Film - Documentary, Wind & Sky Productions, 'The Missing', 2019

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[Dr Bart Ziino]

What the First World War delivered to people in Australia was an unprecedented encounter with mass death. And it was not just unprecedented in its scale it certainly was enormous it was also unprecedented in terms of what had happened to those on the battlefields in terms of the loss of their bodies being unrecoverable. If still today we don't have a third of those who were lost in that war then you know try and imagine that after the 1918 when those numbers were even higher. I mean this really is something extraordinary to try and come to terms with both on a military level but also on a personal level.

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[Professor Melanie Oppenheimer]

So when you say farewell to your loved ones on the wharf and you know they enlist in the AIF and off they go you can't imagine that they're going to be mislaid or missing. So it's the scale of what happens at Gallipoli first off and then later in the Western Front. It's the nature of the warfare and that the military then haven't got the capacity to actually pick up the bodies bury the dead keep a note. So it's the chaos of the Gallipoli campaign writ large.

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[Dr Bart Ziino]

Okay there it's a couple of main weapons in the First World War the machine gun and high-explosive artillery and they can destroy human bodies. You know the Western Front can chop up people but Gallipoli is a situation where people can be lost really quite easily. Especially in that first series of battles at the landing.

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[Professor Melanie Oppenheimer]

Because of the nature of the campaign they have to take all the people - the wounded - off the peninsula, put them onto boats. Often they have far too many wounded. They have too few boats, so those who died on the boats are just buried at sea.

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[Dr Bart Ziino]

And we have these enormous battles in which people's bodies are simply destroyed or lost, or especially if you are in a losing battle bodies remain on the battlefields, unrecoverable and even where cemeteries exist, where you can bury people, sometimes the fighting moves over those cemeteries as well and destroys those things outright. In the Australian context alone we have thousands upon thousands of men that go missing. It's a real problem now what do you do when you cannot discover where these people are? On the battlefield amongst the military, well, the assumption is generally that they're dead. There's not too much doubt about this. But for people at home of course there's enormous doubt.

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[Professor Oppenheimer]

By January 1916 all the states have their own Red Cross Information Bureau run by lawyers.

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[Dr Ziino]

It's an important service it really is I mean the military for all they would like to do are in the game of fighting a war. They're not in the game of solving people's broken hearts, but the Wounded and Missing Bureaus of the Red Cross are there to bridge that gap, to make the leap from lost on the battlefield to reporting back to families.

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[Professor Oppenheimer]

The Red Cross go, are there with the troops. They and the other patriotic funds the Salvation Army, the YMCA, who look after the fit and well soldiers, they're all there. The Red Cross's remit is to look after the wounded and sick. So they realized very quickly that they need to set up their own Australian bureaus. They have people in Egypt, they set up the Bureau there, run by Vera Deakin who is very well known, the young Victorian daughter of a former Prime Minister. And when the Gallipoli campaign is concludes that Bureau then moves to London. And their searchers who work largely in the hospitals have this extraordinary list of details that they want to know and they want to know it because they know that the people at home want to know it. So they will take this information they will create a card. So as you can imagine there are hundreds of thousands of these cards. And then they will commence their search. It's like it's detective work. It's like a jigsaw puzzle trying to piece together the last moments of this individual. Who was around him? They're trying to find the people around him who can witness. They need eye witnesses. And this process can take months. It can take years. The bureau they don't close down until 1919 1920 so they're going on after the war, because of course in the aftermath of war in 1919 there are many thousands of these missing cases, and that's when the Army's coming through periodically and saying right, fine, this person has to have died on Gallipoli. Dead.

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[Dr Ziino]

It's a shocking thing to happen to these people. What they looked for were people who would act for them and that was the the real importance of a group like the Australian Graves Detachment or the Australian Grave Services. That was the work they were doing not just bringing in bodies and putting them in the ground carefully and reverently they were working for the bereaved at home who couldn't do that job themselves.

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[Professor Oppenheimer]

If he died here in Australia there would be a funeral you would have a proper... you would have a body you would have a grave you would have a headstone. And across the Western Front there were a lot of these makeshift crosses that were made that after the war they reinterred these people into the set graveyards.

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[Dr Ziino]

What you have after the war thousands of bodies in graves that are known but isolated, so you would recover those bodies and bring them in to consolidated cemeteries. Detachment workers are a bit of a mixed bag as far as I can tell. If you imagine after the war most people just want to go home and they've got lots of different reasons for being there, and they have to remember those reasons for being there because the work is so terrible. And some of them are finding friends they know these people at times. At Gallipoli you have you know it's so quiet out there there's no one else really on the peninsula and yet you know people are writing 'I hear things in the night. Terrible things.' It does result in quite significant alcohol abuse and friction between members of that organization. The authorities so the people in charge are aware of this, they know that it's hard work, there's a certain amount of leeway given to those men. But the important thing here is that there were Australians on the battlefields for three years after the war.

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[Professor Oppenheimer]

I actually think that Australia was in mourning after World War One. I think the community's in mourning, is suffering what today we would call post-traumatic stress. The whole society. No one achieves closure. I think this is a misnomer. This word it doesn't really describe anything that's happening to people after that encounter with mass death. It just doesn't work that way.