Loading

Stanley also engages with historical controversies. Was “Breaker” Morant a hero or murderer? Did the Turks use machine guns on April 25, 1915? Were the Japanese planning to invade Australia? Were Wilfred Burchett’s activities in Korea treasonable? And did Agent Orange contribute to veterans’ ill-health? Those writers who recycle popular myths rather than scrutinising historical records are, again, scorned.

Given the daunting task of identifying 1000 books, significant omissions are perhaps inevitable. Women and the Great War (2015), Law in War: Freedom and Restriction in Australia during the Great War (2020), Jungle Warriors: from Tobruk to Kokoda (2014) and A Different Sort of War: Australians in Korea 1950-53 (2005), among others, are overlooked. Another quibble is that the extremely broad scope of the book (extending to depictions of war in cinema, fiction, art and poetry) and the excessively detailed 21-page “dictionary” preclude deeper discussions of some key texts.

I also wondered for whom the book is intended. Not the popular military historians who, generally, are disparaged. Not, perhaps, the general reader, for whom a survey of 1000 books is daunting. But to the legion of researchers interested in the discipline of Australian military history, this book will be indispensable. It is provocative, readable and erudite. And it’s a reminder that in our understanding of war, we have come a long way in the 50 years since The Broken Years appeared, when the complexities of gender, race and frontier conflict were unrecognised or unacknowledged by Australian military historians.

Phillip Deery is an emeritus professor at Victoria University whose most recent book, with Sheila Fitzpatrick, is Russians in Cold War Australia (Lexington Books, 2024).