Noble Alexander Black was an office boy before he went to war. Raised in the pleasant seaside suburb of Manly, it was said he was spoilt as a child; a bit too bookish for his own good, leading too sheltered an existence. But France changed all of that. Black was just 18 years old when he enlisted. Despite his tender years, the young bombardier was sent into the thick of the fighting and soon gained a commission.

Then, in November 1917, Lieutenant Black was gassed and caught by a shell blast.

Sent home medically unfit, Black was no longer suited to clerking work in the city. The country air would do him good, the doctors said, and he was encouraged to try a new life as a grazier. Black married a Mudgee girl and took up a soldier settlement block.

Many thought the young man’s prospects were good. Although Black had barely nine months’ experience on the land, his father-in-law’s money and practical assistance would help him. The country, too, was ‘in very good heart’. An optimistic inspector, charged with valuing soldiers’ blocks, boasted Black’s run would comfortably carry five hundred sheep, and Black was just the fellow to work it. Five years of poor returns proved otherwise, and even the authorities admitted that sending a sick man to work poor land was nothing but ‘a gross blunder’.1

In 1931, Noble Black was hospitalised in Randwick on four separate occasions, in part because of the residual effects of gas. Medical notes record that as well as ‘harsh, vescular breathing sounds’ in his back:

[Black] states he has been washing out his right nasal passage every two days since April but it always makes him feel sick. He does not get much hassle or mucous away but it is always mucky.2

Alongside this rapid physical decline was a worsening in what medical staff called Black’s ‘mental condition’. An attending doctor noted:

This man was admitted in a very nervous and jumpy state. At the slightest sound or even the electric light being turned on or off, he threw his arms up trying to escape. He could not walk without assistance. His legs seem to have lost all power.3

Black was described as ‘queer in manner’, given to ‘fits of crying’, stammering and nightmares. He also experienced hallucinations, during which he relived the traumas of the trenches. ‘He thought he could see ghosts,’ the doctor noted, ‘he was . . . throwing himself about in a frightened state . . . At times he is very violent.’ Having failed to build a new life for himself on the land, Noble Black became one of the nervy, displaced men who haunted the cities and towns of interwar Australia.

Black often imagined violence committed against those he loved. ‘He started to . . .  yell out,’ a disturbed doctor noted, ‘when asked what was the matter he stated that men were stripping the flesh [off his wife’s body] and crunching and eating the bones.’4

Damaged men like Black posed both a problem and an embarrassment for the authorities. At first, they were hidden away in rigid isolation, sent to special soldiers’ wards in hospitals. Then they were locked up in institutions. In 1931, Black was finally certified. Admitted to Darlinghurst Reception House, he was diagnosed as ‘delusional, restless and depressed’.

Hidden away in rigid isolation: A view of Callan Park. This asylum for the mentally ill received hundreds of former soldiers in the postwar period, Noble Black included. Special facilities were provided by the repatriation authorities for ‘nervy’ and shell-shocked men. 4481_a026_000151 Callan Park Hospital, courtesy State Records Office, New South Wales

Throughout the 1930s, Black and thousands of others like him drifted in and out of one kind of institution or another – nerve homes, asylums, hostels for the homeless and incapacitated. These men, this deeply damaged generation, were effectively lost to the families and communities they came from. Mrs Black complained that her once attentive husband was now ‘moody and bad tempered’, given to violent outbursts against herself and her children. She lived in fear of the man she once loved. War had made a stranger of him.5

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Noble Black’s soldier settlement file State Records NSW: 12/7293, BLACK NA; his repatriation file NAA: C138/4 C29645, BLACK NA; his service dossier NAA: B2455, BLACK N A. For further reading about illness and disability after the war see Martin Crotty and Marina Larsson (eds) Anzac Legacies: Australians and the Aftermath of War (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010); and Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer, The Last Battle of the Great War: Soldier Settlement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).

1 Inspector’s Reports, Soldier Settlement file, State Records NSW: 12/7421.

2 Medical file, 1 August 1931, NAA: C138/4, C29645 BLACK NA.

3 ibid.

4 Medical files, 25 August, 1 September 1931, ibid.

5 Personal History notes, Callan Park Mental Hospital, ibid.