The curious case of John Brenell: The only known Jewish Aboriginal Australian First World War soldier?

Cultural sensitivity warning: this post contains the name and photograph of an Aboriginal person who is now deceased.

There is only one identified Aboriginal Australian soldier buried among the hundreds of Commonwealth First World War graves at Outtersteene Communal Cemetery Extension. He is one of the approximately 175 Indigenous Australian men who gave their lives while serving in the First World War. He is also the only known First World War Aboriginal Australian soldier whose Commonwealth War Graves headstone includes an engraved Star of David – the emblem of the Jewish faith. He was first brought to Memorial Indigenous Liaison Officer Michael Bell’s attention in 2018, but researchers are still searching for answers to the mystery of Brabiralung man Private John Brenell and his indicated Jewish heritage.

John Brenell is a difficult man to track in the surviving written record. He was born in around 1880 on Kurnai Country in the Victorian town of Bairnsdale, the son of an unidentified Brabiralung woman and John “James” Brenell. He grew up in the Gippsland region of Victoria, and completed a five-year apprenticeship at the Gippsland Racing Stables before moving north for work.

John appears to have settled in the Hunter Valley town of Cessnock by the 1900s. He found work as a coal miner, and developed a relationship with a widowed local woman, Rachael Mary Anne Field. The couple had one child, Oswald, in 1909, and they appear to have married in around 1913.

Even after his marriage, John continued to move around for work, taking up labouring jobs as they became available. By 1916, he had travelled south to Queanbeyan in search of employment. It was here that he underwent a preliminary examination with Australian Imperial Force medical officers, before making his way to Goulburn to enlist in October 1916.

John’s attestation papers described him as a “British subject (Aboriginal descent), and having a “dark” complexion with brown eyes and black hair. Official regulations barred Aboriginal men from enlisting in the Australian Imperial Force, though across Australia these rules were enforced with varying degrees of strictness. It is not clear whether John explained to recruiting officers that his father was a white man, or if they were simply willing to overlook his Aboriginality. Either way, John’s enlistment was accepted without complications.

Private John Brenell left Australia in November 1916, and after eight months of further training in England, he served with the 34th Australian Infantry Battalion in France and Belgium throughout the autumn and winter of 1917.

John’s time in the army was not easy. He was charged by military authorities seven times for being absent without leave or missing parade, and in October 1917, during a failed attack on German positions around Zonnebeke, he sustained a gunshot wound to the face.

Although John recovered from his wound and was able to return to his battalion for the bitter winer of 1917–18, by early February the effects of the cold weather and life on the Western Front had taken their toll. He was suffering severely from pneumonia, and medical officers at the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station discovered that one of John’s lungs was almost completely inflamed and filled with fluid.

John died of pneumonia on the 14th of February 1918, aged around 37. His remains were buried at the military cemetery in Outtersteene on the day of his death. After the Armistice, the Imperial War Graves headstone was erected to permanently mark his final resting place. It bears the Star of David, as well as the Hebrew inscription “may his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life” from the Book of Samuel,

Aboriginal and Jewish Australians have a long shared history. Walbunja Yuin scholar Zac Roberts is an expert in the relationship between Indigenous and Jewish communities since 1788. He first became interested in John Brenell while trying to discover if there were any Jewish Indigenous Australian First World War soldiers. Although there were vibrant Jewish communities in Australia by the outbreak of the First World War, little is recorded about their lives and experiences compared with such communities after the Second World War. Even less is known about regional communities outside major cities. In learning about Brenell, Zac explained that “the fact that there was at least one if not more [Indigenous Jewish] soldiers who are documented in an easily verifiable way was really fascinating to me.”

But John’s Jewishness, it turns out, hasn’t been easily verifiable.

While John may have been Jewish, the surviving accessible records of his life and war service don’t give any indication. John’s attestation papers record his religion as “Church of England”. There are many examples of men lying on their service records: about their name, age, marital status, previous military experience, and even their religion. While many details of correspondence between the then-Imperial War Graves Commission and the next-of-kin of deceased survive in service records, any discussion between Rachael and the Commission has been lost both to the Memorial and to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.

In 2018, Michael Bell contacted the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, hoping for further insight into the decision to place a Jewish symbol on John’s headstone. The only surviving record at the Commission into how the inscription was selected is the original headstone schedule, which identified the Star of David and the personal inscription “Rest in Peace” as having being selected for John’s headstone. While acknowledging that either Rachael, the Commission, or the Australian Department of Defence may have made an error at some stage during the process, they were unable to offer any further clues into the discrepancy between John’s attestation papers and his headstone.

For years, the accepted theory at the Memorial was that John had either converted to Judaism after marrying Rachael in 1913, or was at least culturally practising, which led Rachael to request the Star of David on his headstone following the war. Jewish heritage is typically passed down matrilineally (i.e. from the mother), and while John’s own past offers no clues, it was hoped that Rachael’s might.

There’s just one problem with this theory: neither Memorial historians nor Zac have been able to find any evidence that Rachael was Jewish. We know very little about her life and ancestry. Before marrying John, she had been married to a Mr. William Gilbert, who died at some stage between 1906 and 1908. Rachael died in 1954, and at some stage after her death was reinterred alongside her daughter Eileen and son-in-law Frederick in the Anglican section of the Cessnock Cemetery. While their son Oswald married, it does not appear that he had any children. He is buried in the Anglican section of Gordon Williams Memorial Lawn Cemetery, and his half-siblings all also appear to have been buried in Anglican areas of cemeteries in New South Wales.

These discoveries leave historians both within and beyond the Memorial asking the initial question raised by a volunteer in 2018: is the Star of David the correct symbol for John’s grave marker?

Zac is hopeful an answer will emerge from the records or from community oral histories soon. “If John was Jewish”, he says:

it would challenge a lot of assumptions in terms of both Indigenous history in Australia but also Jewish history in Australia [and] reclaim the complexities of Indigenous and Jewish identities. A lot of the complexities that we know exist and have existed in our communities are often not included in the ways our histories are written. It would show that even when Australia was actively trying to be a white Australia, there were a lot of intercultural, interracial, and interreligious experiences.

If you have any insight into the story of Private John Brenell and his connection to Judaism, Michael Bell and historian Rachel Caines are eager to hear from you. They can be contacted at rachel.caines@awm.gov.au.