AustLit

'On the eve of the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign comes a long overdue new biography of this iconic Australian war correspondent. On the eve of the centenary of the Gallipoli campaign comes a long overdue new biography of this iconic Australian war correspondent, C E W Bean. Charles Bean's wartime reports and photographs mythologised the Australian soldier and spawned the notion that the Anzacs achieved something nation defining on the shores of Gallipoli and the battlefields of western Europe. But did Bean tell the whole story of what he knew? In this new biography, Ross Coulthart explores not only the veracity of Bean's post-war official history but also how closely his actual experience from his diaries and other first-hand accounts compares with what he actually wrote as a journalist during the conflict. Much has been made of Bean's journalistic honesty, but the evidence suggests Bean did not have to be censored much at all. How constrained was he not only by the threat of official censorship but also by his own social and class prejudices and considerations of continued journalistic access? Coulthart's thesis is that repeatedly throughout Bean's frontline reportage, he made journalistic compromises to avoid clashing with the commanders who gave him unhindered access to the front lines. What has never been properly examined is how Bean abandoned any notion of covering the conflict as a proper news reporter to instead dedicate himself to the official history - perhaps because he knew that an attempt to honestly report what he was seeing would not be allowed to be told as the war still raged. This meant that like every other correspondent reporting on the allied armies in the Great War, the full catastrophic story of strategic and command failures was never properly told to his readers. Bean certainly faced death as often as many of the soldiers he stood beside in the trenches, seeing more combat than most of them. But did he get too close and in so doing, lose sight of the role of a journalist/correspondent in a war zone? Like Charles Bean, Ross Coulthart studied the law, became a journalist and has covered conflicts in hostile war zones such as East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan. He has always admired Bean's courage and scrupulous honesty, but he believes it is time to step behind the hagiography; he brings his journalist's eye to the real story a century on of the man who is so strongly linked with Australia's Great War.' (HarperCollins)