John Connor
John Connor is a senior lecturer in history in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at UNSW Canberra. His books include The Australian Frontier Wars 1788–1838 (2002), which was shortlisted for the Royal United Services Institute’s Westminster Medal for Military Literature, Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence (2011) and the ‘Politics’ chapters of The War at Home, co-authored with Peter Stanley and Peter Yule, as part of the five-volume Centenary History of Australia and the Great War (2014–16).
When I first heard that Tom Frame’s latest book was about the Voyager disaster, I wondered if the author had come down with amnesia, for he had already published a book on this subject thirteen years ago. However, if the federal government required two royal commissions to come to a conclusion about this naval accident, it is surely appropriate that Frame, having written Where Fate Calls: The HM ... (read more)
These two books on the building of the Thai–Burma railway in World War II are very different in format and tone. Australian film-maker Patti Wright’s Men of the Line is an exquisitely designed collection of stories and images by Australian prisoners of war who were forced to build the railway for their Japanese captors. Wright describes her book as ‘a tribute to the ex-POWs who experienced t ... (read more)
Do not be put off by this book’s bland title. In a country that has placed the Anzac Legend at the centre of its national identity, Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War is a profoundly subversive book. Cherished ideas of the Australian army as an egalitarian institution and of Australians as natural soldiers whose setbacks can always be blamed on the failings of others (genera ... (read more)
Anthony Hill begins his biography of Jim Martin by describing Martin’s death. Beginning the story of a person’s life by going straight to the end is unusual but wholly appropriate in this case because Jim Martin’s fame lies solely in the fact that his death at the age of fourteen, at Gallipoli, makes him the youngest known Australian soldier ever to die in a war.
At first, it would seem imp ... (read more)
How violent was the Australian frontier? At the moment, this is the biggest debate in Australian history. As most would know, the question has gained national attention largely through the efforts of Keith Windschuttle who, in four Quadrant articles in 2000 and 2001, argued, among other things, that historians had inflated the numbers of Aborigines killed on the Australian frontier and that the Na ... (read more)