A history of Shakespeare in wartime could not be complete without including an object representing the only built memorial in London for Shakespeare’s Tercentenary of 1916, the Shakespeare Hut for servicemen on leave in London. However, material traces of this extraordinary building are extremely scarce. Focusing for the first time on the material and paradigmatic significance of one surviving object from this building and a sister document, this essay examines a paper programme that epitomizes the multilayered significance of women’s Shakespearean performance in wartime. This programme presents an evening of Shakespearean speeches, scenes, and songs, performed by diverse practitioners from theatre superstar Ellen Terry to a troupe of teenaged girls from Miss Italia Conte’s school. Terry kept a copy of this piece of ephemera for the rest of her life. The programme’s flimsy physical form (a small, folded piece of thin paper) reveals how necessary wartime austerity contrasts starkly with the cornucopia of star talent and entertainments presented within, reminding us of the ephemeral and uniquely transient nature both of wartime performance and of the specific fragility and rarity of material traces of women’s wartime Shakespeare production.

This story from the Korean War goes to the heart of the unique bond between Australian and New Zealand soldiers, one cemented in mutual respect, expressed by a fierce rivalry and a steadfastness to stand shoulder-to-shoulder against any foe, perceived or real. The old coat of arms for New Zealand carried the motto ‘Onward’ (also the motto of the 1 New Zealand Expeditionary Force during the First World War and of the 1 Royal New Zealand Infantry Regiment today). It is a motto of modest intent somewhat in keeping with the retiring, nocturnal and flightless kiwi emblazoned on the sleeves of members of the New Zealand Army.

Chapter 6 examines how veterans responded to Vietnamese war memory at four key sites: the War Remnants Museum, Hỏa Lò Prison Museum, Sơn Mỹ Memorial and Museum, and Long Tân. When veterans returned to Việt Nam, they discovered that the Vietnamese narrative of the “American War” rendered them perpetrators of atrocities or, at best, passive victims of imperialist warmongering nations. While some returnees embraced Vietnamese war memory, others rejected or challenged it, and many struggled with the tensions and contradictions between different versions of the war. Across national and ideological lines, veterans displayed a selective acceptance of Vietnamese war memory, isolating elements that corroborated their memories of war and rejecting the legitimacy of others. This chapter also considers varied response to the Vietnamese erasure of veterans’ wartime allies and concludes by examining how Australian returnees increasingly approached the site of Long Tân through the Australian tradition of “Anzac” pilgrimage.

In the space of thirty years the circumstances of Australian nationhood changed irrevocably. The country’s strategic dependence on Britain drew it into two wars that originated in European rivalry and together exhausted European supremacy. The first strained the political stability of the combatants and cut the flows of trade and investment that sustained their prosperity. The second destroyed their empires, leaving the continent in thrall to the two superpowers to its east and west. Britain, victorious in both wars, was perhaps the most diminished by their cumulative effects and its fading imperial certainties created doubt and division in Australia. Only as the second war spread to the Pacific, and Australia found itself isolated and in danger of invasion, came a belated recognition of the need to reconstruct the nation for changed circumstances.

On 25 April 1915, when John Simpson Kirkpatrick set foot on the Gallipoli peninsula as part of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), it is unlikely that he had an inkling of the frequency with which his story would be told, retold and mistold to generations of Australians. Nor is it likely he had any idea of the extent to which that story would grow, distort and become part of Australia’s national creation myth. The idea that the Australian nation was ‘born on the shores of Gallipoli’ through the sacrifice, endurance, initiative, resourcefulness, mateship and larrikinism of the Anzacs codified the First World War as a moment of national significance in the formation of an Australian identity. Kirkpatrick’s story is entirely enmeshed in this myth-making; as ‘Australia’s most famous stretcher-bearer’, he has come to embody both the ‘Anzac spirit’ and the work of the Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) in the First World War.1