News / History
A Brunswick man went to war and never came home
Great-nephew seeks to immortalise story as a short film
Mark Phillips
THERE is nothing remarkable about James Carney’s story.
In May 1916, midway through the Great War, the 29-year-old Brunswick man enlisted to join the Australian army. He would die a little over six months later on the battlefields of northern France, killed by an artillery shell during the German withdrawal from the Hindenberg Line.
Carney’s story is little different from that of the thousands of other working class Australian men who lost their lives on overseas battlefields between 1915 and 1918. About 500 fellow Brunswick residents died in Australian uniforms in World War I.
But it is that very ordinariness of his life and death that has inspired his great-nephew, Michael Carney, to attempt to make a short film about him.
Michael Carney says his great-uncle’s story is that of other working class Australian men who went off to war writ small. And it would have remained untold if not for Michael’s discovery of a letter written by his deceased father, Bernard, to the uncle he never knew.
The letter, just over two pages and less than 350 words long, was the springboard for an investigation into James Carney’s life that has taken Michael to different parts of Australia as he has sought to piece together more knowledge about him.
Carney said there was a universality of his great-uncle’s story that makes him want to tell it.
“I thought that what came through Dad’s letter is there’s an emptiness to the whole thing, a futility,” he said.
“There’s no famous battle, no heroic medal, no rich back story where he was a promising sportsman or he could have been Prime Minister.
“But with these guys, there’s no romance, just a working man who went off to war and was killed.
“This was a working class, poor area of Melbourne and that would be replicated across Australia where young men went away and never came back, so while on one hand it shines a light on Brunswick in that time, this is the same right across the country.
“The impact of World War I was catastrophic and with so many men were killed it had a societal impact.”
Michael Carney, 61, who lives in Pascoe Vale South, admits he has no formal training or experience in film-making, and although he has had encouraging feedback about his project, he will need professional help to see it to fruition.
James was born in 1885 in Brunswick, the youngest of four children to James and Mary Carney, immigrants from Ireland and seemed to have lived his entire life in a tiny cottage at 28 Wilson Avenue near Jewell Station (one of his two sisters lived there until her 90s, but the house was demolished after a fire in the 1980s and today is the site of two-storey building with a café on the ground floor).
“They were terribly poor, no bathroom or kitchen, just a cottage,” Michael Carney said.
James went to school at St Ambrose in Sydney Road, and worked as a driver, but Michael has been unable to find out who employed him.
He was 29 when he enlisted on May 6, 1915, becoming a private in the Seventh Battalion of the Australian Infantry Force’s Second Infantry Brigade.
After basic training at Castlemaine, he shipped to Plymouth in England in September that year and on December 13 arrived at Etaples in northern France, where he spent his last Christmas in 1916.
On February 24, 1917, James Carney saw his first fighting near the village of Le Barque when the Australians captured a German trench. Some time the following day, he was killed by a heavy German artillery bombardment.
There is a mythical Carney family story that on the day James died, a photo of him in the Wilson Avenue cottage fell off the wall where it had been hung.
A more prosaic family story is that on his departure for England, his mother predicted to other family members that he would never return alive to Australia.
Michael Carney said the motivation for James signing up for the army is unknown, but he doubts the son of Irish immigrants was inspired by patriotism to fight in Britain’s war against Germany.
“We know he’s poor, his prospects were slim, so here’s an opportunity to get fed, get clothed, get paid, to be with your mates, travel overseas and fight the bad guys. If you add that up, you’d think why the hell not?”
Michael Carney says that his great-uncle’s body was most likely so badly impacted that it was never buried in a coffin. All that remains is a name on walls at the Australian National Memorial at Villers-Bretonneux, at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, and in the foyer of the Brunswick Town Hall.
There are records of about 3000 men from Brunswick who fought in World War I, of which about 500 died in service or were killed in action.
Michael Carney said like so many other young Australians who served in the armed forces, his great-uncle never got to live to have normal experiences like marriage or fatherhood, although he is believed to have left behind a girlfriend, Lizzie Courtney.
“You end up mourning not the life that was, but the life that could have been,” Michael Carney said.
“They had hopes, dreams and loves … It’s a future that was never fulfilled.”
Now Carney is looking for collaborators to help him bring the story of his great-uncle to life.
He has sketched out a basic script based on the letter written by his father, who died in 2008, but needs professional expertise to turn that into a short film that he believes could become part of a collection at the Australian War Memorial or the Shrine of Remembrance.
“Maybe it [the film] doesn’t work out but I have to try,” he said. “I’ll keep chipping away and see where it goes.”
Michael Carney will deliver a free talk about his great-uncle and his project at the Brunswick Community History Group at 1.30pm on Saturday, April 5, in the Kirrip Djerring Room in the Brunswick Town Hall.
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