Galahs

When Europeans arrived in Australia, galahs were typically inland birds, quite sparsely distributed. Now they range from coast to coast, and are common. Why did this change occur? Why didn’t it occur earlier? Galahs feed on the ground. They found Australia’s dominant inland grasses too tall to get at the seed, so relied on an agency to shorten them: Aboriginal grain cropping before contact, introduced stock after it

Interview with Bill Gammage, 28 October 2013

Bill Gammage is a historian and Adjunct Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He taught history at the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Adelaide and the ANU. His books include The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the First World War (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974), Narrandera Shire (Narrendera: Narrandera Shire Council, 1986), The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998) and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011). I met Bill at his office at the ANU on a coolish morning in October 2013 and started our interview by describing how I had first encountered his work through his role as military advisor on the film Gallipoli (1981), directed by Peter Weir. I recorded our interview and the following transcript matches the recording with very little intervention. I cut some tangential asides, and Bill and I occasionally added words in square brackets to clarify the discussion where words were implied rather than said. But what follows is our conversation - unedited

The broken years : a study of the diaries and letters of Australian soldiers in the Great War, 1914-18

There has never been a greater tragedy than World War One. Other events, by leading valorous men to contest trivial causes and by encouraging the perpetration of base and noble acts, have been as treacherous to humanity; no event has involved so many, nor so blighted the hopes of men. The Great War engulfed an age, and conditioned the times that followed. It wreaked havoc and disillusion among everything its contemporaries valued and thought secure, it contaminated every good ideal for which it was waged, it threw up waste and horror worse than all the evils it sought to avert, and it left legacies of staunchness and savagery equal to any which have bewildered men about their purpose on earth. Among those who fought in the war were 330,000 Australians. They were civilians who volunteered for and were accepted into the Australian Imperial Force, soldiers who enlisted and sailed to defend King and Country, or for the novelty of it. Overseas a maelstrom caught them, and in four years swept most of their assumptions away. Although their spirits rarely were broken, they amended their outlooks to absorb the unexpected challenges they encountered, and returned to Australia the flotsam of old ways, but the harbingers of a new world and a new century. One thousand of these soldiers left the documents which inspired what follows, and the thesis considers none but them. Yet wider speculations readily assert themselves, and not merely about the A.I.F. at large, or about kindred soldiers from Canada or New Zealand or Scotland, or about men at war. It may not be possible to discern the nature of man, because each guesses at that from his own standpoint, and in describing others makes a puppet of himself, and dances to his own invention. Yet if these men do not answer great questions, they might be seen to raise them, for they too had to ask whether their actions prospered mankind or corrupted it, whether mankind itself is great or depraved, and whether men serve events or master them. Therefore I commend the chronicles they wrote to the reader. They are impressed with a tragic nobility beyond the ability of the following extracts to convey, and the spirit of an age moves through their pages far more perfectly than through mine

The biggest estate on earth

An Author event presented by The Friends of the University of Adelaide Library

Galahs (Revised March 2009)

When Europeans arrived in Australia, galahs were typically inland birds, quite sparsely distributed. Now they range from coast to coast, and are common. Why did this change occur? Why didn’t it occur earlier? I argue that because galahs feed on the ground, they found Australia’s dominant inland grasses too tall to get at the seed, so relied on an agency to shorten them: Aboriginal grain cropping before contact, introduced stock after it

Anzac Day's Early Rituals

Much of the scholarship on the Great War, and especially the Dardanelles/Çanakkale campaign, has been viewed through a narrow national prism and focused exclusively on military aspects of the engagement. This new collection of essays offers fresh perspectives from countries on both sides of the trenches of Gallipoli. Examined here are intersections of art and memory, and the role that material culture and museums play in the representation and commemoration of war. The ideas and writing draw on fiction, poetry and diaries, as well as new digital media, which together frame the memory of war. Our ongoing encounter with Gallipoli’s much-contested landscape here takes on new hues and reveals untold stories. Beyond Gallipoli takes an innovative approach to the varied and controversial cultural legacies of an event which continues to shape the identity of Australia, New Zealand and Turkey

The broken years : Australian soldiers in the Great War

Before the First World War most Australians shared the emotions and traditions of the British Empire. Proud of their British heritage, anxious to raise the Imperial status of Australia, they were eager to fight and, if need be, to die in defence of their race and country. But the horror and tragedy of the conflict brought fundamental changes in outlook. Many of the pre-war enthusiasms persisted, but the days of unquestioning allegiance to Empire were beginning to come to an end, to be replaced by the bittersweet tradition of Anzac. Dr Gammage shows how and why these changes took place. Using the diaries and letters of one thousand front-line soldiers of the First Australian Imperial Force, most of them now part of a unique collection housed in the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, he reconstructs the motives and expectations with which these men volunteered and the experiences they encountered. He highlights and examines the new attitudes to war and to the homeland that developed and foreshadows the important effects in Australia of the changed outlook brought home by the survivors. Those who have returned from war will recognise immediately the raw realities faced by the 'diggers', the growing disillusionment, and the hopes for the future. Those with fathers, husbands, or brothers who served, and all those concerned with what happens to men at war, cannot fail to be moved by the simple dignity of the men{u2019}s accounts, or by the understated courage with which they wrote to their families of the miseries they endured. This book, written with sensitivity and scholarly care, must be read if we are to understand war and its impact on the ethos of a nation