Book Review: Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75
Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75
Written by: Tristan Moss
Cambridge University Press, 2017,
ISBN 9781108182638, 284pp
Reviewed by: Lieutenant Colonel Mark O’Neill
Dr Tristan Moss is currently a researcher on the Official Histories of Australian Operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and East Timor at the Australian War Memorial and an Adjunct Lecturer at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He is also a previous winner of the C. E. W. Bean Prize for Military History. Guarding the Periphery: The Australian Army in Papua New Guinea, 1951–75 is his first published book since completing his doctorate in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Bell School at the ANU in 2015.
Moss notes in his introductory chapter: ‘It is a cliché when writing Australian military history to refer to the degree to which a particular battle, campaign, war or person has been neglected by historians.’ Authors, publishers and literary agents inevitably make such assertions seeking the ‘cachet of an untold story’—and the higher interest and book sales such a cachet is perceived to bring. Moss’s book can rightly lay claim to contradicting the cliché.
In this book, Moss objectively and comprehensively explores the history of the Australian Army in Papua New Guinea (PNG) between 1951 and 1975, when PNG achieved independence. The book is well written and relies on a wide variety of excellent archival primary sources and an extensive array of oral history interviews with both Papua New Guineans and Australians. Moss’s narrative takes an essentially linear historical course, with a diversion into social history in a chapter on the experiences of Australian soldiers and their families in PNG. This result is a clear, logical and coherent story of Australia’s efforts to defend Australia by guarding PNG during the period as well as the contribution this effort made to the development of the military in the lead-up to independence and beyond.
A key strength of the book is its unflinching address of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ on both sides. This is done with objectivity and obvious respect, meaning that difficult subjects such as racial and cultural issues are able to contextualised and evaluated and useful judgements offered.
For me, one of the principal attractions of the book was the insight into the Australian Army at that time that it offered, which was different from what I had previously understood. This is summed up in a quotation from the concluding chapter (and highlighted by former Governor-General Major General Michael Jeffery at the book’s launch in 2017):
The Australian Army during the period between 1951 and 1975 was not a force that existed only on the battlefields of South-East Asia, or that was composed entirely of Australians. Instead it was an institution with far wider and more complex responsibilities, one of which was the establishment and management of a force of Papua New Guineans and the eventual creation of an independent defence force.
The then Chief of Army, Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, wrote in 2017 that, in publishing the Australian Army History Series, ‘The Australian Army and Cambridge University Press are dedicated to exploring, analysing and understanding our nation’s military history’. Guarding the Periphery makes a solid contribution to achieving this aim. It offers good insight into a little- known piece of the shared past of the Australian Army and PNG Defence Force and provides useful context for those working on furthering the trust and partnership between our forces today.
