War remains: contributions of the Imperial War Graves Commission and the Australian War Records Section to material and national cultures of conflict and commemoration

The Imperial (subsequently the Commonwealth) War Graves Commission (IWGC) was established in 1917 comprising member countries of the former British Empire. The organisation was charged with providing appropriate memorials to commemorate the Empire’s war dead, individually and equally, without regard for military rank, class or nationality. This was no easy task given the numbers of dead from multiple theatres of war, the variety and oftentimes competing demands of imperial and national war offices, and the uncertain aesthetics arising from individually attuned and publically oriented commemorative intentions. Equally caught up in the mix of agencies and design practices were hordes of war trophies, captured artillery and military relics retrieved from battlefields across Europe, items carefully catalogued and preserved by the British War Office (BWO) and offspring agencies to provide artefacts for building memorials in Commonwealth states. This paper describes the work of the IWGC during and immediately following the years of the First World War. It relates the Commission’s activities building war cemeteries in view of changing geopolitical circumstances and commemorative conventions. The paper highlights tensions that appeared in the near routine collection of trophies for memorials and war cemeteries between British imperial offices and those of dominions and former colonies, specifically the Australian War Records Section which gained independence from the BWO in May 1917. The paper examines the mutual engagement of war’s material culture with patterns of sentiment shaped by mass conflict, an engagement mediated by administrative practices of war and remembrance.     

Homophobic Bullying and Same-Sex Desire in Anglo-American Schools: An Historical Perspective

SUMMARY

Homophobic bullying has come into new prominence given its alleged connection to several recent acts of school violence. This article traces the historiography of homophobic bullying, both in recent years and with reference to the original era of concern over this problem, Victorian England. As can be seen through novels and autobiographies of school life, Victorians linked bullying and sexuality in several important ways. Their traditional understanding actually supported many acts of bullying as a way to teach boys accepted codes of masculine behavior. In the late- and post-Victorian era, growing scientific investigation into human sexual behavior and increasing openness about homosexuality changed this picture to some extent, leading writers to understand bullying as a product of the bully's repressed same-sex desires. Both these views persist today and provide a stimulating context for present-day investigations of homophobic bullying.     

The Cultural Legacy of Makassar Stone in East Timor

During research on the archaeology and ethnohistory of fortified settlements in East Timor, a series of old graves was recorded with masonry features that local Timorese referred to as ‘Makassar stone’ (M: Batu Makassar, or Makassar mataru in the Fataluku vernacular). Oral histories of Fataluku-speaking communities associate the grave styles with traders from Sulawesi who developed a major maritime network from the late sixteenth century. While the stone used in the Timorese graves is clearly of local origin, the use of similar stonework for grave construction in seventeenth-century Makassar graves in Sulawesi suggests the possibility of close links between the two societies, including the extension of Islamic influences into East Timor at this time. In the following paper, we evaluate a range of evidence for these associations, including a seventeenth-century Islamic burial of a high-born Sulawesi woman near the port of Hera in East Timor.