World War I

The Art of War is published ‘to accompany the television series’ produced by Film Australia and to be broadcast on SBS. The television spin-off is an attractive genre for an art book. Writers have to keep to the point. There is a conventional picture-book formula, comprising a potted artist’s biography, a bit of art-historical placement and sometimes too little about what is specific to the work. Lola Wilkins’s Artists in Action: From the Collection of the Australian War Memorial (2003) is a good example. But a television producer knows that the words must concentrate upon the works we are staring at: forget the biography and the art history; just look at the art. Betty Churcher, like Sister Wendy, is very good at looking at works of art. For vivid specificity, take Colin Colahan’s striking Ballet of wind and rain (1945), men suddenly glimpsed leaning into the midwinter elements on a recently liberated airfield. Churcher suggests that it was so titled ‘perhaps because he has danced his brush across the canvas to simulate wild gusts but more likely because the four RAAF airmen duck their heads in unison like the cygnets in the dance from Swan Lake’.

In a response to Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli published in Quadrant in 1982, Gerard Henderson observed that ‘recounting the story of the Anzacs has become something of a growth industry’. Five years on, the Gallipoli industry shows no sign of a downturn. The salvaging and publication of war diaries, letters and manuscripts that had long mouldered in museums, libraries and attics, the spate of ‘epic’ teledramas and ersatz war fiction (like Jack Bennett’s spin-off from the aforesaid movie), new historical studies and the resurrection of old ones such as C. E. W. Bean’s Official History and, at the other end of the scale, John Laffin’s Digger: The story of the Australian soldier (its subtitle magically changed to ‘The legend of the Australian soldier’), all attest to the enduring appeal of Australia’s military exploits to writers and filmmakers and to the subject’s ability to tap a popular audience.

Leonard Mann’s account of his experiences in World War One, Flesh in Armour, has recently been reissued. It may be the case that there are certain experiences that are impossible to write about unless one has personally undergone them. The three great Australian classics of World War One – Flesh in Armour, The Middle Parts of Fortune and When the Blackbirds Sing – all convey an air of total verisimilitude when it comes to describing the conditions of battle. In comparison, even such gifted writers as David Malouf and Roger McDonald convey the impression of faking it when they come to write about war, no matter how much care they take or research they have done.

This book is concerned essentially with the impact of the environment upon Europeans in Australia. It sets out to test C.E.W. Bean’s thesis that during the Great War the most effective Australian soldiers came from the bush. It does this in relation to men from Western Australia, arguing that the West was one of the most predominantly bush areas of Australia, and therefore that there, if anywhere, the influence of the bush should show up in the achievements of soldiers.

This is the jubilee history of a unique Australian institution. Legacy, initially a club of World War I veterans, aiming to help each other re-establish themselves in civilian life, quickly became an organization concerned to assist the dependents of dead or incapacitated servicemen. Though the age of legatees is rising, the number of elderly widows increasing, and the number of dependent children declining, this remains its raison d’être. Forty-seven Legacy clubs today spend nearly $3,000,000 annually on some 100,000 widows and children in addition, personal assistance – leading youth groups, acting as advisers to bereaved families – continues the paramount part of Legacy’s service.

Sir Harry Chauvel, one of the founding fathers of the Australian Armed Forces, died in 1945. His involvement in the military and political history of Australia stretches back to the Boer War, through Gallipoli and Beersheba to the Volunteer Defence Corps of World War II. A.J. Hill’s affectionate and painstaking biography of Chauvel also implies concern for the present and future defence of the nation. At a time in popular repute when military sympathies of any kind are regarded as sabre-rattling, Hill’s book is welcome in both tone and content