Damage : the 'war neurotic' serviceman comes home

While the figure of the ‘shell-shocked’ veteran of the First World War is a customary archetype in histories of that conflict, the soldier suffering from ‘war neurosis’ in the aftermath of the Second World War is a less familiar character in accounts of that era. Yet as I argue in this article, in the Australian context medical and popular ideas about the ‘war neurotic’ serviceman – in particular, the notion that he was irreparably psychologically damaged and socially maladjusted – serve as a useful index of broader anxieties about the process of postwar repatriation and notions of home in the immediate postwar years.