Review Essay - The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War
The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War,
Written by: Bill Gammage,
Melbourne University Publishing, 2010,
ISBN 9780522854947, 336pp
Reviewed by: Peter Stanley, National Museum of Australia
Almost exactly fifty years ago a teenaged schoolboy from Wagga Wagga visited Canberra with his family. At the Australian War Memorial his mother confidently disregarded old ornate wood-and-glass doors marked ‘Staff Only’ and they found themselves in the former library. There they met staff member Bruce Harding, also from Wagga. Rather than shooing them out, Bruce showed the Gammages around. (O for the days when casual visitors could simply drop by offices: long barred by the tyranny of the swipe card.) Bruce opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a file of letters written by a soldier from the Great War. ‘That stuck’, Bill recalled.
Two years later Bill, then a student at the Australian National University, was driving a wheat truck in the Riverina in the holidays. He parked his lorry in the queue at the Boree Creek silo and walked over to look at the local war memorial. He noticed ‘more names it seemed than then lived in Boree Creek’. That stuck too.
Bill might have become a pioneer historian of the depopulation of rural Australia. Instead, he became intrigued by the Great War. Soon after, he bought volumes of Charles Bean’s official history in a jumble sale. His honours year, 1965, coincided with the 50th anniversary of Gallipoli. Ken Inglis’ writings on its meaning for Australia encouraged Bill, and he wrote ANU honours, masters and doctoral theses on Australia and the Great War. So unusual was Bill’s interest in military history that he had difficulty finding a supervisor, and was able to find Bruce Kent more out of a shared interest in football than in their subject—Bruce was, and remains, a specialist in European political ideas. Perhaps they justified the choice by noticing that Bill was examining Australians who served in a European war.
In 1974 ANU Press published his doctoral thesis as The Broken Years. Penguin took it up in 1975, producing an illustrated edition in 1990. Melbourne University Publishing has now produced a new illustrated edition. The latest, largest, illustrated edition of Bill Gammage’s The Broken Years appeared in time for Anzac Day 2010, fifty years after its genesis. It has attracted widespread admiration and deserves renewed critical attention.
The Broken Years was a pioneering work of history, partly because Bill practically invented the use of ‘soldiers’ letters and diaries’ in writing Australian military history, something that we take for granted today. As my National Museum of Australia colleague Anne-Marie Condé has shown, for a decade, from the mid-1920s, the energetic Arthur Bazley collected soldiers’ letters, diaries, memoirs and private papers for the War Memorial’s collection. Though justified by reference to Charles Bean’s official history, Bean had in fact barely used them. Hardly anyone had, until young Bill turned up to do his thesis.
Himself the grandson of an Anzac, Bill realised the potential of the contents of the cabinets Bruce Harding had opened to him. He did something no academic researcher had done and fronted up to the old library to ask to have a look. The rest, as they say, is history.
Bill used about a thousand men’s letters and diaries. The notes he took are now a part of the manuscript collection of the National Library of Australia, in themselves now a source for those following Bill’s lead—as dozens if not hundreds of students, post-graduates, colleagues and enthusiasts have done over the past thirty-odd years. It must feel odd to become aware that you have practically invented a form of or an approach to history. So short are our memories, so much do we take the prevailing health of Australian military history for granted, that we now must make an effort to understand how much the landscape of our field has been created and shaped by what Bill Gammage did.
Bill happened to write at a particular moment in the history of Australian military history. Great War veterans were still available as advisers and sources (and presumably critics). They were more plentiful then than, say, Second World War veterans are for us now. Bill had the immense good fortune to benefit from the advice and the astonishingly detailed recall of Arthur Bazley, Charles Bean’s confidential clerk, who had largely gathered those sources. He has described how he would look up from a diary and ask Arthur whether he recollected a man or an event. Bazley’s memory was retentive and his recall detailed and exact. Bill’s is likewise today, as he has become a second-hand link with that time, and now fields questions of the kind Arthur Bazley faced from Bill. Like Bazley’s, Bill’s memory is good and his willingness to respond mirrors that of his mentor. In the great chain of being that constitutes Australian military history’s practitioners, Bill’s generosity has in turn become a worthy model to emulate.
The Broken Years was a product of both its author’s questions and the approach he adopted. Naturally it did not need to do what Charles Bean’s volumes provided; that is, operational narrative. Bill was not interested in doing (and could not span within the confines of one thesis) what many successors have done—that is, to undertake operational analysis. As a result, The Broken Years does some things superbly and other things not at all. Bill acknowledges that he missed some aspects of the AIF’s experience; sex, for one. Others may contest his claim that ‘the average Australian soldier was not religious’. Some continue to criticise his neglect of the AIF’s military performance, though the book proclaimed early on ‘this is not a military history of the First AIF’. Like any pioneering work it can be criticised for not saying all that has been said subsequently (though not for getting stuff wrong: there are remarkably few corrections to the text). A sign of its quality is that it continues to stimulate fresh questions.
In fact, The Broken Years was an attempt to write ‘an emotional history of the AIF’, though he didn’t call it that at the time—he saw it more in the stern (German) empirical tradition of describing the past ‘as it was’. But its emotional tone explains its continuing value. This is a book that explains what the Great War felt like at the time, an immediacy that explains its durability in continuing to be as insightful and informative as it was thirty-odd years ago, even after the massively productive scholarship that followed and, to an extent, was inspired by it.
The Gallipoli chapter, ‘Nationhood, Brotherhood and Sacrifice’, remains, I think, the single best thing written to explain what Gallipoli meant to Australia. It caught the imagination of David Williamson and Peter Weir, the writer and director of the great 1980 film Gallipoli, an indication of its influence in shaping popular as well as academic interpretation of the Great War.
Melbourne University Publishing’s new edition is handsome and expansive. Larger than any previous edition, it reproduces Bill’s text at a generous size. It includes his many source notes (though unfortunately as endnotes; how come publishers remain resistant to footnotes, when technology makes putting notes on the page easier than ever before?) But MUP retrieves itself with the lavish presentation of images.
Bill has gone on to write other books, all notable. He has written on the social and environmental history of rural Australia (Narranderra; perhaps the wait at the Boree Creek silo had other effects) and the Australian adventure in Papua New Guinea (Sky Travellers). His current research, on how Indigenous people shaped the landscape through fire, will be equally stimulating. But Bill will always be known for having the insight to realise that he could answer the question ‘What did the Great War do to Australia?’ by reading and thinking about those letters Bruce Harding pulled out that day fifty years ago.
It is extraordinary for a work of history to endure for half a lifetime. The Broken Years remains, to use an overworked complement, an Australian classic. An artefact of its time, it also speaks to generations of readers not even born when the last edition appeared.
