AustLit

'Australia’s war in Afghanistan has led to the production of a number of military memoirs, published commercially and reaching a diverse readership. These memoirs shape public understandings of the experience of the war and how it was fought. This article analyses a selection of these military memoirs, focusing on how soldier-authors frame their reasons for joining the military and for being deployed to war. The article pays attention to descriptions of combat, mateship, and the enemy, and to the ways in which these books convey the costs of war.' (Publication abstract) 

'Vere Gordon Childe remains, after a century, Australia’s greatest archaeological expatriate. During the interwar period and into the 1960s he played a seminal role in crafting a coherent pan-European narrative of prehistoric cultural change from what had largely been several centuries of localised antiquarian object collecting. He not only connected local manifestations of archaeological evidence into cultural units that extended beyond national boundaries but was able to arrange them in time, providing a structure in which cultural successions and ethnic change could be examined as forming the evolving human map of Europe and the Middle East that emerged with the earliest historical records.'  (Introduction)

'I found this book to be somewhat puzzling. Ross Walker writes very well and has a gift for telling stories. I could imagine this being the sort of book that one might purchase at an airport to read on a flight.'  (Introduction)

'In Indigenous Peoples and the Second World War R. Scott Sheffield and Noah Riseman have crafted a detailed comparative study of Indigenous peoples – Native Americans of the United States, First Nations peoples of Canada, the Māori people of New Zealand and the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Torres Strait Islands – and their military service during World War II. As one can imagine, each community’s participation in the war was rich and varied, but as Tom Holm emphasises in his foreword, ‘their experiences before, during and following their return home were remarkably similar’ (xi).'  (Introduction)

'This book tells an extraordinary story of war mobility during the tremendous demographic upheavals of World War II. Miyakatsu Koike, the author of the book, travelled from Surabaya in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) to Australia as a civilian internee, and this book is his firsthand account of his experience in two countries, Indonesia and Australia.' (Introduction)

'This book is a lyrical, meditative exploration of the making and re-making of Australian History. In particular, it ponders the place of Australian ‘History’ as a scientific, evidence-based discipline bound up with nationhood and national identity, themes felt perhaps strongly with self-conscious colonisation in 1788, the ‘progress’ of nineteenth-century frontiers, the cause of Federation, and of course throughout the long echoes of the History Wars since the early 2000s.' (Introduction)

'In the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and as the nation ponders the Uluru Statement from the Heart, there is increasing public interest in biographies of Aboriginal subjects. Henry Reynolds and Nick Clements’ Tongerlongeter (2021) and Cassandra Pybus’ Truganini (2020) have provided new understandings of the violent dispossession of the palawa/pakana peoples of lutruwita from Country that colonists named Van Diemen’s Land.'  (Introduction)

'A Question of Colour and Debesa are both intimate and personal accounts of the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families and their resilience and survival in the face of this removal. A Question of Colour is the story of a family in north Queensland – especially Cairns, Townsville and Palm Island – and the family story told in Debesa is set in the Kimberley in the northwest of Western Australia. The two books document different aspects of intergenerational impacts of removal under the harsh ‘assimilationist’ policies in the respective states.'  (Introduction)

'Tongerlongeter is less a traditional biography of a specific Aboriginal man than an exercise in refocusing discursive attention on an Aboriginal figure: a significant proportion of the book is essentially contextual. In terms of biographical detail, the story the authors tell about Vandemonian Aboriginal leader Tongerlongeter hinges on a handful of recorded moments in an under-documented life. The authors situate these moments within a broad narrative encompassing the first third of the nineteenth century, seeking to both relate and reframe the violent encounter between Aboriginal peoples and the ‘white men’ in early colonial Van Diemen's Land.'  (Introduction)