The exhibition in 2016 explored the lives of the men and women from the Tasman Peninsula who served in World War I.
Those who returned carried serious physical and mental scars for the rest of their lives. In this exhibition we tell their story.
We also tell the story of what happened to the survivors and those who were left behind.
In Back on the Farm we tell the stories of individual soldiers. Particularly poignant is the story of the four Allen brothers who left Taranna to join up. Only James came home. After the war, he would show up periodically to camp on his sister’s verandah, but he could never sleep under a roof again.
There are twenty-six sets of brothers who went to the war. Some men, whose war records show treatments for VD of between 20 and 108 days, never married. Yet others were resilient beyond all expectations.
Despite a wound to his back, Jabez Alfred Batchelor went on to build most of the houses on the Peninsula, while Eric Benjafield became a major apple-exporter. Frank Fazackerley who was discharged as medically unfit, earned fame as a boxer, rower and cyclist and Frank Alberry had a stamp and aerogramme issued in his honour.
In Keeping the Home Fires Burning the focus turns to those who remained at home. Twenty panels record Peninsula life in the first half of the twentieth century as families struggled through two world wars and the Great Depression.
Watch this space in coming months as these exhibition panels are up-loaded here for information and family research.
Local Heroes Gallery
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