Martin Crotty reviews Peter Stanley’s Beyond the Broken Years: Australian Military History in 1000 Books UNSW Press, Sydney, 2024. ISBN9781761170140. 272 pp, RRP $39.99.
An historian as productive as Peter Stanley – with some fifty books to his credit – must be a voluminous reader and have the gift for turning thoughts and ideas quickly and effectively into learned writing. Perhaps only Stanley could have written this book – a wide-ranging survey of the history of Australian military history – in books at least. He is part of the phenomenon, but an astute observer and critic at the same time, and perhaps uniquely qualified to produce a guidebook through the field.
Good guidance matters in this field, partly because of the extraordinary boom in Australian military history writing in the last 40-50 years, but also because it attracts a disproportionate share of shonks and boosters alongside those genuinely committed to understanding the past and its effects. I cannot imagine how any serious student of Australian military history is going to make their way, for the foreseeable future, without reference to Beyond the Broken Years. It offers an almost exhaustive listing of relevant works in some fifty sub-categories of Australian military history, anecdotes and titbits about the authors and their works, some searing critiques, pointers to where more work is to be done, and thoughts about the structures and institutions which have helped and hindered the field. It is part annotated bibliography and part historiographical commentary, but much more readable than either of those terms would suggest.
In five parts and fifty short chapters (one for each year since the publication of The Broken Years), Stanley offers summaries and critiques of different genres and themes in Australian military history writing. He does so with characteristic brevity, frankness and occasional sharp humour. Among my favourites were his description of the Korean War as the most remembered “forgotten” conflict in history, his observation that the greater attention given to Australians in Greece in WWII than North Africa might have something to do with the relative congeniality of the research environments, and his criticism of Roland Perry for referring to the Light Horse’s victories in Arabia in a book title – on the not unreasonable grounds that the Light Horse did not fight in Arabia.
Thorough though Stanley is, there are, inevitably, a few omissions, and some topics get surprisingly little attention. There is almost nothing on veterans and veteran organisations, for example, or on military discipline, or military medicine. These might have to wait for future editions, of which there will surely be several as the field and its practitioners show few signs of slowing down. Perhaps most significantly, Stanley has restricted himself to the book form. This makes his task manageable, but it does mean that much influential military history in edited collections, theses, journal articles and other media is omitted.
What is clear from Stanley’s discussions is that Australian military history over the last half a century has been, on most measures, an only lightly qualified success story. Institutional support and research funds have encouraged growing numbers of researchers who have produced excellent work, and new generations have looked at topics old and new with approaches both novel and traditional. Military history might once have been blokes writing about guns and bombs, but it is now about men and women writing about operations, medical care, trauma, gender and sexuality, ethnic minorities, censorship and much more. The ending of military history’s isolation from the topics covered in academic history, which dates from Bill Gammage’s 1974 The Broken Years, has prompted a fruitful interchange that has enriched military and non-military history – we are all the better for it.
And yet there remain threats and hindrances. The “boosters”, or “’storians”, who care more for telling a good story than getting it right, continue to prompt nationalistic and partisan understandings, and often engage in outright falsehoods. Roland Perry and Peter FitzSimons are Stanley’s two particular bugbears, but they are in good company. Les Carlyon and Grantlee Kieza also rate a few mentions, and deservedly so. They and their ilk are forever rediscovering “forgotten” Anzac stories, including, rather incredibly, that of John Monash. One wonders if they are capable of searching library catalogues, or Google Maps, or visiting memorial sites – one has to be blind to miss the attention Monash has always received. The same might be said for many other topics on which “’storians” write not so much to advance new ideas but to sell vast qualities of often rather poor work.
Another threat comes from the rapid and disturbing decline in university history. Contrary to popular opinion, much Australian military history has been produced by university academics. They have brought to the subject a range of insights coming from memory studies, gender history, race relations, cultural history and much more. Indigenous, queer, non-Anglo servicemen and women, anti-war protesters, conscientious objectors, veterans, war correspondents, deserters, bereaved families and others all now have a place on the much-enlarged stage of Australian military history. It is no longer the sole preserve of warriors and their officers and commanders. Military and non-military history have enriched each other in ways that are increasingly difficult as governments and universities starve the humanities disciplines.
A third comes from the Australian War Memorial’s at times questionable commitment to historical research, increasingly favouring the celebration rather than the understanding of our military past. During the recent expansion of the memorial, via a $500m commitment from the federal government, the research centre and its users were consigned to a cramped demountable in the carpark and made to wait three months for files that had previously been accessible within minutes. The symbolism was impossible to miss.
In this, Australian military history shares much with other academic history. Governments and the broader public are often reluctant to hear the truth. Official obstruction of the latest official history mirrors the hostility and even death threats that Stanley was subjected to when he showed that Japan had no intention of invading Australia in 1942. Those writing on the frontier wars, or the experiences of the Stolen Generations are all too familiar with publics that want their beliefs confirmed rather than challenged. Fealty to Anzac remains, as Frank Bongiorno has argued, a litmus test of one’s patriotism.
One can’t change the past, but you can choose who you get your History from. Stanley’s guidance and wisdom is an indispensable aid to navigating a crowded and often perilous field.
