Life with Birds: an archaeology of war and loss in the suburbs

Life with Birds is an investigation of the disjunction between public and private experiences of the Vietnam war and its aftermath. The creative non-fiction component of the thesis juxtaposes historical documents with family stories, photographs and memories in order to situate military history in the home and disrupt the binaries around dominant war tropes, such as the heroic/traumatic binary. It focuses on the everyday, the small scale and the ordinary as worthy of historical and cultural attention and aims to redress the silences and erasures in bureaucracies, archives and within families by reimagining or repopulating them with found materials, a combination of information, observation and guesswork. This lyric methodology was developed using concepts of Toni Morrison’s ‘literary archaeology’, Marianne Hirsch’s ‘postmemory’ and Hélène Cixous’ l’écriture féminine, as well as Claudia Rankine’s deployment of the lyric form in Citizen. The exegesis examines writings and discourses around war in Australia that erase the experiences and legacy of certain war veterans and their families, including mine. In it I discuss the disconnect between national mythologisation and commemoration of Anzac and Vietnam veterans and the lived experiences of veteran families, such as impacts of war trauma, bureaucratic intransigence and veteran health and suicide. This thesis highlights the ongoing negotiations between public and private lives in an attempt to broaden the conversation around the invisible or erased impacts of war in Australia, particularly for women and the children of war veterans