Memories of family's war and peace involvement live on through memorabilia

For Josephine Raw, there are plenty of reminders of the heartache of those who mourned her family's Great War casualties.

At her mother Helen Raw's Warrnambool home, the memories of the family's war dead live on.

An array of medals and ribbons line an ornate glass cabinet, uniformed, earnest young men are immortalized behind framed glass, and wartime memorabilia nestles in carved wooden boxes.

But among them is one very different cache of items that tell of the family's role not at war, but at the heart of post-war peace.

Josephine's grandparents (Helen's in-laws) met in a chance encounter at the Paris peace conference of 1919 where both were working with Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes.

Her grandmother, young English woman (Eleanor) Maida Carter landed the job as his shorthand-typist, while the handsome Aussie Digger, Lieutenant Alfred Raw was appointed as an aide to the PM, after recovering in London from a gassing on the French battlefields.

Once the peace treaty was signed on June 28, 1919 at the Palace of Versailles just outside Paris, Alfred travelled home to Australia with the PM. Maida, much to her disappointment, went back to London to a secretarial job.

But the pair kept in touch and a year later, Maida was a war bride sailing into a new life with Alfred, tying the knot in Melbourne on November 6, 1920. Alfred was 33, his bride 26.

Tucked among Maida's belongings packed carefully in her trunk was an extraordinary document.

Presumably typed by Maida, with hand-written alterations by Prime Minister Hughes himself, was the lengthy speech delivered by the PM at the Versailles Peace Treaty.

Josephine surmises that the revised version was given to the PM and Maida kept the original draft as a souvenir.

In a box of treasures that includes photos, letters, an official peace conference pass and several palm-sized hand-written diaries that Maida wrote during 1919-20, the speech remained in the Raw family after Maida's death in 1972, passed first to her son, Helen's late husband Peter and then to Helen.

"I always felt it was an important document," Helen said. "But it only occurred to me as the children grew older that they would be interested in it."

Now, 125 years on from the peace treaty, the treasured family record documenting a personal link to the historic event is being preserved as part of Australia's national archive.

Josephine and her brother Tim, who also served in the Army, decided in the interests of preservation that the speech and associated documents should be donated to an archivist with a view to possible digitization and public access.

In late 2019, the Canberra-based National Archives of Australia (NAA) agreed to accept the material, however the advent of COVID soon after derailed a planned trip to collect it from Josephine in Melbourne. It took until March 2023 before the records were safely in the keeping of the NAA after Tim made a road trip to Canberra to deliver them personally.

Josephine, who retired to Bendigo from her position as deputy CEO of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, said she was notified that the NAA had quarantined the documents ahead of preservation and was awaiting word of their accession into the collection.

Helen has retained a photocopy of the speech.

In an email last year, "the NAA said it was very excited about what these items can contribute to our understanding of Australia's role in and Billy Hughes contribution to the peace conference".

For Josephine and Tim, there is a deep sense of gratitude for that first serendipitous Paris encounter between their grandparents.

"If they had not met, my sister, brother and I would not be here today," she wrote in a letter to the editor of National Geographic magazine in 2019 praising a feature article on the centenary of the armistice.

Eleanor Maida Carter was born on July 4, 1894 at Wellington Barracks, Westminster, London, where her father was a Grenadier Guard. She was baptized in the Royal Chapel of St Peter ad Vincula at the Tower of London.

Maida, as she was known, worked for an advertising agency before being appointed as a temporary shorthand-typist in the High Commissioners offices at Australia House from September 1, 1918 for three pounds a week.

She was sent to Paris in January, 1919, living at the Hotel Majestic throughout her appointment to the Prime Minister during the peace conference.

Josephine said Maida's diary entries gave her a clearer image of her grandmother as a young woman living and working in post-war Paris.

"I had no idea, but once I started reading the diaries, it opened up a whole different view of her.

"She was based in an office in Paris and spent five to six days a week in the office and some evenings, according to her diary entries.

"On evenings she was not in the office, she sat in the lounge at the hotel or went to dancing classes."

References were also made to evening strolls and nights at the opera.

Alfred, her husband-to-be, was born in Carlton in 1887, and took a job as an office boy for Carlton & United Breweries after leaving school.

He was 27 when he enlisted in the AIF for World War 1, serving on the Western Front with the Eighth Field Artillery Brigade. Before peace was declared, he was repatriated to a London hospital after being gassed.

Once recovered, Alfred worked at Australia House, later stepping into the position of aide to Billy Hughes. Josephine said Alfred and Maida's love story was a welcome antidote to the tragedies that war had wrought on her family.

Three of her great-uncles died on the Great War battlefields of France. Two, Private Thorold Womersley and Lance Corporal Jack Womersley rest in French cemeteries, while the third, Private Wallace Hill Hammond was killed at the Battle of Fromelles and has no known grave.

Josephine's father, Helen's husband Peter, was one of the RAAFs most highly decorated World War 2 and post-war pilots. He died in 1988 from thyroid cancer believed to be the result of flying through toxic radioactive clouds of the 1950s British atomic testing.

In February the air commodore was posthumously awarded the Nuclear Test Medal.