Odyssey of the Unknown Anzac

by David Murray Hastings
Odyssey of the Unknown Anzac
Author: David Murray Hastings
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2018-04-12
Genre: History
ISBN: 1775589838
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Ten years after the end of World War I, the Sydney Sun reported that an unknown Anzac still lay in a Sydney psychiatric hospital. &‘This man . . . was found wandering in a London street during the war,' reported the paper. &‘He said he was an Australian soldier. Beyond his first statement that he was a Digger, he has not given any information about himself.'Thousands of people in Australia and New Zealand responded to this story and an international campaign to find the man's family followed. The story tapped into deep wells of sorrow and uncertainty which had been covered over by commemorations of Anzac heroism and honourable national sacrifice. More than a quarter of the Anzac dead had no known resting place. Might this be someone's missing son?David Hastings follows this one unknown Anzac, George McQuay, from rural New Zealand through Gallipoli and the Western Front, through desertions and hospitals, and finally home to New Zealand. By doing so, he takes us deep inside the Great War and the human mind.

Callan Park: ‘The Jewel of the West’

by Edward Moxon
Callan Park: ‘The Jewel of the West’
Author: Edward Moxon
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: History
ISBN: 1669886727
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This book is a record of events that happened at Callan Park before 1960. It is a journey of discovery that uncovers facts and manoeuvring not published before. In time dramatic changes did happen; there was a paradigm shift from mothering to encouraging independence. The government’s predominant focus, through its bureaucrats, was on costs, structure, and process. Others had different ideas. The change came through a handful of unlikely people; a female psychiatrist and her friends, two young nurses, one psychopathic doctor, a patient’s brother, a few buck-passing bureaucrats, a newspaper, and a Royal Commission. This story involves the CIA. Sexual favours; one doctor proudly claimed that there were three things necessary for a happy life, “...to eat in style, to drive in style and to f... in style.” The use of spies to gather information for personal gain or write headlines for a paper. Political gameplay and deals. Lies and empire builders, hatchet people and scapegoats. Callan Park is littered with the refuse of dedicated staff who succumbed to suicide, alcoholism, PTSD, depression, and family breakdown—written off as collateral damage. Treatments for psychiatric conditions are continually changing, not necessarily due to scientific advances. A popular treatment in the 1920s was isolation, an aperient in the 1940s and 50s, brain surgery, psychotropic drugs and LSD in the 1950s and 60s. The stage was set to usher in a revolution in the care and treatment of people with a mental health problem and to experience the worse of political intervention. Volume two explores these two concepts.

Anzac Memories

by Alistair Thomson
Anzac Memories
Author: Alistair Thomson
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
Total Pages: 426
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 1921867582
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Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994, and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave ‘as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation’, and Michael Roper concluded that ‘an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by’. In this new edition Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has transformed over the past quarter century, how a ‘post-memory’ of the Great War creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of the national past, and how veterans’ war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. He returns to a family war history that he could not write about twenty years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans’ post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory.

The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory

by Matthew Haultain-Gall
The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory
Author: Matthew Haultain-Gall
Publisher:
Total Pages: 336
Release: 2021-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9781922464064
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The Ypres salient 'was the favourite battle ground of the devil and his minions' wrote one returned serviceman after the First World War. Few who fought in the infamous third battle of Ypres - now known as Passchendaele - in 1917 would have disagreed. All five of the Australian Imperial Force's (AIF) infantry divisions were engaged in this bloody campaign. Despite early successes, their attacks floundered when autumn rains drenched the battlefield, turning it into an immense quagmire. By the time the AIF withdrew, it had suffered over 38,000 casualties, including 10,000 dead, far outweighing Australian losses in any other Great War campaign. Given the extent of their sacrifices, the Australians' exploits in Belgium ought to be well known in a nation that has fervently commemorated its involvement in the First World War. Yet, Passchendaele occupies an ambiguous place in Australian collective memory. Tracing the commemorative work of official and non-official agents, The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory explores why these battles became, and still remain, peripheral to the dominant First World War narrative in Australia: the Anzac legend.

Don't Mention the War

by Kevin Foster
Don't Mention the War
Author: Kevin Foster
Publisher: Monash University Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2013-12-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1922235180
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The war in Afghanistan is now the longest and, arguably, worst reported conflict in Australian history. In Don’t Mention the War, Kevin Foster explores why this is so and considers who engineered and who has benefitted from its impoverished coverage. He examines how and why the Australian Defence Force restricted the media’s access to and freedom of movement among its troops in Afghanistan and what we can learn about their motives and methods from the more liberal media policies of the Dutch and Canadian militaries. He analyses how the ADF ensured positive coverage of its endeavours by bringing many aspects of the reporting of the war in-house and why some among the fourth estate were only too happy to hand over responsibility for newsgathering to the military. The book also investigates how political responses to the conflict, and the discourse that framed them, served to conceal the facts and neuter public debate about the war. After more than a decade of evasion and obstruction, half-truths and hype, Don’t Mention the War reveals how politicians, the military and the media failed the public over the Afghan conflict. Here is the real story behind the Australian story of the war.

Beyond Gallipoli

by Raelene Frances
Beyond Gallipoli
Author: Raelene Frances
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: War and society
ISBN: 9781925495102
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A selection of papers originally presented at a conference held in ðCanakkal, Turkey in 2015.

Blood Lust, Trust & Blame

by Samantha Crompvoets
Blood Lust, Trust & Blame
Author: Samantha Crompvoets
Publisher: In the National Interest
Total Pages: 96
Release: 2021-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781922464613
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As Australia comes to grips with accusations that some of its elite soldiers committed war crimes in Afghanistan, a catchcry for certain commentators is that the 'fog of war' explains, justifies and possibly excuses the alleged atrocities that have come to light. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, the adversary's capability, and intent. However, the 'fog of war' is woefully inadequate in explaining actions that were deliberate, targeted and repeated. Abuses of power and the normalisation of deviance are at the heart of the 'cultural issues' that have long plagued the Australian Defence Force. In fact, this can be said of all institutions grappling with the same problems: histories of abuse and secrecy, sexual harassment, and problems of diversity and inclusion. It is always easiest to point a finger at a 'what' rather than a 'who', so 'culture' features prominently in analyses of what went wrong regarding the alleged war crimes committed by Australia's Special Operations Command. But does a focus on culture provide clarity or obscurity? Does it lead to or is it a barrier to accountability? How do you know when you've achieved cultural change?

Antipodes

by Avan Judd Stallard
Antipodes
Author: Avan Judd Stallard
Publisher: Australian History
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Australia
ISBN: 9781925377323
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This book is a new history of an ancient geography. It reassesses the evidence for why Europeans believed a massive southern continent existed, and why they advocated for its discovery. When ships were equal to ambitions, explorers set out to find and claim Terra Australis. Antipodes charts these voyages?voyages both through the imagination and across the High Seas?in pursuit of the mythical Terra Australis. In doing so, the question is asked: how could so many fail to see the realities they encountered? And how is it a mythical land held the gaze of an era famed for breaking free the shackles of superstition? That Terra Australis did not exist didn?t stop explorers pursuing the continent, unwilling to abandon the promise of such a rich and magnificent land till it was stripped of every ounce of value it had ever promised. In the process, the southern continent?an imaginary land?became one of the shaping forces of early modern history. Includes 48 pages of b & w and colour images.