Museums, History and the Intimate Experience of the Great War

The Great War of 1914-1918 was fought on the battlefield, on the sea and in the air, and in the heart. Museums Victoria’s exhibition World War I: Love and Sorrow exposed not just the nature of that war, but its depth and duration in personal and familial lives. Hailed by eminent scholar Jay Winter as "one of the best which the centenary of the Great War has occasioned", the exhibition delved into the war’s continuing emotional claims on descendants and on those who encounter the war through museums today. Contributors to this volume, drawn largely from the exhibition’s curators and advisory panel, grapple with the complexities of recovering and presenting difficult histories of the war. In eleven essays the book presents a new, more sensitive and nuanced narrative of the Great War, in which families and individuals take centre stage. Together they uncover private reckonings with the costs of that experience, not only in the years immediately after the war, but in the century since.

Joy Damousi is Professor of History at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (1999) and co-editor (with Paula Hamilton) of A Cultural History of Sound, Memory and the Senses (2017).Deborah Tout-Smith is Senior Curator, Home & Community, in the Society & Technology Department of Museums Victoria. She has curated major exhibitions including World War I: Love & Sorrow (2014), and curates Museum Victoria’s Military History, Home & Community and Childhood collections. Deborah is Vice-chair of the Board of ICOM Australia.Bart Ziino is Senior Lecturer in History at Deakin University. He has published widely on the politics of memory and commemoration. He is the author of A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (2007), and editor of Remembering the First World War (2015).