Melbourne U. Publishing

The broken years; Australian soldiers in the Great War.

This edition of a 9x12 inches coffee table book, first published in 1974, offers a wealth of b&w historical photos and illustrations on every page, supplementing accounts of battles and campaigns based on the diaries and letters of about 1,000 Australian soldiers who fought on the front lines in WWI. The book highlights the Australian fighters' transformation from patriotism to cynicism in the face of the horrors of a new kind of war, and also explores how the return of shell-shocked soldiers affected the country of Australia. After a prologue on Australia before 1914, chapters focus on various phases of the war, the soldier's experiences, and life on the home front in Australia. Most of the manuscripts were collected following appeals to the public or through requests made by the Australian War Memorial in the 1920s and 1930s to specific veterans or their relatives. Gammage teaches at the Humanities Research Center at the Australian National University. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Witnesses to war; the history of Australian conflict reporting.

The authors (both of the U. of Melbourne, Australia) offer a history of how war has been reported in the Australian new media and its impact on the Australian national imagery from the colonial conflicts of the New Zealand Wars and the Boer War through to the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the 21st century. Their narrative explores such issues as the evolution of Australian war journalism, including the role of technology; war reporting and censorship; the political uses of the "Anzac spirit" (the supposedly shared national characteristics displayed by Australian and New Zealand soldiers during World War I); and representations of enemy and race. (Annotation ©2011 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)