Beyond the Broken Years; Australian Military History in 1000 books. By Peter Stanley. New South Publishing, Sydney 2024.
Reviewed by Tim Coyle
The cover of Beyond the Broken Years attracts the eye of anyone with even a passing Interest in Australian military history. The figure of a World War One Australian Digger mounted a plinth with plaques listing men from the local area who had enlisted for the Great War is a common sight in most Australian regional towns.
However, the plinth is replaced by the Digger standing on a pile of books to illustrate the theme: Australian Military History in 1000 books. For such a study it is practically axiomatic that it would be written by Peter Stanley. The sometime Australian military history reader would recognise Stanley as a foremost writer in the genre; this book is Stanley’s 46th. His over 40 years of military history writing, teaching and mentoring includes 20 years at the Australian War Memorial, culminating in the position of Principal Historian, and recently retiring as Research Professor at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.
Beyond the Boken Years is an overview of books written on Australian military history which, according to Stanley, number over 1000. He chose the title – Beyond the Broken Years – to observe the 50th anniversary of the book Beyond the Broken Years; Australian Soldiers in the Great War, by Bill Gamage. Gammage’s book stemmed from his PhD thesis of 1970 which, Stanley states, was ‘almost certainly the first doctoral thesis written in Australian military history, and certainly the first to be published’. This fact may seem astounding to many but, as Stanley explains, military history was unfashionable at the time; Gammage had difficulty securing a PhD supervisor. It was a period immediately post the divisive Vietnam war and the general Australian public seemed to have cooled to the concept of war commemoration as demonstrated in declining attendances at Anzac Day observations which were seen as the prerogatives of ‘returned men’. Veterans observed the day at solemn dawn services, followed by marches with their old units, to be followed by reunions fuelled by alcohol and ‘two-up’. It was definitely a day for the ‘old diggers’ and families and friends left them to it.
Those born after World War Two grew up in its shadow. Their fathers (and many mothers) had served, and many carried the scars of that service. Support services were minimal – one could receive a war pension from the Repatriation Department after undergoing a level of interrogation (sadly this has scandalously continued in various forms up to the present day as evidenced by the recent Royal Commission findings). The RSL ruled the veteran community with an iron rod as a politically powerful institution; however, its perceived tribalism turned many veterans away.
War books and feature films were plentiful in the 1950s; these were overwhelmingly British and American. There was a community feeling that writing about war was the domain of ‘those that were there’ and those that weren’t had no right to do so. Many veterans wanted to forget the war and rarely spoke of it to their families. The same characteristic was evidenced after 1918.
From his Introduction: From Memory to History, Stanley takes the reader off at a fast clip into the genesis and maturation of Australian military history. The book has 50 bite-sized chapters arranged in six parts:
A Short History of Australian Military History
Before Anzac
The Great War and After
The Second World War
Post 1945, and
Themes in Australian Military History.
The topics cover the corpus of Australian military history, delving into major themes as well as rarely explored fields. Each is dealt with concisely in a dignified and considered manner – military history can be tribal and divisive. Populist authors can ride roughshod over referenced and evidenced facts in favour of trumpeting Australian military brilliance in the face of (usually British) incompetent generals.
Stanley addresses this popularism in Chapter Four: Hellfire; Rise of the ‘storians. ‘Storains’ is a cute term invented by a prominent populist author. In Stanley’s words: ‘Storians value the story above the evidence, emphasising personalities, drama and action.
Australian military history writings are largely army related. Stanley allocates only one chapter to the navy and air force respectively. The navy’s chapter is HMAS Australia; The Royal Australian Navy, but it is sufficient to cover the field. Apart from the naval volumes in the official histories of Australia in the two World Wars, Stanley maintains there was little naval history published until the late 1960s. He credits Lew Lind, the Garden Island public relation officer, with starting the Naval Historical Society in 1970 which opened the field to naval history writers.
Most early writers were former Navy members and Stanley critiques these earlier authors as espousing a certain level of tribalism. He quotes Robert Hyslop – a long serving naval administrator – in his 1998 book, A Very Civil Servant that ‘a misunderstanding common to Naval Officers, that only someone who has ‘been there’ is capable of writing the history of Naval events’. Happily, this situation has transitioned to a wider and more considered treatment of Australian naval history as evidenced in works reviewed by the Australian Naval Institute. The names of many naval writers are mentioned in this chapter.
For those who wish to explore the 1000 books, Stanley provides a bibliography through a URL to the UNSW press. Beyond the Broken Years should be read by anyone with an interest in Australian military history, regardless of which topics occupy their primary interests. Written by a respected historian who uses his over 40 years of writing and research into the full range of military history topics, this is an excellent aid to refining one’s appreciation of the genre and enhancing selectivity in choosing what to read – and perhaps write!
