991, pp. 1–15; Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees, The Last Shilling: A History of Repatriation in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 187–8; Bobbie Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia: The Social and Political Impact of the Great War 1914–1926, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1995; Ian Harrison, A Terrible Emptiness: Anzac Masculinity and Memory, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1995; Stuart Macintyre, The Reds: The Communist Party of Australia from Origins to Illegality, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1998. Gerhard Fischer, ‘”Negative Integration” and an Australian Road to Modernity: Interpreting the Australian Homefront Experience in World War I’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 26, no. 104, April 1995, pp. 452–76. For the many references to domestic violence in Australia after the First World War, from the earliest to the most recent, see Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, Nelson, West Melbourne, 1980, pp. 222–3; Judith Allen, ‘The Invention of the Pathological Family: A Historical Study of Family Violence in NSW’ in Carol O’Donnell and Jan Craney (eds), Family Violence in Australia, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, 1982, pp. 1–27, p. 6; Barbara Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists: A Study of Women’s Emancipation in the 1920s’ in M. Bevage, M. James and C. Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, pp. 257–69, p. 262; Patsy Adam-Smith, Australian Women at War, Nelson, Melbourne, 1984, p. 106; Janet McCalman, Struggletown: Public and Private Life in Richmond, 1900–1965, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1985, p. 91; Judith Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions: Changing Battered Women’s Options since 1880’, in National Conference on Domestic Violence: Proceedings, Volume 1, ed. S. Hatty, Australian Institute of Criminology, 1986, pp. 119–36, p. 130; Lake, The Limits of Hope, p. 190; John Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, Longman Cheshire, London, 1988, pp. 176–7; White, ‘War and Australian Society’, pp. 414–15; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 131–41; Raymond Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven: Masculinism and Gendered Violence’ in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992, pp. 197–218, p. 203; Janet McCalman, Journeyings: The Biography of a Middle-Class Generation 1920–1990, Melbourne University Press,

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13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

Melbourne, 1993, pp. 81, 84; Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994, p. 112; Katie Holmes, Spaces in Her Day: Australian Women’s Diaries of the 1920s and 1930s, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1995, p. 15; Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1996, pp. 196–201; Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997, p. 144; Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1999, p. 68; Greg Kerr, Private Wars: Personal Records of the Anzacs in the Great War, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 2000, pp. 243–4; Elizabeth Nelson, ‘Civilian Men and Domestic Violence after the First World War’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 76, 2003, pp. 99–108; Michael Tyquin, Madness and the Military: Australia’s Experience of the Great War, Australian Military History Publications, Loftus, 2006, pp. 3, 125–8; Elizabeth Nelson, ‘Victims of War: The First World War, Returned Soldiers, and Understandings of Domestic Violence in Australia’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 19, no. 4, 2007, pp. 83–106; Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009, p. 139; Peter Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Murder and Mutiny in the Great War, Murdoch/Pier 9, Sydney, 2010, pp. 167, 243; and Carolyn B. Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention in the American West and Australia, 1860–1930’, Indiana Law Journal, vol. 86, no. 1, 2011, pp. 185–255, p. 234. Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 132–3. White, ‘War and Australian Society’, pp. 414–15. Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven’, p. 203. Scates and Frances, Women and the Great War, p. 144. Tyquin, Madness and the Military, p. 3. Peter Stanley, Bad Characters, p. 231. Lake, The Limits of Hope, p. 190; McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, pp. 222–3. Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’, p. 130; Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 6. Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 130–3, 135, 141. Garton, The Cost of War, pp. 196–201, 242. Joy Damousi likewise recognised the uncertainty of the link between domestic violence and war service with respect to the Second World War. She observed that, in the years following the war, men’s war service provided an ‘all-encompassing explanation’ for domestic abuse, when in fact it is difficult to know for sure what role the war played in such violence: Joy Damousi, Living with the Aftermath: Trauma, Nostalgia and Grief in Post-war Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 110–38. Roper, The Secret Battle, p. 13. See also Roper, ‘Between the Psyche’, p. 254. See, for example, Reinhard Sieder, ‘Behind the Lines: Working-Class Family Life in Wartime Vienna’ in Richard Wall and Jay Winter (eds), The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 109–37; Ute Daniel, The War From Within: German Working-class Women and the First World War, Berg, Oxford, 1997, pp. 151–2; Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939, Cornell University Press, Ithica, 1984, p. 115; Winter, Death’s Men, pp. 168–9; Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies. Volume 1, translated by Stephen Conway, University of Minnesota Press, Mineapolis, 1987, p. xiii; Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1993, pp. 97–113; Françoise Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’ in Françoise Thébaud (ed.), A History of Women in the West. Volume V: Toward a Cultural Identity in the Twentieth Century, Belknap Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1994, pp. 21–75, p. 68; Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004, pp. 203–4, 341; Michael Roper, ‘Between the Psyche and the Social: Masculinity, Subjectivity and the First World War Veteran’, The Journal of Men’s Studies, vol. 15, no. 3, Fall 2007, pp. 251–70, pp. 254, 264; Kimberley Jensen,

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25 26

27 28

29

30

31 32 33 34 35

36

Mobilizing Minerva: American Women in the First World War, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2008, pp. 143–55; Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2009, pp. 6–7, 13, 294–5. Sieder, ‘Behind the Lines’, pp. 129–30. Judith Allen noted that the absence of men at the war, ‘especially those prone to violence’, allowed women to make new living arrangements but she does not discuss any actual cases of women who were thus relieved from domestic violence: Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 118. The only relevant finding has been Allen’s discovery that the interwar years saw an increase in cases of violence against women in general before the NSW higher courts: Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 132. Joanna Bourke noted that this occurred in Australia, America and Britain for all of the major twentieth century wars: Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth-Century Warfare, Granta Books, London, 1999, pp. 349–50, 355. Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 6; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 131, 134–5. For other discussions of judicial leniency towards returned soldiers who committed crimes, see Lake, A Divided Society, pp. 186–7; Garton, The Cost of War, pp. 196–201, 242; Tyquin, Madness and the Military, pp. 127–8; and Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, p. 234. Elizabeth Heineman has pointed out that observers have trouble seeing sexual assault during wartime as related to war because the perpetrator and victim are on the same side and the violence occurs in civilian space: Elizabeth D. Heineman, ‘Introduction: The History of Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones’ in Elizabeth D. Heineman, ed., Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2011, pp. 1–21, p. 9. Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 135. Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 135, 138. See Allen, ‘Invention’, pp. 14, 21; Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions, p. 119; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 108–27. At the time of conducting most of the research for this book, the criminal case files were not accessible for years after 1925. For a late-twentieth century example, an Australian Bureau of Statistics survey, ‘Women’s Safety Australia’ (1996), found that only 19 per cent of women who had been physically assaulted in the previous 12 months had contacted police, and only 4.5 per cent had contacted a crisis centre: Commonwealth Office of the Status of Women, ‘Facts About Women’, May 1999. Also see Anna Clark, ‘Humanity or Justice? Wifebeating and the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ in Carol Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 187–206, p. 188; V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation’ in E. A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1972, p. 350. VicHealth, ‘Preventing Violence Against Women in Australia: Research Summary’, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Carlton, 2011; Lori Heise and Claudia Garcia-Moreno, ‘Violence by Intimate Partners’ in Etienne Krug, Linda L. Dahlberg, James A. Mercy, Anthony B. Zwi and Rafael Lozano (eds), World Report on Violence and Health, World Health Organisation, Geneva, 2002, pp. 89–121, p. 97; Sharon D. Herzberger, Violence Within the Family: Social Psychological Perspectives, Brown & Benchmark, Madison, 1996, pp. 93–153; Jana L. Jasinski, ‘Theoretical Explanations for Violence Against Women’ in Claire M. Renzetti, Jeffrey L. Edlson and Raquel Kennedy Bergen (eds), Sourcebook on Violence Against Women, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 2001, pp. 5–21, p. 6; Michele Harway and James M. O’Neil, ‘Revised Multivariate Model Explaining Men’s Risk Factors for Violence Against Women’ in Michele Harway and James M. O’Neil (eds), What Causes Men’s Violence Against Women?, Sage Publications, London, 1999, pp. 207–41; Dawn Bradley Berry, The Domestic

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37

38

39

40

41

42

43

Violence Sourcebook: Everything You Need to Know, Lowell House, Los Angeles, 1998, p. 30; Strategic Partners Pty Ltd in collaboration with the Research Centre for Gender Studies, University of South Australia, Current Perspectives on Domestic Violence: A Review of National and International Literature, Partnerships Against Domestic Violence, Canberra, 1999. James O’Neil and Rodney A. Nadeau, ‘Men’s Gender-Role Conflict, Defense Mechanisms, and Self-Protective Defensive Strategies: Explaining Men’s Violence Against Women From a Gender-Role Socialization Perspective’ in Harway and O’Neil (eds), What Causes Men’s Violence Against Women, pp. 89–116, p. 111. Rebecca Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash, ‘Violent Men and Violent Contexts’ in R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash (eds), Rethinking Violence Against Women, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1998, pp. 141–68, p. 141. For power and control as the prime motive of men’s violence against their wives, see Margi Laird McCue, Domestic Violence: A Reference Handbook, ABC-CLIO, Santa Barbara, 1995, pp. 9–10, 110; Bob Pease, Recreating Men: Postmodern Masculinity Politics, Sage Publications, London, 2000, p. 9; O’Neil and Nadeau, ‘Men’s GenderRole Conflict’, p. 103; Michael Kaufman, ‘Men, Feminism, and Men’s Contradictory Experiences of Power’ in Harry Brod and Michael Kaufman (eds), Theorizing Masculinities, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1994, pp. 142–64; Alan Petersen and Deirdre Davies, ‘Psychology and the Social Construction of Sex Differences in Theories of Aggression’, Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 1997, pp. 309–20; Henrietta L. Moore, A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 66–9. McCue, Domestic Violence, p. 13; R. W. Connell, Masculinities, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, p. 83; David Buchbinder, Masculinity and Identities, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 2–4; Dobash and Dobash, ‘Violent Men’, p. 168; Dale Bagshaw and Donna Chung, Women, Men and Domestic Violence, University of South Australia, Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Canberra, 2000, p. 14. VicHealth, ‘Preventing Violence Before it Occurs: A Framework and Background Paper to Guide the Primary Prevention of Violence Against Women in Victoria, Victorian Health Promotion Foundation, Carlton, 2007; Heise and Garcia-Moreno, ‘Violence by Intimate Partners’, pp. 89, 99; Pease, Recreating Men, p. 98; Ola W. Barnett, Cindy L. Miller-Perrin and Robin D. Perrin, Family Violence Across the Lifespan: An Introduction, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1997, p. 197. O’Neil and Nadeau, ‘Men’s Gender-Role Conflict’, p. 97; Family Violence: Everybody’s Business, Somebody’s Life, p. 115; John Archer, ‘Power and Male Violence’ in John Archer (ed.), Male Violence, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 310–31, p. 322; Dobash and Dobash, ‘Violent Men’, pp. 164–8; K. Yllö, and M. Straus, ‘Patriarchy and Violence Against Wives: The Impact of Structural and Normative Factors’ in M. A. Straus and R. J. Gelles (eds), Physical Violence in American Families: Risk Factors and Adaptations to Violence in 8,145 Families, Transaction, New Brunswick, NJ, 1990, pp. 383–99. Nicholas Seddon, Domestic Violence in Australia: The Legal Response, The Federation Press, Sydney, 1993, pp. 6, 10; Berry, Domestic Violence Sourcebook, p. 44; Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculnities, Changing Men, Virago Press, London, 1990, p. 252; Brian Moon, ‘Theorising Violence in the Discourse of Masculinities’, Southern Review, vol. 25, no. 2, July 1992, pp. 194–204, pp. 199, 202. Pease, Recreating Men, p. 9; Connell, Masculinities, p. 84; John Archer, ‘Power and Male Violence’, pp. 310–31; Michael Roper and John Tosh, ‘Introduction: Historians and the Politics of Masculinity’ in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain Since 1800, Routledge, London, 1991, pp. 1–24, p. 9; Jeff Hearn, ‘Men’s Violence to Known Women’: Historical, Everyday and Theoretical Constructions by Men’ in B. Fawcett, B. Featherstone, J. Hearn and C. Tott (eds), Violence and Gender Relations: Theories and Interventions, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1996, pp. 22–37, p. 31; Jackson Toby, ‘Violence and the Masculine Ideal: Some

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47 48 49

50 51

Qualitative Data’ in Suzanne K. Steinmetz and Murray A. Straus (eds), Violence in the Family, Harper & Row, New York, 1974, pp. 58–65. Cited in Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven’, p. 212. McCue, Domestic Violence, pp. 11, 107–10; O’Neil and Nadeau, ‘Men’s Gender-Role Conflict’, pp. 110–11; Sherri L. Schornstein, Domestic Violence and Health Care: What Every Professional Needs to Know, Sage, Thousand Oaks, 1997, pp. 49–54. Richard Gelles, ‘Male Offenders: Our Understanding from the Data’ in Harway and O’Neil (eds), What Causes Men’s Violence Against Women?, pp. 36–48; Heise and Garcia-Moreno, ‘Violence by Intimate Partners’, p. 98; Barnett, Miller-Perrin and Perrin, Family Violence Across the Lifespan, p. 198; Herzberger, Violence Within the Family, pp. 99, 120. Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, ‘Trauma in Men: Effects on Family Life’ in Martha B. Straus (ed.), Abuse and Victimization Across the Life Span, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1988, pp. 170–87. Donald G. Dutton, The Batterer: A Psychological Profile, Basic Books, New York, 1995, pp. 61–77. O’Neil and Harway, ‘Revised Multivariate Model’, pp. 225–6; Segal, Slow Motion, p. 257; Arthur Brittan, Masculinity and Power, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989, pp. 188–9; Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce, Family Violence, pp. 111–12; Richard Gelles, Intimate Violence in Families, third edition, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1997, pp. 79–86; Krug, World Report on Violence, pp. 97–9; Ronet Bachman, ‘Epidemiology of Intimate Partner Violence and Other Family Violence Involving Adults’ in Robert L. Ammerman and Michel Hersen (eds), Assessment of Family Violence: A Clinical and Legal Sourcebook, second edition, John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1999, pp. 107–23, p. 121. Krug, World Report on Violence, p. 98; Family Violence Professional Education Taskforce, Family Violence, pp. 105, 108; McCue, Domestic Violence, p. 111; Barnett, Family Violence Across the Lifespan, p. 198. Holly Johnson, ‘The Role of Alcohol in Male Partners’ Assaults on Wives’, Journal of Drug Issues, vol. 30, no. 4, 2000, pp. 725–40; VicHealth, ‘Preventing Violence Against Women in Australia’.

One

‘The Old Story of Marital Misery’ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8

O. v. O. (1912), divorce case file: Public Record Office Victoria (PROV), VPRS 283, unit X, item X; Herald, X X 1922, p. X; O. v. O., (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit X, item X. Farley Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, 1880–1914, PhD thesis, Monash University, 1982, abstract and pp. 84–6. Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 108. Aboriginal women in Victoria would have to wait until 1962 to be enfranchised for federal elections. Technically they were able to vote for state elections after 1908 but in practice most people assumed they were not able to vote. Australian Heritage Commission, Women’s Employment and Professionalism in Australia: Histories, Themes and Places, Commonwealth of Australia, Canberra, 2002, pp. 18–30. Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, p. 245. Marilyn Lake, ‘Intimate Strangers’ in Verity Burgmann and Jenny Lee (eds), Making a Life: A People’s History of Australia, Penguin Books, Melbourne, 1988, pp. 152–65, p. 154; Patricia Grimshaw, Marilyn Lake, Ann McGrath, Marion Quartly, Creating a Nation 1788–1990, McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 90–1; Jill Roe, ‘The End Is Where We Start From: Women and Welfare since 1901’ in Bettina Cass and Cora V. Baldock (eds), Women, Social Welfare and the State in Australia, second edition, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 7. W. A. Sinclair, ‘Women and Economic Change in Melbourne 1871–1921’, Historical Studies, vol. 20, no. 79, October 1982, pp. 278–91, p. 291

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Lake, ‘Intimate Strangers’, p. 154. In 1870 the birth rate per 1000 population in Victoria was 38.07. In 1900 it was 25.79: Victorian Year Book, 1921–2, Government Printer, Melbourne, p. 101. 10 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, p. 119. 11 Jessie Ackermann, Australia From a Woman’s Point of View, Cassell, London, 1913, p. 78. 12 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, pp. 428–9. 13 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, pp. 413, 403. 14 Truth, 28 March 1914, p. 10. 15 Also see Royal Commission on the Decline of the Birthrate and on the Mortality of Infants in New South Wales, Report, Sydney, 1904, pp. 52–4, cited in F. K. Crowley, Modern Australian Documents. Volume I, 1901–1939, Wren Publishing, Melbourne, 1973, pp. 57–9. 16 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, p. 401. 17 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, p. vi. 18 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, p. 248. 19 Ackermann, Australia From a Woman’s Point of View, p. 77. 20 For discussions of domestic violence in colonial Victoria, see James, ‘Not Bread but a Stone’; James, Marriage and Marital Breakdown in Victoria; Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2002, pp. 12–26; and Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia. 21 Australian Women’s Sphere, vol. 2, no. 19, March 1902, p. 151. 22 Worland v. Worland (1910), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 187, item 60. 23 Ruddell v. Ruddell (1911), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 194, item 80. 24 Hocking v. Hocking (1910), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 187, item 59. 25 Knight v. Knight (1913), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 212, item 56. 26 Woods v. Woods (1911), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 196, item 118. 27 Maddox v. Maddox (1910), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 189, item 126. 28 Argus, 23 May 1913, p. 5. 29 Van Nooten v. Van Nooten (1913), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 212, item 49. 30 McNamara v. McNamara (1913), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 212, item 52. 31 R. v. Frey (1910), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1539, item 177. 32 Truth, 19 February 1916, p. 7. 33 Argus, 21 February 1912, p. 14. 34 Ruddell v. Ruddell. 35 R. v. Walsh (1913), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1566, item 593; Argus, 25 March 1911, p. 20. 36 Geelong Advertiser, 29 February 1928, p. 2. 37 Hearson v. Hearson (1912), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 201, item 26. 38 Hearson v. Hearson. 39 Inquest into the deaths of Caroline and Harry Hart: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 886, item 1000. 40 Argus, 10 October 1913, p. 9. 41 Argus, 23 May 1914, p. 20. 42 Argus, 9 April 1914, p. 9; R. v. Paterson (1914), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/ P0, unit 1694, item 292. 43 Argus, 16 June 1914, p. 5. 44 McNamara v. McNamara. 45 R. v. Stevens (1913), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1648, item 174. 46 Truth, 28 March 1914, p. 6. 47 B. v. B. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 2, item 70. 48 Kew Asylum, male patients admissions book: PROV, VPRS 7398, P0001, units 17 and 21. 49 Kew Asylum, male patients admissions book, unit 17. 50 Kew Asylum, male patients admissions book, unit 21.

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Paul Ward Farmer, Three Weeks in the Kew Lunatic Asylum, second edition, J. J. Halligan, Melbourne, 1900, pp. 12, 31, 40, 49–51, 61–2. 52 Garton, Stephen, Medicine and Madness: A Social History of Insanity in NSW, 1880– 1940, NSW University Press, Sydney, 1987, p. 127. 53 Numerous historians have found that the immediate trigger for men’s violence towards their wives was women’s real or perceived challenge to their husbands’ authority and control: Saunders, Kay, ‘The Private Prison: Aspects of Domestic Violence in Colonial Queensland’, Third Women and Labour Conference Papers, vol. 1, 1982, pp. 33–44; Allen, ‘The Invention of the Pathological Family’, p. 4; Nancy Tomes, ‘A Torrent of Abuse: Crimes of Violence between Working Class Men and Women in London, 1840–1875’, Journal of Social History, vol. 11, Spring 1978, pp. 328–45; E. Ross, ‘Fierce Questions and Taunts: Married Life in Working Class London 1870–1914’, Feminist Studies, vol. 8, no. 3, 1982, pp. 575–602; Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence, Boston 1880–1960, Viking, New York, 1988, p. 286; Carolyn Strange, ‘Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and the Death Penalty in Australia, 1890–1920’, British Journal of Criminology, vol. 43, 2003, pp. 310–39, p. 333. 54 Heise and Garcia-Moreno, ‘Violence by Intimate Partners’, pp. 89, 99; Pease, Recreating Men, p. 98; Barnett, Miller-Perrin and Perrin, Family Violence Across the Lifespan, p. 197. 55 Woman Voter, no. 102, 2 June 1914, p. 3. 56 Argus, 29 November 1910, p. 9. 57 R. v. Edwards (1911), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1566, item 585. 58 Kelly, The ‘Woman Question’ in Melbourne, pp. 8, 14, 27; Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 69, 209; Audrey Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or a Struggle? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1992, p. 136; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1999, pp. 19–24; Katie Spearritt, ‘New Dawns: First Wave Feminism 1880–1914’ in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992, pp. 325–49, pp. 332, 340–2; Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, footnote 97, p. 203. 59 Marilyn Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability: Identifying the Masculinist Context’, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 86, 1986, pp. 116–31, p. 117; Grimshaw et al, Creating a Nation, p. 117; Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven’, pp. 203–5. 60 Michael C. C. Adams, The Great Adventure: Male Desire and the Coming of World War I, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1990, p. 66; Pieter Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, Violence, and Honor: An Introduction’ in Pieter Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence: Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, Ohio State University Press, Columbus, 1998, pp. 1–29, p. 7; A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Married Life, Routledge, London, 1992, p. 3; Martin Wiener, ‘Domesticity: A Legal Discipline for Men?’ in Martin Hewitt (ed.), An Age of Equipoise? Reassessing Mid-Victorian Britain, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000, pp. 155–67. For feminist activism against domestic violence in Britain and America during the late nineteenth century, see Carol Bauer and Lawrence Ritt, ‘Wife-abuse, Late Victorian English Feminists, and the Legacy of Frances Power Cobbe’, International Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 6, no. 3, 1983, pp. 195–207; Elizabeth Pleck, ‘Feminist Responses to Crimes Against Women 1868–1896’, Signs, vol. 8, no. 3, 1983, pp. 451–70; Maeve E. Doggett, Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1992; Jayne Mooney, Gender, Violence and the Social Order, Macmillan Press, Houndmills, 2000, pp. 68–73. 61 Martin J. Wiener, ‘The Victorian Criminalization of Men’ in Spierenburg (ed.), Men and Violence, pp. 197–212; Anna Clark, ‘Humanity or Justice? Wifebeating and the Law in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’ in Carol Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 187–206, p. 196; Margaret May, ‘Violence in the Family: An

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Homefront Hostilities Historical Perspective’ in J. P. Martin (ed.), Violence and the Family, John Wiley and Sons, Chichester, 1978, pp. 135–67, pp. 139–40; R. P. Dobash, and R. E. Dobash, ‘Community Response to Violence Against Wives: Charivari, Abstract Justice, and Patriarchy’, Social Problems, vol. 28, June 1981, pp. 563–81, p. 570. 62 Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, pp. 190, 197, 233. Jo Aitken has found that there was an uneasy recognition that wife-beating was unmanly even in the disrespectable Truth newspaaper, which combined both tragic and misogynist comic stories of wife-beating: Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, p. 209. 63 Evans, ‘A Gun in the Oven’, p. 206; J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, ‘Introduction’ in J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (eds), Manliness and Morality: Middle-class Masculinity in Britain and America 1800–1940, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1987, pp. 1–6, p. 1. 64 Max Chamberlain, The Australians in the South African War 1899–1902: A Map History, Army History Unit, Department of Defence, Canberra, 1999, p. 88. 65 Martin Crotty, Making the Australian Male: Middle-class Masculinity 1870–1920, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2001, p. 17; Craig Wilcox, For Hearths and Homes: Citizen Soldiering in Australia 1854–1945, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1998, pp. 46–7, 54–9; C. D. Coulthard-Clark, ‘Formation of the Australian Armed Services, 1901–14’ in McKernan and Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 121–43; L. L. Robson, Australia and the Great War 1914–1918, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1970, p. 2. 66 Crotty, Making the Australian Male, p. 28; John Barrett, Falling In: Australians and ‘Boy Conscription’ 1911–1915, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, p. 254. 67 Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830–1914, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, pp. 226–8; Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, p. 189. 68 Jayne Mooney, Gender, Violence and the Social Order, Macmillan Press, Houndmills, 2000, pp. 35–9. 69 Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, p. 188. 70 Victorian Parliamentary Debates (VPD), vol. 95, 25 September 1900, p. 1571. 71 Mr Hirsch, Legislative Assembly, VPD, vol. 102, session 1902–3, 10 December 1902, p. 1230. 72 Quoted in Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 282, 284. 73 Argus, 23 April 1913, p. 13. 74 Aitken, ‘The Horrors of Matrimony Among the Masses’, pp. 123–4. 75 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 104, 109. 76 Elizabeth Windschuttle, ‘Women, Crime and Punishment’ in S. K. Mukherjee and Jocelynne Scutt (eds), Women & Crime, George Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1981, pp. 31–50, pp. 37, 40. A similar understanding was prevalent in Britain: Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship, p. 6. 77 Mr McKenzie, Legislative Assembly, VPD, vol. 83, session 1896, 29 October 1896, p. 2974. 78 Lake, ‘Politics of Respectability’, p. 124. In 1899, the Government Medical Officer reported that drink was the main factor in over half of all assault charges heard across Victoria: Report of the Board of Inquiry into the Treatment of Habitual Drunkards, Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP), session 1899–1900, vol. 4, p. 499. 79 Truth, 10 January 1914, p. 3. 80 Blair Ussher, ‘The Salvation War’ in Graeme Davison, David Dunstan and Chris McConville (eds), The Outcasts of Melbourne, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 124–39, pp. 128–30. 81 Lt Colonel John Kirkham, ‘Hope Hall’, n. d., Salvation Army Heritage Centre, Melbourne. 82 War Cry, 9 June 1900, p. 14. 83 Walter Phillips, ‘”Six O’Clock Swill”: The Introduction of Early Closing of Hotel Bars in Australia’, Historical Studies, vol. 19, no. 75, 1980, pp. 250–66, p. 260.

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Notes 84

See White Ribbon Signal, August 1894, p. 110, April 1896, p. 380, and March 1900, p. 48; Anthea Hyslop, ‘Christian Temperance and Social Reform: The WCTU of Victoria, 1887–1912’ in Sabine Willis (ed.), Women, Faith & Fetes: Essays in the History of Women and the Church in Australia, Dove Communications, Melbourne, 1977, pp. 43–62, p. 51; Karen Batt, Domestic Violence and Divorce: Perceptions and Reality. A Study of Divorce and Domestic Violence in Victoria in the Period 1891–1900, BA Hons thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984, pp. 4, 10–11; Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 115, 120. 85 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 70, 85, 257–8. 86 Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 58. 87 Chris McConville, Outcast Melbourne: Social Deviance in the City 1880–1914, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1974, p. 34; Susan Priestley, South Melbourne: A History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1995, p. 263; McCalman, Struggletown, pp. 26–7, 51. 88 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions (Civil/Summons) Register: PROV, VPRS 3189/P0000, units 24–36; Warrnambool Court of Petty Sessions Register, PROV, VPRS 12779/P0001, units 14–18; McConville, Outcast Melbourne, pp. 103, 110, 290–91. 89 Joseph Fraser, Husbands: How to Select Them, How to Manage Them, How to Keep Them, E. W. Cole, Melbourne, 1900, p. 24. 90 Clark, ‘Humanity or Justice?’, p. 201; Linda Gordon, ‘A Right Not to Be Beaten: The Agency of Battered Women, 1880–1960’ in Dorothy O’Helly and Susan M. Reverby (eds), Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1992, pp. 228–43, p. 229; Jan Lambertz, ‘Feminists and the Politics of Wife-Beating’ in Harold L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, Edward Elgar, Aldershot, 1990, pp. 25–43, p. 28. 91 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, p. 109. 92 Windschuttle, ‘Women, Crime and Punishment’, pp. 37, 40. 93 Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’, pp. 120–2. 94 Robert R. Smith, A Constable’s Experiences, George Robertson & Co, Melbourne, n. d., p. 41. 95 Strange, ‘Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and the Death Penalty’, p. 334. 96 Maddock v. Maddock (1910) divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 190, item 160. 97 R. v. Swift (1912), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1606, item 58. 98 Argus, 12 June 1914, p. 10. 99 Argus, 23 February 1911, p. 8. 100 My research did not uncover cases where the racial hierarchy obviously influenced proceedings but it is likely that in some cases it played a role. For instance, Jo Aitken cites instances of Aboriginal men being criticised for wife-beating in Melbourne in 1912: Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 285, 289. 101 Wiener, ‘The Victorian Criminalization of Men’, p. 197; David Taylor, Crime, Policing and Punishment in England, 1750–1914, Macmillan, Houndmills, 1998, p. 30. 102 Sociologists Richard Gelles and Murray Straus have found that the media and the public tend not to view as abusive those perpetrators who do not conform to the cultural stereotype of the wife abuser: Richard J. Gelles and Murray A. Straus, Intimate Violence, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1988, p. 42. 103 Argus, 24 November 1910, p. 7. 104 Strange, ‘Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and the Death Penalty’, p. 313. 105 VPD, vol. 95, session 1900, Legislative Council, 25 September 1900, p. 1571. 106 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 75, 72. 107 VPD, vol. 113, session 1906, Legislative Assembly, 15 August 1906, p. 933. 108 VPD, vol. 114, session 1906, Legislative Assembly, 2 October 1906, pp. 1857–8. 109 Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 10; Karen J. Taylor, Gentled Words and Battered Families: A Comparative Study of Australia and America, 1850–1910, PhD thesis, Duke University, 1988, p. 148.

195

Homefront Hostilities 110 Argus, 19 April 1904, p. 6. 111 Argus, 5 August 1911, p. 15. 112 Argus, 29 November 1910, p. 9. 113 Argus, 11 August 1911, p. 4. 114 Argus, 23 May 1913, p. 5. 115 Garton, Medicine and Madness, pp. 125–6, 129. 116 Kew Asylum, male patients admissions book, unit 17. 117 Kew Asylum, male patients admissions book, unit 17. 118 ‘Treatment of Inebriates’, Argus, 4 May 1909, p. 4. 119 Inebriates Act 1904 (Vic.). 120 VPD, vol. 117, session 1907, Legislative Assembly, 8 October 1907, p. 1459. 121 Bates v. Bates (1916) divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 241, item 39. 122 The Marriage and Matrimonial Causes Statute Amendment Act 1883 (Vic) allowed women to be guardians of their children and gave magistrates power to grant orders for separation, maintenance and custody if husbands were convicted of aggravated assault. 123 Matrimonial Causes Act 1861 (Vic.). 124 Divorce Amendment Act 1890 (Vic.), ss. 11(a), (b), (d) and (e). 125 Margaret James found that wife abuse featured in around one third of wives’ petitions for divorce in the year 1911: James, Marriage and Marital Breakdown, p. 227. Tess Maloney found that of 20 petitions for divorce in 1891 the most striking theme was the high level of domestic violence: Tess Maloney, ‘A Consideration of the Divorce Legislation in Colonial Victoria and the Divorce Petitions in 1861 and 1891’, Australia 1888 Bulletin, no. 13, May 1983, pp. 60–70, p. 68. 126 Victorian Year Book, 1907–1913. The year books provide no breakdown of the grounds for which divorces were granted to men and women for this period; Margaret James, ‘Double Standards in Divorce: Victoria, 1890–1960’ in Judy Mackinolty and Heather Radi (eds), In Pursuit of Justice: Australian Women and the Law 1788–1979, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1979, pp. 202–10, p. 209. 127 Worland v. Worland [1910] VLR 374 at 375. 128 Argus, 15 December 1910, p. 6; Hocking v. Hocking (1911) 17 ALR 13 at 14. Also see Ruddell v. Ruddell (No. 2) [1911] VLR 330 at 331. 129 Hilary Golder and Diane Kirkby, ‘Marriage and Divorce Law Before the Family Law Act 1975’ in Diane Kirkby (ed.), Sex, Power and Justice: Historical Perspectives on Law in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1995, pp. 150–67, pp. 163–5. 130 Victorian Year Book, 1907–1913. 131 Drake v. Drake (1896) 22 VLR 391; James, ‘Double Standards in Divorce’, p. 208; John Litherland, The Law Relating to Maintenance of Wives and Children who are Deserted or Left Without Means of Support in Australasia and New Zealand, second edition, The Law Book Co. of Australia, Sydney, 1959, p. 97. 132 Halihan v. Halihan [1913] VLR 443. 133 Hutchinson v. Hutchinson [1908] VLR 411. 134 Argus, 15 November 1912, p. 10. 135 James, Marriage and Marital Breakdown, p. 118. This was also the case in NSW: Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’, pp. 123–4. 136 Victorian Year Book, 1901–1915. Also see Figure 4 in Chapter Six. 137 Hilary Golder, Divorce in Nineteenth-Century New South Wales, New South Wales University Press, Sydney, 1985, p. 257; James, Marriage and Marital Breakdown, p. 181. 138 Sample of 52 divorce petitions citing cruelty as a ground: PROV, VPRS 283, 1910–1914. 139 Gordon, Heroes of their Own Lives, p. 258. 140 R. v. Daly (1911), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1592, item 436. 141 Stuart Macintyre, Winners and Losers: The Pursuit of Social Justice in Australian History, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1985, pp. 55–8; Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work 1788–1974, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989 (first pub. 1975), pp. 51, 107, 110–11.

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Notes 142 Woman Voter, no. 32, 11 July 1912, p. 1; Woman Voter, no. 62, 19 August 1913, p. 1; Roe, ‘The End Is Where We Start From’, p. 7; Helen Tudehope, Pubs, Factories, Parliament and Bedrooms: The Concerns of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of Victoria, 1887–1902, BA Hons thesis, University of Melbourne, 1982, p. 30. 143 Truth, 24 January 1914, p. 3. 144 Truth, 10 January 1914, p. 3; Truth, 28 March 1914, p. 3. 145 Argus, 31 March 1913, p. 6. 146 Truth, 24 January 1914, p. 1. 147 John Gray, ‘Woman, Save the World: An Anglican Response to Late Nineteenth Century Domestic Violence’, Lucas: An Evangelical History Review, no. 17, June 1994, pp. 47–66, pp. 48, 60–61; Grimshaw et al, Creating a Nation, p. 89. 148 Fraser, Husbands, p. 74. 149 Argus, 29 November 1910, p. 9. 150 Argus, 4 August 1911, p. 10. 151 Cited in McCalman, Struggletown, p. 51. 152 Argus, 23 April 1913, p. 13; Truth, 21 February 1914, p. 7. 153 Argus, 23 May 1913, p. 5. 154 Fraser, Husbands, p. 33. 155 Dawn, 1 January 1902, p. 7; Dawn, 1 September 1902, p. 1. 156 David Philips and Susanne Davies, ‘Introduction’ in David Philips and Susanne Davies (eds), A Nation of Rogues? Crime, Law and Punishment in Colonial Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 1–12; Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 110; Suellen Murray, More Than Refuge: Changing Responses to Domestic Violence, University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2002, p. 91; Twomey, Deserted and Destitute, p. 87; Leonie Campbell, ‘Breaking the Noose’? Women and the 1880s Victorian Divorce Law Reforms, BA Hons thesis, University of Melbourne, 1996. 157 Truth, 21 March 1914, p. 7. 158 Truth, 28 February 1914, p. 6. 159 R. v. Swift (1912), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1606, item 58. 160 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, pp. 231–3. 161 Divorce Amendment Act 1890 (Vic.), s. 12. 162 Strange, ‘Masculinities, Intimate Femicide and the Death Penalty’, p. 322. 163 Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 58. 164 Ramsey, ‘Domestic Violence and State Intervention’, p. 195. 165 Twomey, Deserted and Destitute, p. 24. 166 Murray, More Than Refuge, p. 89.

Two

Domestic Violence on the Homefront 1 Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 8. 2 Argus, 6 November 1916, p. 8. 3 Truth, 17 March 1917, p. 2. 4 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 5 April 1918. 5 White, ‘War and Australian Society’, p. 409; Clive Moore, ‘Guest Editorial: Australian Masculinities’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 56, 1998, pp. 1–16, p. 12; Harrison, A Terrible Emptiness, p. 8; Crotty, Making the Australian Male, p. 228. 6 Garton, The Cost of War, p. 193; Dale Blair, Dinkum Diggers: An Australian Battalion at War, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2001, p. 172; Kent, Making Peace, p. 97; Adams, The Great Adventure, p. 60; Barry McCarthy, ‘Warrior Values: A Sociohistorical Survey’ in John Archer (ed.), Male Violence, Routledge, London, 1994, pp. 105–20, pp. 105–9. For an example of the analogy of war to sex, see Annie Call, Nerves and the War, Little, Brown and Co, Boston, 1918, p. 123. For recent studies of the connection between war and masculinity, see Stefan Dudnik, Karen Hagemann

197

Homefront Hostilities and John Tosh (eds), Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2004. 7 Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990, p. 88. 8 Gammage, The Broken Years, pp. 8–10; Richard White, ‘Motives for Joining Up: Self-Sacrifice, Self-interest and Social Class, 1914–18’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 9, October 1986, pp. 3–15, p. 15; Barbara Caine and Glenda Sluga, Gendering European History, Leicester University Press, London, 2000, p. 151; Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 1. 9 L. L. Robson, The First AIF: A Study of its Recruitment 1914–1918, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1982, p. 23; David Huggonson, ‘The Dark Diggers of the AIF’, The Australian Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 3, 1989, pp. 352–57, p. 352. 10 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, p. 211. 11 Department of Public Instruction, New South Wales, Australians in Action: The Story of Gallipoli, Government Printer, Sydney, 1915; Alistair Thomson, ‘Steadfast Until Death? C. E. W. Bean and the Representation of Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 93, October 1989, pp. 462–78; Bill Gammage, ‘The Crucible: The Establishment of the Anzac Tradition, 1899–1918’ in McKernan and Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 147–66, pp. 161–6; Jane Ross, The Myth of the Digger: The Australian Soldier in Two World Wars, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, pp. 14, 27–8. 12 Argus, 8 May 1915, p. 7. 13 Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 13. 14 Michael Gilding, ‘Men, Masculinity and Australian History’, Southern Review, vol. 25, July 1992, pp. 160–7, p. 162. 15 John Horne, ‘Social Identity in War: France 1914–1918’ in Thomas Bartlett, T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffery (eds), Men, Women and War, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1993, pp. 119–35, pp. 122–4; Robert L. Nelson, ‘German Comrades – Slavic Whores: Gender Images in the German Soldier Newspapers of the First World War’ in Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, Berg, Oxford, 2002, pp. 69–85, p. 80; Kathleen Kennedy, Disloyal Mothers and Scurrilous Citizens: Women and Subversion During World War I, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1999, p. 9; Bourke, Dismembering the Male, p. 175; Ilana R. Bet-El, ‘Men and Soldiers: British Conscripts, Concepts of Masculinity, and the Great War’ in Billie Melman (ed.), Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, 1870–1930, Routledge, New York, 1998, pp. 73–94. 16 R. G. Lindstrom, Stress and Identity: Australian Soldiers During the First World War, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1985, p. 85. 17 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, p. 874. 18 Stephen Garton, ‘Return Home: War, Masculinity and Repatriation’ in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 191–204, p. 191. 19 Robson, The First AIF, p. 3; Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 7; Terry King, ‘Telling the Sheep From the Goats: “Dinkum Diggers” and Others, World War I’ in Judith Smart and Tony Wood (eds), An Anzac Muster: War and Society in Australia and New Zealand 1914–18 and 1939–45, Monash Publications in History, No. 14, Department of History, Monash University, 1992, pp. 86–99, p. 88. Even in England where conscription was in place ‘indispensable’ men, who were not permitted to serve, suffered from their civilian status. Vera Brittain’s uncle, one such ‘indispensable’, wrote to her in early 1917: ‘I am getting more and more ashamed of my civilian togs and I shrink from meeting or speaking to soldiers or soldiers’ relatives, and to take an ordinary walk on Sunday is abominable’: Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900–1925, Fontana, Glasgow, 1979 (1933), p. 307. 20 Punch, 7 January 1915, p. 4. 21 Punch, 14 January 1915, p. 38. 22 Robson, The First AIF, p. 40.

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Notes 23 Truth, 18 September 1915, p. 7. 24 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, p. 439. 25 Of 626 men examined at depots across Victoria on 2 February 1916, only 290 were immediately accepted for active service: The Age, 3 February 1916, p. 7. 26 Gammage, The Broken Years, pp. 15–17. 27 These terms appeared in the local South Melbourne newspaper, the Record. See also Lake, A Divided Society, p. 190; Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty, p. 27, and Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, pp. 76–7. 28 The Age, 12 April 1918, p. 8. 29 The Age, 16 April 1918, p. 7. 30 Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 20. 31 Brian Lewis, Our War: Australia During World War I, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1980, p. 174. 32 Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 7; Robson, The First AIF, p. 3; T. W. Heney, cited in Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, footnote 30, p. 209; King, ‘Telling the Sheep From the Goats’, pp. 88–9. 33 Truth, 27 July 1918, p. 6. 34 Argus, 6 February 1918, p. 12; John Sandes, ‘Australian National Character’, Australia To-Day, 21 November 1917, pp. 85–91, p. 87. 35 Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1981, p. 72. 36 Daniel Reynaud, ‘Convention and Contradiction: Representation of Women in Australian War Films, 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 30, no. 113, 1999, pp. 215–30, pp. 221–2. 37 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, pp. 871, 874. 38 Heney, cited in Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, footnote 30, p. 209; Carmel Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914–1918’, Hecate, vol. 1, no. 1, January 1975, pp. 7–22, pp. 9–10, 18. 39 Cited in Patsy Adam-Smith, The Anzacs, Nelson, Melbourne, 1978, p. 352; White, ‘War and Australian Society’, pp. 414–15. 40 Truth, 3 February 1917, p. 3. 41 Truth, 24 July 1915, p. 4. 42 Inquest into the death of James McGrath, 24 August 1915: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 926, item 682; Argus, 11 August 1915, p. 10. 43 Truth, 28 August 1915, p. 3. 44 R. v. Poyner (1916), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1769, item 279. 45 Truth, 20 January 1917, p. 5. 46 Truth, 7 December 1918, p. 6. 47 Truth, 6 February 1915, p. 6. 48 Truth, 23 January 1915, p. 3; Argus, 12 March 1915, p. 12; Inquest into the death of Joseph Sweeny, 11 March 1915: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 923, item 356. 49 Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing, p. 11; Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War, Basic Books, New York, 1999, pp. 231–41. 50 John T. MacCurdy, The Psychology of War, William Heinemann, London, 1917, p. 52. 51 Punch, 4 February 1915, p. 147. 52 Wilcox, For Hearths and Homes, p. 80; King, ‘Telling the Sheep from the Goats’, pp. 89, 90–4. 53 Letter to the editor from a resident of Colac, Truth, 2 October 1915, p. 6. 54 R. v. Dawson (1916), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1757, item 49. 55 Argus, 10 October 1916, p. 8. 56 R. v. Hines (1917), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1792, item 127. 57 R. v. McNamara (1915), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1753, item 56. 58 Phillips, ‘“Six O’Clock Swill”, pp. 260–1. 59 Phillips, ‘“Six O’Clock Swill”‘, p. 264; Intoxicating Liquor (Temporary Restriction) Act Licensing Act 1915 (Vic.) and Licensing Act 1916 (Vic.).

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Homefront Hostilities 60 Herald, 20 September 1915, p. 7; Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 26 August 1916; Phillips, ‘“Six O’Clock Swill”‘, pp. 251, 260; Lake, A Divided Society, pp. 45–6. 61 Woman Voter, no. 153, 3 June 1915, p. 2. 62 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 4 September 1915. 63 Record, 13 November 1915. 64 The Age, 4 July 1916, p. 4. 65 Record, 5 June 1915. 66 War Cry, 31 August 1918, p. 3. 67 Victorian Year Book, 1915–1919. 68 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, p. 874. 69 Senior Constable Samuel Hallet, 31 January 1918, Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor – Effect on Australian Soldiers and Best Method of Dealing with Sale, Reports and Minutes of Evidence, Commonwealth Parliamentary Papers (CPP), Session 1917–18–19, vol. 1, pp. 457–890, pp. 488, 490. 70 War Cry, 2 November 1918, p. 1. 71 Phillips, ‘“Six O’Clock Swill”‘, pp. 250, 266. 72 Rickard, Australia: A Cultural History, p. 182. 73 Jill Roe, ‘Chivalry and Social Policy in the Antipodes’ in Richard White and Penny Russell (eds), Memories & Dreams: Reflections on 20th Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, pp. 3–19, p. 11; Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability’, p. 130. Elizabeth Roberts proposes the view that domestic violence decreased in Britain as the result of restricted licensing hours and reduced potency of beer during the First World War: Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-class Women, 1890–1940, Blackwell, Oxford, 1984, pp. 121–2. 74 Chris McConville, ‘Rough Women, Respectable Men and Social Reform: A Response to Lake’s “Masculism”‘, Historical Studies, vol. 22, no. 88, 1987, pp. 432–40, p. 435. 75 Record, 3 February 1917. 76 Truth, 3 February 1917, p. 3. 77 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions, Police/Arrest Register: PROV, VPRS 3191/P0000, unit 25. 78 K. v. K. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 18, item 451. 79 C. v. C. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 6, item 241. 80 Joan Beaumont, ‘Australia and the First World War’, Sydney Papers, vol. 7, no. 2, 1995, pp. 116–25, p. 123. 81 Secretary, Department of Defence, Melbourne, to Senator Millen, Minister for Repatriation, Melbourne, 17 December 1917: National Archives of Australia (NAA), A2479, 17/430, Hammond, Rev. R. B. S., Suggestion re Alcoholism. 82 War Cry, 31 August 1918, p. 3; White Ribbon Signal, vol. 26, no. 2, 1 January 1917, p. 23. 83 War Cry, 21 September 1918, p. 4. 84 Truth, 29 May 1915, p. 1. 85 Truth, 15 August 1914, p. 2. 86 Record, 13 March 1915. 87 Truth, 11 September 1915, p. 3. 88 Record, 15 January 1916. 89 P. J. C. W. Wallace, Playing a Man’s Part: Gippsland 1893, Gallipoli, 1915, J. T. Picken & Son, Melbourne, 1916, p. 15. 90 Joanna Bourke cites the case of an English soldier who wrote a letter to his mother from the front, in which he criticised a certain civilian man who had abused his wife. The soldier thought it was ‘pretty evident he [was] no man’ and that he should ‘try knocking the Huns about instead of knocking his poor wife about’: Bourke, Dismembering the Male, pp. 168–9. 91 Adam-Smith, Australian Women at War, p. 90. 92 Stanley, Bad Characters, pp. 45–7. 93 Herald, 2 August 1915, p. 4. 94 B. v. B.(1920), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 28, item 404; Military service record, Alfred B: NAA, B2455.

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Notes 95 Truth, 11 March 1916, p. 6. 96 Record, 5 February 1916; Truth, 5 February 1916, p. 7. 97 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions, Police/Arrest Register, unit 24. 98 Truth, 18 September 1915, p. 3. Several months earlier, there was a similar judicial determination to not allow a man convicted of rape to join the forces. In mid-1915, Patrick Lynch, a military policeman, was covicted of raping a 16 year old girl in Melbourne. He told the court that he had wanted to go to the front. The Chief Justice responded: ‘The front! There are men at the front. You will go to the back as far as ever you can’. He sentenced Patrick to 4 years gaol and a whipping: Stanley, Bad Characters, p. 59. 99 Argus, 12 October 1917, p. 4. 100 W. A. T. Lind, ‘Criminology as a Branch of Medicine’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 3, 8 July 1916, pp. 19–23, p. 20. 101 Record, 23 November 1918. 102 Argus, 25 October 1917, p. 4; Argus, 27 November 1917, p. 5. 103 Truth, 25 September 1915, p. 3. 104 Truth, 26 February 1916, p. 2. 105 Truth, 14 July 1917, p. 5. 106 Judith Smart, ‘Poor Little Belgium’, War & Society, vol. 2, no. 1, 1994, pp. 27–46, pp. 34, 37–8; Reynaud, ‘Convention and Contradiction’, p. 224. 107 The Age, 4 October 1916, p. 4. 108 Carmel Shute, ‘“Blood Votes” and the “Bestial Boche”: A Case Study in Propaganda’, Hecate, vol. 2, no. 2, 1976, pp. 6–22, pp. 16–17; Pike, Australian Film 1900–1977, p. 83; Reynaud, ‘Convention and Contradiction’, p. 227. For similar propaganda in Britain, see Nicoletta F. Gullace, ‘Sexual Violence and Family Honor: British Propaganda and International Law During the First World War’, American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 3, June 1997, pp. 714–47. 109 Lewis, Our War, p. 13. 110 Aitken, Representations of Wife-beating in Australia, p. 109. 111 Argus, 27 April 1917, p. 6; Joy Damousi, ‘Marching to Different Drums: Women’s Mobilisations 1914–1939’ in Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans (eds), Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Sydney, 1992, pp. 350–75, pp. 354–9. 112 The Age, 4 October 1916, p. 4. In other combatant nations there was also a denial, at official and patriotic levels, of male violence against women on the homefront. In the face of such denials there existed female expressions of distrust of men of their own nationality, relief at some men’s absences, and even, in the United States, a desire to use guns to protect themselves from men at home: Susan R. Grayzel, Women’s Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1999, p. 65; Bourke, Dismembering the Male, p. 169; Kent, Making Peace, p. 47; Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars, Pandora, London, 1987, p. 112; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva. 113 Truth, 9 December 1916, p. 7. 114 Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to be Heard’, p. 213. 115 Annabel Cooper, ‘Textual Territories: Gendered Cultural Politics and Australian Representations of the War of 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 25, no. 100, 1993, pp. 403–21, p. 410. For female vulnerability as central to war culture, see Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes’, pp. 10, 12; Damousi, ‘Marching to Different Drums’, pp. 350–1; Margaret R. Higonnet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz, ‘Introduction’ in Margaret R. Higonnet et al (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987, pp. 1–17, p. 5 116 Record, 19 January 1918. 117 Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake, ‘Warfare, History and Gender’ in Damousi and Lake (eds), Gender and War, pp. 1–20, p. 5.

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Homefront Hostilities Three

Domestic Violence on the Homefront 1

Margaret R. Higonnet and Patrice L. Higonnet, ‘The Double Helix’ in Margaret R. Higonnet et al (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987, pp. 31–47, p. 41. 2 A total of 89,100 Victorian men served overseas with the AIF: Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, pp. 884, 890. 3 Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, pp. 206–7; Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (eds), Doubletime: Women in Victoria: 150 Years, Penguin Books, Ringwood, Vic., 1985, p. 270. 4 Lake, The Limits of Hope, p. 173. 5 Garton, The Cost of War, p. 191. 6 Truth, 7 July 1917, p. 5. 7 Secretary, Department of Defence, Melbourne, to Senator Millen, Minister for Repatriation, Melbourne, 17 December 1917: NAA, A2479, 17/430. 8 S. v. S. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 19, item 473. 9 Truth, X X 1914, p. X; Repatriation case file, G.D.: NAA, B73. 10 G. v. G. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 2, item 51. 11 John M: First World War Nominal Roll Database; M. v. M. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 53, item 446; Y. v. Y.,(1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 15, item 325; D. v. D. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 44, item 76; Truth, 1 April 1922, p. 3; Repatriation case file, Alfred H: NAA, B73; H. v. H. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 15, item 312; Repatriation case file, Walter H: NAA, B73; H. v. H., no. 27 (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 54, item 27; S. v. S. (1920), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 25, item 254; S. v. S. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 8, item 23. 12 O. v. O. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X; W. O., military service record: NAA, B2455. 13 Truth, 29 January 1916, p. 6. 14 D. v. D. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 60, item 312. 15 Smart, ‘Feminists, Food and the Fair Price’, pp. 113–31, p. 115. 16 War Cry, 1 February 1919, p. 3. 17 Truth, 14 November 1914, p. 2. 18 Flinn v. Flinn (1915), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 234, item 114; John Manton Flinn: First World War Nominal Roll Database. 19 Simkin v. Simkin (1916), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 244, item 131; Henry Simkin: First World War Nominal Roll Database. 20 Porter v. Porter (1915), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 234, item 111; Victor Arthur Porter: First World War Nominal Roll Database. 21 Dr C. to Secretary, Repatriation Commission, 28 August 1925: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, Samuel G. 22 C. v. C. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 45, item 130. 23 M. v. M. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 18, item 455. 24 B. v. B. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 47, item 211. 25 Taylor v. Taylor (1917), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit 256, item 248. 26 O. v. O. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X. 27 Grey, A Military History of Australia, pp. 118–19. 28 F. v. F. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 5, item 180. 29 M. v. M. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 18, item 455. 30 Taylor v. Taylor (1917): PROV, VPRS 283, unit 256, item 248. 31 Y. v. Y. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 15, item 325. 32 Truth, X X 1922, p. X; Repatriation case file, A.H.: NAA, B73. 33 M. v. M. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 53, item 446. 34 M. v. M. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 18, item 455. 35 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 479. 36 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 6 February 1918, p. 507.

202

Notes 37

Mrs Millie D., Geelong, to Senator Millen, ‘Repatriation Fund’, 28 May 1918: NAA, A2481, A18/2644, Mrs M. E. D., complaint re husband. 38 The Age, 18 January 1916, p. 8. 39 Lewis, Our War, p. 156. 40 Inspector of Inebriate Institutions, Victoria, to N. Lockyer, Comptroller of Repatriation, 6 December 1917: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415 Accommodation for inebriates. 41 Analysis of camp reports, October 1918, Military Service Committee Minute Book: University of Melbourne Archives, YMCA, 75, 92. 42 The Australian, 18 November 1918, newspaper clipping: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 43 Argus, 8 January 1916, p. 14. 44 Record, 20 March 1915. 45 Record, 5 June 1915. 46 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 484. See also Ferguson, The Pity of War, pp. 351–2; Stanley, Bad Characters, pp. 85–6, 89. 47 Record, 5 February 1916. 48 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 138. 49 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 6 February 1918, p. 501. 50 Minutes of Victorian Repatriation Board, 11 June 1918: NAA, A2483, B18/8358. 51 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 8 February 1918, p. 520. 52 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 6 February 1918, p. 504. 53 W. Ernest Jones, Inspector-General of the Insane, memo re treatment of mentally deranged returned soldiers, 6 August 1915: NAA, MP 367/1, AB 513/7/9 Correspondence re treatment of mentals in Victoria. 54 W. Osborne, shell shock and war strain, 30 August 1918: Australian War Memorial (AWM) 27, 376/216 Treatment of soldiers returned to Australia suffering from shell shock or war strain (Defence Central Administration file A513/7/42), AugustSeptember 1918. 55 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 1 February 1918, p. 494. 56 ‘More Disgraceful Riots’, The Age, 8 January 1916, p. 7; Damousi, ‘Socialist Women’, pp. 10–14. 57 Senator Gardiner, Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 82, session June-August 1917, 19 July 1917, pp. 273–4. 58 Cited in Jan Bassett, The Home Front 1914–1918, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1983, p. 62. 59 The Australian, 18 November 1918: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 60 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 30 January and 7 February 1918, pp. 477, 516, 518. 61 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 25 August 1917. 62 Military service record, Donald Bain: NAA, B2455; Bain v. Bain [1923] VLR 420 at 423; Argus, 28 June 1923, p. 7; Argus, 29 June 1923, p. 7; Argus, 1 August 1923, p. 81. 63 Truth, X X 1919, p. X; Repatriation case file, H.S.: NAA, B73. 64 Truth, 4 September 1915, p. 1. 65 Horne, ‘Social Identity in War’, pp. 122–3. 66 Peter Cochrane, ‘Deliverance and Renewal: The Origins of the Simpson Legend’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, no. 16, April 1990, pp. 18–29, pp. 18, 20–1; Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, p. 88. 67 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 24 February 1917. 68 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 489. 69 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 479. 70 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 489. 71 Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Intoxicating Liquor, 31 January 1918, p. 482. 72 Lake, A Divided Society, p. 151; Damousi and Lake, ‘Warfare, History and Gender’, p. 15. 73 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 25 September 1915. 74 Truth, 19 February 1916, p. 8. 75 Truth, X X 1917, p. X; Repatriation case file, F.K.: NAA, B73.

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Homefront Hostilities 76 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 25 September 1915. 77 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 11 January 1918. 78 Record, 7 October 1916. 79 Record, 12 January 1918. 80 Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, p. 88; Harrison, A Terrible Emptiness, pp. 8, 15, 27. 81 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 24 June 1916; Marilyn Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’ in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 194–222, pp. 197–200. 82 Truth, 23 September 1916, p. 5. 83 Argus, 4 July 1916, p. 6. 84 Truth, 8 July 1916, p. 7. 85 Penny Summerfield, ‘Gender and War in the Twentieth Century’, The International History Review, vol. 19, 1997, pp. 2–15, p. 6. 86 Truth, 4 September 1915, p. 1. 87 The Age, 4 October 1916, p. 4. 88 W. Fitzpatrick, The Repatriation of the Soldier, Victorian State War Council, Melbourne, 1917, p. 72. 89 American women challenged the war gender system to a greater extent than Australian women and were strongly opposed for doing so. See Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva. 90 Jan Bassett, ‘Ready to Serve: Australian Women and the Great War’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, vol. 2, 1983, pp. 8–16, pp. 8–9. 91 Woman Voter, no. 149, 4 May 1915, p. 2 and no. 154, 10 June 1915, p. 2. Radical feminists in England were similarly critical of English soldiers’ violence against women on the homefront: Kent, Making Peace, p. 47. 92 Damousi, ‘Socialist Women’, p. 8; Socialist, 24 December 1915, p. 1, cited in Damousi, ‘Socialist Women’, p. 13. 93 Monica McWilliams, ‘Violence Against Women in Societies Under Stress’ in R. Emerson Dobash and Russell P. Dobash (eds), Rethinking Violence Against Women, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1998, pp. 111–40, pp. 125–6. For further discussion of traditional wartime prohibitions against women protesting against their own men’s violence, see Susanne Davies, ‘Women, War, and the Violence of History’ in Sandy Cook and Judith Besant (eds), Women’s Encounters with Violence: Australian Experiences, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1997, pp. 159–76, p. 163 and Sara Ruddick, ‘Toward a Feminist Peace Politics’ in Miriam Cooke and Angela Woollacott (eds), Gendering War Talk, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., 1993, pp. 109–27, p. 113. 94 Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes’, p. 18. 95 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 76. 96 Cited in Lake, The Limits of Hope, p. 35. 97 R. v. Oldring (1918), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1814, item 21; The Age, 22 February 1918, p. 9 and 23 February 1918, p. 12. 98 Herald, 7 June 1918, p. 8. 99 The Woman Suffers, silent film, Southern Cross Film Company, Australia, 1918: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA), 4112. 100 Marilyn Dooley, Suffering in Silents: The Reconstruction of ‘The Woman Suffers’, paper delivered at Australian Film and History Conference 1993, in Marilyn Dooley, ‘Photo Play Artiste: Miss Lottie Lyell (1890–1925)’: ScreenSound Australia, Research and Academic Outreach, . 101 Record, 1 July 1916. 102 Truth, 24 August 1918, p. 4. 103 Truth, 26 May 1917, p. 6. 104 Repatriation case file, Mr B.: NAA, B73; B. v. B. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit X, item 211.

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Notes 105 G. v G. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 2, item 51. 106 Q. v Q. (1918), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 1, item 11. 107 Oliver, War and Peace in Western Australia, p. 153. 108 Argus, 11 July 1916, p. 6, cited in Marina Larsson, An Iconography of Suffering: VD in Australia 1914–1918, MA thesis, University of Melbourne, 1995, pp. 54, 59. 109 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 1 September 1917. 110 Truth, 19 August 1916, p. 6. 111 For discussion of similar attitudes in other combatant countries, see Susan R. Grayzel, Women and the First World War, Pearson Education International, London, 2002, pp. 62–78; Daniel, The War From Within, pp. 286–7; Horne, ‘Social Identity in War’, p. 125; Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War, Routledge, London, 1984, p. 90. 112 For example, see Truth, 14 July 1917, p. 1. 113 Truth, 10 February 1917, p. 4. 114 Truth, 4 March 1916, p. 6; Military service record, Benjamin Zelley: NAA, B2455. 115 Truth, 13 May 1916, p. 2. 116 For discussion of similar official attitudes in European countries, see Magnus Hirschfeld, The Sexual History of the World War, Cadillac Publishing, New York, 1941, pp. 41–2, and Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’, p. 50.

Four

Disturbed and Dangerous? 1

Arthur Butler states that 77,900 members of the AIF returned to Victoria in total. Given that about one third of the AIF returned during the war, it can be estimated that about 26,000 Victorian men returned during the war and 52,000 Victorian men returned after the war: Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, pp. 883–4. 2 Clem Lloyd and Jacqui Rees, The Last Shilling: A History of Repatriation in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1994, pp. 120–1. 3 Peter F. McDonald, Marriage in Australia: Age at First Marriage and Proportions Marrying, 1860–1971, Australian National University, Canberra, 1975, p. 160. 4 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 890. 5 15,500 AIF soldiers returned to Australia with a British bride or fiancée. It is reasonable to suppose that several thousand of these men were from Victoria: Lloyd and Rees, The Last Shilling, p. 129. 6 Alistair Thomson, ‘Steadfast Until Death? C. E. W. Bean and the Representation of Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 23, no. 93, October 1989, pp. 462–78, pp. 466–7. 7 John Sandes, ‘Australian National Character’, Australia To-Day, 21 November 1917, pp. 85–91, pp. 87–8. 8 Herald, 7 June 1918, p. 8. 9 Joan Beaumont, ‘Australia’s War’ in Joan Beaumont (ed.), Australia’s War: 1914– 1918, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, NSW, 1995, pp. 1–34, p. 25. 10 Hans Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress: A Comparative History of Military Psychiatry, translated by John O’Kane, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 1997, p. 42. 11 Cited in Dale Blair, Dinkum Diggers: An Australian Battalion at War, Melbourne University Press, Carlton South, 2001, p. 176. 12 Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee, ‘Introduction’ in Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee (eds), Authority, Identity and the Social History of the Great War, Berghahn Books, Providence, RI, 1995, pp. vii-xii, p. ix; Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 77; Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, p. 46; Robert L. O’Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression, Oxford University Press, New York, 1989, pp. 242–3; Charles Bird, ‘From Home to the Charge: A Psychological Study of the Soldier’, The American Journal of Psychology, vol. xxviii,

205

Homefront Hostilities no. 3, July 1917, pp. 315–48, p. 343; C. E. Montague, Disenchantment, Macgibbon & Kee, London, 1938 (1922), p. 44. 13 W. M. Maxwell, A Psychological Retrospect of the Great War, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1923, p. 100. 14 Henri Massis, cited in G. A. Panichas (ed.), Promise of Greatness: The War of 1914– 1918, Cassell, London, 1968, p. 275. 15 Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 196. 16 The ratio of fighters to support-workers in the AIF was 10 to 1: Jane Ross, The Myth of the Digger: The Australian Soldier in Two World Wars, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1985, p. 49; Modris Eksteins, The Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, p. 153. 17 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, pp. 880, 883, 894, 963. 18 One in every seven men discharged from the AIF had venereal disease: Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 111. 19 Mufti, 1 July 1934, p. 13, cited in Marina Larsson, Returned Soldiers and Disability in Australia, 1919–1939, paper presented at Postgraduate History Seminar, La Trobe University, Melbourne, 31 October 2002. 20 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 818. 21 Garton, The Cost of War, p. 153. See also Stephen Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat: Understanding Shell Shock in World War I’, Australian Cultural History, no. 16, 1997–8, pp. 45–59; Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 109; Joanna Bourke, ‘Shell Shock and Australian Soldiers in the Great War’, Sabretache, vol. 36, July-September 1995, pp. 3–10, p. 3; Blair, Dinkum Diggers, p. 194. 22 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 99. 23 Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress, pp. 3–5. 24 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 105; Millais Culpin, Psychoneuroses of War and Peace, University Press, Cambridge, 1920, p. 47; J. W. Springthorpe, ‘War Neuroses and Civil Practice’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 14, October 1919, pp. 279–84; Sidney I. Schwab, ‘The Mechanism of the War Neuroses’, The Journal of Abnormal Psychology, vol. 14, nos. 1–2, April-June 1919, pp. 1–8; The Age, 3 December 1918, p. 4; Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat’, p. 48. 25 W. R. Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, no. 23, 7 June 1919, pp. 455–60, pp. 455, 458; Springthorpe, ‘War Neuroses and Civil Practice’, p. 281. 26 Anthony Babington, Shell-shock: A History of the Changing Attitudes to War Neurosis, Leo Cooper, London, 1997, p. 47; Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat’, p. 49; Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1995, pp. 60–1. Later in the twentieth century new terms to describe mental disorder in veterans would emerge within Western psychiatric discourse, such as ‘combat fatigue’ and ‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD): see Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress, and Edgar Jones et al, ‘Post-Combat Syndromes from the Boer War to the Gulf War: A Cluster Analysis of their Nature and Attribution’, British Medical Journal, vol. 324, no. 7334, 16 February 2002, p. 397. 27 Survey of 132 Victorian repatriation case files (NAA, B73) randomly selected for this study by the Commonwealth Department of Veterans’ Affairs. My finding complements Stephen Garton’s finding that psychological problems were evident in 28 per cent of cases in a random sample of Australian soldiers’ repatriation case files: Garton, The Cost of War, p. 172. 28 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 142. 29 Repatriation, vol. 1, no. 8, October 1919, p. 6. 30 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, table 69, p. 966. 31 Cited in Anthony Ellis, The Impact of War and Peace on Australian Soldiers 1914– 1920, BA Hons thesis, Murdoch University, 1979, p. 95. 32 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 125.

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Notes 33

Treatment of neurasthenic cases: AWM 41, 290; Alistair Thomson, ‘The Return of a Soldier’ in Richard White and Penny Russell (eds), Memories & Dreams: Reflections on 20th Century Australia, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1997, pp. 62–73, p. 62. 34 Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat’, p. 51. Paul Dane was Victoria’s first psychoanalyst who treated ex-soldiers at the Caulfield Repatriation Hospital in the 1920s: Joy Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes: A Cultural History of Psychoanalysis in Australia, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2005, p. 33. Damousi found that numerous doctors selectively adopted psychoanalytic methods even though they had no official training in psychoanalysis: p. 40. 35 Treatment of shell shock patients, January-September 1920: NAA, MP 367/1 Department of Army, 513/2/1592. For instance, the Inspector General of the Insane, W. Ernest Jones, argued that the best method of help for nerve-strained soldiers was rest, diet and regulation of functions: Report of the Inspector-General of the Insane, 1919, Victorian Parliamentary Papers (VPP), session 1921, no. 2, p. 203, report p. 21; The Age, 3 December 1918, p. 4; Treatment of war neurosis in Australia: AWM 25, 885/4; Springthorpe, ‘War Neuroses and Civil Practice’, p. 279; Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, p. 459. 36 Random repatriation case file, V017454: NAA, B73. 37 Damousi, Freud in the Antipodes, p. 39. 38 Herald, 5 June 1922, p. 7; Herald, 29 November 1918, p. 4; Truth, 4 June 1921, p. 7. 39 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 130. 40 Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, p. 458. 41 Random repatriation case file V026937: NAA, B73. 42 Random repatriation case file V077146: NAA, B73. 43 Random repatriation case file V038700: NAA, B73. 44 Random repatriation case file V101649: NAA, B73. 45 Random repatriation case file V094466: NAA, B73. 46 Random repatriation case file V017454: NAA, B73. 47 Random repatriation case file V0457098: NAA, B73. 48 Random repatriation case file V044198: NAA, B73. 49 Random repatriation case file V045363: NAA, B73. 50 James Murray, The Paradise Tree: An Eccentric Childhood Remembered, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1988, p. 19. 51 Argus, 16 February 1922, p. 7. 52 People suffering from PTSD can be prone to irritability and outbursts of anger: Kirtland Peterson, Maurice F. Prout, and Robert A. Schwartz, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: A Clinician’s Guide, Plenum Press, New York, 1991, pp. 28–9; American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders DSMIV, fourth edition, American Psychiatric Association, Washington, DC, 1994, p. 428. 53 American Psychiatric Association, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, p. 428. 54 Bessel A. Van Der Kolk, ‘Trauma in Men: Effects on Family Life’ in Martha B. Straus (ed.), Abuse and Victimization Across the Life Span, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1988, pp. 170–87. 55 Over 1919 and 1920, Norman Fenton, Associate Professor of Psychology at Ohio University, studied 2600 American soldiers suffering from shell shock. He made a follow-up study of the same men six years later in 1924 and 1925. He found that the group had a higher divorce rate than all other census age groups for males in the United States: Norman Fenton, Shell Shock and its Aftermath, Henry Kimpton, London, 1926, p. 145. There do not appear to have been any comparable Australian studies of shell-shock in AIF ex-servicemen although, according to the 1933 census, returned soldiers in general were more likely to be divorced than other men in their age bracket: White, ‘War and Australian Society’, pp. 414–15. Studies of more recent wars have found that veterans suffering from PTSD have a higher likelihood of marital problems and violence. See David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society, Lime Brown & Company, Boston, 1995, p. 291; Thomas W. Miller and Lane J. Veltkamp, ‘Family

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Homefront Hostilities Violence: Clinical Indicators Among Military and Post-Military Personnel’, Military Medicine, vol. 158, no. 12, 1993, pp. 766–71, p. 767; Zahava Solomon, ‘The Effect of Combat-Related Post-traumatic Stress Disorder on the Family’, Psychiatry, vol. 51, August 1988, pp. 323–9, pp. 325–6; Aphrodite Matsakis, Vietnam Wives: Women and Children Surviving Life with Veterans Suffering PostTraumatic Stress Disorder, Woodbine House, Kensington, Md, 1988, pp. 15, 146; R. S. Laufer and M. S. Gallops, ‘Life-course Effects of Vietnam Combat and Abusive Violence: Marital Patterns’, Journal of Marriage and the Family, vol. 47, 1985, pp. 839–53, pp. 850–1; Vicki E. Hogancamp and Charles R. Figley, ‘War: Bringing the Battle Home’ in Charles R. Figley and Hamilton I. McCubbin (eds), Stress and the Family. Volume II: Coping with Catastrophe, Brunner/Mazel, New York, 1983, pp. 148–165, p. 153. 56 Joseph Pugliese, ‘The Gendered Figuring of the Dysfunctional Serviceman in the Discourses of Military Psychiatry’ in Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth-Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 162–77, p. 163; Joanna Bourke, ‘Effeminancy, Ethnicity and the End of Trauma: The Sufferings of ‘Shell-Shocked’ Men in Great Britain and Ireland’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2000, pp. 57–70, pp. 59–60; George L. Mosse, ‘Shell-Shock as a Social Disease’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2000, pp. 101–8; Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture 1830–1980, Virago, London, 1987, p. 173. 57 Herald, 8 February 1916, p. 6. 58 Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 109. See also Alistair Thomson, ‘A Crisis of Masculinity? Australian Military Manhood in the Great War’ in Damousi and Lake (eds), Gender and War, pp. 133–47, p. 146; Thomson, ‘Embattled Manhood’, pp. 164–5, 173. 59 K. v. K. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 64, item 484. 60 Camberwell Citizen, X X 1924. 61 Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, pp. 190–91. 62 Repatriation case file, F.M.: NAA, B73. 63 Repatriation case file, G.W.: NAA, B73; Military service record, G.W.: NAA, B2455. 64 Record, X X 1920. 65 Record, X X 1923; Repatriation case file, W.D: NAA, B73. 66 Record, X X 1921, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, and R. v. G.R. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X; Military service record, G.R.: NAA, B2455; Repatriation case file, G.R.: NAA, B73. 67 Interview with B.W., Dromana, 23 November 2001. 68 H. v. H. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 54, item 27; Repatriation case file, Henry H: NAA, B73. 69 C. v. C. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 47, item 227; Repatriation case file, Glen C: NAA, B73. 70 Samuel L. Bradshaw, Carroll D. Ohlde, and James B. Horne, ‘Combat and Personality Change’, Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, vol. 57, no. 4, Fall 1993, pp. 466–78, pp. 467–8. 71 Van Der Kolk, ‘Trauma in Men’, p. 173. 72 Memo of resolution adopted at a conference of Medical Officers on the Treatment of Neurasthenic cases held 17 June 1918: AWM 41, 290, Official History, 1914–1918 War, Records of Arthur G. Butler, Notes on mental hygiene, psychoneurosis, shell shock and neurasthenic cases. 73 Record, 22 April 1922. 74 Senator Millen to T. H. Nesbitt, Town Clerk, Sydney City Council, 8 February 1922: NAA, A2487, 22/5154, RSL Employment File, Pt 1. 75 Mark Lyons, Legacy: The First Fifty Years, Legacy Co-ordinating Council and Lothian Publishing Company, Melbourne, 1978, pp. 36–7. 76 Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability’, p. 130. 77 Herald, 7 February 1925, p. 12.

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Notes 78 Herald, 22 May 1922, p. 5. 79 Bendigo Advertiser, 23 January 1920, p. 3. 80 Truth, 14 December 1918, p. 5. 81 Cited in Adam-Smith, Australian Women at War, pp. 107–8. 82 Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, p. 91; Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 272. 83 Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 109; Blair, Dinkum Diggers, p. 194. 84 Cited in Rhonda Wilson (ed.), Good Talk: The Extraordinary Lives of Ten Ordinary Australian Women, McPhee Gribble/Penguin Books, Fitzroy, 1984, p. 13. 85 Susan Priestley, South Melbourne: A History, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 1995, p. 310. 86 Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Solid Bluestone Foundations, Macmillan, South Melbourne, 1983, p. 74. 87 Cited in Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 166. 88 D. v. D. (1924), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 68, item 136; Military service file, Stanley D: NAA, B2455. 89 G. v. G. (1924), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 71, item 287; Military service file, Alexander G: NAA, B2455. 90 R. v. W.B. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X, and Truth, X X 1924, p. X. 91 Repatriation case file, W.B.: NAA, B73. 92 J. E. F. McDonald, ‘Some Aspects of Insanity’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, no. 15, 15 April 1922, pp. 399–403, pp. 402–3. 93 Inquest into the death of Angelo Lembo, 12 February 1920: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 989, item 184. 94 R. v. G.Q. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X, and Herald, X X 1922, p. X; Repatriation case file, G.Q: NAA, B73. 95 Herald, 6 February 1919, p. 6. 96 Analysis of camp reports, 1919, Military Service Committee Minute Book: University of Melbourne Archives, YMCA, 1/5, 75, 92. 97 Helen Duffy and Ingrid Ohlsson, Walking Melbourne, New Holland Publishers, Sydney, 1999, p. 115. 98 Alfred W. McCoy, Drug Traffic: Narcotics and Organized Crime in Australia, Harper & Row, Sydney, 1980, pp. 82–6; Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 88. 99 Report from Major Woollard, MO, 48th Btn: AWM 25, 885/5, Result of enquiry into shell shock cases at Corps Rest Station, Vadencourt. 100 Herald, 21 February 1919, p. 8. 101 Random repatriation case file, V22479: NAA, B73. 102 Random repatriation case file, V22479: NAA, B73. 103 Geelong Advertiser, 27 April 1928, p. 1. 104 R. v. Johnson (1924), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 2029, item 5; Argus, 16 February 1924, p. 31. 105 See Appendix. 106 Military doctors frequently used rheumatism as a euphemism for venereal disease. Thanks to John McQuilton for pointing this out to me. 107 See Stanley, Bad Characters, pp. 29–36. 108 My discussion of the case of L. W. is based on the following sources: Inquest into the deaths of L and D. W., X X X: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit X, item X, Argus, X X 1919, p. X, and Record, X X 1919; Military service record, L. W: NAA, B2455; Repatriation case file, L. W: NAA, B73. 109 Ute Frevert, Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, translated by Anthony William, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp. 201, 218–19. 110 Frevert, Men of Honour, pp. 171, 184; Spierenburg, ‘Masculinity, Violence, and Honor’, pp. 8, 19. 111 Record, 1 March 1919; Argus, 22 February 1919, p. 19. 112 Military service record, F. D: NAA, B2455; Truth, X X 1916, p. X.

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Homefront Hostilities 113 Repatriation case file, F. D: NAA, B73. 114 Alistair Thomson found that around one quarter of the veterans he interviewed in the 1980s for his study, Anzac Memories, had not seen frontline action. He detected that some of these men still felt ‘uneasy or guilty’ about their roles behind the lines: Thomson, Anzac Memories, pp. 34–5. 115 See Appendix. 116 G. H., Pensions Section, Repatriation Department, to Officer in Charge, Bendigo Rest Home, 16 January 1923: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, James S; Military service record, James S: NAA, B2455; S. v. S. (1920), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X. 117 S. v. S. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X; Repatriation case file, P.S.: NAA, B73. 118 May Nelson, interview with the author, Murrumbeena, 21 July 2002. 119 Cited in Ellis, The Impact of War and Peace, p. 96.

Five

Social Responses to Returned-Soldier Wife Abuse 1

R. v. W.O. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X; O. v. O. (1912), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283, unit X, item X; Argus, X X 1922, p. X, Argus X X 1922, p. X, Argus, X X 1922, p. X, Argus, X X 1922, p. X, Argus, X X 1922, p. X, Herald, X X 1922, p. X, and Truth, X X 1922, p. X; O. v O.(1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X; Military service record, W.O.: NAA, B2455; Repatriation case file, W.O.: NAA, B73. 2 R. v. W.O. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X. 3 O. v. O. (1923). Interestingly, even though in her petition for divorce Marguerite testified to W.O.’s violence since early in their married life, the official law report of the divorce case presented the ‘facts’ of the case in a way which suggested that W.O.’s violence had begun after his return from the war: O. v. O. [X] VLR X. 4 Judith Allen found that in New South Wales most returned-soldier defendants successfully used shell shock and their war service as an excuse in cases of femicide: Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 6. 5 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 134. 6 Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 81. 7 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the War, pp. 65–70. 8 Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, p. 455. 9 Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat, p. 55; Young, The Harmony of Illusions, p. 55. 10 Schwab, ‘The Mechanism of the War Neuroses’, p. 4; Bird, ‘From Home to the Charge’, p. 333; Young, Harmony of Illusions, pp. 64–7; Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat’, pp. 53–4. 11 Bird, ‘From Home to the Charge’, p. 333; Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 182. 12 Carrol Lija Nichols, ‘War and Civil Neuroses – a Comparison’, Long Island Medical Journal, vol. 13, August 1919, p. 259, cited in Leed, No Man’s Land, pp. 8–9. 13 Maxwell, A Psychological Retrospect of the Great War, p. 85. 14 Culpin, Psychoneuroses of War and Peace, pp. 15–19, 93, 97. 15 For articles explaining shell shock see: The Age, 18 May 1915, p. 12; Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 24 February 1917; War Cry, 9 March 1918, p. 3; Returned Soldier, April 1918, p. 17; Herald, 29 November 1918, p. 5; The Age, 3 December 1918, p. 4; The Age, 3 February 1919, p. 4. 16 Argus, 12 October 1917, p. 4. 17 Civilians of other nations also tended to understand returned soldiers’ anti-social behaviour as the result of war service: Leed, No Man’s Land, p. 196. 18 Repatriation, vol. 1, no. 8, October 1919, p. 6. 19 War Cry, 9 March 1918, p. 3. 20 Report of the Inspector-General of the Insane, 1919, VPP, session 1921, no. 2, p. 21. 21 Repatriation, vol. 1, no. 4, June 1919, p. 5.

210

Notes 22

Mrs K. to Closer Settlement Board, 18 March 1926: PROV, VPRS 748 Advances files, W. Division, unit 87, Mr K. Thanks to Ken Frost for this source. 23 Wilson (ed.), Good Talk, p. 172. 24 G. v. G. (1924), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 71, item 287. 25 M. v. M. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 18, item 455. 26 Record, 15 October 1921 and 5 November 1921. 27 Mrs C., interview with the author, Camberwell, 31 January 2002. 28 B. W., interview with the author. 29 Garton, The Cost of War, p. 200. 30 Camberwell Citizen, 21 February 1925. 31 Minutes of the Victorian Repatriation Board, 11 June 1918: NAA, A2483, B18/8358. 32 Repatriation, vol. 1, no. 4, June 1919, p. 18. 33 Presbyterian Church, Returned Soldiers’ Repatriation Committee, Reports of Assistance, June 1918: NAA, A2483, B18/2843. 34 Resolutions passed by Australian Ministers’ Conference at Australian YMCA Headquarters, 1–2 May 1919: NAA, MP 367/1, 527/21/1550, Medical and moral lectures to servicemen. 35 Marilyn Lake gives an example of a Tasmanian soldier who used shell shock as an excuse for an offence, despite having nine pre-war convictions. The court hearing his case dismissed the charge against him: Lake, A Divided Society, p. 187. 36 Lake, A Divided Society, pp. 186–7; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 131–4; Tyquin, Madness and the Military, pp. 127–8. 37 Tyquin, Madness and the Military, p. 128. 38 Herbert M. Moran, Viewless Winds: Being the Recollections and Digressions of an Australian Surgeon, Peter Davies, London, 1939, p. 149. 39 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 131; Lake, ‘The Power of Anzac’, p. 206. 40 Lloyd and Rees, The Last Shilling, pp. 115–17. The same mixture of sympathy, leniency and fear of Bolshevism in response to veteran violence was apparent in America: see Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, p. 146. 41 Gullace, Nicoletta F., ‘War Crimes or Atrocity Stories? Anglo-American Narratives of Truth and Deception in the Aftermath of World War I’, in Elizabeth D. Heineman (ed.), Sexual Violence in Conflict Zones: From the Ancient World to the Era of Human Rights, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 2011, pp. 105–21, p. 105. 42 Record, X X 1921, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, Argus, X X 1921, p. X, and R. v. G.R. (X), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit X, item X; Military service record, G.R.: NAA, B2455; Repatriation case file, G.R.: NAA, B73. 43 R. v. Brown (1925), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 2103, item 543; Geelong Advertiser, 3 September 1925, p. 10; Military service record, George Arthur Brown: NAA, B2455. 44 See, for instance, Camberwell Citizen, 21 August 1925; Camberwell Citizen, 25 December 1925; Colac Herald, 5 September 1928, p. 1 and Colac Herald, 21 September 1928, p. 2. 45 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 6 February 1920. 46 R. v. William Charles (1923), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1992, item 11. 47 Record, X X 1921; Military service record, Thomas D: NAA, B2455; Repatriation case file, Thomas D: NAA, B73. 48 Garton, The Cost of War, pp. 191, 198. 49 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, X X 1919; Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, X X 1919; Truth, X X 1919, p. X; Repatriation case file, C.H.: NAA, B73. 50 Argus, 29 June 1923, p. 7; Argus, 30 June 1923, p. 19; Bain v. Bain [1923] VLR 423. 51 Record, X X 1920. 52 Record, 11 March 1922. 53 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, p. 802. Also see Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 130. 54 Cathcart, Defending the National Tuckshop, pp. 91–2; Garton, The Cost of War, p. 197.

211

Homefront Hostilities 55

‘“Australia” and the Returned Soldier: Interesting Revelations’, Australia: A Monthly Review, vol. 2, no. 9, 1 August 1919. 56 Truth, 28 January 1922, p. 4. 57 Camberwell & Hawthorn Adverister, 11 July 1919. 58 Deputy Director General, Australian Army Medical Service, Defence Department minute paper, 9 September 1918 and W. Osborne, Shell shock and war strain, 30 August 1918: AWM 27, 376/216, Treatment of soldiers returned to Australia suffering from shell shock or war strain (Defence Central Administration file A513/7/42), August-September 1918; Memo: resolution adopted at a conference of Medical Officers on the Treatment of Neurasthenic cases: AWM 41, 290; Psychoneuroses treatment in the AIF: AWM 41, 295; Treatment of ‘shell shock’ patients, January - September 1920: NAA, MP 367/1 Department of Army, AB 513/2/1592; Assistant Director of Medical Services to Director of Medical Services, AIF Headquarters, London, n. d.: AWM 25, 885/4, Treatment of war neurosis in Australia; Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, p. 458. 59 Mental Treatment Act 1915 (Vic.); Correspondence re treatment of mentals in Victoria: NAA, MP 367/1, AB 513/7/9; Memo re admission to the Military Mental Hospital, Mont Park, August 1923: PROV, VPRS 7472/P001 Mont Park Military Hospital, outward letterbooks, unit 1, 1922–4. 60 The Civil Re-establishment of the AIF. A Summary of the work of the Department of Repatriation from April, 1918, to the end of June, 1920, with some account of the activities which preceded the Department’s formation, 1920, CPP, no. 67, p. 5. 61 Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, pp. 150–54. 62 Peter Barham gives an example of this also occurring in Britain. The wife of a mentally disturbed returned soldier who acted violently towards her asked that he be admitted to a mental asylum: Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2004, p. 341. 63 M. v. M. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 45, item 118. 64 Report of the Inspector-General of the Insane, 1919, VPP, session 1921, no. 2, p. 203. 65 Peter Braun, a ‘very delusional’ soldier, was confined to a Sydney asylum after being discharged from the AIF as ‘suicidal’. The asylum unwisely allowed him home to visit his family, whereupon he killed his wife and himself: Stanley, Bad Characters, p. 243. 66 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPD), vol. 78, October 1914-March 1917, House of Representatives, 28 July 1915 and 18 August 1915, pp. 5411, 5837; Herald, 31 May 1922, p. 5; Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, p. 161. 67 Mr Rodgers, House of Representatives, CPD, session 1920–21, vol. 95, 5 May 1921, p. 8108. 68 John Weaver has found that the New Zealand Army’s policy of not certifying mentally-ill returned soldiers led to an initial lack of recognition of the seriousness of mental disorders in some ex-soldiers: John Weaver, Out of Love and Duty: The Politics of Shell Shock and Neurasthenia in New Zealand, paper presented at NZHA Conference, University of Otago, Dunedin, November 2003, pp. 11–12. See also Tyquin, Madness and the Military, p. 126. 69 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services, pp. 142–3. 70 Report of the Repatriation Commission, June 1921, CPP, session 1920–21, vol. 4, no. 173, p. 19; Thomson, ‘The Return of a Soldier’, p. 65. 71 The Civil Re-establishment of the AIF, p. 20. 72 Argus, 13 March 1925, p. 8. 73 Repatriation Commission, Instructions to Local Medical Officers, Government Printer, Canberra, 1927. 74 Repatriation case file, William X: NAA, B73. 75 Repatriation case file, George R.: NAA, B73. 76 Garton, The Cost of War, pp. 178, 201. 77 Senator Millen, Report to Cabinet on Repatriation, 29 May 1917: NAA, A2479, 1917–1918, 17/422.

212

Notes 78

Payment of sustenance in cases where a married man refuses to support his wife and family: NAA, A2481, 1918–1919, A18/7632. 79 Quoted in Larsson, Shattered Anzacs, p. 142. 80 Conference of Local Committees, Victoria: NAA, A2487, 1919–1929, 1919/4728. 81 NAA, A2481, A18/7632. 82 Employment statistics: NAA, A2487, 1922/9952. 83 S. Cunningham, Acting Deputy Comptroller, Department of Repatriation, Victoria, to Comptroller, Department of Repatriation, Melbourne, 3 September 1918, and Minute Paper, 3 September 1918: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415, Accommodation for inebriates. 84 Minute Paper, 17 August 1918: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 85 The Australian, 18 November, 1918, NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 86 Mr James Page, Address in Reply, CPD, session 1920–21, vol. 91, 18 March 1920, p. 556; The YMCA in relation to repatriation work: NAA, A2487, 1919/4439; Conference of local committees, Victoria: NAA, A2487, 1919/4728; Accommodation for inebriates: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 87 Ruling no. 83, 4 December 1918: Department of Repatriation, Rulings of the Repatriation Commission Under the Australian Soldiers’ Repatriation Act 1920, and the Regulations, Government Printer, Melbourne, 1921, p. 76. 88 The Civil Re-establishment of the AIF, p. 19. 89 Chairman, Repatriation Commission, to General Secretary, RSSILA, Melbourne, 17 December 1921: NAA, A2487, 1921/19415. 90 Reports of the Inspector of Inebriate Institutions: 1918, VPP, session 1919, vol. 2, no. 27, p. 465; 1920, VPP, session 1922, vol. 2, no. 10, pp. 3–4; 1921, VPP, session 1922, vol. 2, no. 26, p. 473; 1922, VPP, session 1923–24, vol. 2, no. 20, p. 2; 1923, VPP, session 1924, no. 27, p. 4; 1924, VPP, session 1926, vol. 2, no. 5, p. 4; 1925, VPP, session 1927, vol. 2, no. 12, p. 3; 1927, VPP, session 1928, vol. 2, no. 27, p. 3; Inspector-General of the Insane, memo re Lara, 29 September 1930: PROV, VPRS 7471/P0001, Lunacy Department files, unit 2, 1925–30. 91 Lloyd and Rees, The Last Shilling, pp. 149–50. 92 Inspector-General of the Insane to Colonel J. Semmens, Chairman, Repatriation Commission, 7 August 1925: PROV, VPRS 7471/P0001, unit 2; Dr C. to Secretary, Repatriation Commission, 28 August 1925: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, Samuel G. 93 Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 109. 94 Stephen Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 56, 1998, pp. 86–95, p. 93. 95 Garton, The Cost of War, pp. 177–8; Fitzpatrick, The Repatriation of the Soldier, p. 72. 96 ‘When the Shell-Shock Soldier Comes Home’, RSA Magazine, June 1919, pp. 19–21, p. 19. 97 Bourke, ‘Shell Shock and Australian Soldiers in the Great War’, p. 10. 98 Everylady’s Journal, 6 January 1918, p. 48. 99 Fitzroy City Press, 2 February 1918, p. 2. 100 Everylady’s Journal, 6 November 1919, p. 597. 101 This proportion was less than the proportion of Victorian men of military age who enlisted in the AIF (38.6 per cent). However, the figure may indicate that returned soldiers were overrepresented in divorce cases when it is considered that many soldiers only married after their return home, nearly one-fifth of the AIF had been killed during active service, and divorce petitions did not always identify returnedsoldier respondents as such. 102 Sample of 89 divorce petitions involving domestic violence, 1919–24: PROV, VPRS 283. 103 Ada H., Moonee Ponds, to Mr R., Department of Repatriation, 25 September 1922: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, Mr H. 104 H. v H. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X. 105 Ada H., Moonee Ponds, to Matron, Department of Repatriation, 3 September 1923: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, Mr H.

213

Homefront Hostilities 106 Deputy Commissioner, Repatriation Department, to Ada H., 20 September 1923: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, Mr H. 107 Emily S., Malvern, to Repatriation Department, 12 January 1923, and G. H., Pensions Section, to OIC, Repatriation Department, 16 January 1923: NAA, B73, repatriation case file, James S.; S. v S. (1920), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit X, item X. 108 B. W., interview with the author. 109 Mrs C., interview with the author. 110 Joy Damousi found that many abused wives of Second World War and Vietnam War veterans were likewise silent about their subjection to violence: Damousi, Living with the Aftermath, p. 107. 111 Mrs C., interview with the author. 112 Thomson, Anzac Memories, p. 112. 113 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 131.

Six

Post-war Battles 1 Argus, 21 February 1922, p. 10. 2 Record, 14 October 1922. 3 Record, 4 January 1919. 4 Record, 29 April 1922. 5 Argus, 17 February 1922, p. 11. 6 Argus, 17 February 1922, p. 11. 7 Truth, 28 January 1922, p. 4. 8 Priestley, South Melbourne, p. 284. 9 Priestley, South Melbourne, pp. 240–1, 265; John F. Lack, ‘Working-class Responses to Industrial Capitalism in Footscray, c. 1880–1910’, ANZAAS paper, August 1977, Table 1, cited in Priestley, South Melbourne, p. 115. 10 During this period the court maintained two separate registers: South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions (Police/Arrest) Register, PROV, VPRS 3191/P0000, units 1–35 and (Civil/Summons) Register, VPRS 3189/P0000, units 36–79. I chose 1905 rather than 1900 as the starting date because there is no Police/Arrest register for the period 1900–1904. I counted all charges relating to domestic violence, regardless of whether they were subsequently struck out, withdrawn or prosecuted to the point of conviction because charges give a closer approximation of the actual incidence of domestic violence than do convictions: Gatrell and Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics’, p. 351. I noted every charge obviously relating to domestic violence (such as wife assaults, threats to kill wives, and wives’ applications to have their husbands bound over to keep the peace) entered in the registers of the court for the period 1905–1929. Maintenance claims were not counted because they may or may not have involved domestic violence. I calculated the rate by using yearly population estimates for South Melbourne as published in the Victorian Year Books. It would have been preferable to use figures for married couples in South Melbourne but these were not available. 11 Fluctuations in the recorded rate of crime may reflect fluctuations in the incidence of such crime: Gatrell and Hadden, ‘Criminal Statistics’, pp. 337, 362. 12 Priestley, South Melbourne, p. 284. 13 First World War Nominal Roll Database. 14 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions (Police/Arrest) Register, 1921, units 26–7. 15 Inquest into the death of Alfred Roy Bilney, 27 April 1922: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 1021, item 396; Argus, 28 April 1922, p. 8; Truth, 29 April 1922, p. 6. 16 Inquest into the deaths of Allan and Audrey Fenton, 25 May 1922: PROV, VPRS 24/ P0, unit 1022, item 430; Herald, 18 May 1922, pp. 1, 8; Herald, 19 May 1922, pp. 1, 7; Herald, 20 May 1922, p. 6.

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Notes 17

Holmes, Spaces in Her Day, p. 16; Ellen Holtzman, ‘The Pursuit of Married Love: Women’s Attitudes Toward Sexuality and Marriage in Great Britain, 1918–1939’, Journal of Social History, vol. 16, no. 2, 1982, pp. 39–51, p. 41; Elaine Tyler May, Great Expectations: Marriage and Divorce in Post-Victorian America, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980, pp. 61, 90. 18 Stephen J. Hart, A Man and His Wife, Diocesan Book Society, Melbourne, 1925, p. 3. 19 Pike and Cooper, Australian Film 1900–1977, pp. 139, 143, 148–9, 163–9, 175–7, 182–9; Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in Australia, Nelson, 1977, pp. 133–4. 20 Garton, Cost of War, p. 177. 21 Kent, Making Peace, pp. 99, 113. 22 Holmes, Spaces in Her Day, pp. 15–16. 23 McDonald, Marriage in Australia, p. 132. In 1914 the birth rate in Victoria per 1000 population was 25.45. In 1919 it was 21.57: Victorian Year Book, 1921–2, p. 101. 24 Sinclair, ‘Women and Economic Change in Melbourne’, p. 290; Beverley Kingston, The World Moves Slowly: A Documentary History of Australian Women, Cassell Australia, Stanmore, 1977, p. 45; White, ‘War and Australian Society’, p. 409; Jennifer Crew, ‘Women’s Wages in Britain and Australia during the First World War’, Labour History, no. 57, 1989, pp. 27–43, p. 30; Edna Ryan and Anne Conlon, Gentle Invaders: Australian Women at Work 1788–1974, Penguin, Ringwood, Vic., 1989 (first pub. 1975), p. 78; Barbara Cameron, ‘The Flappers and the Feminists: A Study of Women’s Emancipation in the 1920s’ in M. Bevage, M. James and C. Shute (eds), Worth Her Salt: Women at Work in Australia, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1982, pp. 257–69; Holmes, Spaces in Her Day, pp. 2–3; Amanda Lucas, Women’s Magazines in Melbourne During the 1920s: Attitudes to the Impact of War on Women’s Role in Society, BA Hons thesis, University of Melbourne, 1984, pp. 10–13; Priestley, South Melbourne, p. 345. 25 Australian Heritage Commission, Women’s Employment, p. 40. 26 Truth, 25 March 1916, p. 4; Argus, 19 August 1916, p. 18. 27 Truth, 6 January 1917, p. 3; Truth, 20 January 1917, p. 2. 28 The Victorian marriage rate rose about 50 per cent between 1918 and 1920: Macdonald, Marriage in Australia, p. 132. 29 Smith’s Weekly, 29 March 1919, p. 10. 30 Rosemary Campbell, Heroes and Lovers: A Question of National Identity, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1989, pp. 22–3; Denis Shoesmith, ‘The New Woman: The Debate on the “New Woman” in Melbourne, 1919’, Politics, vol. 8, no. 2, 1973, pp. 317–20, p. 317. 31 Argus, 7 February 1925, p. 12. 32 Holmes, Spaces in Her Day, pp. 17–18. 33 Dulcie Deamer, ‘That Married Look’, The Australian Woman’s Mirror, 7 September 1926, p. 10, cited in Beverley Kingston, The World Moves Slowly: A Documentary History of Australian Women, Cassell Australia, Sydney, 1977, pp. 43–4. 34 Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 126, 141; Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 5. 35 Colac Herald, 3 August 1925, p. 5. 36 Everylady’s Journal, 6 January 1920, pp. 36–7. 37 Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 126; Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 136; Samuel Hynes, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, The Bodley Head, London, 1990, p. 375. 38 Golder and Kirkby, ‘Marriage and Divorce Law’, pp. 163–4; Lincoln H. Day, ‘Patterns of Divorce in Australia and the United States’, American Sociological Review, vol. 29, no. 4, 1964, pp. 509–22, p. 511; Jensen, Mobilizing Minerva, p. 152. 39 Herald, 11 May 1922, p. 1. 40 Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter, and Poor Mary Ann, pp. 133–4. 41 Sample of 154 divorce petitions citing cruelty as a ground: PROV, VPRS 283, 1910– 14 (52 petitions) and 1919–24 (102 petitions). 42 Dorothy Farrall, Autobiography (oral): State Library Victoria, Australian Manuscripts Collection, MS 12790, box 3561/2. 43 Farrall, Autobiography; Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 6.

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Homefront Hostilities 44 45

Holmes, Spaces in Her Day, p. 103. Cited in Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake (eds), Freedom Bound II: Documents on Women in Modern Australia, Allen & Unwin, St Leonards, 1995, p. 50. 46 War Cry, 15 May 1926, p. 12. 47 Campbell, Heroes and Lovers, p. 9; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 132, 141; Garton, ‘Return Home’, p. 192; Higonnet et al (eds), ‘Introduction’, pp. 2–3. 48 Truth, 6 May 1916, p. 4. 49 The Age, 5 June 1919, p. 6. 50 Shoesmith, ‘The New Woman’, p. 317. 51 Lake, A Divided Society, p. 196. 52 Truth, 7 June 1919, p. 6. 53 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions (Police/Arrest) Register, unit 26, 29 July 1921. 54 Crotty, Making the Australian Male, pp. 93, 229–30; Garton, ‘War and Masculinity’, p. 88; Allen, ‘“Mundane” Men’, p. 619; McConville, ‘Rough Women’, p. 440; Harrison, A Terrible Emptiness, p. 8. For discussions of post-war masculinity in other warring nations, see George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars, Oxford University Press, New York, 1990, pp. 165–6; George Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996, pp. 118–19, 158; Adams, The Great Adventure, pp. 113–15, 133; Kelly Boyd, ‘Knowing Your Place: The Tensions of Manliness in Boys’ Story Papers, 1918–39’ in Michael Roper and John Tosh (eds), Manful Assertions, pp. 145–67; Thébaud, ‘The Great War and the Triumph of Sexual Division’, p. 68; Caine and Sluga, Gendering European History, pp. 167–8. 55 James Grant and Geoffrey Serle, The Melbourne Scene 1803–1956, Hale & Iremonger, Melbourne, 1978 (1957), p. 254. 56 Campbell, Heroes and Lovers, p. 9; Michael McKernan, ‘Writing about War’ in M. McKernan and M. Browne (eds), Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace, pp. 11–21, pp. 14–15. 57 Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, pp. 109–13. Some historians have noted that interwar fascism and political violence tended to be driven by men who had been too young to directly experience the First World War: Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: A History 1918–1985, Basil Blackwood, Oxford, 1987, p. 27; Karen Hagemann, ‘Home/Front. The Military, Violence and Gender Relations in the Age of the World Wars’ in Karen Hagemann and Stefanie Schüler-Springorum (eds), Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in Twentieth-Century Germany, pp. 1–41, pp. 15–16. 58 Satyanshu K. Mukherjee and Carlos Carcach, Violent Deaths and Firearms in Australia: Data and Trends, Australian Institute of Criminology, Canberra, 1996, p. 9. 59 Herald, 30 September 1921, p. 6; Argus, 28 September 1922, p. 7. 60 VPD, session 1921, vol. 158, Legislative Assembly, 28 September 1921, p. 227. 61 VPD, session 1921, vol. 158, Legislative Council, 18 October 1921, pp. 486–7. 62 R. v. John Norman Gray (1924), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 2048, item 316. 63 Inquest into the death of William Henry Morris, 8 July 1920: PROV, VPRS 24/P0, unit 994, item 681; Argus, 22 June 1920, p. 3; 64 Judith Allen found that the majority of femicides in New South Wales in the period 1910–30 were committed by husbands whose wives had left them: Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 116, 126, 132, 141; Jenny Mouzos, Femicide: The Killing of Women in Australia 1989–1998, Australian Institute of Criminology, Research and Public Policy Series No. 18, Canberra, 1999, p. 11. 65 For discussion of the impact of the war on civilian men’s wife abuse, see Elizabeth Nelson, ‘Civilian Men and Domestic Violence After the First World War’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 76, 2003, pp. 99–108. 66 Albert Bandura, Aggression: A Social Learning Analysis, Prentice-Hall, Eaglewood Cliffs, N. J., 1973, p. 49; Linda L. Dahlberg and Etienne G. Krug, ‘Violence: A Global Public Health Problem’ in Etienne G. Krug, Linda L. Dahlberg, James A. Mercy,

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Notes Anthony B. Zwi and Rafael Lozano (eds), World Report on Violence and Health, pp. 1–21, p. 15; Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner, ‘Peacetime Casualties: The Effects of War on the Violent Behaviour of Noncombatants’ in E. Aronson (ed.), Readings About the Social Animal, W. H. Freeman, San Francisco, 1981, pp. 236–48, p. 336; Dane Archer and Rosemary Gartner, ‘Violent Acts and Violent Times: A Comparative Approach to Postwar Homicide Rates’, American Sociological Review, vol. 41, 1976, pp. 937–963, p. 960; Charles Bebber investigated the rate of violent crime in America following military engagements during the 1980s. He found that there was a 32 per cent increase in the year after each engagement as compared to a six per cent increase in other years of the decade: Charles C. Bebber, ‘Increases in U. S. Violent Crime During the 1980s Following Four American Military Actions’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 9, no. 1, 1994, pp. 109–16. 67 Truth, 15 July 1921, p. 1; Argus, 16 July 1921, p. 20. 68 R. v. Braid (1921), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1936, item 439; Herald, 2 August 1921, p. 1; Argus, 3 August 1921, p. 9. 69 R. v. Braid; Argus, 18 August 1921, p. 9; Argus, 1 September 1921, p. 3. 70 Butler, Official History of the Australian Army Medical Services in the War, p. 828. 71 ‘Does the Psycho-analyst Hold Nature’s Key?’, Herald, 27 May 1922, p. 6; Maxwell, A Psychological Retrospect of the Great War, pp. 21–5; Binneveld, From Shell Shock to Combat Stress, pp. 105–6; A. A. Roback, ‘Behaviorism in the Light of Medicine’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 17, 1922–3, pp. 88–92, p. 88; John T. MacCurdy, The Psychology of War, pp. ix, 57; Hynes, A War Imagined, p. 365. 72 C. Macfie Campbell, ‘The Psychopathologist and His Responsibility’, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 14, 1919–20, pp. 48–53, p. 48; Culpin, Psychoneuroses of War and Peace, preface; Regnell, ‘The Psycho-Neuroses of War’, p. 458; G. Elliot Smith and T. H. Pear, Shell Shock and its Lessons, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1917, pp. x-xi. 73 Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 77. 74 Argus, 17 June 1925, p. 9. 75 John Bostock, ‘The Treatment of Nervous Disorders’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 2, no. 12, 21 September 1929, p. 401, cited in Frazer Andrewes, A Culture of Speed: The Dilemma of Being Modern in 1930s Australia, PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2003, p. 65. In the early 1930s, the British psychologist Cyril Burt explained that the war had ‘brought home to the medical world the artificiality of the distinction between the normal mind on the one hand, and the abnormal condition on the other’, cited in Tyquin, Madness and the Military, p. 150. 76 W. M. O’Neil, A Century of Psychology in Australia, Sydney University Press, Sydney, 1987, pp. 19–20; Ruth Rae, ‘An Historical Account of Shell Shock during the First World War and Reforms in Mental Health in Australia 1914–1939’, International Journal of Mental Health Nursing, vol. 16, 2007, pp. 266–73. 77 Garton, ‘Freud Versus the Rat’, pp. 50, 57. 78 W. A. T. Lind, ‘Preventative Medicine in Mental Diseases’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, no. 15, 15 April 1922, pp. 403–8, pp. 404–6. 79 David Walker, ‘Modern Nerves, Nervous Moderns: Notes on Male Neurasthenia’ in S. L. Goldberg and F. B. Smith (eds), Australian Cultural History, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 123–37, pp. 125–6. Elaine Showalter has argued that in England many people believed that women’s more fulfilling work opportunities, arising out of the war, had made them less vulnerable to nervous breakdown: Showalter, The Female Malady, p. 195. 80 Lind, ‘Preventative Medicine’, p. 403; Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 80. 81 ‘Morons, Morals and Mentality’, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 1, no. 20, 17 May 1919, p. 406; Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’, p. 131; Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 188; Andrewes, A Culture of Speed, pp. 61–3. 82 Judith Allen has argued that a psychological model of the violent husband came into being in the interwar period. See Allen, ‘Invention’, 14, 21; Judith Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’; Allen, Sex and Secrets, pp. 108–27. A psychological

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Homefront Hostilities model of domestic violence also emerged overseas in the first half of the twentieth century: Elizabeth Pleck, Domestic Tyranny: The Making of Social Policy Against Family Violence from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 83 McDonald, ‘Some Aspects of Insanity’, p. 402; Lind, ‘Preventative Medicine’, p. 406; James McRae, ‘Alcohol and Character’ in The Menace of Alcohol, The Australian Presbyterian Publication Committee, Melbourne, 1926, pp. 36–43, p. 40. 84 Report of the Inspector-General of the Insane, 1919, VPP, session 1921, no. 2, p. 13. 85 Victorian Year Book, 1932, p. 106. 86 Report of the Inspector of Inebriate Institutions, 1925, VPP, session 1927, vol. 2, no. 12, p. 3. 87 Phillips, ‘”Six O’Clock Swill”‘, p. 251. 88 R. v. Pullin (1919), criminal trial brief: PROV, VPRS 30/P0, unit 1858, item 271; Argus, 28 May 1919, p. 10; Argus, 2 July 1919, p. 7. 89 R. v. Pullin; Argus, 2 July 1919, p. 7; Argus, 26 July 1919, p. 20. 90 Argus, 23 March 1922, p. 7; Argus, 29 April 1922, p. 17; Truth, 29 April 1922, p. 6. 91 Sigmund Freud, Reflections on War and Death, translated by Dr A. A. Brill and Alfred B. Kuttner, Moffat, Yard and Company, New York, 1918, pp. 63–5; Ferguson, The Pity of War, p. 358; Kent, Making Peace, p. 99. 92 Argus, 31 March 1922, p. 10. 93 Argus, 12 October 1920, p. 8. 94 Argus, 20 March 1922, p. 7. 95 Argus, 7 July 1920, p. 6. 96 Argus, 17 February 1922, p. 10. 97 Argus, 21 February 1922, p. 10. 98 Geelong Advertiser, 10 April 1926, p. 1. 99 Record, 19 October 1929. 100 T. v. T. (1921), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 32, item 35. 101 S. v. S. (1921), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 37, item 236. 102 T. v. T. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 64, item 489. 103 K. v. K. (1924), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 74, item 419. 104 Record, 4 December 1920. 105 B. v. B. (1920), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 31, item 496. 106 Garton, Medicine and Madness, p. 188. 107 Camberwell & Hawthorn Advertiser, 16 May 1919. 108 Record, 12 January 1924. 109 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 138; Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 6. 110 Truth, 26 April 1924, p. 9. 111 B. v. B. (1923), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 60, item 300. 112 W. v. W. (1922), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 44, item 108. 113 Record, 1 May 1920. 114 Record, 12 January 1924. 115 Truth, 3 January 1920, p. 7. 116 VPD, 1923–1924, vol. 165, Legislative Council, 9 October 1923, pp. 1269–70. 117 Argus, 7 January 1924, p. 8. 118 Record, 11 January 1919. 119 There was similar hostility in NSW where there was a campaign against constructive desertion in the 1920s: Allen, ‘Desperately Seeking Solutions’, p. 128. 120 Bain v. Bain [1923] VLR 421 at 429–30. 121 Bain v. Bain [1923] VLR 693 at 696, 699. 122 Halihan v. Halihan [1913] VLR 443. 123 The exception was that insanity was added as a ground for divorce in 1919. Very few petitioners used this ground. 124 Marriage Act 1915 (Vic.), s. 122(d). 125 M. v. M. (1919), divorce case file: PROV, VPRS 283 unit 17, item 409. 126 Smith’s Weekly, 29 March 1919, p. 16.

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Notes 127 Herald, 5 June 1922, p. 4. 128 Gullace, ‘War Crimes or Atrocity Stories?’, p. 106. 129 Truth, 1 February 1919, p. 3; Truth, 29 March 1919, p. 6. 130 Truth, 7 December 1918, p. 6. 131 Allen, Sex and Secrets, p. 135. 132 This finding is based on criminal trials involving cases of domestic violence. Although few in number, these cases indicate that convictions for manslaughter, wounding with intent to cause grievous bodily harm, unlawful wounding, and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, involved lighter penalties in the 1920s than in the four years before the war: Criminal Trial Briefs, cases involving domestic violence, 1910–1913 and 1919–1926: PROV, VPRS 30/P0. For press comments on judicial leniency towards wife abusers see ‘Assaults on Women’, Truth, 18 February 1922, p. 6. 133 Lambertz, ‘Feminists and the Politics of Wife-Beating’, p. 34. 134 According to Ernest Scott, two-thirds of the AIF were tradesmen or labourers, 12 per cent were professionals or clerical workers, and 17 per cent were rural workers: Scott, Official History of Australia in the War, Appendix 6, p. 874. Lloyd Robson found that, in a 0.5 per cent sample of attestation papers, labourers and industrial workers accounted for half of all enlisters, while commercial, professional, and clerical workers accounted for one fifth of enlistments in Victoria: L. L. Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First A.I.F., 1914–1918: Some Statistical Evidence’, Historical Studies, vol. 15, no. 61, October 1973, pp. 737–49, p. 745. 135 Lewis, Our War, p. 170; White, ‘Motives for Joining Up’, p. 11. 136 White, ‘War and Australian Society’, p. 400. 137 Ray Jones, France, letter to parents, 21 May 1916: University of Melbourne Archives, Ray Jones Collection, L53/1–2. 138 Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 21. 139 Springthorpe, ‘War Neuroses and Civil Practice’, p. 283; Lind, ‘Preventative Medicine’ pp. 404–7. 140 Allen, ‘Invention’, p. 21. 141 Argus, 27 July 1921, p. 10; Argus, 5 August 1921, p. 4; Argus, 10 August 1921, p. 13; Argus, 17 August 1921, p. 6. 142 Woman Voter, no. 325, 18 December 1919, p. 3. 143 Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives, pp. 21–2. 144 Holmes and Lake, Freedom Bound II, p. 50; Marilyn Lake, ‘Marriage as Bondage: The Anomaly of the Citizen Wife’, Australian Historical Studies, vol. 30, no. 112, April 1999, pp. 116–29, pp. 118–19. 145 Lake, ‘Marriage as Bondage’, pp. 128–9.

Conclusion 1 Argus, 20 July 1929, p. 24. 2 Richard Evans, ‘The European Family and the Great War’, Social History, vol. 16, October 1991, pp. 341–52, pp. 341–2; Archer and Gartner, ‘Violent Acts and Violent Times’, p. 938. 3 Montague, Disenchantment, pp. 9, 134, 163. 4 Bernd Hüppauf, ‘Modernity and Violence: Observations Concerning a Contradictory Relationship’ in Bernd Hüppauf (ed.), War, Violence and the Modern Condition, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin, 1997, pp. 1–29, p. 15. 5 Quoted in Robert W. Rieber and Robert J. Kelly, ‘Substance and Shadow: Images of the Enemy’ in Robert W. Rieber (ed.), The Psychology of War and Peace: The Image of the Enemy, Plenum Press, New York, 1991, pp. 3–39, p. 10. 6 Roe, ‘Chivalry and Social Policy in the Antipodes’, p. 7.

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Index

abused wives, attitudes towards, x, 13–14, 16–17, 20, 29–31, 56–57, 80–82, 104–105, 109, 121–27, 129, 141, 148, 153–54, 158, 163–74, 182 criticism of husbands, xviii, 13–14, 78–80, 93, 104–105, 109, 114, 137, 146, 148, 153–54 loyalty to husbands, 15, 22, 29–30, 114, 138, 173 mental illness, 8, 104, 138, 164–65 see also soldiers’ wives Ackermann, Jessie, 5–7 adultery, 4, 9, 24, 64, 80–82, 114, 125 AIF, ix, xxiii, 62, 68, 83–90, 100, 110, 129, 176 battle experiences of, ix, xiii–xv, 35–36, 69, 84, 88, 90–91, 100, 111–12, 116, 121, 177 criticism of, 69, 75–76, 127–28, 139 drug use, 100–103 enlistment in, 35–39, 59–61, 63, 82 glorification of, xxiii, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 46, 48–49, 54, 57–59, 65, 72–82, 176 physical standards for recruits, 35–37 rejection of volunteers, 35–38, 45–46, 48–49, 61, 77, 177 repatriation of, 65–68, 73, 83–90, 96–97, 115–18, 129, 131–35, 140 violence towards wives before embarkment, 61–65 see also Egypt, Gallipoli, returned soldiers, Western Front alcohol, as a factor in domestic violence incidents, xiv, xxii, 10–12, 15–16,

19, 22–24, 27, 29, 32, 41, 43, 45, 49, 64, 66–67, 71, 74, 79, 82, 98–101, 109–10, 112, 118–19, 124, 126, 129, 137–38, 141, 154, 162, 177, 184–85 pledge to abstain from drink, 22 soldiers’ drinking on active service, 43, 66–69 wartime restrictions, 43–46, 162 see also drunkenness, returned soldiers, temperance activists asylums 11–12, 19, 22–24, 87, 172 Australian Government, xxiii, 5, 7, 14, 22, 35, 37, 51–52, 56–57, 60, 63, 68, 76, 86, 120, 131, 135, 140, Australian Women’s National League, 48 Billy Hughes, PM, 52, 56–57, 76 birth rate, 26, 150 Boer War, 14, 41, 78 Broadmeadows Camp, 37, 61 Bundoora Military Hospital, 129, 131, 134–35 Caulfield Military Hospital, 69, 70, 92, 105, 122, 137 child abuse, xiii, xiv, 7, 10, 20, 24, 28, 51, 56, 74, 78, 116, 120, 130, 142 child-bearing, 5, 26, 149–50 children, xiii, xiv, 5, 7, 9–10, 20, 24, 26–28, 30, 51, 56, 60, 74, 83, 92–93, 98, 101, 106, 109, 111, 116, 119, 120–21, 124, 127, 130, 139, 142, 145–46, 154, 157–59, 162, 173 chivalry, 14, 46–48, 54, 57, 59, 76, 140, 169–71, 174 Christian churches, 10, 28, 43, 120–21, 134, 149

241

Homefront Hostilities civil law, xvii, 133 civilian men, violence towards wives during war, x, xv–xvi, xxiii, 34, 39–42, 45, 48–51, 56, 58, 178 wartime anxieties of, 35–41, 176–77 class, xxii, 16, 18, 19, 21, 26, 31–33, 46, 57, 140, 143, 150, 171, 179–80 middle class, 18–19, 21, 26, 31, 33, 46, 143, 150, 171 upper class, 6, 18, 179 working class, 16–18, 21, 26, 31, 33, 43, 57, 143, 171, 179 colonial Victoria, ix, xxii, 4, 7, 14–15, 24, 30, 105, 168, 173 Commonwealth Arbitration Court, 27 conscription campaigns, xii, 51–52, 56–57, 69 courts, ix, xv–xix, xxiv, 7 Coroner’s Court, xvii, 41, 106, 147–48 Court of General Sessions, xvii, 30, 75 courts of petty sessions, xvii–xix, xxiv, 7, 10–11, 16, 20–23, 27–28, 30, 45, 48–51, 57, 61, 63, 66, 69–70, 73–76, 79–81, 90–91, 93, 107, 113, 119–20, 123 High Court of Australia, 169 South Melbourne Court of Petty Sessions, xix, xxiv, 23, 48–49, 57, 79, 93, 119, 124, 127, 143–45, 152, 155, 167–68, 170, 173, 178 Supreme Court of Victoria, xvii, 7, 21, 25, 43, 50, 99, 113–15, 123–24, 128, 159, 163, 168–69, 179 crime, xii, xiv, xix, 15, 18, 43, 50, 74, 115, 120, 128, 142, 144, 174 criminal law, xvi–xvii, xix, 19, 20–24, 43–44, criminal trial briefs, xvii cruelty, as a ground for divorce, xviii, 4, 24–26, 64, 114, 153, 169 in constructive desertion cases, 25–26, 169 Culpin, Dr Millais, 116–17 Defence Department, xix, 37–38, 41, 48, 60–61, 63, 69, 76, 79–80, 115, 120 depression (psychological), xxi, 40–41, 87–89, 92, 94, 97, 106 desertion, 4, 24–26, 28, 114, 126–27 constructive desertion, 25–26, 168–69

divorce, xvii–xiii, xx, 4, 7–10, 18, 20, 24–29, 31–33, 42, 45, 60, 62, 64, 71, 79–80, 95, 98–99, 101, 109, 113–14, 119, 126, 130, 136, 137, 140, 152–54, 164–69, 171 attitudes towards, xvii, 28–29, 33, 153–54, 166–69, 171 case files, xviii law, 5, 24–26, 31–32, 154 167–69 rate of, 25–26, 32, 64, 152–53, 167, 171 doctors, 11–12, 23–24, 35, 62, 66–67, 86– 90, 93, 100–101, 104–107, 109, 115–16, 118, 121, 139, 135, 138, 160–61, 174 domestic service, 4–6, 26, 158 domestic violence, attitudes towards, x, xiii–xvi, 13–27, 29–33, 46–51, 56–58, 72–82, 104–105, 109, 118–27, 129, 134–41, 148, 153–54, 158–74, 163–74, 178–79, 182 incidence of, xiv, xix–xx, xxiv, 7, 110, 142–44, 152, 157, 174, 178, 183 patterns of, xx, xxiii, 7–13, 45–46, 58, 156–57, 162 physical abuse, 7–11, 16, 20–24, 28, 40–42, 48–51, 61–66, 72, 74, 77, 79, 81, 90, 93–95, 98–103, 107, 113, 120–22, 124–27, 130, 137–38, 140–47, 157–59, 162–63, 165, 167, 170, 182 psychological abuse, 7–8, 104, 164–65 triggers for, xx, xxii, 8, 12, 34, 39, 72, 99, 111, 176, 178 see also understandings of domestic violence drugs, xxii, 87, 95, 100–103, 177 drunkenness, as a ground for divorce, 4, 24, 114, 162 incidence of, 44–46, 58 see also alcohol economy, xv, 4–5, 96, 139, 173, 182 education, 13 Egypt, 68, 74, 80, 92, 103–104, 107, 125 equal pay, 27, 33, 150, 173 femininity, 4, 30, 38, 57, 126–27, 136, 150–51, 155, 168, 173 see also ‘New Woman’ feminists, 6, 14–15, 19, 27, 30–32, 56, 63, 76, 172, 199

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Index films, 16, 18, 31, 38, 46, 52–56, 58–59, 76, 89, 95, 101, 167, 170, 179 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 164 Gallipoli, 35, 37–38, 64, 70, 79–81, 84, 89, 92, 98, 100, 103–104, 107, 125, 175–76 Germans, 41, 46–47, 51–56, 58–59, 76, 89, 95, 101, 167, 170, 179 Goldstein, Vida, 22 guns, 7, 37, 41–42, 106, 113, 129, 146–47, 156–58, 174, 176 historical sources, vii–viii, xvii, xix, 91 historiography, ix–xvi, 110, 177 Home Service, 70, 74, 104 housework, see work, unwaged infidelity, see adultery inquests, xvii, 41, 106, 147–48 insanity, 11–12, 22–24, 69, 99, 129, 131, 160, 172, 176 journalists, xv, xvii, xxii, 6–7, 14, 16, 29, 32, 37, 80, 91, 117, 128, 131, 147, 164, 173, 179 judiciary, xv, xviii, 14, 19, 21, 22–23, 25, 30–32, 43, 49, 74–75, 79, 113, 120, 123, 128, 140, 156, 163, 165, 169, 172–73, 182 see also courts Kew Asylum/Hospital for the Insane, 11, 12, 23 Langwarrin Camp, 114 Lara Inebriate Retreat, 24, 67, 70, 126, 133–34 Lawson, Louisa, 30 McLeod Sanatorium, 91 maintenance, xviii, 5, 10, 24, 26–28, 30, 32, 50–51, 56–57, 61, 63–64, 70, 72, 74, 79–80, 93–94, 119, 125–27, 152, 154, 165–70 marriage, power balance in, xx, 19, 27–28, 60, 63–64, 135–36, 149, 152–55, 157, 162, 165, 173 role of husbands, xx–xxi, 6, 27, 60–61, 75, 148–49, 154–55 role of wives, xx, 6, 26, 28–30, 32, 60, 63, 75, 126, 135–36, 149–51, 166, 174 social expectations of, xx, 6, 19, 24,

27–29, 32, 60–61, 135–36, 149–52, 154–55, 165–69, 182 masculinity, xxiii, 14–15, 34–41, 57, 75, 96, 154–57, 174 men, anxieties about women’s participation in public sphere, 5–6, 150–51, 155, 166, 169, 178 identities, 14, 36, 38, 79, 90, 96–97, 105, 111, 154–57, 176–77, 180 middle-class, 19, 21, 31, 33, 46, 171 role in society, xxi, 6, 13, 32, 38, 75, 110, 133, 149, 156 working-class, 16, 18, 21, 31, 33, 43, 171, 179 see also masculinity mental hygiene movement, 161 mental illness see abused wives, depression, insanity, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, shell shock, returned soldiers, violent husbands, war neurosis military allotment, 59–65, 177 military training, 14, 50, 76–77, 103, 156 Mont Park Military Hospital, 129–31 National Council of Women, 56 ‘New Woman’, 4, 13, 166 newspaper reporting of domestic violence, xvii–xviii, 7, 18–19, 29, 56, 65, 53, 90–91, 164 orders to keep the peace, 45, 119 patriarchy, xxii, 19, 32 pensions, 66–67, 85, 93, 96, 107, 109, 111, 132, 134, 137 police, xii, 10–11, 19–21, 24, 30, 44, 49, 51, 61, 66, 69, 73–74, 91, 94–95, 97–98, 101, 120, 122–24, 130, 145, 157–58, 178 political violence, xii, 69, 127 politicians, xvii, 14, 19, 22–23, 32, 35, 50, 52, 56–57, 76, 131, 134, 156, 167, 173, 179 Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, xxi, 90, 96, 98, 180 poverty, xxii, 15–18, 179 propaganda, 38, 51–59, 76, 176, 178 Psychiatry, 86–87, 115–117, 160–161, 164–65, 172, 186 psychoanalysis, 87, 116 Psychology, xx, 115–16, 160–61, 164–65, 171, 174 psychotherapy, 87, 116–17, 129, 135

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Homefront Hostilities race, 14, 19, 32, 36, 50, 179–80 Regnell, Dr W. R., 88, 115 Repatriation Commission, 76, 86, 133–34 Repatriation Department, 67, 89, 96, 99, 107, 109, 118, 122, 130–35, 137, 140, 182 repatriation casefiles, xix, 86, 88, 91–92, 107, 132 returned soldiers, alcohol abuse, xiii–xiv, 66–74, 77–79, 82, 87, 98–101, 109–10, 112, 118–19, 123–24, 126–27, 129, 133– 35, 137–38, 140, 177, appendix anger, xii, xvi, 72, 89–91, 95, 97, 108, 116, 177 disabled, ix, xiv, 70, 85–87, 92–97, 103–104, 107, 110, 117, 120, 122, 134 drug abuse, 87, 95, 100–103, 177 explanations for violence, xiii–xv, 113–30, 139, 142, 159, 179 failure to fight, 79, 103–108, 110, 112, 114, 125, 177, 179 ill health, 65, 77, 85, 91–96, 160, 177 leniency towards, xv, 74–75, 113–15, 120–24, 127–28, 140 mentally ill, ix, xiii–xiv, xxi, xxiii, 70, 85–89, 90, 92–94, 96, 99–101, 103, 108, 110, 112, 115–119, 120– 22, 128–36, 139–40, 142, 159–60, 177–82, 179, appendix unemployment, 96–98, 107, 110, 134, 140 venereal disease, 80, 85, 106–109, 114 violence towards members of the public, xii, 69, 75–76, 97, 142 violence towards wives after war, ix–x, xii–xv, xix, xxiii–xxiv, 65–67, 69–72, 74, 79–82, 90–140, 176–83 violence towards wives before enlistment, 60–66, 108–111, 114, 119, 139, 177, Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Association, 69 Returned Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Imperial League of Australia, 85, 134, 180 romance, 149, 152, 154–56 Royal Park Military Mental Hospital, 67 Salvation Army, 16–17, 44, 46, 63, 67, 118, 134, 155 Second World War, 95

separation, xx, 24, 26–27, 30, 64, 109, 136, 140, 153–54, 166–67, 174 see also divorce sexual assault, xiii, 7, 76, 114–15, 122, 130 132 shell shock, xv, 69, 85–90, 94, 99–100, 110, 115–18, 120, 129–32, 135–36, 139–40, 159–60, 174, 177, 179 see also war neurosis, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, returned soldiers shirkers, 36–38, 48, 57–58, 155 social impact of First World War, xi–xii, 142 social reformers see Christian churches, feminists, Salvation Army, socialists, temperance activists social violence, xii, 69, 127, 142 socialists, xii, 76–77 soldiers’ wives, abused during war, 59, 61–62, 64–67, 69–74, 77–82 economic independence, 59–64, 177 freedom from violence during war, 62–65, 82 South Melbourne, xviii–xix, xxiv, 23, 44–45, 48–49, 57, 62, 68, 79, 93, 96, 98, 111, 119, 124–25, 127, 141–45, 152, 155, 167–68, 170, 173, 178 Springthorpe, Dr John, 86, 103, 118 State War Council, 66–67 suicide, xiii, 28, 40–41, 94, 100, 122, 135, 146–48 sustenance payments, 66, 96, 133, 137 temperance activists, 5, 16–17, 19, 27, 32, 43–46, 58 see also alcohol, drunkenness trench warfare, xiii, 56, 84–86, 96–97, 103, 105, 111, 116, 140 understandings of domestic violence, xx–xxii, 13–19, 39 class-based, xxii, 13–19, 32, 171–72, 179–80 contemporary, xx–xxii, 13, 39 environmental, xxii, 15–19, 32, 162, 179 evolutionary, xvi, 14–15, 19, 32, 179 feminist, xx, xxii, 19 psychological, xvi, xx–xxi, 161–64, 172–74, 180 sociological, xx–xxii

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Index unemployment, ix, xx, xxii, 94, 96–98, 103, 145, 177 see also sustenance payments venereal disease, 9, 80–81, 85, 92, 103, 106–109, 114 Victorian Government, 5, 24, 43, 46, 68, 134, 156, 162 Victorian Repatriation Board, 68, 120 Victorian Supreme Court, 21, 25, 43, 50, 99, 113–15, 123–24, 128, 159, 163, 168–69, 179 Vietnam War, xi, xxi violent husbands, attitudes towards, xiii–xvi, 13–27, 31–33, 46–51, 58, 72–82, 118–27, 134–40, 159–74, 178–79 criminal prosecution of, 19–24, 171 criticism of wives, 8–13, 23, 30, 40, 45, 61, 79, 93–94, 104, 123, 125–27, 157, 159, 163, 166, 183 denial of violence, 91, 93, 120, 123, 167, 183 desire for power over wives, x, xx–xxii, 8, 12–13, 32–33, 97, 107, 110–11, 151, 155, 157, 162, 172, 176, 183 explanations for violence, xiii–xv, 23, 30, 49, 113–30, 139, 142, 159–64, 179 leniency towards, xv–xvi, 22, 74, 82, 99, 113, 122–24, 132, 140, 179 medical assessment and treatment of, xvi, 11–12, 23–24, 103–104, 116–117, 129–31, 135, 163, 172–73 mental illness, ix, xiii–xiv, xxi, xxiii, 11–12, 23–24, 32, 70, 92–94, 96, 99–101, 103, 110–12, 118–21, 128–35, 139–40, 142, 159–64, 177–82, 179, appendix paranoia, xiii, xxi, 11, 94, 110, 176–77 possessiveness, 9–10 trivialisation of violence, xviii, 23, 30 see also civilian men, returned soldiers, ‘wife-beater’ stereotype

wages, 4–5, 27, 33, 96, 154, 173 war culture, 14, 35–36, 39, 41–42, 50, 57–58, 72, 176 see also propaganda war neurosis, 68, 85–87, 110, 116–18, 129, 160 see also shell shock, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Western Front, xii, 37, 51, 56, 64, 70, 72, 77, 84–85, 92, 94–95, 98, 100–101, 103, 109, 111, 122, 125, 171–76 ‘wife-beater’ stereotype, 14–16, 19, 21–23, 32, 46, 49, 52, 115, 164, 174, 179–80 Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement, 5, 16, 27 women, economic dependence, 27, 141, 150 educational opportunities, 5–6, 13 identities, 4–5, 30, 38, 57 independence, xiii, xxiv, 27, 33, 60, 63, 126, 149–50, 170, 173, 178 middle-class, 26, 150 participation in public sphere, xxii, 4–6, 13, 26 rights, xxii, 5–7, 13, 19, 22, 56 role in society, xxi–xxii, 4–7, 13, 26, 29, 32, 38, 75–76, 80, 166–70, 174 upper-class, 6, 18, 171, 179 working-class, 18, 26, 57, 143 see also abused wives, femininity Women’s Political Association, 13, 27, 43, 76, 173 women’s suffrage, 5–7, 19, 22, 56 work, unwaged, 6, 8–9, 26, 30, 127 waged, xxii, 3–6, 26–27, 51, 61, 63–64, 66, 96–98, 112, 134, 137, 140, 145, 150, 152, 154, 159, 170, 173 Young Men’s Christian Association, 67, 100

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