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Keeping My Hat On : A Night, a Day and Another Night in the Life of an Infantry Soldier single work   autobiography   war literature  
Issue Details: First known date: 2011... 2011 Keeping My Hat On : A Night, a Day and Another Night in the Life of an Infantry Soldier
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Notes

  • Editor's note:Much-loved former ABC TV presenter Peter Cundall (b. 1927) was a paratrooper in the British Army before going on to a colourful military career in postwar Europe, which included arrest and imprisonment for alleged espionage in Tito's Yugoslavia. After his release in early 1947 he was posted to the Palestine War (1945-48). He joined the Australian Army in 1950 and was sent with 3 RAR as a machine gunner to Korea. By November 1951 the Korean War had reached a stalemate, an agonising, protracted battle for ridges, outposts and hills that was to last until the Armistice Agreement was signed in July 1953.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing Mark Dapin (editor), Camberwell : Viking , 2011 Z1828081 2011 anthology extract autobiography correspondence diary war literature

    'From the cliffs of Gallipoli, through the jungles of Vietnam, to the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq, Australia's short history is a story of war.

    'The battlefield has shaped the way we define ourselves - the Australian values of mateship, courage under fire, larrikinism - but few of us have witnessed these scenes firsthand. Soldiers writing from the front and journalists on the ground have formed the way we think about war and so formed the way we think about ourselves.

    'In The Penguin Book of Australian War Writing, author and journalist Mark Dapin has gathered together the finest of these accounts. Starting with Watkin Tench's observations of an Aboriginal war party, we see the terror, confusion and occasional heroics of the front line through the eyes of some of our best writers, including AB Paterson, Martin Boyd, Patrick White, Alan Moorehead, Kenneth Slessor, Peter Cundall and Barry Heard.

    'These remarkable letters, diaries, memoirs and reports remind us of our history, and of our responsibility in recording and remembering what happens in the wars we send our soldiers to fight. (From the publisher's website.)

         Camberwell : Viking , 2011     pg. 357-366
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Last amended 3 Apr 2012 09:41:38
Subjects:
  • Korea, East Asia, South and East Asia, Asia,
  • 1951
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