scholarly journals "The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Anne Walker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Great War ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Quantitative Sample ◽  
Post War ◽  
Wage Earners

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

scholarly journals "The Living Death": The Repatriation Experience of New Zealand's Disabled Great War Servicemen

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Elizabeth Anne Walker
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Disabled Persons ◽  
Great War ◽  
Cultural Issues ◽  
Civilian Life ◽  
War Memory ◽  
Active Service ◽  
Quantitative Sample ◽  
Post War ◽  
Wage Earners

<p>The New Zealand government committed over 100,000 men to active service during the Great War of which around 40,000 returned injured. Due to the severity of their disabilities many wounded servicemen required ongoing medical care and were unable to return to their former employment. New Zealand introduced a variety of repatriation initiatives during the 1920s and 1930s to aid the Great War’s struggling wounded soldiers and restore them to their traditional masculine role as independent wage-earners and useful citizens. ‘The Living Death’ uses a variety of qualitative sources including state-based documents, newspapers, journals and oral history as well as a quantitative sample from military personnel files. Using these sources this thesis explores the medical treatment, pensioning and employment assistance offered by state and society to disabled soldiers in order to elucidate how New Zealand’s wounded ex-servicemen experienced and negotiated the cultural issues of disability, masculinity and citizenship in the post-war period. I argue that these men were identified as a class apart from other disabled persons in the immediate aftermath of the war, but that this identity began to fade once the economic conditions worsened, war memory faded and as some wounded ex-servicemen failed to complete a successful transition into civilian life.</p>

scholarly journals The Reality of Return: Exploring the Experiences of World War One Soldiers after Their Return to New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Coralie Clarkson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Idealistic View

<p>The focus of this thesis is the lives of New Zealand's returned Great War soldiers. This thesis explores the experiences of men who did not successfully repatriate as a counterpoint to the experiences of those who did, and argues that men's return to New Zealand and their post war lives were shaped by many factors including access to employment and good health. Many returned soldiers were able to resume their lives on return and led relatively happy and successful lives. For these men, their success seems to have come from the ability to find or resume employment, good health, family support, and financial support. For those who did not, one or more of these factors was often missing, and this could lead to short or long term struggle. The 1920s form the backdrop of this thesis, and were a time of uncertainty and anxiety for returned men and their families. The disillusionment of the 1920s was exacerbated by men's nostalgia for New Zealand which they built up during the war. Tens of thousands of men returned to New Zealand from war with dreams and hopes for the future. The horrors of war had given men an idealistic view of peaceful New Zealand, and dreams of home comforts and loved ones had sustained these men through their long absence. For those who returned to find life difficult, the idealistic view of New Zealand as a land of simplicity and happiness would have been hard to maintain. Chapter 1 demonstrates the idealisation of New Zealand and 'home' built up by soldiers and their families during the war. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 use the lenses of employment, illness – specifically tuberculosis – and alcoholism to argue that for many men and their families, the 1920s were an extension of the anxieties and separation of the Great War years. Sadly, for some, their lives were forever marred by the spectre of war and what their absence from home cost them.</p>

After Life – Expressions of Mourning in Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-26
Author(s):  
Juliane Römhild
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Great War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Responses ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

Like many women, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth von Arnim lost members of their immediate family in the Great War, and both writers worked through their loss in writing. Although their work is stylistically and thematically different, the expressions of grief in their work shares certain characteristics with other (post-)war writing. This article examines the literary responses to personal to loss in von Arnim’s novels Christine and In the Mountains, as well as Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and “The Fly” with the help of their private diaries and letters.

Reports of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, 1911–14, and of the British-Australian-New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition, 1929–31

Polar Record ◽  
1938 ◽  
Vol 2 (15) ◽  
pp. 60-61
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Government Printing ◽  
Great War ◽  
Antarctic Expedition ◽  
Commonwealth Government ◽  
Antarctic Research ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War

It is pleasant to be able to record that the printing of the results of the Australasian Antarctic expedition of 1911–14 has been resumed. It will be remembered that the publication of these reports was greatly interfered with by the Great War. During the post-war years the reports were slowly issued from the Government Printing Office, Sydney; but, in 1930, in the absence of financial provision for continuing the work, the printing of the manuscripts was suspended. A resumption of the printing of these reports has now become possible through the good offices of the Minister of Education, Mr D. H. Drumond, largely owing to generous assistance from the Commonwealth Government.

scholarly journals The Reality of Return: Exploring the Experiences of World War One Soldiers after Their Return to New Zealand

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Coralie Clarkson
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Good Health ◽  
Great War ◽  
World War ◽  
World War One ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Idealistic View

<p>The focus of this thesis is the lives of New Zealand's returned Great War soldiers. This thesis explores the experiences of men who did not successfully repatriate as a counterpoint to the experiences of those who did, and argues that men's return to New Zealand and their post war lives were shaped by many factors including access to employment and good health. Many returned soldiers were able to resume their lives on return and led relatively happy and successful lives. For these men, their success seems to have come from the ability to find or resume employment, good health, family support, and financial support. For those who did not, one or more of these factors was often missing, and this could lead to short or long term struggle. The 1920s form the backdrop of this thesis, and were a time of uncertainty and anxiety for returned men and their families. The disillusionment of the 1920s was exacerbated by men's nostalgia for New Zealand which they built up during the war. Tens of thousands of men returned to New Zealand from war with dreams and hopes for the future. The horrors of war had given men an idealistic view of peaceful New Zealand, and dreams of home comforts and loved ones had sustained these men through their long absence. For those who returned to find life difficult, the idealistic view of New Zealand as a land of simplicity and happiness would have been hard to maintain. Chapter 1 demonstrates the idealisation of New Zealand and 'home' built up by soldiers and their families during the war. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 use the lenses of employment, illness – specifically tuberculosis – and alcoholism to argue that for many men and their families, the 1920s were an extension of the anxieties and separation of the Great War years. Sadly, for some, their lives were forever marred by the spectre of war and what their absence from home cost them.</p>

Reconstituting the International, 1918–1923

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay
Keyword(s):  
Seismic Events ◽  
Great War ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Meaning And Purpose ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Impact ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Do So ◽  
Lengthy Process

This chapter examines the post-war efforts of European socialists to reconstitute the Socialist International. Initial efforts to cooperate culminated in an international socialist conference in Berne in February 1919 at which socialists from the two wartime camps met for the first time. In the end, however, it would take four years to reconstitute the International with the creation of the Labour and Socialist International (LSI) in 1923. That it took so long to do so is a testimony to the impact of the Great War and to the Bolshevik revolution. Together, these two seismic events compelled socialists to reconsider the meaning and purpose of socialism. The search for answers sparked prolonged debates between and within the major parties, profoundly reconfiguring the pre-war world of European socialism. One prominent stake in this lengthy process, moreover, was the nature of socialist internationalism—both its content and its functioning.

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