Recovering the Past
Recovering The Past is a unique photographic exhibition of 25 thought provoking images and accompanying text.
Through thousands of dedicated cemeteries and memorials, society rightly remembers the men who died in the battles of the Great War. For its embattled survivors, the war-widows and orphans, and the mothers who grieved for lost sons, a very different story exists. With no such commemorative sites dedicated to the millions of these men, women and children who endured great personal suffering from the war in the years after the Armistice, their plight has been all but forgotten.
Recovering The Past raises the profile of these people, and in doing so, has given them a long overdue and much deserved voice.
Take Jim McPhee from Drouin, Victoria; a veteran of Gallipoli and the Western Front, interviewed about his wartime experiences over fifty years after the Armistice, he said:
“We thought we managed alright, kept the awful things out of our minds, but now I’m an old man they come out from where I hid them. Every night.”
