Australians who served in the Vietnam war spent much of the time in extreme heat, with their shirts off. It’s a fact Stephanie Boyle, a curator at the Australian War Memorial, was grateful for as she researched the history of tattoos in Australian service personnel.
It’s an area historians had not previously deemed worthy of consideration, Boyle says, but photographs and medical records attest to the prominence of tattoos in all conflicts since the first world war.
On the long sea voyages from Australia to Egypt before troops were sent to Gallipoli, they whiled away the time tattooing each other on deck. An image in the war memorial’s archive captures soldiers using an electric needle equipped with three batteries and a bottle of ink.
The enlistment papers of servicemen attest to how many had tattoos, Boyle says, because the medical officer assessing their fitness for duty would note any distinguishing marks such as appendix or smallpox vaccination scars – including tattoos.
When Sgt John Spence signed up on 29 July 1915, the officer noted six tattoos: an eagle and Australian flag on his back, the Australian coat of arms on his chest, “Advance Australia” on his left arm and “unity” on his right – as well as a swallow on both.
“We’ve had glimpses of this sort of unofficial history within the official history, but no one had ever talked about it,” Boyle says.
The stories behind the tattoos in Australia’s military are being told for the first time in an exhibition, Ink in the Lines, by the war memorial. The exhibition has toured regional galleries since November 2021 and is now at Sydney’s Manly Art Gallery and Museum before its final leg in Melbourne in November.
For many soldiers, their skin became a visual history of their career and a record of where they had served. For others, tattoos became a means of survival.
When Alfred Passfield was examined on enlistment in 1939, he had only one distinguishing mark – an acne scar on his shoulder – but by the war’s end he would be, in his own words, “covered from neck to ankle with pictures”.
After being captured by the Germans on the island of Crete, Passfield made eight escape attempts. Boyle says: “When he wasn’t working on actual escape plans, his other form of escape – a mental escape, if you will – was to tattoo himself using handmade and bartered tools and needles.”
In an oral history interview, Passfield said “tattooing was not just a craze nor did I do it for the sake of the finished result – but simply because I had to be doing something to take my mind away from being wired in”.
“I could not take prison life lightly, as a good many could. I took it darned hard. If I had not found a pastime like tattooing, I would have probably ended up as another poor coot did by hanging myself or going off my rocker.”
Boyle says Passfield is an unusual example of a soldier talking about tattoos because service people generally weren’t asked about it in oral history interviews – “unsurprising when you think there was such a longtime stigma of tattoos”.
“I think people just wouldn’t have thought about it seriously as a matter for inquiry or of interest. It’s a bit too much like a question about your underwear – who wants to know?”
Nevertheless, the river of ink running through the Australian defence force has fascinated the curators at the war memorial for years. Boyle says she was not the first among them to raise the idea of an exhibition but did not believe it would happen “because the war memorial is such a conservative organisation”.
But a 2018 public lunchtime talk by Boyle on the subject arrived at just the right moment.
“Ten or 15 years ago you wouldn’t necessarily see the war memorial pick up a subject like that.”
Boyle says the project began with a realisation that there were no stories to go with the records in the photographic and official archive.
The memorial put out a call for veterans to share images and the stories of their tattoos. With the memorial’s photographer and videographer, she set out to capture interviews and portraits to document the stories of those who responded.
What stood out for Boyle was the range of meanings behind the tattoos.
She knew many would be commemorative, such as the tattoo at the centre of veteran Adam’s chest (only first names are used in the exhibition). Adam’s tattoo depicts a Tarin Kot memorial to his friend, David “Poppy” Pearce, who was killed by an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan in 2007.
But Boyle found many other reasons for getting a tattoo.
“The very act of being tattooed, it’s painful, it’s discomfiting and people were responding to that as a therapeutic or grounding experience.
“People were finding that being tattooed, you couldn’t dwell in darkness because of the discomfort of the tattoo. And other people would even go as far as to say, ‘The least I can do is put up with the pain of this tattoo because someone I know and love has died. The least I can do is bear this pain on their behalf.’”
Another veteran, Paul, who returned from service depressed, having lost a friend as well as one of his lower legs to an IED, found getting tattooed got him out of the house, Boyle says.
For others, a tattoo is a reminder of a joyous or formative experience in their military service.
Boyle spoke to Deb, who was one of the first female sailors when the navy changed its policy in the 1980s to allow them to serve on board ships.
“She was very young, just beginning in her life and a lot of her interview was about coming to terms with – as she put it – being a woman in a man’s world and how her naval experience really formed her, and made her confident and competent, and made her who she is.
“She had a lovely tattoo of an anchor, and instead of a metallic linked chain attached to the anchor it’s a chain of flowers, and that beautifully captures what she was telling us about being a woman in a man’s world and how much her naval service meant to her.”
