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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 July 2010
[T]he husband has given his life for his country and that wife has given her husband so I don't think she really should have to be burdened with anything to do with money. I think anything she gets she deserves.
In 1954, the Melbourne branch of the War Widows' Guild of Australia broke with the tradition and custom of the day, and took the radical step of organising a Remembrance Day service exclusively for war widows. This dramatic gesture was a protest against the dismissive treatment it believed war widows had received on a number of public occasions earlier that year. Jessie Vasey, the Guild's founder and president, asserted that war widows had no choice but to organise a ceremony which would be inclusive of their mourning and their grief. They decided to hold:
a service in praise of and thankfulness for our own men's sacrifice, with a few words of comfort and advice to us in our problems and sorrows, would bring help and satisfaction to many war widows, bereaved mothers and other bereaved relatives because I think we should ask all bereaved folk to share the service with us.
Vasey was motivated by events during the Royal Visit to Melbourne in 1954, when the Queen had delivered a dedication to fallen soldiers at the Shrine of Remembrance, the iconographic war memorial in Melbourne.
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