Those We Forget by Noonan David;

Author:Noonan, David;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2014-05-09T00:00:00+00:00

In 1936 the Lyons government passed legislation to introduce a ‘Service Pension’ for returned men aged over sixty and women over fifty-five years of age in the impoverished circumstances (determined by a means test), those deemed permanently unemployable, and those suffering tuberculosis whether war caused or not.

A plot of the recorded years of the soldiers’ pension applications as evidenced in their Attestation Papers will demonstrate the rise in these application numbers in response to those public inquiries and the dates of changing pension entitlements. This will challenge the strength of the hypothesis that it was the economic hardship of the depression that precipitated an increase in the number of returned soldiers seeking some form of supplementary income.

The many soldiers’ records cited and examined in this chapter, which represent a small number of the total, have been presented to facilitate the examination of the finer details contained in the records that required interpretation necessary to carry out this analysis. Disagreement with these interpretations may arise for some but the overall impact of any disagreement on the end result will be minor when compared to the enormity of the extent of total AIF casualties of the First World War. The interpretations may end up in different boxes but the totals will remain the same. The examples cited here are an ominous sign of what these total casualties will prove to be.

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