Frederick Whirlpool - The Medal

The Medal

The presentation of Whirlpool's medal, on 20 June 1861, was the first public presentation in Australia of a Victoria Cross. The medal was presented to him by Lady Barkly, the wife of Sir Henry Barkly, KCB, the governor of Victoria at that time. His Victoria Cross is displayed at the Australian War Memorial (AWM) in Canberra, Australia.

The medal has not always been on display in the AWM, though, and the story of its acquisition is of itself indicative of the debate about Whirlpool's national identity and the reluctance of Australians to consider the role of the British in the nation's early military history. Where the medal went initially after Whirlpool's death is unknown. There is speculation that it might have been kept by Smith, or that Smith sent it to Whirlpool's brother in the United States; however, by the 1950s it was in the possession of a medal dealer in London. It was then purchased by Denys Croll, an Irish school teacher working in Australia. Croll subsequently offered to donate the medal to the AWM in the early 1960s but was turned down as it was initially felt that it did not belong in their collection because "Whirlpool wasn't Australian".

The Mitchell Library in Sydney offered to display it but Croll died before this could be affected. Croll's widow subsequently offered to loan the medal and in the mid-1960s one of the AWM's curators, Peter Burness, argued that Whirlpool was Australian and sought to acquire it for a new section of the memorial dedicated to Victoria Cross recipients. Nevertheless, the debate about the appropriate characterisation of Whirlpool's nationality continued to affect the way the award was presented in the memorial for a number of decades. This lasted until the mid-1980s when Whirlpool's integration into the story of Australia's pre-World War I military history seemingly came into acceptance when he was included in the second edition of Wigmore and Harding's They Dared Mightily, in which although he was not included in the official count of 96 Australian recipients he was characterised as an Australian recipient of the award, albeit one who had not served in the Australian forces and who had been born elsewhere.