From the day his son Mervyn was killed on the Sinai Peninsula, to the moment of his own death twelve years later, Justice H B Higgins set out to remember. He erected an ornate Celtic cross over the family tomb at Dromana in Victoria, typed and bound all Mervyn’s letters, framed his photographs and assembled his officer’s kit like a shrine in the family home. And between 1916, the year of Mervyn’s death, and 1924, when Henry Higgins at last stood by his son’s distant grave, the High Court judge also wrote one letter of inquiry, complaint or outright reprimand after another. Usually a soldier’s service dossier runs to a few dozen pages; the bare details of postings and promotions – Mervyn’s record swells to one hundred and forty-two pages.

The family tomb at Dromana: Higgins had this Celtic cross raised in memory of his son. Mervyn’s body is buried oceans away. This is a surrogate tomb for an absent body, but a place a family could come to grieve. Courtesy Ross McMullin.

For the father who loved him, Mervyn’s death was insurmountable. The letters of condolence, the caress of family and friends, even the sympathy of his King, all counted for nothing. ‘My grief has condemned me to hard labour for the rest of my life,’ Henry wrote, and that servitude of sorrow lessened little as one year folded into another.1

Reading Mervyn’s letters (as Higgins must have read and reread them) it is not hard to see why this boy was so treasured. The correspondence from Gallipoli, where Mervyn watched one mate after another die, conveys courage, compassion and dignity. ‘We are dug in like rabbits,’ the young man wrote, ‘the Turkish trenches [are] pretty close . . .  with only a sandbag barricade between us.’ But every letter home made light of the hardship and danger: ‘The climate suits me very well [though] our wardrobes are of course limited’; ‘The flies are very troublesome but on the whole we are very comfortable’; ‘We are having splendid weather and feeling quite pleased with life in general’. Reading between the lines reveals another story: days without a break from fighting in the line, ‘incessant’ bomb duels, poor food, little water, lives snatched away in an instant by snipers.

Lieutenant Higgins survived the suicidal charge at the Nek. He was one of the few officers to do so. Posted next to a bitter desert war in Palestine, his bravery earned him the admiration of his men and a mention in despatches. The correspondence ends abruptly in 1916. Mervyn’s last letter home is as tender and loving as his first, selflessly consoling a friend ‘cut up’ over the death of his brother. Then the voice of that ‘ever loving son’ was covered over by ‘the heavy sands’ of the Eastern desert.2

The death of a son is always tragic, but it was the waste of this war that most outraged Higgins. Mervyn was killed in brief but savage action against the Turks at El Magdhaba.The battle had limited strategic significance and Mervyn was shot whilst taking prisoners. It should have been a consolation that the young soldier died almost instantly. He felt ‘absolutely no pain’, a comrade wrote, and the body was guarded by his men until the time came for burial. They lowered their captain into the earth on Christmas Eve, burying him ‘right where he fell’. A rough wooden cross was raised and the padre read a service. But for the family back home, this swift death and hasty burial meant no last message, no final farewell. And everything done in the wake of Mervyn’s death – from the epitaph chosen for the makeshift cross, to the return of his belongings to wet, windswept Dromana – served to prolong and sharpen the grief of his father. The whole process of public memorialisation went seriously wrong in the case of Mervyn Higgins.

The first failings were easy to forgive. The family knew that weeks, sometimes months, would pass between the first cable confirming death and some ‘greater detail’ from the chaplain and fellow officers. But the wait was torturous and in the meantime Higgins wrote to the authorities, extracting every possible detail of his son’s service. And he longed for some token of his boy. Mervyn might not be coming home, but every day the family waited for the arrival of his kit.

When four boxes of belongings finally arrived in Melbourne, two were railed and carted all the way to distant Dromana (a holiday residence, closed out of season) and two were mislaid in the railway station at Mornington (the line stopped well short of Dromana). Higgins’ distress still howls from his hastily scribbled handwriting: first his son and then these ‘precious things’ had been lost in a kind of limbo. And all the authorities seemed capable of was ‘wooden inaction’:

The records people say that Dromana is my ‘registered address’; but it is not . . .  By a little care, the officials could have found that my proper address is Malvern. I learn that two of the four cases have reached my home in Dromana; but what of the other two? And why should I have the painful duty of carting about any of the boxes!3

But a little care seemed too much to ask of the authorities. Mervyn’s body was exhumed and re-interred on two different occasions; the cross that came to mark his grave denied him a soldier’s death (‘died of wounds’ was not quite the same as ‘killed in action’); absurd and rigid rules prevented the sending of Mervyn’s photograph to friends and family in England, and the Australian War Memorial even incorrectly recorded the action in which his life was taken.4

Seven years after his son’s death, Higgins finally secured permission to visit the grave. It was a journey of over 8000 miles and one an old, sick man was scarcely capable of undertaking. Arriving in that lonely corner of the Sinai Peninsula must have been a terrible moment. The cemetery at El Magdhaba was still a wasteland; water could not be had, the plots were stark and windswept and all the plants had perished. Higgins found no memorial to his son, the marble for the tombstone had still not arrived and the grave was marked only with a rough wooden cross. Mervyn lay buried in the ever-shifting sands of the desert – a grave forsaken at the corners of Empire.

The ever-shifting sands of the desert: Kantara War Memorial Cemetery where Captain Mervyn Higgins lies buried. Kantara is a concentration cemetery and relatives were distressed to hear that the bodies of their loved ones were moved several times in the postwar period. Kantara contains the graves of more than 1500 servicemen from the Great War. The Second World War saw a further 110 men buried there. Courtesy the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

Higgins’ story reads like a claimant’s appeal against his grief: the picking, nagging correspondence; the weighing of evidence; the questioning of procedure – all that might be expected from a lifetime in the courtroom. But to read it as such would blind us to its true significance. The Higgins correspondence reminds us of an unfathomable loss – the separation of an only son from a father who will always love him. And Higgins is as unforgiving of himself as he is of those overworked and ill-resourced authorities, the clerks and officers who had to deal with anger and disbelief, who tried (however hopelessly) to offer comfort to the grieving.

But Henry Higgins did find some comfort in pilgrimage and poetry. ‘The Grave at El Magdabha’ was written after that long trek through the Middle East. Penned to the memory of a boy buried a world away, it enables us to stand alongside not just one broken father but all those of his generation who journeyed across the oceans to find the grave of a loved one:

Ah, there he lies – moveless, in desert drear;
His broad breast weighted with the sullen sand;
The sword of the crusader marks him here,
A parting tribute from that gallant band . . . 

He lies, in plenitude of rest, serene,
He rooks not now of welter, horrors, grime;
To him all was as if it had not been,
For us – his death divides the course of time.

. . . This, at the least, we know – in coming years
Nothing shall do his honour stain;
The test is over and the world with tears
Will cherish those for whom the world were slain.5

To the memory of a boy buried a world away: This portrait of Mervyn Higgins was completed in the year after his death. It shows the young Mervyn resting on his oars having rowed the length of the Yarra. The portrait, like the cross raised at Dromana, was part of the memorialisation process – a way of ensuring this young man would always be remembered. In the 1920s the Mervyn B. Higgins Trophy was established and awarded annually in the inter-varsity rowing championships. Mervyn himself had rowed number 3 in the Ormond crew. Portrait of Captain M B Higgins by H F Crowther Smith courtesy National Library of Australia.

Higgins would always cherish those ‘for whom the world were slain’. And the first debt to that lost generation was to honour the promise made to them. Justice Higgins became the President of the World Disarmament Movement and devoted the rest of his life to the cause of peace. For him, the Great War had been the war to end all wars, otherwise how could he possibly justify the loss of his only son? Justice Higgins died in 1929, well before the outbreak of another world war. He was buried in Dromana beneath a cross bearing Mervyn’s name.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Captain Higgins’ service dossier NAA: B2455, HIGGINS M B CAPTAIN; and his Red Cross Wounded and Missing file AWM 1DRL/0428. This story also draws on the extensive archival collections held by the National Library of Australia and Australian War Memorial, Higgins Papers NLA MS 2525; Higgins Papers NLA MS1057; Higgins, Mervyn Bournes AWM 3DRL/0421. For further reading on Henry Higgins, his bereavement and his pilgrimage see Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). There are also a number of outstanding biographies including Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir (London: Harrap, 1931) and John Rickard, Henry Higgins: The Rebel as Judge (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984).

1 Henry Higgins to Professor Frankfurter, 27 December 1918, Higgins Papers, NLA MS 2525, Folder 1; Nettie Palmer, Henry Bournes Higgins: A Memoir (London: Harrap, 1931), p. 233.

2 Correspondence Mervyn Higgins to his mother, Higgins Papers, NLA MS1057, Series 3, Box 7, see in particular letters dated 30 November 1914; 3, 9, 12 June 1916; 13 and 18 July 1915; 17 December 1916.

3 See correspondence between Henry Higgins and Major McClean 23, 28 and 30 January 1917, 28, 31 March 1917, 9, 12 April 1917 and Higgins to Senator Pearce, 31 March 1917, NAA: B2455, HIGGINS M B CAPTAIN.

4 See correspondence from Henry Higgins to the Imperial War Graves Commission, 25 February 1925, NAA: B2455, HIGGINS M B CAPTAIN; diary entry for 20 January 1924, Higgins Papers, NLA MS1057 Series 3.

5 Henry Higgins ‘The grave at El Magdabha’, Higgins Papers; see also diary entry for 20 January 1924, NLA MS1057 Series 3.