During the First World War traditional 19th century mourning rituals, such as having an extended period of bereavement where the widow wore black for years, started to be frowned upon socially.

It was considered inconsiderate to publicly dwell on a personal grief when so many others were going through the same thing, and the war still to be fought.

It became customary to grieve in silence out of the public eye, yet at the same time families were burning with questions.

Pictured here is a funeral procession in the regional Victorian city of Ballarat in 1900, fourteen years before the outbreak of the war.

During and after the War, families would discover new ways to mourn.

Monuments, honour rolls, avenues of honour, and cenotaphs within municipal districts and towns would be built to provide a focus for mourning relatives in the absence of a grave. Small mementos such as dog-tags, medals and letters of the dead would take on great private and personal significance.

Pictured here is the Bacchus Marsh Avenue of Honour, a tree-lined avenue planted in August 1918 in honour of locals who served in the First World War. Avenues such as this were planted throughout Australia and particularly in Victoria during and after the war.

As the war progressed concern built within society about how and whether graves of loved ones were being cared for overseas. There was also great anxiety across the British Empire whether the bodies of those missing in action would ever be found. For Australians, so far away from the burial sites, this became a great burden of worry.

Part of the concern was due to changing societal expectations around how the government should honour the dead. Prior to WWI, officers might have been memorialised with grave markers, but most front-line soldiers were buried unmarked, often in mass graves.

However by the early 20th century there was now a belief that every dead soldier should be equally treated and honoured with a gravestone.

The First World War would mark the first time in Australian and British military history that significant effort would be made to identify every soldier who fought and died.

Pictured here is the interim wooden grave marker of Private Clive John Thorne Bunbury, of Victoria.

A 23-year-old Gunner in the 102 nd Battery of the 2nd Australian Field Artillery Brigade, Clive died of wounds under the care of Australian Field Ambulance medics in West Flanders on the 14 January 1918. He was buried in the Irish House Cemetery near the village of Kemmel, halfway between Ypres and Armentieres. Pictures of temporary graves such as this were sent to Australian families so they could see how their loved ones’ graves were marked.

In 1917, as a result of ongoing graves registration campaigning by Sir Fabian Ware and others, the Imperial War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established to commemorate every soldier with permanent memorials or headstones, and to make no distinction between rank.

This created an immense challenge for authorities on how to appropriately care for and commemorate the war dead. Of the vast numbers of military dead from the war, not all bodies were able to be buried – even today a third of the Australian dead have never been found - and temporary cemeteries were scattered over a great swathe of Western Europe and elsewhere.

After the war ended every soldier’s grave would be allocated a permanent gravestone and those whose bodies were never found were listed on permanent memorials.

Pictured here is part of the Imperial War Graves Commission Headstones Personal Inscriptions Report for the Irish House Cemetery in Kemmel, Belgium. It shows the wording the family of Clive Bunbury requested for his permanent headstone. The family requested the words ‘DEARLY LOVED SON OF THOS. C. & LAURA BUNBURY OF BALLENDELLA, VICTORIA’ which are inscribed on his gravestone today.

The graves effort would require an army of volunteers to revisit the battlefields after the war’s end to find burial sites, replace headstones, dig up and rebury bodies and create new cemeteries.

Pictured here is Irish House Cemetery, Kemmel, today. Kemmel is a village in West Flanders (or West-Vlaanderan). The cemetery owes its name to a nearby farmhouse which was called "Irish House" by the troops. The cemetery, which is quite small, contains 117 Commonwealth graves including that of Gunner Clive Bunbury. Some of the dead were reburied here from other locations after the war ended. 40 of the burials are unidentified, meaning their remains were found but their names were never discovered.

All the gravestones, including Clive Bunbury’s, were standardised to a common format after the war ended.