Issue Details: First known date: 2018... 2018 Speaking for the Dead : Writing and the Unknown Australian Soldier
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'One third of the 60,000 Australians killed in the 1914-1918 war were unable to be identified. Known collectively as the ‘Unknown Soldier’ they were reburied in the postwar years with the inscription ‘Known unto God’. In 1993, the remains of one Australian killed on the Western Front were exhumed, repatriated and interred in the Hall of Memory at the Australian War Memorial. In 2007, Archie Weller published a poem titled the ‘Unknown Soldier’ (Weller 2007) which gives a name, voice, history and character to the soldier-larrikin and anti-hero whose bones lie there, effectively challenging former prime-minister Paul Keating’s eulogy which insists ‘We will never know who this Australian was’ (Keating 1993). Weller deploys prosopopoeia, which has been described as the ‘fiction of the voice-from-beyond-the-grave’ and a ‘master trope’ of poetic discourse. His verse undercuts notions of the sacred associated with the Unknown Soldier and creates presence from absence, making explicit a key motive of imaginative writing. This paper speculates on the potency of the ‘unknown’ and the way that texts like tombs assist concealment and revelation, remembering and forgetting, resurrection and erasure.' (Publication abstract)

Notes

  • Epigraph: “Like” and “like” and “like” – but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing?… 
    There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. 
    They place it very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. 
    The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; 
    we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation. 
    – Virginia Woolf, The Waves (2000: 90-91)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses vol. 22 no. 1 April Dallas J. Baker (editor), Craig Batty (editor), 2018 13995593 2018 periodical issue

    'Scholarly contributions to this issue of TEXT include a broad range of topics from reflective practice, improvisation, and collaborative writing as method, to questions of examination, experimentation, misinterpretation and activism.' (Source : Editorial)

    2018
Last amended 29 Aug 2024 12:25:19
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