Mnemosyne and Athena: Mary Booth, Anzac, and the Language of Remembrance in the First World War and After

Abstract

War remembrance, war grief, and war memorials have become an important part of the history of war, particularly war in the twentieth century, with its large numbers of dead. The sensitive nature of such commemorative activity is underlined by historians’ tendency to call upon poetic language to do it justice, such as using myth to counteract the more arid language of academic scholarship. The Greek goddess of memory, Mnemosyne, is sometimes invoked, and it seems particularly fitting that she is a female deity, given the role of women as mothers, wives, sweethearts, and sisters in the rituals surrounding war grief. But, as historians such as Jay Winter have observed, war remembrance (as opposed to memory pure and simple) can be a very political activity. This chapter examines the prominent role played by one woman, Mary Booth, in war remembrance in Sydney. It argues that Booth’s language of remembrance was commemorative but also reflected a political sensibility that developed through her wartime patriotic activity and continued to mature in the interwar years. For Booth, Athena, the goddess of military strategy, was perhaps more her inspiration than Mnemosyne.