Later Life
Ten days after the war ended, on 21 November 1918, McCarthy was evacuated to England with influenza. He returned to Australia in December 1919, having married Florence Norville the previous January. Their only son, Lawrence, was killed in action on Bougainville in 1945. McCarthy was demobilised in August 1920. He returned to Western Australia but moved to Victoria in 1926. He gained employment with the Sunshine Harvester Works remaining with them until 1934 when the company was forced to lay off staff during the Great Depression. He found new work the following year with the Trustees, Executors & Agency Co., and remained with that company until his retirement in 1969.
McCarthy died at the Repatriation General Hospital, Heidelberg in Melbourne in May 1975 and was cremated with full military honours. The Lawrence McCarthy ward at the former Repatriation General Hospital, Hollywood has been named in his honour.
His Victoria Cross is displayed at the Australian War Memorial (Canberra, Australia).
Read more about this topic: Dominic McCarthy
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“... into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)