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The Rose of No Man’s Land
Audio
A sentimental song composed as a tribute to Red Cross battlefield nurses.
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Sydney Marches to Remember
Video
With their white, starched uniforms and red crosses on their foreheads, 2000 members of the Junior Red Cross make a startling presence at the eleventh anniversary of Anzac Day in Sydney.
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Anzac football in London
Video
During their war service, Australian troops organised Australian Rules football matches across Europe. The highest profile matches were played in the United Kingdom but one-off matches were also played in other countries, including Belgium and France in 1919.
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With the Aid of the Red Cross
Video
Veterans returning in wheelchairs and with missing limbs gave Australians at home their first sight of the true cost of modern warfare.
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Gallipoli’s wounded return to Wellington
Audio
On 15 July 1915 the transport ship Willochra brought the first group of men wounded in the Gallipoli campaign back to a civic reception in Wellington. Seeing the bandaged and traumatised men paraded in the city’s Town Hall made a big impact on young Max Riske, who was taken to the reception by his mother. Sixty years later, he vividly recalled how the experience changed opinions about the war for him and many other Wellingtonians.
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The walking wounded return home
Video
New Zealand soldiers board a ship. It may be a hospital ship returning them to New Zealand, as some of the men are visibly wounded, using crutches and walking sticks. A civilian woman can be seen in the opening frames, indicating that this scene may have been shot in England.
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Schoolgirl life and love during the war
Audio
There was a sharp divide between rich and poor in New Zealand at the time of the First World War. Marjorie Lees, the daughter of an upper-class Wellington family, was attending boarding school in 1914. Young women of her social status faced a restricted life, with very few options apart from marriage once they left school. But like young people from all walks of life, she was soon to experience the heartbreak of war.
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Mrs Barnard’s gingernuts
Audio
Six of Helena Barnard’s eight sons went away to fight, and she sent them care packages that included the gingernut biscuits she used to bake for them to take on tramping trips. The gingernuts were a welcome change from the notorious Gallipoli diet of tinned bully beef and ship’s biscuits. They lasted well and quickly became favourites with the boys at the front. Many wrote to Mrs Barnard asking her to provide their own mums with her recipe. Her gingernuts became famous and are quite possibly the original ANZAC biscuit. This interview was recorded around the time of Helena Barnard’s 100th birthday.
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Treating Gallipoli’s wounded – Dr Agnes Bennett
Audio
The Australian-born and New Zealand-based doctor Agnes Bennett refused to let routine sexism keep her out of the war. She offered her services to the New Zealand Army as soon as war broke out but was turned down because she was a woman. Undeterred, she paid her own passage to Europe, intending to join the French Red Cross. In May 1915 she was sailing through the Red Sea when word reached the ship of the casualties arriving in Egypt from the Gallipoli campaign. She disembarked at the next opportunity and began working in the over-stretched military hospitals of Cairo, with the status and pay of an army captain. Dr Bennett recalls her wartime experiences in this recording, made in 1959.
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Verdun Buns – a Red Cross cookbook
Audio
Ena Ryan was born in the prosperous Wellington suburb of Kelburn in 1908. In this 1985 interview she leafs through a cookbook produced during the war as a fundraiser for the Red Cross. The recipes and advertisements reveal the social upheaval the war brought to communities back home, from florists advertising speedy service for last-minute weddings (before men departed overseas) to recipes for cooking for invalids. Some recipes were contributed by the public, and Ena is appalled that one woman named her recipe ‘Verdun buns’, after the horrifingly destructive 1916 Battle of Verdun.
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Clowns and kids raise funds for war effort
Video
Clowns boxing and performing ‘pratfalls’, children singing, dancing and marching in formation – this was the crowd-pleasing entertainment at a Red Cross fundraiser at Bondi Junction, Sydney in 1915. The Australian Red Cross had been formed just a year earlier, at the outbreak of the war. It concentrated on raising funds to support the war effort by organising public events such as the ‘fete’, or festival, seen here. This newsreel clip was originally silent and a popular brass band tune of the period, The Gippsland March, has been added to the soundtrack.
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Fundraising for the war effort, Sydney
Video
Various wartime fundraising and recruitment activities are seen in this film from about 1916, shot from outside the General Post Office in Martin Place, Sydney, after rain. In pavilion-style tent stalls, Red Cross workers sell ribbons, flowers and other produce. The top-hatted Governor of NSW, Sir Gerald Strickland, walks among the crowds. Many AIF troops are shown in this clip, their humour in evidence in a shot of a young male civilian being ‘accosted’ and compelled to enlist, while others pretend to take his measurements for a uniform.
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Comforts for the troops
Video
Throughout the war Federal Government House, the magnificent Melbourne residence of Australia’s Governor-General, was a central depot for Red Cross supplies for Australian troops serving overseas. Medical supplies and clothing, and small luxuries such as soap, tobacco and fruitcakes (known as ‘comforts’) were donated by the women of Victoria and delivered to Government House. Its ballroom became a warehouse and factory where goods were received, made, checked and despatched by volunteers, and the stables were converted into a workshop for making furniture and crutches. This silent film clip shows the first shipment of Red Cross supplies being loaded on to motorised and horse-drawn vehicles and leaving Government House for despatch to Australian soldiers in Egypt.
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Sheep dogs & medieval knights, Australian Gazette
Video
From a sheepdog trial to a costume parade in support of the French Red Cross – the weekly Australian Gazette newsreel captured a slice of Australian life through the war years.
This example from mid-1915 starts with a sheepdog trial at a showground, followed by shots of the British barque Inverness-Shire, dismasted by wild weather off the coast of Tasmania. The third segment (unfortunately damaged by deterioration of the nitrate film) records a parade heading down Collins St in Melbourne in aid of the French Red Cross. The clip ends with the mammoth funeral procession in Sydney for the great Australian batsman Victor Trumper.
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Household pets join the forces
Audio
Ena Ryan of Wellington was a young girl when war was declared in August 1914, but she vividly recalled the excitement of those days. In this 1985 interview she describes watching the Main Body marching through the streets of Wellington to the departing ships. She noticed that one of the men had a kitten buttoned into his tunic. Once they arrived at the battlefront the men adopted other pets, including dogs, donkeys and goats found in and around battlefields. These animals helped to keep up the mens’ spirits, and some became official mascots.