Australia, Colonial Era Onward (Military History)

Introduction
The global wars of the 20th century have had a defining effect on the course of Australian history. Despite its relative youth and small size, the Australian nation has chosen to become embroiled in conflicts such as the two world wars, the limited conflagrations of the Cold War such as Korea, Malaya, Borneo, and Vietnam, and more recently in places like Iraq and Afghanistan; this involvement has been a consequence of both particular and enduring themes. The nation’s historical connections to Britain, its unique security dilemmas, and policies designed to solve them have all been central in this regard. Apart from the various “wars” of the 20th century, in the post–Vietnam era Australian military forces have also been involved in numerous international peacekeeping missions. In total, nearly 103,000 Australians died during the course of these conflicts. The social impacts of Australian experiences of war in the 20th century were dominated by the “Anzac” myth. Indeed, no discussion of Australian military history can proceed without an acknowledgment of the importance of this phenomenon. The word itself is derived from Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—a formation that participated in the Gallipoli landing in 1915. As Australians learned of the tragedy and the loss of life in the events unfolding in the Dardanelles, so, too, were they told that such bloodletting had forged their nation’s rite of passage into the international community. Their country had passed its test. At the same time, deeds at Gallipoli, and later in Flanders and Palestine, filled a vacuum for the “newborn” nation. In the 1920s and 1930s the idea of Anzac also came to represent a distinct collection of social values embodying the perceived comradeship of frontline soldiers, the rejection of conventional discipline, physical strength, egalitarianism, loyalty, self-sacrifice, courage, and early-20th-century Australian conceptions of masculinity. It became impossible to escape the myth—and it still is. Anzac is, in fact, getting stronger. The number of politicians invoking the term to hit a social chord bound to reverberate, the size of Anzac Day marches despite the dwindling number of veterans, the number of Australians on annual pilgrimages to Anzac Cove—flags in hand or draped over their shoulders—provide evidence enough of this. This issue here from a historiographical perspective is that efforts at objective and historical analysis often run up against the social expectations of Anzac. Any student of Australian military history must be aware and cautious of the ever-present tension. Partially as a consequence, as it stands, those interested in Australian military history should also be aware that the genre is dominated by populist, nonacademic authors and that the volume of academic work is relatively small. This is particularly so with regard to works dealing with the more technical aspects of military history such as command, operations, doctrine, logistics, and the role of technology.
General Overviews
There are few published works that encompass the entirety of Australia’s 20th-century military history. However, two outstanding standard general reference works in this regard are Grey 2008, now in its third edition, along with Dennis, et al. 2008. See also the six volumes of The Australian Centenary History of Defence, particularly Beaumont 2001. A valuable bibliography in the field is Smith and Moss 1987. Anzac Day and the Anzac legend have attracted some perceptive commentators, most recently the authors of Lake, et al. 2010. An earlier debate on the role of the Gallipoli landings in 1915 in the creation of Australian national feeling may be followed in Serle 1965. For an exceptional general essay about the place of war in Australian history, see White 1988. The amateur and natural soldier traditions are well analyzed by Ross 1985. More recently, Stockings 2010 has offered a critical antidote to some of the enduring “myths” of Australian military history from Gallipoli to East Timor in 1999.
Beaumont, Joan. The Australian Centenary History of Defence. Vol. 6, Australian Defence: Sources and Statistics. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001.
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This is Volume 6 of a six-part series on the history of Australian defense. It is a valuable source of empirical data in its own right but is best used in conjunction with the other five volumes of the series: Jeffrey Grey and David M. Horner, The Australian Army (2001); Alan Stephens, The Royal Australia Air Force (2001); David Stevens, The Royal Australian Navy (2006); David M. Horner, Making the Australian Defence Force (2001); and Eric Andrews, The Department of Defence (2001) (all published by Oxford University Press, Melbourne).
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Dennis, Peter, Jeffrey Grey, Ewan Morris, Robin Prior, and John Connor. The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History. 2d ed. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2008.
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This work is structured and formatted in accordance with typical Oxford Companion style. It represents the distilled expertise of a range of leading Australian military historians and is a necessary reference text for any serious investigator in the field.
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Grey, Jeffrey. A Military History of Australia. 3d ed. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511481345Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the standard single-volume overview of Australian military history from colonial frontier conflict to modern-day military commitments. It is accessible and valuable for general readers, undergraduates, and professional historians alike.
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Lake, Marilyn, Henry Reynolds, Mark McKenna, and Joy Damousi. What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010.
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In this collection, the authors present their belief that it is time to call a halt to the relentless militarization of Australian history. It is a controversial book and one of the few to criticize the Anzac phenomenon.
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Ross, Jane. The Myth of the Digger: The Australian Soldier in Two World Wars. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1985.
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In this book, Ross explores the myth of the Australian “digger” in relation to the reality of the First Australian Imperial Force (1st AIF) and 2nd AIF. In an incisive study, she finds, not surprisingly, that the legend and the actuality are markedly different.
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Serle, Geoffrey. “The Digger Tradition and Australian Nationalism.” Meanjin Quarterly 24.2 (1965): 155–156.
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Serle investigates, among other issues associated with the “digger” tradition, how it was crafted by ex-servicemen and conservative elements within Australian society as an expression of right-wing patriotism and nationalism.
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Smith, Hugh, and Sue Moss, eds. A Bibliography of Armed Forces and Society in Australia. Canberra: University of New South Wales Press, 1987.
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A valuable bibliographical source covering not only the operational aspects of Australian military history, but the social aspect as well.
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Stockings, Craig, ed. Zombie Myths of Australian Military History. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010.
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This is an edited work bringing together a number of leading contemporary Australian military historians. The work is not iconoclastic for its own sake but rather attempts to challenge a number of the most deeply entrenched misconceptions of Australian military history. Invariably, this means that most authors run up against, and must deal with, the distorting effect of Anzac mythology.
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White, Richard. “War and Australian Society.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne, 391–424. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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This article is a clear, articulate, and valuable discussion of the role and place of war within conceptions of Australian military history.
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Colonial Military History
Australia has a considerable, if largely underacknowledged, military history in the period from white settlement in Australia in 1788 to the beginning of World War I. For a wide variety of reasons, including friction on the frontier, limited sectarian-based violence, and most importantly as a consequence of deep political and strategic connections to the British Empire, Australians were involved in military activity in many places. Within Australia, from 1788 onward, were minor insurrections by convicts and by miners and an ongoing small-scale war with the Aborigines that lasted into the 20th century. Australian volunteers served in locally raised British units in the Maori Wars in New Zealand, 1863–1864, and in 1885 a New South Wales (NSW) colonial contingent was sent to Sudan to fight under British command. So, too, in 1900 a naval brigade with volunteers from NSW and Victoria was dispatched to the Boxer Rebellion in China. By far the most significant colonial military experience, however, was the service of around twenty thousand Australians as colonial troops, then as national contingents after Federation, in the war in South Africa 1899–1902.
The British Army and Colonial Australia
Good standard guides to the subject are Bach 1986, and, insofar as tracing the social impact of British regiments, Wilcox 2009. On the British army in Australia, see Stanley 1986. The early development of the local forces is described in Wilcox 1998. The pattern of war scares and colonial social attitudes to war and organized violence are dealt with in Inglis 1974. Strangely, there is no detailed history of the often-reviled New South Wales Corps, although the question of its composition has been much discussed. The best and most recent scholarship on the subject is provided by Statham-Drew 1992. The Corps’ sole “battle honor,” Vinegar Hill, is examined by Silver 1989. An interesting argument concerning the social background to the military in early Australia is provided by Auchmuty 1954.
Auchmuty, J. J. “The Background to the Early Australian Governors.” AustralianHistorical Studies 6.23 (1954): 301–314.
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The purpose of the article is to draw attention to the need for greater study of the social heritage of the early Australian pioneers, whether of military, free, or convict origin, and at the same time to emphasize certain incidents, facts, and situations in other parts of the British Empire that influenced them. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Bach, John. The Australia Station: A History of the Royal Navy in the South West Pacific, 1821–1913. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1986.
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This study concerns the story of the Royal Navy in Australia told from the navy standpoint and is only indirectly concerned with the broader traditional themes of Australian history. It is nonetheless, despite its somewhat narrow scope, a detailed and valuable source of information for this period.
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Inglis, Kenneth Stanley. The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History, 1788–1870. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974.
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A valuable social history of the period from 1788 to 1870, from the beginning of British settlement of Australia to the year when the last British soldiers sailed home from the colonies.
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Silver, Lynette Ramsay. The Battle of Vinegar Hill: Australia’s Irish Rebellion, 1804. Sydney: Doubleday, 1989.
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The author provides a thorough account of the battle and its causes and reveals the lives of the key rebels and their enemies against a background of Irish politics in the colonial period.
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Stanley, Peter. The Remote Garrison: The British Army in Australia, 1788–1870. Kenthurst, Australia: Kangaroo, 1986.
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The author, one of Australia’s most preeminent military historians, covers the history of the British army in Australia; from the first arrival of the First Fleet to 1870 throughout the later colonial and early federal periods, when the various Australian colonies and the new nation began to take over responsibility for their own defense. This is a key title on the early defense forces of Australia.
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Statham-Drew, Pamela. A Colonial Regiment: New Sources Relating to the New South Wales Corps, 1789–1810. Canberra: P. Statham, 1992.
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A valuable edited source that contains, among other resources, a biographical listing of every soldier who served in the NSW Corps from 1790 to 1800.
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Wilcox, Craig. For Hearths and Homes: Citizen Soldiering in Australia 1854–1945. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
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The history of Australia’s citizen soldiers has remained curiously unwritten, despite a number of distinguished studies on various phases and aspects of Australian citizen soldier activities, which began immediately following the Crimean War and came to an end in 1948 with the formation of a professional standing army in this country. Wilcox sets out to redress this deficiency in an overview work on citizens soldiering in Australia between 1899 and 1914.
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Wilcox, Craig. Red Coat Dreaming: How Colonial Australia Embraced the British Army. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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The Anzac tradition is, as historian Ken Inglis has noted, in many ways Australia’s secular religion. In this book, Wilcox describes what came before that and wonders if Australians’ love of the khaki slouch hat might in fact have grown out of an equal enthusiasm for the red coats of the British Empire.
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War on the Frontier
Much of the modern literature on Aboriginal resistance has been framed in the context of the history of race relations. While it has reclaimed an important element of Australian history successfully, much of it is written with little regard for or understanding of European military realities in the 19th century, or the nature of war in general. A standard work is Connor 2002. A good overview of the subject is given by Broome 1988, while a provocative general argument about the nature of black–white conflict is provided by Denholm 1979. The major starting point is the work of Reynolds 2006. For the massacre at Waterloo Creek, Milliss 1992 is a massive 965-page indictment of white behavior on the frontier of settlement.
Broome, Richard. “The Struggle for Australia: Aboriginal-European Warfare, 1770–1930.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne, 92–120. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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The author provides a sound overview of frontier conflict in Australia. He also makes a detailed attempt to estimate Aboriginal casualties.
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Connor, John. The Australian Frontier Wars, 1788–1838. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2002.
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Connor presents the Aborigines fighting on the frontier as neither heroes nor victims. Instead, we are invited to follow, as far as the records allow, the intellectual and imaginative means by which they dealt with problems they had never confronted before.
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Denholm, David. The Colonial Australians. Ringwood, UK: Penguin, 1979.
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Along with addressing the specific issues of frontier conflict, the author provides some controversial insights into colonial Australian society and individual lives.
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Milliss, Roger. Waterloo Creek: The Australia Day Massacre of 1838, George Gipps and the British Conquest of New South Wales. Ringwood, UK: McPhee Gribble, 1992.
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A comprehensive account of two massacres of Aboriginal people in 1838 in northern New South Wales, and the attempts by Governor George Gipps to bring the white perpetrators to justice. Includes an extensive index and a valuable select bibliography.
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Reynolds, Henry. The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006.
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This book constituted one of the first comprehensive research projects on this topic and had a profound impact on Australian historiography. It challenged and changed the way in which many Australians understood the history of relations between indigenous Australians and European settlers. Originally published in 1982.
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Late Colonial Period
The late colonial period in Australia must be understood in its imperial context, and Gordon 1965 meets this need. A valuable work on the colonial forces includes Nicholls 1988—the only treatment of the colonies as a whole. See as well Johnson 1975, the only published treatment of the defense forces of an individual colony, although several other studies exist in unpublished theses. For a solid discussion of citizen soldiering in this period, see Wilcox 1998. The centenary of the Sudan contingent produced a rush of publications, many not worth bothering with. Inglis 1985 is elegant and beautifully illustrated and sets the contingent into the context of colonial society from which it sprang. The role of defense in the move toward Federation is covered in Norris 1975. Studies of the Boer War vary also. The best modern general history, Pakenham 1999, confirms the marginal role overall of the Australian contingents. Wilcox 2002 combines analysis of colonial politics and public opinion with the experience of the contingents and is elegantly written.
Gordon, Donald C. The Dominion Partnership in Imperial Defense, 1870–1914. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965.
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A foundational work that places the late colonial era in Australia within its necessary imperial context.
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Inglis, Kenneth Stanley. The Rehearsal: Australians at War in the Sudan, 1885. Adelaide, Australia: Rigby, 1985.
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This book draws on the soldiers’ own words, and on many other sources, verbal and visual, to tell the story of how the Sudan contingent was formed, how its members fared at war, and how their experience was interpreted by politicians, writers, photographers, and artists.
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Johnson, D. H. Volunteers at Heart: The Queensland Defence Forces, 1860–1901. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1975.
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A well-written and comprehensively researched account of the units that comprised the Queensland Defence Force between 1860 and 1901.
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Nicholls, Bob. The Colonial Volunteers: The Defence Forces of the Australian Colonies, 1836–1901. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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The work was one of the first comprehensive accounts of the defense forces of the Australian colonies from the 1830s to Federation in 1901. It traces the raising and equipping of the military and naval forces of each colony and fills a major gap in the history of 19th-century Australia.
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Norris, Ronald. The Emergent Commonwealth: Australian Federation: Expectations and Fulfilment, 1889–1910. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975.
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A comprehensive account of the movement toward and realization of Australian Federation. Defense issues are only one of many aspects covered in this work.
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Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War. London: Folio Society, 1999.
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This is a well-recognized and standard work on this conflict. It is accessible and extensively researched.
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Wilcox, Craig. For Hearths and Homes: Citizen Soldiering in Australia 1854–1945. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
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This is a valuable overview work on citizens soldiering in Australia from 1854 up to World War II.
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Wilcox, Craig. Australia’s Boer War: The War in South Africa, 1899–1902. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002.
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An account of Australian troops in South Africa, appraising their performance in the field and exploring the relationship between them and their Imperial commanders. Also looks at the home front.
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Early Federal Period
The early federal period, a period of peacetime development, is better served by the secondary literature than virtually any other comparable period, perhaps because the official records have been available to scholars for longer under the relevant archival legislation. An important overview of the topic that argues for the existence of a clearly defined Australian defense and foreign policy is provided by Meaney 1976. The context of Australian military policy may be followed in several good books on imperial defense and empire relations, especially Preston 1967. The army is better served than the navy, especially through the work of Chris Coulthard-Clark (Coulthard-Clark 1976, Coulthard-Clark 1986). Military policy generally, and Hutton’s role specifically, are treated in Mordike 1992, although this work needs to be read alongside Wilcox 1994. The compulsory military training scheme has been analyzed in Barrett 1979. For naval developments, see Gill 1959, which is old but still serviceable.
Barrett, John. Falling In: Australians and “Boy Conscription,” 1911–1915. Sydney: Hale & Iremonger, 1979.
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This book examines the history of and attitudes toward compulsory military training in Australia. It profiles 267 trainees in order to challenge the claim that Australians opposed compulsory conscription.
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Coulthard-Clark, Chris. The Citizen General Staff the Australian Intelligence Corps, 1907–1914. Canberra: Military Historical Society of Australia, 1976.
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This work covers intelligence in colonial Australia and the impact of the war in South Africa, the moves toward an Intelligence Corps, and the formation and disbandment of the Corps and other intelligence-gathering agencies during World War I.
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Coulthard-Clark, Chris. Duntroon: The Royal Military College of Australia, 1911–1986. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986.
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A comprehensive history of the Royal Military College, which includes the political and military context surrounding its founding.
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Gill, G. Hermon. “The Australian Navy: Origins, Growth and Development.” Royal Australian Historical Society Journal 45.3 (November 1959): 139–158.
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This is the text of a paper read to the Royal Australian Historical Society. As suggested by the title, it covers various aspects of Australian naval developments up to 1959.
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Meaney, Neville. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901–23. Vol. 1, The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901–14. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1976.
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This is the first volume in a pioneering two-volume history of Australia’s relations with the world, from the founding of the Commonwealth to the Great War and its immediate aftermath. This book is based on wide-ranging research in collections of personal and official papers in Australia, Britain, the United States, and Canada and offers original insights into Australia’s political culture
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Mordike, John. An Army for a Nation: A History of Australian Military Developments 1880–1914. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Directorate of Army Studies, Department of Defence, 1992.
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For many Australians, Australia’s participation in World War I is both an essential part of their national identity and an inevitable consequence of their British heritage. In this book, Mordike challenges the view of Australia’s past by exposing the competing national and imperial influences which shaped the foundations of the Australian army.
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Preston, Richard A. Canada and “Imperial Defense”: A Study of the Origins of the British Commonwealth’s Defense Organisation, 1867–1919. Durham, NC: Duke University Press for the Duke University Commonwealth-Studies Center, 1967.
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Imperial defense, viewed as a centrally planned and directed defense organization, is a myth. Rather, as Professor Preston effectively argues, the defense structure of the British Empire between 1867 and 1919 was characterized by a number of ad hoc military and naval steps taken by the dominions without imperial control.
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Wilcox, Craig. “Relinquishing the Past: John Mordike’s ‘An Army for a Nation’.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 40.1 (1994): 52–65.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8497.1994.tb00089.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article was written in response and opposition to many of Mordike’s central arguments. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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World War I
Australia’s war began with the government pledging full support for Britain in August 1914. Early military operations saw a small Australian expeditionary force taking possession of German New Guinea and the neighboring islands of the Bismarck Archipelago in October 1914. On 25 April 1915, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) landed at Gallipoli together with troops from New Zealand, Britain, and France. This began a campaign that ended with the evacuation of troops on 19 and 20 December 1915. Following Gallipoli, Australian forces fought campaigns on the western front and in the Middle East. Throughout 1916–1917, Australian losses on the western front were heavy. In July 1918, the Australians fought at the battle of Hamel, and early August they then took part in a series of decisive advances until Germany surrendered on 11 November. Australians also fought in the Middle East from 1916, defending the Suez Canal and participating in the conquest of the Sinai. In 1917, Australian and other Allied troops advanced into Palestine and captured Gaza and Jerusalem. By 1918, they had occupied Lebanon and Syria. On 30 October 1918, Turkey sued for peace. For Australia, World War I remains the most costly conflict in terms of deaths and casualties. From a population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men enlisted, of whom over 60,000 were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed, or taken prisoner. The starting point for any consideration of the Australian role in World War I is Beaumont 1995, which is especially good on economic and social issues. The pivotal series is, of course, the massive official series, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, edited and largely written by Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean from 1921 to 1942. The volumes in the series are Bean 1921, Gullett 1984, Cutlack 1923, Jose 1928, Mackenzie 1927, Scott 1936, and Bean and Gullett 1923.
Bean, C. E. W. The Story of Anzac: From the Outbreak of the War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Landing, May 4, 1915. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1921.
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Traces in detail the initial Australian experience at Gallipoli. See also: The Story of Anzac: From May 4, 1915 to the Evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula (1924); The AIF in France, 1916 (1929); The AIF in France, 1917 (1933); The AIF in France during the Main German Offensive, 1918 (1937); and The AIF in France during the Allied Offensive, 1918 (1942) (all published by Angus & Robertson, Sydney).
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Bean, C. E. W., and H. S. Gullett. Photographic Record of the War: Reproductions of Pictures Taken by the Australian Official Photographers (Captains G.H. Wilkins, M.C., and J.F. Hurley, Lieutenants H.F. Baldwin and J.P. Campbell) and Others. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1923.
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This work contains reproductions of pictures taken by the Australian official photographers (Captains G. H. Wilkins, M.C., and J. F. Hurley, Lieutenants H. F. Baldwin and J. P. Campbell) and others, annotated by C. E. W. Bean and Henry Somer Gullett.
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Beaumont, Joan, ed. Australia’s War 1914–18. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995.
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This text covers all aspects of Australia’s involvement in World War I. It covers topics including where Australia fought and why; the Anzac legend; the Australian war economy; conscription and a divided society; the role of the churches; women, family, and the home front; and the war’s impact on Australia’s place in the world.
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Cutlack, Frederick Morley. The Australian Flying Corps in the Western and Eastern Theatres of War, 1914–1918. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1923.
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This is the history of the Australian Flying Corps on the western front and in the Middle Eastern theatres. Almost half of the text (twelve of the twenty-seven chapters) is devoted to the Australian air force in the skies over Mesopotamia (Iraq), Egypt, Jordan, and Palestine, culminating, appropriately, in the Battle of Armageddon.
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Gullett, H. S. The AIF in Sinai and Palestine, 1914–1918. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1984.
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This volume deals not only with the Light Horse but also with the new Australian Flying Corps, the logistical basis of the various operations, and the general conditions under which the campaign was fought. First published in 1923.
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Jose, Arthur W. The Royal Australian Navy, 1914–1918. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1928.
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This work sets out to show that during the war, the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) had justified the policy of those prewar Australian leaders who had inaugurated it. Whether fighting an action, in routine patrolling, or working ashore, the new Australian fleet and its men, under Admiralty control, had shown themselves worthy.
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Mackenzie, S. S. The Australians at Rabaul: The Capture and Administration of the German Possessions in the Southern Pacific. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1927.
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This work concerns an episode that seemed of little importance at the time but became a major factor in the military history of Australia. In going to Rabaul, the Australians acted as agents of the British Empire. While they were there, the policies and actions of the Australian garrison in German New Guinea were determined almost exclusively by Australians.
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Scott, Ernest. Australia During the War. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1936.
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Scott’s work covers the early unanimity with which the war was greeted, the growing unease at the cost of war, the anguish of the conscription referenda, and the political turmoil that followed. Working from the question of how did Australia react to the war, Scott, traces its effects in discussions of censorship, the internment of aliens, the formation and equipment of Australia’s forces, and the development of a war economy.
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Historiography
World War I is probably the most written-about subject in Australian military historiography. For an analysis of this literature, see Dennis and Grey 1985. Bean himself has been examined by Inglis 1970 and Barrett 1988. McCarthy 1983 is good on details of Bean’s war experience but is uncritical in its judgments and has little to say about the official history itself. An interesting aspect of the production of the history is essayed in Ellis 1983. The raw material of the history, Bean’s diaries, has been published in part in Fewster 1983. Andrews 1990 examines Bean’s role in the politics of the Australian high command in France, while Macintyre 1994 is a sympathetic and nuanced study of the official historian of the home front.
Andrews, Eric. “The Media and the Military: Australian War Correspondents and the Appointment of a Corps Commander, 1918.” War and Society 8.2 (October 1990): 83–103.
DOI: 10.1179/072924790799733381Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
An interesting article that traces how Bean lobbied (along with Keith Murdoch, father of Rupert Murdoch) unsuccessfully against the appointment of General John Monash to the command of the Australian Corps in 1918. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Barrett, John. “No Straw Man: C.E. W. Bean and Some Critics.” Australian Historical Studies 23.89 (April 1988): 102–114.
DOI: 10.1080/10314618808595781Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
A useful historiographical article examining the strengths and weaknesses of Bean’s work and also of those historians who subsequently critiqued it. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Dennis, Peter, and Jeffrey Grey. “Australian and New Zealand Writing on the First World War.” In Neue Forschungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg: Literaturberichte und Bibliographien von 30 Mitgliedstaaten der “Commission Internationale d’Histoire Militaire Comparée.” Edited by Jürgen Rohwer, 1–8. Koblenz, West Germany: Bernard & Graefe, 1985.
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This chapter provided a valuable general review and examination of Australian literature connected to World War I.
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Ellis, Stephen. “The Censorship of the Official Naval History of Australia in the Great War.” Historical Studies 20.80 (April 1983): 367–382.
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This work concerns itself with how censorship was exercised over the official history of Australia’s naval contribution to the war and what was suppressed from the published version of this naval history. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Fewster, Kevin, ed. Gallipoli Correspondent: The Frontline Diary of C. E. W. Bean. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.
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This is an annotated diary of C. E. W. Bean, Australia’s official correspondent during World War I. Bean landed at Gallipoli on the first day, 25 April 1915, and remained until the evacuation. More than any other, he shaped the Anzac legend.
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Inglis, Kenneth Stanley. C. E. W. Bean, Australian Historian. John Murtagh Macrossan Lecture Series. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1970.
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A concise biographical examination of Bean by a leading Australian historian.
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Macintyre, Stuart. A History for a Nation: Ernest Scott and the Making of Australian History. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994.
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This work is a biography of an amateur historian who became professor of history at Melbourne University in 1914. It examines the impact of Scott’s prolific writings and his influence on students such as Manning Clark, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and Keith Hancock. It also discusses the development of Australian historiography during the interwar period.
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McCarthy, Dudley. Gallipoli to the Somme: The Story of C. E. W. Bean. Sydney: John Ferguson, 1983.
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This is a detailed biography of Charles Bean—Australia’s most famous war correspondent during World War I.
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Campaigns
There are few good modern operational analysis– or battlefield-oriented studies of the campaigns in which the Australians participated, probably because it seems to the average reader, and writer, that Bean has left little uncovered. Robertson 1990 is both the last word on the subject in this generation and a careful, scholarly refutation of many prevalent and popular interpretations. A useful counter to most popular treatments of the August offensive on Gallipoli is Crawley 2010. Third Ypres has been analyzed in Prior and Wilson 1996. Several important studies of the AIF have appeared. Gammage 1974 had the effect of placing World War I on the popular and scholarly agenda for a new generation of readers, although his actual argument does not add anything much to the positions advanced by Bean fifty years previously. Robson 1970 discusses both the voluntary enlistment system and the conscription referenda, written from the viewpoint of an opponent of conscription for the Vietnam War. A fine example of the more sophisticated approach possible in the field generally is Pedersen 1988. Brugger 1980 is excellent on the role of the Light Horse as enforcers of empire in the Egyptian revolt and is a model of scholarship and erudition. Similarly, Bou 2009 traces the role of the Light Horse, while Stanley 2005 provides a powerful example of what life and conditions were like for Australian soldiers at a particular point at Gallipoli.
Bou, Jean. Light Horse: A History of Australia’s Mounted Arm. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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Based on extensive research from both Australia and Britain, this book is a comprehensive history of the Australian Light Horse in war and peace. Bou examines the place of the Light Horse in Australia’s military history throughout its existence, from its antecedents in the middle of the 19th century until the last regiment was disbanded in 1944.
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Brugger, Suzanne. Australians and Egypt, 1914–1919. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1980.
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This book examines Australia’s forces in the Great War (particularly the Light Horse) from an unusual angle—their experience of, and impact on, Egypt and the Egyptians. The Australian army provided few facilities for recreation, so the soldiers turned for their amusement to the bars, bazaars, and brothels of Cairo. This book sheds light on Australian attitudes to imperialism and racism; the author’s knowledge of Arabic allows her to give judgment from both sides.
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Crawley, Rhys. “The Myths of August at Gallipoli.” In Zombie Myths of Australian Military History. Edited by Craig Stockings, 50–69. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2010.
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This chapter provides a contextualized overview of the August Offensive, focusing on aspects such as planning, command, logistics, and interservice cooperation. It offers a perspective quite different from most Australian accounts.
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Gammage, Bill. The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1974.
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Using diaries and letters of Australian soldiers, Gammage reconstructs the valor and tragedy of their experience. Through it, he shows how and why World War I was to have profound effects on the attitudes and ideals of Australia as a nation
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Pedersen, Peter. “The AIF on the Western Front: The Role of Training and Command.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne, 167–193. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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Romantic notions of the Australian soldier in World War I tend to focus on his innate military qualities. Much less work has been done, in this context, with regard to the importance of training and command for the AIF in France. This chapter is an attempt to rectify the shortfall.
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Prior, Robin, and Trevor Wilson. Passchendaele: The Untold Story. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996.
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The authors offer a complete account of the campaign, establishing what occurred, what options were available, and who was responsible for the devastation.
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Robertson, John. Anzac and Empire: The Tragedy and Glory of Gallipoli. Richmond, Australia: Hamlyn Australia, 1990.
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This work is a detailed and accurate account of the Gallipoli campaign from the Australian point of view, told largely through the words of participants and observers, and an examination of the relationship and attitudes between Australia and Britain at all levels.
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Robson, Leslie Lloyd. The First AIF: A Study of Its Recruitment, 1914–1918. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970.
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This book deals with the cause, course, and effects of the recruitment of the Australian Imperial Force over the four and a half years of World War I.
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Stanley, Peter. Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.
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Delving into the history of Quinn’s as a key part of the Anzac line, this book illuminates what it was like to live, fight, and die there for a succession of Australian, New Zealand, and British units. It tells the story of this position, drawing substantially on the words of those who served there.
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Strategic Role
Australia had little role in the strategic and higher direction of the war, and literature on this aspect is correspondingly sparse. Louis 1968, Fitzhardinge 1970, and Thornton 1983 deal with this aspect in the Pacific. See also Meaney 2009.
Fitzhardinge, Laurence Frederic. “Australia, Japan and Great Britain, 1914–18: A Study in Triangular Diplomacy.” Historical Studies 14.54 (April 1970): 250–259.
DOI: 10.1080/10314617008595422Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article investigates the fact that relationships between Australia and Japan during World War I saw the first steps toward a distinctive Australian foreign policy, as it came to be realized that Australian and British (or Imperial) interests might conflict and that where such conflict existed Australia could not rely on Britain. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Louis, Roger. “Australia and German Colonies in the Pacific, 1914–1919.” Journal of Modern History 38 (1968): 407–421.
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This article is a detailed examination of Australian attitudes to German Pacific colonies during World War I.
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Meaney, Neville. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy 1901–23. Vol. 2, Australia and World Crisis, 1914–23. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.
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This is the second volume in a two-volume history of Australian defense and foreign policy. It is based on wide-ranging research in Australia, Britain, the United States, and Canada. It offers insight into Australia’s relations with the world from the outbreak of World War I to the making of peace in Europe and the Pacific.
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Thornton, Robert. “Invaluable Ally or Imminent Aggressor? Australia and Japanese Naval Assistance, 1914–18.” Journal of Australian Studies 12 (June 1983): 5–20.
DOI: 10.1080/14443058309386861Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
During the Great War, Britain’s naval weakness in the Pacific forced her to rely to a major extent on the sea power of her Japanese ally for assistance in maintaining the security of the Australasian dominions. This article reveals the serious doubts held in Australia about Japan’s capacity and credibility as an ally and the actual value of her naval support. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Personalities
Leading Australian personalities of World War I are reasonably well served in the existing literature. Monash has received superb handling by Serle 1982, while his generalship has been scrutinized professionally in Pedersen 1985. Hill 1978, a biography of Chauvel, was the first of the modern biographies of Australian generals of the war. It was closely followed by Coulthard-Clark 1979 (on Bridges). Bean 1957 discussed both Bridges and White, but the author was uncritical in certain crucial respects. White deserves a full-length study, which has still not been written. Hughes is treated in Fitzhardinge 1979. More recently, Elliott has been covered by McMullin 2008, Glasgow by Edgar 2011, and Pearce by Connor 2011.
Bean, C. E. W. Two Men I Knew: William Bridges and Brudenell White, Founders of the AIF. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1957.
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The biographies of two generals well known to the author, C. E. W. Bean, who was Australia’s most famous war correspondent during World War I. William Throsby Bridges and Cyril Brudenell Bingham White were two of Australia’s most famous generals of World War I.
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Connor, John. Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
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This is the first full-length biography of George Foster Pearce—a carpenter who became one of Australia’s most influential politicians, and the man central to how Australia planned for, and fought in, World War I. Pearce was the nation’s longest-serving defense minister, holding the portfolio before, during, and after World War I.
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Coulthard-Clark, Chris. A Heritage of Spirit: A Biography of Major-General Sir William Throsby Bridges. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1979.
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This work is a biography of one of the key figures in the post-Federation Australian army, who went on to lead the AIF at Gallipoli before being wounded in action.
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Edgar, Peter. Sir William Glasgow: Soldier, Senator and Diplomat. Newport, Australia: Big Sky, 2011.
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This is a well-researched biography of Glasgow as a soldier, senator, and diplomat. It tells the story of this once-famous figure and his career in the AIF, Commonwealth government, and the diplomatic service, and in doing so reveals much about Australia at war and peace in the first half of the 20th century.
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Fitzhardinge, Laurence Frederic. The Little Digger, 1914–1952: William Morris Hughes; A Political Biography. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1979.
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A detailed biography of William Morris Hughes, the seventh prime minister of Australia, from 1915 to 1923. Much attention is given Hughes’ role in the direction of the Australian war effort, and the conscription debate.
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Hill, A. J. Chauvel of the Light Horse. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1978.
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Alec Hill’s excellent biography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Chauvel is a valuable and readable insight into the life of the officer most commonly associated with the Light Horse.
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McMullin, Ross. Pompey Elliott. Melbourne: Scribe, 2008.
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This work retrieves a significant Australian from undeserved obscurity. It also judiciously reassesses notable battles Elliott influenced—including the Gallipoli Landing, Lone Pine, Fromelles, Polygon Wood, and Villers-Brettoneux—and illuminates numerous aspects of Australia’s experiences during his lifetime, particularly the often-overlooked period of the aftermath of the Great War.
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Pedersen, Peter. Monash as Military Commander. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1985.
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A detailed and dispassionate account of Monash’s development as a military commander before and during World War I. What emerges is an illustration of how a commander works and what he could achieve even under conditions so inimical to the exercise of command as those which prevailed on the western front.
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Serle, Geoffrey. John Monash: A Biography. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press in association with Monash University, 1982.
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The compelling story of one of Australia’s most prominent generals, Sir John Monash.
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Home Front
Studies of the home front in Australia during World War I are numerous, although many tend to concentrate upon the conscription referenda and political dissent. An overview is provided by McKernan 1980, which is reasonably good also on the experiences and views of the AIF in Britain. The conscription issue has been analyzed from varying perspectives: see Smith 1971 and Gilbert 1971. A sound regional study of the issue is Robertson 1959. Regional studies of the Australian home front and war effort in general include Lake 1975 and McQuilton 1987. The role of “socialist” Australian women with regard to the anticonscription movement is discussed by Damousi 1991, but little attention has been paid to conservative women, just as little has been written on pro-conscription groups.
Damousi, Joy. “Socialist Women and Gendered Space: Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns of 1914–1918.” Labour History 60 (May 1991): 1–15.
DOI: 10.2307/27509044Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article investigates the entrance of socialist activist women into the public domain during World War I, and their role in the anticonscription debates. Issues include why, for example, such women faced physical attack by men during the war years as opposed to what seemed to be prewar protection by Australian men. Available online by subscription.
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Gilbert, Alan D. “Protestants, Catholics and Loyalty: An Aspect of the Conscription Controversies 1916–17.” Politics 6.1 (1971): 15–25.
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This article is an attempt to show that the bifurcation of Australian religion over the conscription issue arose partly because of a fundamental disagreement about what it meant to be an Australian.
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Lake, Marilyn. A Divided Society: Tasmania during World War I. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975.
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The author argues that the war caused fragmentation in Tasmania rather than unification, as other scholars have argued.
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McKernan, Michael. The Australian People and the Great War. Melbourne: Nelson, 1980.
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A very readable social history of the war that provides considerable insight into the home front in Australia.
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McQuilton, John. “A Shire at War: Yackandandah 1914–18.” Journal of the Australian War Memorial 11 (October 1987): 3–18.
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Statistical analyses of the characteristics of the men who volunteered for the AIF remain thin on the ground. This study of Yackandandah at war provides information for a rural shire.
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Robertson, J. R. “The Conscription Issue and the National Movement in Western Australia: June 1916–December 1917.” University Studies in Politics and History 3 (1959): 7–57.
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This article is a study, at a state level, of how the conscription issue played out in Western Australia. It shows, for example, that the electorate did not necessarily vote along the lines of party allegiance over this issue.
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Smith, F. B. The Conscription Plebiscites in Australia, 1916/17. Melbourne: Victorian Historical Association, 1971.
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This is an older, yet still-valuable general work on the conscription issue at a national level.
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Cost
The cost of the war to Australia in social and human terms is an area of increasing academic and publishing interest. Lloyd and Rees 1994 is a detailed study of the system of welfare for returned servicemen which sprang out of the Great War experience. Kristianson 1966, though dated, is still valuable for its account of the origins of the major veterans’ organization, which likewise emerged from the war. It must be supplemented by Sekuless and Rees 1986, which has all the strengths and weaknesses of commissioned institutional history, while Lake 1988 provides a dissenting interpretation. Garton 1996 examines the postconflict experiences of those who did return.
Garton, Stephen. The Cost of War: Australians Return. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996.
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This work focuses on Australians who returned from various wars. It examines the effects of combat, the emotional and physical scars borne by returned servicemen, the impact of return on families and friends, the repatriation system that sought to alleviate the effects of return, and the efforts of Australians to understand the bodily, psychological, and cultural wounds of war.
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Kristianson, G. L. The Politics of Patriotism: The Pressure Group Activities of the Returned Servicemen’s League. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1966.
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This book traces the political influence and impact, through advocate and pressure group activities, of the Returned Servicemen’s League. Interestingly, it was written with the full support of that organization.
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Lake, Marilyn. “The Power of Anzac.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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This chapter investigates the political power and role of returned veterans (and the associated image of Anzac) in postwar Australia and efforts by the government to harness them in a cooperative manner by offering a privileged position.
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Lloyd, Clem, and Jacqui Rees. The Last Shilling: A History of Repatriation in Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994.
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The history of repatriation in Australia has tended to turn up in a multitude of diverse forms—articles, chapters in monographs, and studies of aspects of repatriation, or of voluntary work and fund-raising. What Lloyd and Rees have done is add to this compendium of knowledge a thorough reporting of the contents of masses of Commonwealth archives.
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Sekuless, Peter, and Jacqueline Rees. Lest We Forget: The History of the Returned Services League 1916–1986. Sydney: Rigby, 1986.
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This work traces the history of the Returned Services League and the roles it plays in Australian society.
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The Interwar Period
The literature on the interwar period in Australia is uneven. Some subjects, especially the Singapore strategy, are well covered, while others have barely been touched. For a brief overview of the development of policy and practice in Australian interwar defense, see Robertson 1988. The Singapore strategy has generated an enormous literature. A good general work is Meaher 2010. Little of value has appeared on the individual services in this period. A unique work in Australian military studies is Hyslop 1973, with its focus is administration, rather than policy. Coulthard-Clark 1991 is a detailed account of the development of the air force and suggests what might be done with the other two services in this formative period. Rowell 1974 contains a short chapter on the army from firsthand knowledge. Paramilitary political activity in the interwar period is covered by Moore 1989.
Coulthard-Clark, Chris. The Third Brother: The Royal Australian Air Force 1921–1939. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Royal Australian Air Force, 1991.
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This is a history of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) published to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of its founding in 1921. It covers the formative years until 1939, filling the gap between the official histories of Australian air power during World War I and World War II.
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Hyslop, Robert. Australian Naval Administration, 1900–1939. Melbourne: Hawthorn, 1973.
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This work deals primarily with relationships between ministers and their advisers in the formulation and execution of naval policy.
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Meaher, Augustine, IV. The Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal. Sydney: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010.
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This work debunks the myth that the fall of Singapore in February 1942 was a British betrayal that exposed Australia to Japanese invasion. British authorities never gave Australia an iron-clad guarantee against enemy attack and invasion and always stressed the need for Australians to take responsibility for home defense.
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Moore, Andrew. The Secret Army and the Premier: Conservative Paramilitary Organisations in New South Wales 1930–32. Sydney: New South Wales University Press, 1989.
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This book documents the story of The Old Guard and revises existing interpretations of events such as the dismissal of Premier Jack Lang. It also provides insight into some of the forgotten aspects of the history of New South Wales in the 1930s.
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Robertson, John. “The Distant War: Australia and Imperial Defence, 1919–41.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne, 223–244. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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This chapter is a succinct summary of Australian defense policy and strategic thinking from 1919 to 1939.
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Rowell, Sydney Fairbairn. Full Circle. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974.
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An autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Sydney Fairbairn Rowell, K.B.E., C.B. (15 December 1894–12 April 1975), an Australian soldier who served as a divisional and corps commander in World War II, and as chief of the General Staff from 17 April 1950 to 15 December 1954.
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World War II, 1939–1945
World War II is one of the great watersheds in Australian history. Around 560,000 Australians volunteered to serve overseas during the war, significantly more than the 322,000 members of the original AIF of World War I. The air force saw action over Europe, and the navy in 1940–1941 fought with the British Royal Navy in the Mediterranean. At the outbreak of the conflict, the prime minister of Australia, Sir Robert Menzies, immediately announced that its armed forces would support the Allied war effort—without reference to Parliament. This policy continued under John Curtin, the leader of the Australian Labour Party, who gained power in 1941. Compulsory military service was reintroduced with the understanding that conscripts would be required to serve only in Australia and its territories. Volunteer recruitment for overseas service commenced, although the numbers of recruits and the rates of voluntary enlistment were initially much lower than had been the case in 1914. In any case, two divisions (the Sixth and Seventh) of the all-volunteer Second Australian Imperial Force (AIF) under Lieutenant-General Sir Thomas Blamey were sent to Palestine for training in 1940. These soldiers were expected to be sent to France, but after its surrender in June 1940, they were dispatched to North Africa instead. There, Australian troops took part in the First Libyan Campaign, 1940–1941, and went on to form the bulk of the garrison at Tobruk under Lieutenant-General Leslie Morshead. They also fought in Greece, Crete, and Syria in 1941. Australian involvement in the war is well served by the secondary literature. The best general guides are Beaumont 1996 (for social, economic, and political dimensions) and Robertson 1981 (for strategic and high policy issues). The single-volume survey by the official historian, Long 1973, remains a valuable overview as a campaign history. The official series Australia in the War of 1939–1945 is cited here under Long 1952. While the official history does not deal with military and strategic policy, the gap has been filled by Horner 1982. As a consequence, in the first three years of the war, relatively few well-trained and full-time Australian military units were stationed at home prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor of 7 December 1941. Some limited measures had been taken to improve home defenses prior to this date, but the only combat-ready division stationed in the Pacific was the Eighth Division in Malaya. In addition were eight more partially trained and equipped divisions in Australia. The air force contained around 370 mostly obsolete aircraft, and the navy had three cruisers and two destroyers in Australian waters. In 1942, these forces were buttressed by AIF formations recalled from the Middle East and an expansion of the citizen-based part-time militia and the air force. From this point, US units also began arriving in Australia before being deployed to New Guinea. The Allies moved onto the offensive in late 1942, with the pace of advance accelerating in 1943. From 1944, the Australian military was mainly relegated to subsidiary roles as US forces pressed inwards towards Japan, but Australians continued to conduct large-scale operations until the end of the war. For a short bibliographical essay on the period, readers are directed to Robertson and Grey 1990. Relevant volumes of the official history can be found here under Maughan 1967. Government policy can be traced through Neale 1982.
Beaumont, Joan, ed. Australia’s War 1939–45. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996.
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In this edited book, Joan Beaumont, Kate Darian-Smith, David Lee, David Lowe, Marnie Haig-Muir, Roy Hay, and David Walker consider the range of Australia’s experience of this conflict. In a single volume, they draw together the many aspects of the war and of historical scholarship.
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Horner, David M. High Command: Australia and Allied Strategy, 1939–1945. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1982.
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Horner examines Australia’s higher policy decisions and investigates the political forces that were to ultimately determine Australia’s contribution to the war. Issues include: How competent were Australian politicians, military leaders and advisers in formulating their own war strategy? How much did the performance of Australian troops on the battlefield affect the country’s ability to influence Allied strategy?
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Long, Gavin. To Benghazi. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1952.
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This first volume in the official series Australia in the War of 1939–45 covers Australian operations in the Middle East up to the Syrian campaign. See also the other volumes: Gavin Long, Greece, Crete and Syria (1953); G. Hermon Gill, Royal Australian Navy, 1939–42 (1957); Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939–42 (1962); John Herington, Air War Against Germany and Italy, 1939–43 (1954); Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1939–41 (1952); and J. Butlin, War Economy, 1939–42 (1955) (all published by Australian War Memorial, Canberra).
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Long, Gavin. The Six Years War: Australia in the 1939–45 War. Canberra: Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1973.
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This book is Long’s short history of Australia’s role in World War II. In 1943, Long proposed producing a short history of Australia’s role in the war as soon as possible after the war ended. This did not eventuate, however, and The Six Years War was the second-to-last volume to be published. Long began work on the book in 1945 and continued on it throughout the official history project.
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Maughan, Barton. Tobruk and El Alamein. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1967.
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This work covers Australian operations at Tobruk and El Alamein. See also Lionel Wigmore, The Japanese Thrust (1957); Dudley McCarthy, South West Pacific Area: First Year (1959); David Dexter, The New Guinea Offensives (1961); Gavin Long, The Final Campaigns (1963); G. Hermon Gill, Royal Australian Navy, 1942–45 (1969); George Odgers, Air War Against Japan, 1943–45 (1957); Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942–45 (1970); Sydney James Butlin and C. B. Schedvin, War Economy, 1942–45 (1976); and David Paver Mellor, The Role of Science and Industry (1958) (all published by Australian War Memorial, Canberra).
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Neale, Robert George. Documents on Australian Foreign Policy, 1937–49. Vol. 5, July 1941–June 1942. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1982.
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This is a book of documents relating to a number of issues during this period, including the Far East (and the Japanese occupation of Indo-China and Japanese/American relations; the war against Japan; New Caledonia; the war in the Middle East and the return of the AID; the war in Europe; international meetings and organizations; trade and supply, including Lend-Lease; and diplomatic and consular representation. See also volumes 4, 6, 7, and 8.
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Robertson, John. Australia at War, 1939–1945. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1981.
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The book contains assessments of the main personalities who molded Australia’s war effort such as Menzies, Curtin, Blamey, and MacArthur, while also focusing on the men who did the actual fighting and the men and women working on the home front.
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Robertson, John, and Jeffrey Grey. “Australian and New Zealand Writing on the Second World War.” In New Research on the Second World War: Literature Surveys and Bibliographies. Edited by Jürgen Rowher, 13–20. Schriften der Bibliotek fur Zeitgeschichte. Stuttgart: Bernard & Graefe, 1990.
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This work provides an overview bibliographical guide to the period.
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Personalities
Personalities loom large in the discussion of Australia and World War II. The career of Lieutenant-General Frank Berryman, a key and underacknowledged figure in Australia’s involvement in this war, is well documented in Dean 2011. The standard biography of Blamey, Australia’s most senior soldier, is Horner 1998—which crowns a long and distinguished list of writings by its author on the higher command and decision-making processes during the war. Lodge 1998 examines one of Blamey’s rivals. Horner 1992 looks at Vasey, one of the best of the divisional commanders thrown up by the war. Lodge 1986 (on Bennett) is both a penetrating study of its subject and a serious analysis of the Malayan and Singapore campaigns. The soldiers of the AIF speak for themselves in Johnson 1996. For an outstanding study of the issue of Australian battalion commanders during the war, see Pratten 2009. As far as memoirs are concerned, one of the single finest ever written by an Australian soldier about the nature of Australian soldiers is Gullett 1976, which is in a class of its own.
Dean, Peter. The Architect of Victory: The Military Career of Lieutenant-General Sir Frank Horton Berryman. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511974991Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is a biography of Lieutenant-General Sir Frank Berryman, who is relatively unknown yet one of the most important officers in the history of the Australian army. Despite his reputedly caustic personality and noted conflicts with some senior officers, Berryman was crucial to Australia’s success during World War II.
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Gullett, Henry (“Jo”). Not as a Duty Only: An Infantryman’s War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1976.
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An autobiography of Gullett, who was commissioned in the field in North Africa. He served with the AIF in the Middle East, Greece, New Guinea, and then in Europe after D-Day. He was wounded three times and was awarded the Military Cross in 1943.
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Horner, David. General Vasey’s War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.
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This is a biography of a professional soldier who commanded the Australian force in Crete against the Germans in World War II, directed the Australian advance from Kokoda, and was in command during the defeat of the Japanese in the Pacific. It analyzes his military performance and also provides insights into his private life, based largely on his letters to his wife.
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Horner, David. Blamey: The Commander in Chief. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
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Blamey is the only Australian to reach the rank of field marshal and is generally accepted to be Australia’s most important soldier—despite his not being its most accomplished battlefield commander or innovator. He was not respected by many of the soldiers he commanded and the politicians he worked with, and his career was marked by controversy.
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Johnson, Mark. At the Front Line: Experiences of Australian Soldiers in World War II. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
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This work draws on a plethora of letters, diaries, and documents written by over three hundred Australian soldiers in the field to present a picture of the hardships and triumphs of their wartime experience. The author analyzes the suffering of front-line soldiers caused not only by the opposing force, but also by the conditions imposed by their own army.
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Lodge, A. B. The Fall of General Gordon Bennett. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986.
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This book tells the fascinating story of the destruction of the career of Australia’s most controversial soldier. Bennett enjoyed a meteoric rise during the Great War. His bravery at Gallipoli and in France was legendary. Yet at the end of World War II, he faced a military court of inquiry.
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Lodge, Brett. Lavarack: Rival General. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
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This biography traces and analyzes the military career of Lieutenant-General John Lavarack, one of the more controversial military leaders the Australian services have produced. Popular opinion in many circles was of a military leader who was the rival of Blamey and who was responsible for the needless capture and deaths of many Australian soldiers on Sumatra.
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Pratten, Garth. Australian Battalion Commanders in the Second World War. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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This book investigates the background, role, and conduct of the commanding officers of Australian infantry battalions in World War II. Despite their vital role as the lynchpins of the battlefield, uniting the senior officers with the soldiers who fought, the battalion commanders had previously received scant attention in contemporary military history. This book redresses the balance.
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Campaigns
There are a number of quality studies of individual campaigns outside the official history. Worth reading are Williams 2012, Austin 1988, a trilogy cited here under Brune 1997, and Callinan 1953. Horner 1978, a study of Australian military leadership in Papua, and Stanley 1997, on Tarakan, are two of the best books written on Australian operations in recent times.
Austin, Victor. To Kokoda and Beyond: The Story of the 39th Battalion, 1941–1943. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988.
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This is the history of the Thirty-Ninth Australian Infantry Battalion, a militia unit that was thrown into battle against the Japanese army advancing over Owen Stanley’s towards Port Moresby in New Guinea in 1942.
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Brune, Peter. The Spell Broken: Exploding the Myth of Japanese Invincibility. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997.
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An account of the battles at Milne Bay and Buna-Sanananda, about which very little has been written. A well-researched account of the battles that seized the initiative from the Japanese. Its strength is its vivid description of the fighting from the soldiers’ perspective. See also, by the same author, Those Ragged Bloody Heroes: From the Kokoda Trail to Gona Beach 1942 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1991).
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Callinan, Bernard. Independent Company: The 2/2 and 2/4 Australian Independent Companies in Portuguese Timor, 1941–1943. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1953.
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This work is a detailed history of the No. 2 and No. 4 Independent Commando Companies and their operations during World War II against the Japanese.
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Horner, David M. Crisis of Command: Australian Generalship and the Japanese Threat, 1941–1943. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978.
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An excellent and concise account that evaluates the performance of Australian military commanders during World War II, especially during the Papua New Guinea campaigns.
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Stanley, Peter. Tarakan: An Australian Tragedy. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1997.
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In 1945, 240 Australians died taking the small Borneo island of Tarakan. The tragedy was that by the time they succeeded, they need not have begun. The author explores what the battle was like and what it means to Australians over fifty years on. He describes a justifiable operation doomed by the politics of coalition warfare and by bad planning.
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Williams, Peter. The Kokoda Campaign 1942: Myth and Reality. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012.
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The author seeks to present a revisionist case and to dispel the myth that Australians were outnumbered by the Japanese on the Kokoda Trail. It also focuses on strategies and tactics employed by the Japanese.
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Strategy and Policies
The politics of alliance, command relations, and the higher direction of the war may be followed in Horner 1996. A different view is offered in Bell 1977, which is weak on the military aspects but good on the politics of Lend-Lease. Burns 1998 provides a long account of the genesis of the political controversy but also has something to say about the preparations for the defense of the Australian mainland in 1942. On the defense of Australia, Jenkins 1992 is very good on both the analysis and the detail of the flawed submarine campaign waged in Australian waters. Edwards 1977 has edited the reports on wartime Australia of senior American diplomatic personnel.
Bell, Roger J. Unequal Allies: Australian-American Relations and the Pacific War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1977.
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This study of bilateral relations in the war against Japan, 1941–1945, explodes the pervasive belief, in Australia at least, that the two Pacific allies shared a special relationship, an extraordinary cultural and strategic relationship that has survived since the dark days of total war in the Pacific.
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Burns, Paul. The Brisbane Line Controversy: Political Opportunism Versus National Security 1942–45. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998.
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This work investigates the story behind the Brisbane Line controversy—the idea that parts of Australia above a line just north of Brisbane would be surrendered to the Japanese without firing a shot.
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Edwards, Peter G. Australia through American Eyes, 1935–1945. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1977.
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The author brings together the considered views of various US diplomats about Australia and the Australian people.
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Horner, David M. Inside the War Cabinet: Directing Australia’s War Effort 1939–1945. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian Archives, 1996.
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This work examines how crucial decisions were made during World War II—to allocate resources, sustain a nation at war, and send men off to their deaths, and so on—and presents original accounts of the making of fifteen crucial decisions in Australia’s war effort.
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Jenkins, David. Battle Surface! Japan’s Submarine War Against Australia 1942–44. Sydney: Random House Australia, 1992.
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This is an account of submarine naval operations in Australian waters by both the Japanese and the Australians during World War II. It is based on interviews and decoded Japanese messages recently made available in Washington. Includes photographs, maps, a bibliography, and a detailed index.
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The Services
Little of consequence has been written about the services themselves during the war. Notable exceptions are Hopkins 1978, nearly half of which is devoted to the war years, and Horner 1981. Perry 1988 is useful on the fluctuations in strength of the services. The essays in Stevens 1996 range widely in quality and subject matter, but the best are very good indeed.
Hopkins, R. N. L. Australian Armour: A History of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps, 1927–1972. Canberra: Australian War Memorial and Australian Government Publishing Service, 1978.
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The detailed history of the Royal Australian Armoured Corps from 1927 to 1972.
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Horner, David M. “Staff Corps versus Militia: The Australian Experience in World War II.” Australian Defence Force Journal 26 (January–February 1981): 13–26.
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A study of the causes and manifestations on institutionalized friction between permanent and part-time officers in the Australian army, particularly in the lead up to World War II.
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Perry, Frederick William. The Commonwealth Armies: Manpower and Organisation in Two World Wars. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988.
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Perry’s work concentrates upon the mobilization of British and Commonwealth manpower in World Wars I and II. Its primary concern is the issue of raising and organizing, and by implication equipping and training, ground forces for combat operations by the United Kingdom and her Commonwealth allies.
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Stevens, David, ed. The Royal Australian Navy in World War II. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1996.
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This work fully examines the part the Royal Australian Navy played throughout six years of global conflict. Drawing on official documents and the latest scholarly research, it sheds light on the importance of Australia’s role in maritime campaigns in various theatres.
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Home Front
The home front in this period is well served—see McKernan 1983. Darian-Smith 1990 is a good regional study. An example of what might be done in this field is provided by Powell 1988, which provides an exhaustively researched and ably written analysis of the war as it affected the Northern Territory. On the experience of indigenous Australians, see Hall 1989. It is unfortunate that much of the thesis work on women in wartime industry and the armed forces remains unpublished. However, see Bassett 1992 and Thomson 1991. Several books have been written on the impact of American service personnel in Australia during the war; like the several books written on the Cowra outbreak, they are of indifferent quality.
Bassett, Jan. Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992.
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This book records the difficulties, hardships, and triumphs of Australia’s army nurses from the Boer War to the First Gulf War.
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Darian-Smith, Kate. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939–1945. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1990.
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A study of civilian experience on the home front in Melbourne during World War II. Based on the memories of over one hundred people, mainly women, interviewed by the author. They reveal their reactions to wartime dislocation, the problems associated with restrictions and shortages, and the breaking down of moral values.
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Hall, Robert A. The Black Diggers: Aborigines and Torres Straits Islanders in the Second World War. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1989.
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This book explores the war effort of Aboriginal and Islander Australians during World War II, and the reasons their contribution has gone unrecognized for so long.
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McKernan, Michael. All In! Australia during the Second World War. Melbourne: Nelson, 1983.
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This work is a valuable overview on life in Australia during World War II. It is very accessible and full of detail and often quite amusing stories.
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Powell, Alan. The Shadow’s Edge: Australia’s Northern War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1988.
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This book is about Australia’s Northern Territory during World War II. The operations conducted by Australian and Allied armed forces based on this area formed a very small part of a very large war, but they meant that for the first time in the history of European Australia some part of its people faced the impact of modern war.
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Thomson, Joyce. The WAAAF in Wartime Australia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1991.
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Drawing on archival documents and interviews, this book discusses the role of the Women’s Auxiliary Australian Air Force and examines the political and public debate surrounding its formation in 1941.
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Prisoners of War
The experience of prisoners of war (POWs), especially of those captured by the Japanese, has spawned a considerable literature. In addition to the numerous memoirs which may be consulted via Gerster 1985, see Nelson 1985. The best single book on the Australian POW experience is Beaumont 1988, which uses the experiences of Gull Force, captured after the short-lived defense of Ambon, as a vehicle for exploring morale, leadership, mortality, and survival among prisoners of the Japanese. It should be matched with Henning 1995, on Sparrow Force, and McCormack and Nelson 1993. Australian prisoners of the Germans and Italians still await scholarly treatment.
Beaumont, Joan. Gull Force: Survival and Leadership in Captivity, 1941–1945. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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This book is an analysis of the treatment of Australian prisoners of war on the island of Ambon in 1942, where only 30 percent survived.
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Gerster, Robin. “The Rise of the Prisoner-of-War Writers.” Australian Literary Studies 12.2 (October 1985): 270–274.
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An article dealing with the phenomenon of memoir publication by POWs, and writing about the POW experience in a more general sense. This contains valuable bibliographical information.
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Henning, Peter. Doomed Battalion: The Australian 2/40 Battalion 1940–1945: Mateship and Leadership in War and Captivity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1995.
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A history of the 2/40 Battalion, which was sent to garrison an airfield in Dutch Timor immediately after the Japanese entered World War II. Assigned a hopeless military task, it was captured a week after the fall of Singapore and its members were scattered in prison camps throughout Asia.
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McCormack, Gavan, and Hank Nelson, eds. The Burma-Thailand Railway: Memory and History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993.
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This work presents an overview of the experience from a variety of perspectives—the prisoners of war, the Asian labor force, the Japanese engineer regiments, and supporting administration. The contributors include ex-POWs Tom Uren and the late Sir Edward (“Weary”) Dunlop, a Korean guard once sentenced to death as a war criminal, and a Japanese historian specializing in the history of Japan’s relationship with Asia.
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Nelson, Hank. Prisoners of War: Australians under Nippon. Sydney: ABC Enterprises for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 1985.
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This work is concerned with the history of twenty-two thousand Australian service personnel, including seventy-one women of the Australian army nursing service, who became prisoners of war of the Japanese. They were held in camps in Timor, Java, Sumatra, New Guinea, Ambon, Hainan, Borneo, Singapore and Malaya, Thailand, Burma, Manchuria, Formosa, and Japan. Only fourteen thousand survived three and a half years in captivity after varying experiences at the hands of their captors.
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Cold War Conflicts
Tied firmly within the anticommunist block during the Cold War, Australia fought in two of the biggest conflicts of the Cold War—the Korean War and the Vietnam War—and also supported Britain in Malaya and assisted Britain and Malaysia against Indonesia in the Konfrontasi. In Korea, Australia sent contingents from the three services to fight with the UN. The Third Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment (3 RAR) served from September 1951 to July 1953. Significant battles were Kapyong (April 1951) and Maryang San (October 1951). In Malaya, from 1950 to 1960 Australia again sent units from the three services to assist Britain and the Malayan government fight communist terrorists in the Malayan Emergency. Australian battalions served on rotation for periods of two years beginning in 1955. From 1965 to 1966, Australian forces assisted Britain and Malaysia in countering Indonesia’s policy of confrontation with Malaysia. Two Australian battalions, two Special Air Service squadrons and several engineer squadrons, served in Borneo. There were several deadly ambushes and patrol clashes but no major battles. In Australia’s largest commitment of the Cold War, Australian forces assisted South Vietnam and the United States in Vietnam. In 1962, Australia sent army advisers, and in 1965 a battalion was deployed. The following year, this battalion was replaced by a task force with two and later three battalions operating in Phuoc Tuy Province. The air force sent helicopters, Canberra bombers, and Caribou transport aircraft. The navy generally had a ship operating offshore. Major battles included Long Tan (August 1966), Coral‒Balmoral (May 1968), and Binh Ba (June 1969). The official series covering conflicts, The Official History of Australia in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975, under the general editorship of Peter Edwards, consists of Edwards 1992, McNeill 1993, O’Keefe and Smith 1994, Coulthard-Clark 1995, Grey and Dennis 1996, Edwards 1997, Grey 1998, McNeill and Ekins 2003, and Ekins and McNeill 2012.
Coulthard-Clark, Chris. The RAAF in Vietnam: Australian Air Involvement in the Vietnam War 1962–1975. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1995.
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Volume 4 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. A detailed account of RAAF involvement in Vietnam.
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Edwards, Peter. Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1965. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1992.
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Volume 1 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. This work deals with the political and diplomatic issues that led to Australian military commitment in the Vietnam War.
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Edwards, Peter. A Nation at War: Australian Politics, Society and Diplomacy during the Vietnam War 1965–1975. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1997.
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Volume 6 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. This volume covers the controversial “home front” issues of the antiwar and anti-conscription movements, the political and diplomatic rationale for the escalation of Australia’s military commitment, and the eventual withdrawal of Australian forces from Vietnam; contains a comprehensive appendix on the National Service scheme with a list of the birthdates drawn in all ballots from 1965 to 1972.
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Ekins, Ashley, and Ian McNeill. Fighting to the Finish: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War, 1968–1973. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 2012.
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Volume 9 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. The final volume in the series, which concludes the story of the Australian army in the Vietnam War.
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Grey, Jeffrey. Up Top: The Royal Australian Navy and Southeast Asian Conflicts 1955–1972. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1998.
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Volume 7 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. A detailed account of RAN involvement in Vietnam.
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Grey, Jeffrey, and Peter Dennis. Emergency and Confrontation: Australian Military Operations in Malaya and Borneo 1950–1966. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1996.
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Volume 5 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. Deals with Australian military involvement of all three services in the Malayan Emergency and the Indonesian/Malaysian Confrontation.
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McNeill, Ian. To Long Tan: The Australian Army and the Vietnam War 1950–1966. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1993.
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Volume 2 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. This is a highly readable study of the Australian army’s involvement in Vietnam up to the end of 1966, including a masterful account of the battle of Long Tan.
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McNeill, Ian, and Ashley Ekins. On the Offensive: The Australian Army in the Vietnam War, January 1967–June 1968. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 2003.
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Volume 8 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. The volume that follows To Long Tan, continuing the story of the Australian army in the Vietnam War through the expansion of the Australian Task Force to the battles at fire support bases Coral and Balmoral.
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O’Keefe, Brendan, and F. B. Smith. Medicine at War: Medical Aspects of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1950–1972. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1994.
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Volume 3 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. A comprehensive study of military medical matters, including the issues of malaria and “Agent Orange.”
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Postwar Period, 1945–1965
Australia’s post-1945 period is not well served in the secondary literature, especially before the involvement in Vietnam. However, a major interpretation of the foreign and defense policies in the earlier period is provided by O’Neill 1981. Older works that repay reading are Watt 1967 and Millar 1978. Both concentrate upon foreign policy, however, and military policy is generally ignored. Of interest here as well is Lee 1995.
Lee, David. Search for Security: The Political Economy of Australia’s Postwar Foreign and Defence Policy. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Department of International Relations, RSPAS, ANU, 1995.
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This work is a study that analyzes the search for security pursued by successive Australian governments in the decade following the end of World War II. Provides an economic dimension to the study of Australian foreign policy and demonstrates how even in the immediate postwar years, Australia’s global economic and security policies were deeply enmeshed.
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Millar, T. B. Australia in Peace and War: External Relations 1788–1977. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1978.
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This work is an overview history of Australian foreign policy from 1901 to 1977.
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O’Neill, Robert. Australia in the Korean War, 1950–53. Vol. 1, Strategy and Diplomacy. Canberra: Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1981.
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Volume 1 of the official history Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. Tells the story of Australia’s participation in the Korean War at the political and strategic levels.
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Watt, Alan. The Evolution of Australian Foreign Policy, 1938–1965. London: Cambridge University Press, 1967.
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The author demonstrates a number of facets of Australian diplomacy—the rational calculation of its needs, the recognition of its limited capabilities, the balanced choice of means to reach reasonable goals, and the calm nature of its diplomacy.
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Occupation of Japan
Similarly, little has been written on the Commonwealth role in the occupation of Japan, and the best examination is provided by Buckley 1982. The book’s principal shortcomings are that it focuses on Britain to the neglect of the Commonwealth and looks at most aspects of the topic only up to 1947, when Britain withdrew its occupation forces. The long-serving commander in chief of the force is discussed at some length, as is his command, in Grey 1992. An excellent compilation of documents is provided by Kay 1982.
Buckley, Roger. Occupation Diplomacy: Britain, the United States and Japan, 1945–1952. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982.
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This work attempts to provide a counterbalance against dominant views, which tend to stress the American occupation of Japan, and throws light on the British side of the Allied occupation by liberal utilization of British archival materials made available in recent years and also American documents.
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Grey, Jeffrey. Australian Brass: The Military Career of Lieutenant General Sir Horace Robertson. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
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Sir Horace Robertson was one of Australia’s most colorful and controversial generals. His career spanned forty years and two world wars, as well as a lengthy period in Japan and Korea between 1946 and 1951. Australian Brass charts the life of Red Robbie and uses his career as a vehicle to trace the development of the Australian regular army and professional officer corps.
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Kay, Robin, ed. Documents on New Zealand External Relations. Vol. 2, The Surrender and Occupation of Japan. Wellington, New Zealand: Government Printer, 1982.
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This is a massive collection of nearly 750 documents with information about the occupation of Japan.
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Korean War
On Australian participation in the Korean War, O’Neill 1985 is essential reading, although the level of detail is not necessary for the general reader. Grey 1988 examines Australian participation in its Commonwealth context, and from an alliance viewpoint. Odgers 1952, although old, is worth consulting for Australia’s part in the air war. The services themselves are covered more generally in Wright 1998; by some of the essays in Frame, et al. 1991; and in Stephens 1995, a magisterial account of the postwar air force.
Frame, T. R., James Goldrick, and P. D. Jones, eds. Reflections on the Royal Australian Navy. Kenthurst, Australia: Kangaroo, 1991.
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An edited work concerned with the history of the RAN since its formation.
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Grey, Jeffrey. The Commonwealth Armies and the Korean War: An Alliance Study. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1988.
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This book is principally concerned to show the pattern of relations between Commonwealth forces in the Korean War.
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Odgers, George. Across the Parallel. Melbourne: Heinemann, 1952.
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This work is a history of No. 77 Squadron RAAF in the Korean War.
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O’Neill, Robert. Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. Vol. 2, Combat Operations. Canberra: Australian War Memorial and the Australian Government Publishing Service, 1985.
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Volume 2 of the official history Australia in the Korean War 1950–53. Describes the war experiences of the RAN, Australian army, and RAAF.
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Stephens, Alan. Going Solo: The Royal Australian Air Force 1946–1971. Canberra: AGPS, 1995.
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This work is a history of the RAAF’s development from the end of World War II to its golden anniversary in 1971. Discusses its emergence as an organization independent of the RAF and the US Air Force, and covers events such as demobilization.
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Wright, Anthony. Australian Carrier Decisions: The Acquisitions of HMA Ships Albatross, Sydney, and Melbourne. Canberra: Maritime Studies Program, Department of Defence (Navy), 1998.
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This work embodies a three-part study, which was written between 1977 and 1978, written in the midst of debate on a replacement for the RAN’s sole aircraft carrier, HMAS Melbourne, but before any final decision had been reached.
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Personalities
Australian military figures have never written much for public consumption, and this period is no exception. Rowell 1974 covers his period as chief of the General Staff from 1949 to 1954, but is frustratingly brief and circumspect on most issues Rayner 1984 devotes a chapter to Scherger’s command of Commonwealth air units in Malaya from 1952 to 1954 but does little to analyze policy issues in this period. Australian foreign ministers have fared little better. Evatt awaits a biographer able to disengage himself from his subject. In the interim, Edwards 1984 is still the best starting point. Percy Spender awaits his student, but R. G. Casey has been well served by Hudson 1986, although the evolution of SEATO is dealt with in passing only.
Edwards, Paul G. “Historical Reconsiderations II: On Assessing H. V. Evatt.” Australian Historical Studies 21.83 (October 1984): 258–269.
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A valuable article that lays the groundwork and sets the scope for a more detailed and rigorous study of Evatt. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Hudson, William. Casey. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. 1986.
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A major biographical study of R. G. Casey—an Australian politician, diplomat, and the sixteenth governor-general of Australia.
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Rayner, Harry. Scherger: A Biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Scherger. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1984.
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This work covers the life of a leading Australian air force commander from 1921 to 1966.
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Rowell, Sydney Fairbairn. Full Circle. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1974.
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An autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Sydney Fairbairn Rowell, K.B.E., C.B. (b. 15 December 1894–d. 12 April 1975), was an Australian soldier who served as a divisional and corps commander in World War II and as chief of the General Staff from 17 April 1950 to 15 December 1954.
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Policy, 1945–1955
The issue of Australian postwar demobilization in 1945–1946 is covered briefly in Butlin and Schedvin 1977. Royal Institute of International Affairs 1956 is a useful introduction by a contemporary Chatham House study group. A more modern analysis is Buszynski 1983. The best source available on the genesis of ANZUS is another volume in the series Documents on New Zealand External Relations: Kay 1985. See also McIntyre 1995. On atomic testing, consult Arnold 1987. The official history of the long-range weapons program is Morton 1989.
Arnold, Lorna. A Very Special Relationship: British Atomic Weapons Trials in Australia. London: H.M.S.O., 1987.
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This book discusses the five series of nuclear weapon tests that Great Britain conducted in Australia from 1955 to 1960. Those tests are significant because it is the only instance in which a nuclear nation cooperated with and tested missiles in a non-nuclear nation; the author states that was possible because of the special relationship between Great Britain and Australia.
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Buszynski, Leszek. SEATO: The Failure of an Alliance Strategy. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1983.
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This work is a careful, informative, and well-prepared study. Particularly useful are the discussions and analyses of the five basic stages of the organization’s “life cycle,” related to the changing conditions that faced SEATO, and to which it was supposed to respond.
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Butlin, Sydney James, and C. B. Schedvin. War Economy, 1942–1945. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1977.
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This is the second of two volumes on economic aspects of the war of 1939–1945 in Australia. It describes the steps taken to mobilize the economy fully: the diversion of labor to the services, the growth of munitions production, internal and external transport organization, food production, the introduction of the National Economic Plan, and the many measures taken to restrict and control private activities.
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Kay, Robin, ed. The Anzus Pact and the Treaty of Peace with Japan. Wellington, New Zealand: Historical Publications Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Government Printer, 1985.
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This is a book of documents on New Zealand external relations from 1945, including Japan and the ANZUS Pact from 1951.
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McIntyre, W. David. Background to the ANZUS Pact: Policy-Making, Strategy, and Diplomacy, 1945–55. London: St. Martin’s, 1995.
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This work is a revealing study of ANZUS, which shows that, as well as guaranteeing Australia and New Zealand security, ANZUS was designed to “bolt the back door” so that the Anzacs could help Britain defend the Middle East in a global war and protect bases from which atomic bombers could strike at the heart of the USSR.
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Morton, Peter. Fire across the Desert: Woomera and the Anglo-Australian Joint Project 1946–1980. Canberra: AGPS, 1989.
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This work is an authoritative and official history of Woomera, the “space town” in South Australia, up to 1980. Its chapters deal with the social and domestic life of the village over the years, as well as with the technical work at the range. Its casts some additional light on the political relations between Australia and Britain in the postwar period.
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Royal Institute of International Affairs. Collective Defence in South East Asia: The Manila Treaty and Its Implications. London: Oxford University Press, 1956.
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This British study discusses the Manila Treaty of 1954 and its implications, particularly in that it committed the United States to the defense of continental Southeast Asia.
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Policy, 1955–1965
There is no good overall guide to the defense policy of the period, of the kind provided by O’Neill 1985 for the Korean War. Bell 1988 ranges more widely than defense issues but is good on the higher-level decision making. Two essays with reasonable policy coverage are Richardson 1974 and Millar 1968.
Bell, Coral. Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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A substantial evaluation of Australia’s postwar relations with its great and powerful friends—between Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. Bell contends that Australia’s relations with Great Britain and America were influenced primarily by the way in which politicians, diplomats, and the military defined national interest.
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Millar, T. B. “Australian Defence, 1945–1965.” In Australia in World Affairs, 1961–1965. Edited by Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper, 251–312. Melbourne: Cheshire for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1968.
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This chapter is set to the context of Australia moving steadily away from relationships with Europe to greater military, political, and economic dependence on the United States and Australia’s Asian neighbors. Millar focuses on the defense and strategic implications of such a shift.
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Richardson, J. L. “Australian Strategic and Defence Policies.” In Australia in World Affairs, 1966–1970. Edited by Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper, 233–269. Melbourne: Cheshire for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1974.
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The period under examination was a turbulent time in world affairs—a stabilization of nuclear parity, the Sino–Soviet dispute, and the Vietnam conflict moving almost full circle from the start of a large US troop commitment in 1965 to Richard Nixon’s search for Vietnamization by the start of the 1970s. This chapter provides a gives a well-documented account of Australian strategic and defense policies in this context in the period 1966–1970.
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Malayan Emergency and Konfrontasi
Australian involvement in the Malayan Emergency and Konfrontasi with Indonesia is treated in Dennis and Grey 1996, while the naval dimension of both is discussed in Grey 1998. Discussion of diplomacy and government policy is to be found in Edwards 1992. Because of the relatively small role they played, more general histories of these conflicts do not mention Australian forces. See Mackie 1986. An interesting personal account of service with 3 RAR in Malaya is offered in Bannister 1994.
Bannister, Colin. An Inch of Bravery: 3 RAR in the Malayan Emergency 1957–59. Canberra: Directorate of Army Public Affairs, 1994.
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Australia’s military involvement in the Malayan Emergency was at its strongest from 1955 to 1960, when army units were deployed to augment the national contribution of an RAAF squadron already stationed there for some years, and RAN ships operating with SEATO forces. This work traces the action of one Australian army unit present.
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Dennis, Peter, and Jeffrey Grey. Emergency and Confrontation: Australian Military Operations, Malaya and Borneo, 1950–1966. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1996.
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Volume 5 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. This work is the first scholarly account of Australia’s military involvement in the Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960, and in the Confrontation, an undeclared war initiated by Indonesia to destabilize the emergent Federation of Malaysia and fought largely along the common border in the northern part of Borneo, 1962–1966.
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Edwards, Peter. Crises and Commitments: The Politics and Diplomacy of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1965. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1992.
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Volume 1 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. This work deals with the political and diplomatic issues which led to Australian military commitment in the Vietnam War.
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Grey, Jeffrey. Up Top: The Royal Australian Navy in Southeast Asian Conflicts, 1955–1972. Sydney: Allen & Unwin in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1998.
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Volume 7 of the Official History of Australia’s Involvement in Southeast Asian Conflicts 1948–1975. A detailed account of RAN involvement in Vietnam.
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Mackie, James Austin Copeland. Low-Level Military Incursions: Lessons of the Indonesia-Malaysia “Confrontation” Episode, 1963–66. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, 1986.
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This publication is a working paper (Australian National University; Strategic and Defence Studies Centre) that sheds light on the limited Australian military involvement in this conflict.
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Organizational Changes
The organizational changes during the period have not been fully dealt with in the available literature. Mediansky 1980 deals with the Morshead Committee and changes in the 1960s. Rayner 1984 discusses the changes as they affected Scherger as, successively, chief of the Air Staff and chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, but was written without access to official files. He includes some material on the changes in equipment procurement policy also. Blaxland 1989 provides a thorough analysis of the Pentropic experiment. On doctrinal development, see Welburn 1994 and Bushby 1998. McNeill 1984 has a brief discussion of Pentropic and Wilton’s part in ending it, and is as yet one of the few published analyses of a postwar chief of any of the services. On the navy, Frame 1992 is excellent on the institutional culture and imperatives of a service approaching organizational crisis in the early 1960s.
Blaxland, John. Organising an Army: The Australian Experience, 1957–1965. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1989.
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Examines three separate reorganizations that occurred in the Australian army between 1957 and 1965. The changes that occurred during this period set the scene for Australia’s military involvement in the Vietnam War and provided a basic organizational structure for the army’s combat elements that remained essentially the same for the next twenty years.
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Bushby, Richard. “Educating an Army”: Australian Army Doctrinal Development and the Operational Experience in South Vietnam, 1965–72. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1998.
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This work is a useful and insightful guide to how the army adapted to the challenges of Vietnam, and associated doctrinal and structural difficulties, from 1965 to 1972.
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Frame, Tom. Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy. Sydney: Coronet, 1992.
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This is a detailed account of a dramatic naval disaster in which eighty-two men died also discusses the investigations that followed and the repercussions of the tragedy.
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McNeill, Ian. “General Sir John Wilton: A Commander for His Time.” In The Commanders: Australian Military Leadership in the Twentieth Century. Edited by David M. Horner, 316–334. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1984.
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This chapter includes a discussion of Wilton’s part in ending the army’s Pentropic organization. It is also one of the few studies of Wilton, aside from the much larger work: David M. Horner, Strategic Command: General Sir John Wilton and Australia’s Asian Wars (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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Mediansky, F. A. “Defence Reorganisation, 1957–1975.” In Australia in World Affairs, 1971–1975. Edited by W. J. Hudson, 37–64. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1980.
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This chapter deals in the main with structural changes made in the 1960s as a consequence of the Morshead Committee. This committee reviewed the group of departments concerned with defense. The Menzies government accepted the committee’s recommendation that supply and defense production be amalgamated but dropped the key proposal that the Department of Defence absorb army, navy, and air force. This was finally carried out in 1975.
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Rayner, Harry. Scherger: A Biography of Air Chief Marshal Sir Frederick Scherger. Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1984.
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This work covers the life of a leading Australian air force commander from 1921 to 1966.
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Welburn, M. C. J. The Development of Australian Army Doctrine, 1945–1964. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1994.
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Australian counterinsurgent practice and experience have received little serious analysis in published form. There is some discussion, inter alia, in the official histories of postwar Southeast Asian conflicts. Welburn and Bushby (see Bushby 1998), both serving army officers at the time of writing, discuss the evolution of army doctrine in the 1950s and 1960s and its interaction with operational experience in Malaya and South Vietnam.
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Vietnam
Scholars are much better served with literature on Australia and the Vietnam War. There is no uniformly good, single-volume synopsis of the Australian war, though one will doubtless follow the completion of the official history. In the meantime, Murphy 1993 does a good job, although it is not so strong on the military dimension. A finely detailed if overly long study of the strategic and diplomatic context in which the Vietnam commitment was played out is Pemberton 1988. Discussion of Australian Task Force operations appears in Frost 1987. Frost presents a highly critical picture of the aims and achievements of the Australian force, and his judgments are open to challenge. The experiences of the Australian Army Training Team—Vietnam (AATTV) are fully covered in McNeill 1984. The best account of an individual unit is O’Brien 1995, which follows 7 RAR through two tours during the war and thus demonstrates the ways in which the fighting, and the unit, developed over time. Horner 1986 covers the problems of command and control of Australian forces. Accounts of the other two services which appeared shortly after the end of the Australian commitment can be found in Fairfax 1980 and Odgers 1974. For a recent overview, see Caulfield 2009.
Caulfield, Michael. The Vietnam Years: From the Jungle to the Australian Suburbs. Sydney: Hachette, 2009.
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This book uses interviews with regular and national servicemen and women, doctors, nurses, American officers and troops, and North Vietnamese and Viet Cong combatants, as well as the families of the Aussie solders serving, to paint a firsthand picture of events of the time.
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Fairfax, Denis. Navy in Vietnam: A Record of the Royal Australian Navy in the Vietnam War. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1980.
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This work is a thorough account of the history and operations of the Royal Australian Navy (including RAN Helicopter Flight) in Vietnam from 1965 to 1972.
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Frost, Frank. Australia’s War in Vietnam. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987.
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This book offers the first detailed account of the strategy, policies, and experience of the Australian force that was based at Nui Dat in Phuoc Tuy Province from 1966 to 1971.
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Horner, David M. Australian Higher Command in the Vietnam War. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, 1986.
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This work discusses the command and control of Australian forces in Vietnam.
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McNeill, Ian. The Team: Australian Army Advisers in Vietnam, 1962–1972. St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press in association with the Australian War Memorial, 1984.
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This work gives insight into the experiences and personal feelings of the men of the Australian Army Training Team—Vietnam in action, written with access to Australian Department of Defence records and supported with personal interviews by the author.
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Murphy, John. Harvest of Fear: A History of Australia’s Vietnam War. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993.
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This is a history of Australia’s experience of the Vietnam War. Although it provides an insight into the kind of war the Australians found themselves fighting in Phuoc Tuy, the book is not a blow-by-blow account of battles and strategy. Instead, it aims to offer an understanding of how the war came about, how Australia came to be involved, and why Australian involvement was the cause of such division at home.
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O’Brien, Michael. Regulars and Conscripts: With the Seventh Battalion in Vietnam. Sydney: llen & Unwin in association with Seventh Battalion, The Royal Australian Regiment Association, 1995.
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This is a detailed history of the Seventh Battalion of the Royal Australian Regiment in South Vietnam—1967 to 1968 and 1970 to 1971.
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Odgers, George. Mission Vietnam: RAAF Operations, 1964–1972. Canberra: Australian Government Publishing Service, 1974.
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This work is a complete account of seven-and-a-half years of operations by the RAAF in the Vietnam conflict. Beginning with a small Caribou transport flight in August 1964, by 1967 the RAAF had built up its strength to three operational squadrons.
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Pemberton, Gregory. All the Way: Australia’s Road to Vietnam. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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This account begins soon after World War II and traces two linked themes—the development of Australia-US relations and the progress of Australia’s engagement with Southeast Asia. Both themes are explored through the examination of the major episodes of the 1950s and 1960s: Indonesia’s takeover of West New Guinea, the Indonesian/Malaysian Confrontation, the Laos crises, and the increasing fragility of the pro-Western regime in South Vietnam.
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Conscription
Nothing has been written on in the Cold War period or for Vietnam conscription from an institutional or administrative perspective. Ross 1983 looks at the experience and attitudes of national servicemen from a sociological perspective, but the treatment relegates the regulars to a minor place. Of value still in a wider perspective is Albinski 1970, although written without access to official sources and before the end of the Australian commitment.
Albinski, Henry. Politics and Foreign Policy: The Impact of Vietnam and Conscription. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1970.
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This work provides valuable context and a wider perspective on the issue of conscription in Vietnam.
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Ross, Jane. “Australian Soldiers in Vietnam: Product and Performance.” In Australia’s Vietnam: Australia in the Second Indo-China War. Edited by Peter King, 72–99. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.
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The author examines the experience of Australian National Servicemen—a sizable proportion of the eighty-three hundred troops who served in Vietnam between 1968 and 1971. The conscripts who went to Vietnam served for only one year; 187 of them were killed and 1,030 wounded.
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The Antiwar Movement
On shifts in public perception of the Vietnam War, see Goot and Tiffen 1983. The only serious analyses of the Australian media are Tiffen 1983 and Gorman 1997. There are several articles on aspects of opposition to the war and conscription for it, but as yet no overall treatment of the movements or their membership, although Langley 1992 is a good starting point. See as well Saunders 1982 and Beazley 1983. The context of antiwar dissent and the anti-conscription movements is provided by Gilbert and Jordens 1988.
Beazley, Kim. “Federal Labor and the Vietnam Commitment.” In Australia’s Vietnam: Australia in the Second Indo-China War. Edited by Peter King, 36–55. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.
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The author discusses labor’s reactions to and relationship with the commitment to Vietnam, with particular attention to protest and dissent.
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Gilbert, Alan, and A. M. Jordens. “Traditions of Dissent.” In Australia: Two Centuries of War and Peace. Edited by Michael McKernan and Margaret Browne, 365–368. Canberra: Australian War Memorial in association with Allen & Unwin, 1988.
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The authors trace the various traditions of protest against Australian military commitments. They contend that undercurrents of dissent against military commitments, flowing from a pluralist society, have had varied ideological and social sources. The purpose of the chapter is to examine the significance of these undercurrents.
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Goot, Murray, and Rodney Tiffen. “Public Opinion and the Politics of the Polls.” In Australia’s Vietnam: Australia in the Second Indo-China War. Edited by Peter King, 129–164. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.
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This chapter traces public opinion with respect to Australian involvement in Vietnam. The authors show that the level of support for Australia’s commitment rose until 1967 but then declined steadily until 1971.
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Gorman, Lyn. “Television and War: Australia’s Four Corners Programme and Vietnam, 1963–1975.” War and Society 15.1 (May 1997): 119–150.
DOI: 10.1179/072924797799733276Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article offers insight into the Australian media and Vietnam through the use of the Four Corners program as a case study. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Langley, Greg. A Decade of Dissent: Vietnam and the Conflict on the Australian Home Front. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992.
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This work presents the recollections of fifty-seven Australians who served in the Vietnam War or were affected by it at home in relation to their views of war and government.
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Saunders, Malcolm. “‘Law and Order’ and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement, 1965–72.” Australian Journal of Politics and History 28.3 (1982): 367–379.
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8497.1982.tb00116.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This article explains why during the period from April 1965 to November 1966, that is, from the announcement that Australia would send a battalion of troops to South Vietnam until the 1966 federal elections, conservative politicians in Australia seldom referred to the lawlessness and disorderliness of some of the activities of sections of the anti–Vietnam War and anticonscription movements. Available online for purchase or by subscription.
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Tiffen, Rodney. “News Coverage of Vietnam.” In Australia’s Vietnam: Australia in the Second Indo-China War. Edited by Peter King, 165–187. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1983.
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This chapter argues that Australian journalists’ coverage of the Vietnam War was inferior to that of their American counterparts and timidly paralleled American trends.
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From the Cold War to the War on Terror, 1972 Onward
Following the Vietnam War, Australia again started sending troops overseas for combat operations from 1990, although on a much smaller scale than in earlier wars. The UN-sanctioned deployment of a brigade group to East Timor in 1999 for peacemaking and humanitarian reasons was the largest Australian deployment since Vietnam. Aside from East Timor, Australian forces in this context were usually part of coalition operations, generally led by the United States. Such deployment included the Gulf War in 1991, where Australia sent ships to assist the US-led coalition in the war with Iraq. Australians from the three services were also to Afghanistan in 2001–2002, where some Special Forces elements were involved in several fierce battles. In 2003, Australia sent units from the three services to assist the US-led coalition in the invasion of Iraq, and in the period 2005–2009 Australians returned to Iraq to assist the US-led coalition in maintaining security. From 2005 to the present, Australians from all three services returned to Afghanistan to assist the NATO-organized force in the country. The major Australian contribution was engineers, special operations troops, and small numbers of infantry. Most of the secondary literature dealing with this period has been produced by political scientists and defense commentators, whose concerns are different from those of the historian. The absence of historical writing is explained almost entirely by the lack of access to the official documentary record controlled by the relevant archival legislation. Cheeseman 1993 is arguable in its advocacy but reliable in its factual basis. On the Whitlam period, see O’Neill 1980 and Mediansky 1980. Little has been written on the Pacific Islands Regiment or the fostering of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force. Sinclair 1990 takes the story only to 1975. After Whitlam, recourse should be had to Bell 1988. The ubiquitous Horner 1992 is a reliable guide to Australian involvement in the Gulf War and has a good account of the early development of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), written with high-level access to both records and personalities. For an overview history of Australian peacekeeping, see Horner, et al. 2009. Importantly, the Australian government has recently authorized the Australian War Memorial to research and write a six-volume Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post–Cold War Operations. The first volume of this series (Horner 2011) has been published. A subtle and stimulating essay which sets recent changes in defense thinking into a longer perspective is Evans 1996.
Bell, Coral. Dependent Ally: A Study in Australian Foreign Policy. Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1988.
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A substantial evaluation of Australia’s postwar relations with its great and powerful friends—between Australia, Great Britain, and the United States. Bell contends that Australia’s relations with Great Britain and America were influenced primarily by the way in which politicians, diplomats, and the military defined national interest.
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Cheeseman, Graeme. The Search for Self-Reliance: Australian Defence Since Vietnam. Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1993.
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This work is a controversial critique of Australia’s current defense policy. Outlines the evolution of Australia’s defense policy and organization from 1970 to 1991 and discusses associated problems, dilemmas, and contradictions.
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Evans, Michael. “From Defence to Security: Continuity and Change in Australian Strategic Planning in the Twentieth Century.” In Serving Vital Interests: Australia’s Strategic Planning in Peace and War. Edited by Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey, 116–140. Canberra: School of History, University College, University of New South Wales, Australian Defence Force Academy, 1996.
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This paper situates more-recent developments in Australian defense policy and strategic thinking against a longer-term perspective. It adds useful insight into contemporary defense debates.
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Horner, David M. The Gulf Commitment: The Australian Defence Force’s First War. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1992.
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This is a detailed account of the Australian role in the First Gulf War. This book provides an inside view of the workings of the Australian Defence Force and a record of its performance in Australia’s first war for twenty years.
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Horner, David M. Australia and the New World Order: From Peacekeeping to Peace Enforcement: 1988–1991. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511779459Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
This is the first comprehensive study of Australia’s role in the peacekeeping and peace enforcement operations that developed at the end of the Cold War. With access to official records and through extensive interviews, the author explains the high-level political background to these activities and analyzes the conduct of the missions.
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Horner, David M., Peter Londey, and Jean Bou. Australian Peacekeeping: Sixty Years in the Field. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
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In the last sixty years, between thirty thousand and forty thousand Australian military personnel and police have served in more than fifty peacekeeping missions in at least twenty-seven different conflicts. This volume approaches Australian peacekeeping from four angles: its history, its agencies, some personal reflections, and its future.
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Mediansky, F. A. “Defence Reorganisation, 1957–75.” In Australia in World Affairs, 1971–75. Edited by W. J. Hudson, 37–64. Sydney: Allen & Unwin for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1980.
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This chapter deals in the main with structural changes made in the 1960s as a consequence of the Morshead Committee. This committee reviewed the group of departments concerned with defense. The Menzies government accepted the committee’s recommendation that supply and defense production be amalgamated but dropped the key proposal that the Department of Defence absorb army, navy, and air force. This was finally carried out in 1975.
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O’Neill, Robert “Defence Policy.” In Australia in World Affairs, 1971–75. Edited by W. J. Hudson, 11–36. Sydney: Allen & Unwin for the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 1980.
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This chapter, from a prominent defense analyst and author, deals with Australian defense policy and strategic thinking in the Whitlam period from 1971 to 1975.
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Sinclair, James. To Find a Path: The Papua New Guinea Defence Force and the Australians to Independence. Spring Hill, Australia: Crawford House, 1990.
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This work covers the period from the reraising of the Pacific Islands Regiment in 1950 to the formation of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force and to independence. It provides a condensed history of the Papua New Guinea Defence Force, a detailed examination of the development of the Pacific Islands Regiment, and the role of the headquarters, marine, and ancillary units that contributed to the final shape of the defense force.