AustLit

'This chapter explores some of the ways in which the literary arts of poetry and novels, especially those for children and young people, and the visual arts of paintings and posters, often depicting children, were used in Australia during the First World War to show and tell not only the idea of war to those at home, but the idea of home for those at war. It is part of wartime rhetoric to set personal identity and home place as core (as something worth fighting for), but simultaneously to indent that core with qualities and places beyond the personal and the personally experienced: thus not just my home, my
family, my community, but our family, our community, our nation. This concept of home becomes imbued with symbols that both represent and unite and that establish a semiotics of home that includes both abstractions – a deep inner sense of shared cause alongside like-minded companions, and the materiality of physical space. This physical space expands into the metaphysical, into not just images of home and place and landscape, but potent metonymous and synechdocal imageries of home and place and landscapes.'

Source: introduction.