Australia’s district Honour Rolls of AIF volunteers are unique World War I sources – very different from other contemporary war memorials world-wide, which have been investigated at some length by historians. Typically constructed after the conflict, war memorials have traditionally been treated as architectural structures needing to be interpreted, as manifestations of mass bereavement. By contrast, the long columns of names that constitute a community’s 1^st AIF Honour Roll have effectively been ignored. Yet these products of the war years have the potential to enable a much more precise understanding of the nature of Australia’s war experience.

Why, and how, beginning around mid-1915, Australian communities set about compiling their AIF Honour Rolls constitutes an informative study: any presumption that whole communities were in mourning, intent upon paying condolences to those who were being killed-in-action, provides a very narrow, indeed deeply flawed, understanding of the process. It began with the intention of memorialising the first few locals who had died supposedly heroic deaths. But rapidly it became apparent that this did not accord with community expectations: what was wanted was for each and every local volunteer to have their names recorded for posterity.