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Author: Denis Winter (ed)
Title: Making the Legend – The War Writings of C E W Bean
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1992
Review:
Charles Bean, official war correspondent and official historian of the First World War, has a unique place in Australia's history. Not only did he risk his life walking the battlegrounds with the men of the AIF, but he also observed the fighting first-hand. His awareness of what actually happened at Gallipoli and the Westem Front was unrivalled. His reports on the war were charged with emotion, with harrowing news of death and destruction.
Making the Legend: The War Writings of C. E. W. Bean is an unmatched selection of the best of Bean's six volume Official History, along with some of his diary entries and letters home. Denis Winter's meticulous research and his care and sensitivity, make this single collection the most moving, compelling and compassionate account of Australians at war.
Professor Ken Inglis said of this book,
This is a remarkable study of Australians at war and an historian at work. It is the product of Denis Winter's vast and intimate knowledge of the First World War, his clear-sighted admiration of Charles Bean and his incomparable mastery of Bean's writing, published and unpublished. He has sifted millions of words, and added sparingly some of his own to make Bean's epic narrative accessible to readers as never before. Making the Legend: The War Writings of C.E.W. Bean deserves to stand alongside Bill Gammage's classic The Broken Years.
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Author: Patsy Adam-Smith
Title: The Anzacs
Publisher: Penguin, 1991
Review:
If you have not read The Anzacs there will always be a part of Australia you will never understand.
[Les Carlyon, The Australian.]
Gallipoli was the final resting place for thousands of young Australians. Death struck so fast there was not time for escape or burial. And when Gallipoli was over there was the misery of the European Campaign.
Patsy Adam-Smith read over 8000 diaries and letters to write her acclaimed best-seller about the First World War. Soldiers sought her out to tell her why they went, what they saw, and how they felt about that great holocaust. Their simple accounts are more vivid than any novel; the years have not dimmed their memories of lost comrades and the horrors of war. These are the extraordinary experiences of ordinary men - and they strike to the heart.
Winner of the Age Book of the Year award when first published in 1978, The Anzacs remains unrivalled as the classic account of Australia's involvement in the First World War.
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Author: Denis Winter
Title: 25 April 1915 – The Inevitable Tragedy
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1994
Review:
The Anzac legend has almost sacred significance in Australia and the date of the Gallipoli landing - 25 April - is a national day of remembrance.
Using official documents never before studied by historians, as well as private papers, Denis Winter sheds new light on the landing. The events leading up to 25 April are reconstructed through three interwoven strands in the narrative: the men, strategic planning and operational aspects.
The individual experiences of the men are explored - their attitudes, their feelings on the eve of battle and during it, the impact on survivors - are juxtaposed against the larger picture: the serious planning for Gallipoli that had begun as early as 1903 and the operational aspects that went so disastrously wrong and ensured that the campaign was doomed from the very outset.
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Author: Phil Taylor and Pam Cupper
Title: Gallipoli: A Battlefield Guide
Publisher: Kangaroo Press, first published 1989, reprinted in 1997, 2nd updated edition, 2000
Review:
The first detailed guide to the Gallipoli battlefields and comprehensive handbook for the visitor. This book has enabled thousands of Australians to appreciate the campaign through maps, diagrams, brief histories and plans. It contains invaluable advice for the traveller including distances, signposts and how to travel whether you do it by taxi, bus, private car, bicycle or motorcycle.
Pam Cupper is a history teacher and Phil Taylor is a heritage historian with the Victorian ministry of Education.
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Author: Charles E W Bean
Title: Anzac to Amiens
Publisher: Penguin, 1993
Review:
Out of Bean's experiences on the battlefields of the Great War as the official war correspondent with the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), came one of the most human histories of war. The twelve volume official history of Australia's part in the Great War was edited by Bean. This is Bean's condensation of the official history. It describes with great clarity and compassion the strategies, the tactics, the shellings and the sacrifices of that terrible conflict. First published in 1946, it is an acknowledged classic of military history.
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Author: Bill Gammage, David Williamson, Peter Weir
Title: The Story of Gallipoli – the film about the men who made a legend
Publisher: University of Queensland Press, 1994
Review:
With a preface by the director of Gallipoli, Peter Weir, this book includes the complete screenplay by Australian playwright David Williamson along with two chapters of Bill Gammage's Australian classic The Broken Years (see below) which recount the the Anzac campaign at Gallipoli.
This book provides a compelling record of that ill-fated military campaign at Gallipoli in 1915, through historical photographs and eyewitness accounts of the Anzacs who fought in it.
The Story of Gallipoli also presents by way of the complete screenplay, comments of the director and still photographs, an insight into the process of attempting to capture the spirit of a legend in a film.
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Author: Bill Gammage
Title: The Broken Years – Australian Soldiers in the Great War
Publisher: Penguin, 1974
Review:
Using the diaries and letters of a thousand Australian soldiers, Bill Gammage reconstructs with great sensitivity the valour and the tragedy of their experience. Through it he shows how and why the Great War was to have profound effects on the attitudes and ideals of Australia as a nation. First published in 1974, it has been a widely read classic ever since.
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Author: Harvey Broadbent
Title: The Boys Who Came Home – Recollections of Gallipoli
Publisher: ABC Books, 2000
Review:
The story of and perspectives on Gallipoli from the men who went and returned. Ten years after its first release, Harvey Broadbent's The Boys Who Came Home has to be re-published by ABC Books. The Boys Who Came Home is the story of Gallipoli told by the men who were there - Anzacs, Turks and British - and who returned to relive their memories of the battles throughout their lives.
These experiences are pinpointed against larger events of the campaign and frequently challenge common perceptions about it.
The book includes vivid recollections by men who are no longer with us, giving a taste of the atmosphere of the times and questioning some of the common perceptions of these events which have defined our national identity. The campaign cost many lives but forged a sense of national character - the Anzac spirit.
It was one of the first books on the subject to use first hand oral accounts from veterans, the first book in English to use interviews with Turkish veterans.
Harvey Broadbent, a writer, director, producer and consultant for TV and radio, has had many years experience working in both media for the ABC.
With an honours degree in Middle Eastern studies, he is also a specialist on Turkish history and culture.
His Four Corners documentary, with Chris Masters, won the United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Award, and led to this book and a TV documentary of the same name (available on ABC Video).
He has led study tours to Gallipoli annually for the last ten years and regularly gives talks around Australia.
Harvey compiled The Boys Who Came Home for both the general reader and for Australia's youth, particularly as a resource for Gallipoli studies in the Australian high school curricula - lest we forget.