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'The comparison may be unlikely, but Virginia Woolf’s insight into her diary keeping is a pointer to what defines almost all the soldiers’ diaries that I have examined in the remarkable collection held by the Mitchell Library in the State Library of New South Wales. They are not carefully planned, they are raw and unpolished, they are a more-or-less spontaneous record or narrative of the day or the week, and they are rich with ‘diamonds’. Their pre-eminent quality is an unpretentious authenticity and immediacy, a realism matched by no other literary form in the records of wartime experience.' (Author's introduction)
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Epigraph: If I stopped and took thought it would never be written at all; and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated but which are the diamonds of the dustheap. { Virginia Woolf, 20 January 1919 }
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