In 1996, a small group gathered in Rushworth Cemetery to honour a man they’d never known. Frank Wilkinson’s story had long been suppressed or forgotten but nearly seventy years after his death, his relatives gathered around the new memorial installed at his grave. Though they had discovered a terrible family secret, they all grieved for Frank – they now knew what the war had cost him.

A terrible secret: The Wilkinson family headstone was replaced in 1996. Nearly seventy years after the tragedy, the Department of Veterans’ Affairs made this acknowledgement that Frank’s death was war related. Courtesy George Gemmill.

Although he wasn’t a big man, Frank had a toughness about him, a ruddy complexion, his face hardened by a scar on his lip. He’d eagerly enlisted, leaving Australia months before three of his brothers, Arthur, Gus and Eric, would join him in Europe.

Frank took part in the Third Battle of Ypres. At ‘great personal risk’, and under heavy shelling, he helped extinguish a blaze threatening four ammunition dumps.1 Frank was considered a war hero and awarded the Military Medal for his efforts. His family back home hoped he’d be ‘spared to wear it’.2

Frank survived the war, but not all the Wilkinsons returned to their home town of Donald in Victoria. The eldest of the four brothers, Arthur, was killed at Polygon Wood; his body was never recovered from the battlefield.

After the Armistice, Frank travelled through the United Kingdom. In the long wait for repatriation he trained as a sheep shearer in the verdant hills of Galashiels, where he met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth.

Frank, Elizabeth and their baby girl, Isabella, settled on a block of land in Stanhope, Victoria. Frank’s recommendations in his application to the soldier settlement scheme were glowing: ‘steady’, ‘industrious’, ‘he is one that will make good’. He seemed the ideal man for the land. Few suspected the disaster to follow.3

In spite of his training, experience and hard work, the bleak and barren holding yielded nothing but debt. By 1927 Frank owed more than a thousand pounds and he was having trouble breathing, a result of being gassed in the war. Frank’s body was failing him and he was getting more ‘nervy’ by the day.

Elizabeth sensed her husband was at breaking point. ‘I’m glad we’re getting out of this,’ she confided to a friend, ‘I’m satisfied that Frank is going to go off his head.’ The family had packed up their lives, ready to abandon their farm, move in with Frank’s brother and build a new life for themselves in Seymour. But things went terribly wrong.4

The morning of their planned departure, as the Wilkinsons’ possessions waited for them at the railway station, their worried neighbours discovered a gruesome scene. In the kitchen, Frank lay on the floor, face down in a pool of blood and a stained razor by his hand. There was a tremendous gash across his throat. It was so deep it cut to the bone.

Little Isabella, just four years old, lay lifeless on the bed, her tiny skull beaten and crushed.

The only signs of life were the quiet cries of Frank’s wife. Cowering beneath the bed, Elizabeth, cold and dazed, whimpered, ‘I never thought it would come to this.’ Frank had strangled his wife and smashed her head in with a hammer. The records of the inquest are brutally explicit. Fragments of Elizabeth’s skull littered the floor, the walls were ‘splashed with blood’.5

Elizabeth’s life ended a few days later in Mooroopna Hospital. But she had lived long enough to forgive what her husband had done. ‘He couldn’t help it, he couldn’t help it,’ was all she could say time and again.

Frank was buried with his ‘loving wife’ and ‘beloved daughter’. All of them were victims of the Great War and the trauma that lingered on a decade after the Armistice. ‘Peace’ is their shared family epitaph. It was a plea both for Frank and those he loved.

Decorated for bravery: Frank Wilkinson never recovered from his experiences overseas. Courtesy Jill Fradd.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the Wilkinson Papers courtesy Jill Fradd and her assistance is gratefully acknowledged. Other sources used include the Coroner’s Inquest of the deaths of Frank, Elizabeth and Isabella Wilkinson PROV VPRS24, 1927/1017; Frank Wilkinson’s service dossier NAA: B2455, WILKINSON FRANCIS EDELBERT; his repatriation record NAA: B73, R87683; and his soldier settlement file PROV VPRS5714, unit 1473, file 4147/12. The Wilkinson tragedy was reported on widely in the press and this story has drawn on many of the contemporary newspaper articles. The authors would like to thank George Gemmill, Secretary of the Stanhope RSL, for his generous assistance with this story. For further reading on postwar trauma see Jay Winter, ‘Shell shock’ in Jay Winter (ed), The Cambridge History of the First World War, vol. III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 310–333 and Tanja Lukins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People’s Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Perth: Curtin University Press, 2004) and Richard Lindstrom, ‘The Australian Experience of Psychological Casualties in War 1915–1939’ (PhD thesis, Victoria University of Technology, 1997).

1 Frank Wilkinson citation for Military Medal, 20 July 1917, Wilkinson Family Papers, courtesy Jill Fradd.

2 Donald Mail, 27 November 1917.

3 Soldier Settlement file, PROV VPRS5714, unit 1473, 4147/12.

4 Coroner’s Inquest Frank, Elizabeth and Isabella Wilkinson, PROV VPRS24, 1927/1017.

5 ibid.