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Cameron Forbes

The Korean War: Australia in the Giant’s Playground by Cameron Forbes

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April 2011, no. 330
Richard Broinowski reviews 'The Korean War: Australia in the Giant’s Playground' by Cameron Forbes

To go on thinking of the Korean War as a ‘forgotten’ war in a ‘hermit’ country, as we too often do, ignores the many authoritative accounts of it. Cameron Forbes’s new book is the latest.

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Letters - May 2005

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May 2005, no. 271

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.

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Don't Worry About Me edited by Robyn Arvier & Hellfire by Cameron Forbes

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April 2005, no. 270
Rod Beecham reviews ‘Don’t Worry About Me: Wartime letters of the 8th division AIF’ edited by Robyn Arvier and ‘Hellfire: Australia, Japan and the prisoners of war’ by Cameron Forbes

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.

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