‘From Canada to Australia, with Kindest Thoughts’: Wartime Autograph Books as a Historical Source, 1899–1919

Over the past century, the autograph books held by the Australian War Memorial have experienced several afterlives, shifting from ephemeral interactions to personal items to archival records within an official national collection. This article is focused on the contents of ten autograph books that were owned by Australian women during their work with Australian medical services overseas between 1899 and 1919 during the South African (Second Anglo-Boer) War and the First World War. The interactions captured in these autograph books – signatures, messages, poems, drawings, annotations, pressed flowers, stamps, postcards, and photographs – present an under-considered historical source. Several major themes structure this article: autograph books as a historical source, their bearing on imperial identity, and what they can reveal about the experience of conflict. Taken as a collective, the ambiguous intimacy of these inscriptions are a bottom-up record of conflict and imperial identity.