Book of Remembrance
A signature in a collection of autographs reveals a story of Indigenous service that extends from Australia to Canada and Trinidad.
The legacy of Indigenous Australian service in the First World War has long been overlooked, in part due to wartime policies that initially restricted service to those of ‘substantially European’ descent. Australia had been settled on the legal fiction of
terra nullius, which ignored the rights of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who had inhabited the land for thousands of years. Indigenous Australians were not recognised as full citizens until 1967. As a result, attestation papers rarely explicitly referred to a soldier as ‘Indigenous’. Some recruits were rejected because of their race, but other enlistment papers refer obliquely to a recruit’s ‘dark complexion’.
A memorial plaque to a soldier was recently bought by his hometown museum and is today s Object of the Week. TODAY’S object is a poignant plaque, given to the family of a First World War soldier following his death in the conflict. Private Wilfred Harrison was just 28 when he died in the University War Hospital, Southampton in June 1917. Memorial bronze plaques were issued after the end of the First World War to the next of kin of all British Empire service personnel who lost their lives during the conflict. Now, Thanks to the TWV Roe Trust, Whitby Museum have purchased the bronze memorial plaque awarded to the soldier, of Cleveland Terrace, Whitby.