Heather Merle Benbow – The Conversation

Cover of the menu for the AIF Christmas Dinner, Hotel Cecil, London, in 1916. Illustration by Fred Leist. Museums Victoria collection, donated by Jean Bourke

December 19, 2018

What Australian soldiers ate for Christmas in WWI

Heather Merle Benbow, The University of Melbourne and Deborah Tout-Smith, Museums Victoria Research Institute

For Australians serving overseas in WWI, Christmas was particularly difficult. Menus reveal how soldiers tried to maintain the traditions of home.

Coffee beans picked from a crop in Timor-Leste. United Nations Photo, flickr

April 23, 2017

East Timor, war, coffee and Australia’s debt of honour

Heather Merle Benbow, The University of Melbourne

In wartime, food and drink may be a weapon or embodiment of the enemy, but also ‘a token of hope, a soothing relief’. In East Timor, coffee has played a vital role.

Food was a powerful, and ever-present theme of the first world war. Ward 43, Frank Ward, 1943. © IWM (Art.IWM ART LD 6600)

April 21, 2016

Bread like chaff and putrid rations: how WW1 troops obsessed over food

Heather Merle Benbow, The University of Melbourne

From crossing cultural barriers with a cake, to starvation used as a brutal tool of war, Australian soldiers’ letters and diaries reveal an urgently important relationship with what they ate.

Camp kitchen with the Australian and Light Horse Regiment Queensland, Queensland 1914. John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland

September 29, 2015

Feeding the troops: the emotional meaning of food in wartime

Heather Merle Benbow, The University of Melbourne

Food is central to experiences of war - think of the humble ANZAC biscuit - for both soldiers and those on the home front. Yet we are only just beginning to understand its emotional, social and political significance.

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