AustLit

'Publishing accounts of captivity in Australia in the wake of the First World War presented many aspiring memoirists with a significant challenge. The prisoner of war had an unconventional tale of war to tell, one that was fundamentally at odds with a dominant literary figure in the wake of the war—the Australian soldier hero. Those who did publish retrospective accounts of captivity framed their experience in a deliberate way—through the lens of both personal and public contemporary understandings of that experience—and used their accounts to both reflect and challenge assumptions about military captivity.' (Publication abstract)