Chester Wilmot was blessed with the professional reporter’s principal virtues, talent, self-confidence, resilience, and luck. While his skills as a broadcaster took him to the various fronts of World War II, it was luck, as much as planning, that put him in Tobruk, Greece, and on the Kokoda Track at the precise moments to witness Australia’s armed forces in their first critical tests of the wa ... (read more)
Kevin Foster
Kevin Foster is an Associate Professor in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. His most recent book is Anti-Social Media: Conventional Militaries in the Digital Battlespace (Melbourne University Press 2021).
The recent scandal over Facebook’s censorship of Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of ‘Napalm girl’, Kim Phuc, offers a salutary reminder of photography’s stubborn resistance to narrative orthodoxy or societal norms. The editors at Facebook were hardly the first to fret over the propriety of reproducing the photo. When Ut first brought his film into the Associated Press’s Saigon office, the du ... (read more)
Who was Phillip Schuler? A war correspondent for The Age, his six-week visit to Gallipoli in July and August 1915 produced, inter alia, a few of the rare eyewitness accounts of the battle and resulted in the first extended treatment of the Gallipoli campaign: Australia in Arms (1916). Schuler also compiled a unique photographic record of some of the battlefields and the living conditions in the tr ... (read more)