‘I am wretchedly sad’: Bertha Monash’s letters and women on the first world war home front

Résumé détaillé

The letters Bertha wrote to her father John Monash reveal the agonising struggle of women on the home front.

Bertha Monash – the daughter of battle commander John Monash – was 21 at the outbreak of the first world war, and an eager participant in Australia’s war effort.

Together with tens of thousands of other Australian women, Bertha’s voluntary patriotic work involved knitting socks, sewing shirts, organising fundraising events, making warhorse bandages and assembling comfort parcels to send to the front.

But her most regular patriotic work saw Bertha volunteering for the Red Cross as a civilian orderly in a south Melbourne rest home for returned wounded soldiers. Determined to support the war effort however she could, she wrote to her father, “it’s all a woman can do in these times”.

My new research into the letters Bertha wrote to her father reveals the agonising struggle of women on the home front to remain committed to the war effort and not be overwhelmed by its costs.

Bertha’s patriotic work was built upon an intense emotional battle. With her father, two cousins and many friends at the front, the war represented a time of relentless fear, loneliness and sadness.

When her friend Harry was killed in action, she expressed herself desolately to her father:

Such open expressions of pain were, however, rare. For the most part, Bertha worked hard to disguise her emotions:

We see in Bertha’s letters a determination to prioritise her father’s emotional state above her own. Following the Gallipoli landings in April 1915, Bertha wrote,

Meeting loss and tribulation with stoicism was seen as women’s duty. Some newspaper articles of the time even stated that women on the home front had a responsibility to be cheerful as this would affect the outcome of the war.

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