Peter Ryan

No Australian native son blazed brighter than Hugh D. McIntosh (1876–1942). Here is a lively biography of a Sydney boy who left school aged seven and rose to be the Squire of Broome Park in Kent, the stately seat of Lord Kitchener. McIntosh – contender though he became for a seat in the House of Commons – remained always an Australian. At Broome Park, a cricket pitch was laid down with ten t ... (read more)

Note especially the last word in the subtitle – ‘travel’. This book is not, or not chiefly, about strategy and battles. It is about getting to the war, or passing through an operational area and (with luck) getting home again; it is about visiting war cemeteries, battlefields and memorials, or revisiting them, sometimes decades later. You may think this a wispy and slender thread upon which ... (read more)

This handsome set of volumes – this ‘library’, it might almost be said – is one of the finest large publishing projects undertaken in Australia over recent years. Dedicated to ‘those who have served in the defence of Australia, 1901–2001’, it is brought triumphantly to a conclusion by the recent issue of its Volume VII, An Atlas of Australia’s Wars. This climactic volume, lying ope ... (read more)

Ever since Federation, Australians have heard of the Boer War, as they have heard of the Wars of the Roses. As to deep understanding, they have as much about the one war as about the other. As a ‘Matric’ student in 1939, I had for my Commercial Practice teacher a Boer War veteran – lean, tall, bowlegged – every schoolboy’s image of our horsemen who had taught the Empire’s enemies such ... (read more)