James Newman Dann, a labourer from Broome, enlisted the day after the Anzacs landed at Gallipoli. He arrived on the Peninsula just in time for the August Offensive. Private Dann went over the top at Lone Pine and was wounded soon after. He was hospitalised in Malta and sent home to Australia in 1916.

Like many of his generation, James Dann wasn’t the sort to complain. ‘I still have the bullet in my body,’ he told the repat doctors, ‘[but] so long as I take things quietly I can keep going.’ Even so, Dann just wasn’t the man he once was: ‘I cannot do any [heavy] work [now] . . . any exertion brings on severe pains in the stomach, tremors and . . . lung trouble.’1

The Repatriation Department put Dann to work weaving baskets for the Red Cross. It was light work that even he could manage but it paid him barely a pound a week.

Put to work weaving baskets: An image of one of the workshops designed to teach ‘useful’ trades to disabled men. Dann was incapable of doing any heavier work, but many men viewed weaving baskets as a slight on their masculinity. This picture was published on Anzac Day – an ironic homage to the men who returned. Sunday Times, 25 April 1920 courtesy National Library of Australia.

Then, in 1921, they decided Private Dann might just be fit enough for farming. ‘Inspector Hadlington has interviewed Dann,’ an official from the soldier settlement scheme noted, ‘and considers him a likely man to make a success of the holding.’ The property was a poultry farm outside of Sydney, not too far from where Dann had grown up in Balmain. It was a five-acre block, one small enough (the Department reasoned) for even a weak man to manage. ‘[H]is experience is not great,’ the report concluded, and Dann’s health was not that great either.2

Within a year of taking up the block, Dann had developed pulmonary tuberculosis, a portion of his lung had collapsed and the bullet lodged in his body caused intense pain.

Medical reports chart the steady decline in his health: patient ‘short of breath’, one notes, ‘sleeps badly’, ‘sweats very freely’, and is ‘pale and anemic’. Dann was assessed as ‘totally incapacitated’ and his pension set accordingly. The likelihood of further improvement was deemed ‘problematical’.3

Sick and injured veterans were told that working the land would be a chance to regain their manhood and independence, and raising a few chooks was seen by some as therapeutic. But nervy men like James found otherwise. In 1923 he walked off the land.

‘I frequently have to rest,’ he explained:

the foreign body near my spine handicaps me considerably [and] I get severe backaches and pains in the neck and across the eyes after walking or sitting for any length of time.4

Dann lost not just his farm but also his family. At risk of infection from tuberculosis, his wife and two children were ‘living apart from him under a separation order’.

Tuberculosis was known as the wasting disease in the early twentieth century. It claimed the lives of thousands. In the hope of avoiding its spread, sufferers were often physically removed from their families. Many would die alone, far from the company of those they loved.

James and his family were eventually reunited. But, having survived the Great War, Dann then faced the Great Depression. Through the long dark years of the 1930s, he managed on a pension of a few pounds a week. He did what work he could for the Red Cross, but any heavy lifting brought ‘a stabbing pain’, sometimes for days on end.

James Dann died in 1953, almost thirty-five years to the day from when the Great War ended. Like hundreds of others, his last weeks were spent in the repat hospital in Concord, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on James Dann’s service dossier NAA: B2455, DANN J N; his soldier settlement file State Records NSW: 12/7293/08239; his repatriation file NAA: C138/4 C314427 DANN JD. For further reading on the soldier settlement scheme see Bruce Scates and Melanie Oppenheimer, The Last Battle of the Great War: Soldier Settlement in Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming) and Glenys Allison, ‘Shadows of the Great War: Group Soldier Settlement in Greater Sydney’ (PhD thesis, University of New England, 2011).

1 Record of evidence, 17 September 1917, NAA: C138/4, C314427, DANN JN.

2 Soldier Settlement file, State Records NSW: 12/7293.

3 Doctor’s notes, 16 May 1921, NAA: C138/4, C314427, DANN JN.

4 Soldier Settlement file, State Records NSW: 12/7293.