Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business

As a universal constant, death offers a vast canvas for the historian and, as the French historians Philippe Ariès and Pierre Chaunu have argued, the assessment of attitudes towards death can reveal the character of a society. This important book considers the changing emotional culture related to death and grieving in Australia. There is a grim elegance about Pat Jallard's central thesis. Three paired themes are interwoven across her account: demography and religion; memory and gender; and war and medicine. It is, however, the last couplet, she argues, which provides the real motor of change in the twentieth century in the relationship of Australians to death and dying. The decades between 1914 and 1970 saw the ‘denial of death’ (p. 20), a paradigm of suppressed private sorrow, which privileged stoicism in the face of loss. This cultural shift was powerfully shaped by the impact of two world wars on a young country, but was further confirmed by the century's major medical developments, especially during the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, the role of technologically advanced medical practice, she suggests, became as powerful in the contemporary history of death as Christian religion had been in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the doctor's increasing ability to prolong life had the effect of casting death as a ‘failure’, an awkward and alien experience to be relegated discreetly to a hospital ward. Yet medicalisation and institutionalisation brought their own reaction. Jalland is particularly skilful in tracing the tense relationship between the goals of the euthanasia and palliative care movements, both of which signalled growing public anxiety over the rights and wishes of the terminally ill.