Review of 'Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918'. By Pat Jalland: Oxford University Press, Melbourne. 2002. vi + 378pp. £15.99.

Abstract

What is a typical Australian death? In this compelling history of death, grief and mourning in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth century in Australia, Pat Jalland focuses on a subject that has not been widely researched. In the introduction to her study Jalland explains that her emphasis on examining records of death at sea during the voyage to Australia, and her work dealing with death in the bush as well as death and destitute members of society, yielded distinctively Australian experiences that demonstrate very little continuity with European cultural norms. Moreover, as Jalland reveals in her final chapter of this book, the experience of the Great War of 1914–18 brought about a massive change in attitudes to death in Australia. It ruptured the traditionally held Christian culture of death that had dominated in Australia and it led to a decline in Christian mourning rituals. These rituals were already in decline, which Jalland partly attributes to the secularizing influence of rituals surrounding death in the bush.