Several chapters focus on war disability and its impact on veterans, their families and the wider society. In 1920, about ninety thousand Australian ex-servicemen were on a war disability pension. Melanie Oppenheimer recalls the most severely disabled, ‘fated to a life of suffering’ but finding solace and support in residential institutions such as Sydney’s Graithwaite hostel, where their carers were Red Cross volunteers, usually ‘women from the leisured classes’. Marina Larsson examines the ‘disabled lives’ of family carers, typically mothers, wives and sisters. These women fought the war of the peace, yet were often ignored by repatriation authorities and the histories of war and its impact. As Larsson concludes, ‘the shamefulness of male dependence and the desire to affirm the heroism of Australia’s “brave disabled warriors”, particularly in the context of the burgeoning Anzac legend, saw a broader unwillingness to expose the reliance of soldiers upon kin support’.

Both Oppenheimer and Larsson emphasise the vital repatriation role of voluntary organisations and (women) volunteers, and note the limits of government support and widespread hostility to the ‘Repat’. Governments could probably never match the needs of ex-servicemen and their families, though in a careful revision of the early history of the RSL, Martin Crotty explains the power of ex-service organisations in twentieth-century Australia and their success in prising war pensions and other support from tardy governments.

In the Great War, more than a third of Australia’s war dead were listed as ‘missing’. Jen Hawksley recovers the extraordinary story of the ‘unknown patient’ at Callan Park Mental Asylum in Sydney – found wondering and confused behind the lines in France with no identification except an Australian hat – and the excruciating agony and hope of families who came to the asylum just hoping that he might be their son, their husband, their brother. Bruce Scates explores the practical and ethical challenges posed by the recent discovery of the Australian missing of Fromelles, and the issues it raises about mourning and commemoration in Australian today. Scates notes the important distinction between individual memory and the social phenomenon of remembrance through which versions of the past are articulated, transmitted and contested within family, community and nation.

Recent critics of the Anzac legend berate the sentimental nationalism of young backpackers wrapped in Australian flags at Gallipoli, and the use and abuse of Anzac stories by politicians. Scates shows how the Howard government did conscript the missing of Fromelles, but he also appeals for a more nuanced understanding of inter-generational family remembrance of Australians at war. Though the Anzac legend has a powerful and often limiting grip upon Australian war history and memory, it is a complex phenomenon and is not simply imposed from above. Individuals and families sometimes find space, within and even against the Anzac legend, to carve out alternative meanings for war and its aftermath.

Other chapters examine the impact of war upon Australian gender roles and relations. Janette Bomford traces the return of Australian World War II prisoners of war, and explains why POWs and their wives were so keen to recreate the postwar suburban domestic idyll of ‘a wife, a baby, a home and a new Holden car’. Frank Bongiorno unpicks the ‘remaking of Australian sexuality’ during and after the two world wars. Wartime circumstances, both overseas and on the home front, disrupted sexual norms and stretched the resources and attitudes of authorities seeking to control ‘sexual misbehaviour’. Yet Bongiorno concludes that war ‘unsettled but did not destroy the sexual double standards that demanded chastity of women while assuming that men’s sexual urges needed a regular and “natural” – that is, female – outlet’.

These are Australian studies, but at their best they are informed by comparative international research. Chris Dixon considers the impact of American popular culture upon Australian Vietnam War remembrance. Though Australian and US experience of Vietnam differed in significant ways, Vietnam veterans in both countries came to believe that they were neglected or ill-treated upon return (Dixon shows that was mostly not the case in Australia). Veteran disaffection fired later demands for recognition and a ‘proper’ welcome home. Craig Barrett shows how POW claims for reparation from the Japanese were stymied in the 1940s by the Australian government’s acceptance of America’s Cold War alliance with anti-communist Japan, and that a second, unsuccessful reparation campaign in the 1980s was shaped by new international attitudes about reparation and recognition as well as parochial unease about Japanese investment in Australia.

Two final chapters explore war’s aftermath for Australian servicemen and their families in the twenty-first century. Damien Hadfield explains how war ‘stressors’ have changed with new ways of war and new types of conflict and peacekeeping, and Peter Murphy argues that post-deployment and return can be more stressful for servicemen (and their families) than overseas deployment. For veterans, families and society, the most significant battles are often fought in the aftermath of war. These two Australian Defence Force psychologists show how lessons from the present can suggest new ways of understanding the past.