Resembling the memorials seen all over Australia, a slouch-hatted digger stands atop an obelisk, his hands resting on a service rifle. However, this obelisk is not made of granite or marble but a pile of books ascending skywards. The cover of Peter Stanley’s penetrating critique of Australian military history, Beyond the Broken Years, is a telling, if reductive, visual conceit, suggesting the instrumental role played by historians in placing the soldier on a pedestal.

There has been no shortage of conflicts for Australians to write about. Stanley notes that Australia is a ‘notably bellicose’ nation, with ‘a third of its first century and virtually all of its second spent at war’. In Beyond the Broken Years, he counts well over a thousand works of Australian military history. There are probably many more, depending on how one defines a notoriously hybrid genre.