I’m Joseph Edwards and I’m a student at the University of Wollongong, studying history
and politics and I’ve been working on the Kiama Libraries World War One walking App.
I took over the work from ken Donnellan, he did the bulk of collecting people’s stories.
What I came into was basically a collection of individual soldier’s stories, which had
been collected from their families. The Kiama Library has actually created
previous walking Apps so I got to actually talk to my colleagues and
kind of learn from their experiences on the do’s and don’ts, like, what works, what doesn’t.
I had to try and balance practicality, so it was doable, with as much history as possible.
Kiama’s contribution to the war was primarily at the beginning, the early parts of it,
and whether due to planning or coincidence, it kinda became a hub for a lot of the country towns,
more rural areas, and those young men going to war to meet, do their early preliminary
training together and then after being sent off to I believe Liverpool in Sydney for their
final training, they would be sent overseas. The first world war was purely volunteers.
The people of Australia generally organised themselves
in terms of who was to be a volunteer. So, it was very much community driven.
There were war committees in virtually every town in Australia,
but it was the community that organised all of the events.
From the Red Cross, to rifle associations, to business groups n adjust members of the
community who understood the sacrifices that were being made, but also understood
what Australia needed at that time. Which was volunteers.
So, every town did their own recruitment where they, to use the term, drummed up support.
Men just came out of the crowd, put their hand up and were widely applauded by the locals
for volunteering, for in those days, King and country.
Including Kiama who had a particularly good committee.
Kiama was a major port in those days, a major tree-felling area,
and a burgeoning rural farm area as well. So, it was a very important area.
The stories try to catalogue the time just before they left to go overseas to fight in the war,
their period during the war, and in some parts how their family reacted, while they were at home,
whether that be from receiving the letters or the sad news, and when they came back.
Working on the App helped bring awareness, helped really connect you to the personal
stories of people and remind you that, whilst it’s easy to get caught up in the
big numbers the fact that this was a war between countries, between continents,
that, ultimately these were just your everyday people, same as you and me, who went overseas.
These weren’t people that wanted to go to war. They did it out of a sense of duty.
A lot of the men were very young, like some tried to join at sixteen or seventeen.
They went for many many reasons, including having fun.
But that fun certainly changed and if you read the
great references put out by historians up and down the coast,
you’ll get to understand why they joined, but later on, what they were putting up with.
Before doing anything, I thought it was important to establish what actually happened, what was the
timeline and how did the community react. And then
from there, design the tour around that. At the earlier parts of the war
there was a lot of enthusiasm and support for the camp.
There was that sense of patriotism in the sense that Kiama was doing their part in support of
the war, however, over the course of the war, the enthusiasm, like many places in Australia,
began to wane because as the population of the town began to drop, like people were sending their
children, their sons away overseas, no one was there to work the farms, no one was there to
actually populate the town, keep the town going. So, eventually reality kinda sunk in.
I tried to cross over the past and the present through some photoshopping of images.
Sights I would have loved to include in the tour are no longer around.
Now the Letters from the Front were a section in the local paper.
Basically, the families would receive the letters and they would donate them to the
local newspaper to publish. These letters were letters from the
soldiers telling their experience, telling them like, what’s happening over there.
I always found them really interesting to read through because there was always that sense
of dualism in them where they want to tell their family what is actually happening over there, vent
the horrors that they were experiencing, but they never wanted to go too far because they didn’t
want to bring their family anymore stress. I think the other thing that also really
showed was a sense of community. The soldiers in these letters they’d
be asking like, how is Jim or how is Jenny down the road, like,
they expressed curiosity of how is Kiama going while I am over here?