Australian folk memory of the Pacific War centres on specific events – the sinking of the Repulse and the Prince of Wales, the fall of Singapore, the bombing of Darwin – events overlaid by semi-mythical visions of an insomniac prime minister and his cable wars with Winston Churchill, and of epics of soldierly endurance on the Kokoda Trail. The horrors of the Thailand–Burma railway belong, in a sense, to the immediate postwar period, when the stories of liberated survivors penetrated the national consciousness. The horrifying images of emaciated men with gaunt faces and prominent ribs brand that generation and, to some extent, their children. In the diaries of Weary Dunlop and in Rohan Rivett’s Behind Bamboo (1946), the immediate postwar Australia was given a vivid picture of Japanese cruelty and Australian suffering.

Robyn Arvier, editor and publisher of Don’t Worry about Me: Wartime Letters of the 8^th Division AIF, has assembled and published a revealing and moving collection of letters by men of the Second AIF unit sent to Malaya: the 8^th Division. The directness, simplicity and non-sensationalism of these missives, even the triteness of much of their content, make them unputdownable. We hear from those precious creatures, the ordinary people who acted in and witnessed history.