War
Kevin Foster reviews 'No Front Line: Australia’s special forces at war in Afghanistan' by Chris Masters
Few organisations defend their reputation more vigorously than the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Long since clasped to the national bosom, the ADF has no intention of being shoehorned out of its prized position at the heart of Australian identity and culture. The first duty of its public affairs personnel is to protect ...
... (read more)Peter Morgan reviews 'Fracture: Life and culture in the West 1918–1938' by Phillip Blom
In 1915 a young Englishman was repatriated from the Western front to Craiglockhart psychiatric hospital in Scotland. Traumatised and disillusioned, he would write ...
... (read more)Joy Damousi reviews 'Armenia, Australia and the Great War' by Vicken Babkenian and Peter Stanley
The Armenian Genocide, which claimed an estimated 1.5 million lives, began in 1915. It continues to cause controversy today and is a hotly contested event; ...
... (read more)Lucas Grainger-Brown reviews 'Firing Line: Australia's path to war (Quarterly Essay 62) by James Brown
Australians must start 'thinking like hawks, while moving like doves', James Brown asserts in his viscerally illustrated but poorly argued Firing Line: Australia's path to war ...
... (read more)Alistair Thomson reviews 'Memory and Migration in the Shadow of War: Australia's Greek immigrants after World War II and the Greek Civil War' by Joy Damousi
When we talk about the importance of Australia's remembered wartime past, we mostly think of home-front experiences or Australians who went away ...
... (read more)Mark Edele reviews 'The Conflict in Ukraine: What everyone needs to know' by Serhy Yekelchyk
For more than a year and a half the armed conflict in Ukraine has touched many in Australia. On 17 July 2014, Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 crashed in the war zone after being hit by a surface-to-air missile. There was a short burst of jubilation by pro-Russian rebels on social media, before it became clear that this was not a military machine but a civilian airliner. ...
Susan Sheridan reviews 'Australian Women War Reporters' by Jeannine Baker
In this meticulously researched and eminently readable history, Jeannine Baker presents a gallery of impressive women who reported war news despite the obstacles put in their way by military authorities and press traditions alike. Along the way she deftly fills in key information about the conflicts involved, from the Boer War to Vietnam – a disturbing reminder of ...
Charles Bean is now seen as one of the classiest journalists and historians Australia has produced. Like many talented historians, he had no prior training in his craft, except as a war correspondent during World War I, when he wrote in the face of daily and nightly dangers such as most war journalists no longer have to confront.
I have the strong impression ...
David Horner reviews 'Australia and the Vietnam War' by Peter Edwards
In 1966 as a young first-year cadet at the Royal Military College, I purchased Anzac to Amiens by C.E.W. Bean, which had been published twenty years earlier. Bean had been Australia’s Official Historian for World War I, and Anzac to Amiens was his masterly condensation of the twelve-volume official history of which he had been the general editor and principal author. It was to be many years before I purchased the twelve volumes or could find time and commitment to read them. In the meantime, Anzac to Amiens was my guide to the history of Australia’s involvement in the war. I still refer to it.
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This book by Nigel Biggar, Anglican minister and Oxford Professor of Theology, is in the rich and broad tradition of thinking about war known as Just War Theory (JWT). JWT sees war as justifiable, but holds that decisions about going to war, as well as about the way it is fought, are subject to moral constraints ...
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