One of the keenest childhood memories of David Meredith, narrator of George Johnston’s novel My Brother Jack (1964), is of the hall of his parents’ suburban home in Melbourne. It was full of prostheses, the artificial limbs of servicemen returned, maimed, from the Great War. The men are friends and former patients of Meredith’s parents. Her mother was a nurse, her father served in the First AIF. The scant historical regard that has been paid to these damaged men, and to their families, is rectified by Marina Larsson’s brilliant study of Shattered Anzacs. Her subject is the cohort of revenants who returned to Australia after the war – their bodies ruined, shell-shocked, infected with venereal disease and tuberculosis – and the families, institutions and government bureaucracies into whose hands they fell.

Larsson’s book complements Bart Ziino’s recent study, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (2007). Those graves, cemeteries and memorials became the focus of private grief and communal remembrance of the 60,000 Australian dead. Ziino notes especially ‘the great distance [that] separated grieving men and women from those they mourned’. In Shattered Anzacs, the story of the aftermath of the war is repatriated, along with scores of thousands of demobilised servicemen. One of the most telling observations in Larsson’s book concerns that figure of 60,000 dead, enshrined since Prime Minister Billy Hughes’s blustering at the Peace Conference in Versailles. Larsson shows how the real mortality rate of the Great War, the death toll directly if eventually consequent upon it, was much higher.