AustLit

'On opening Serving Our Country I immediately turned to the index, looking for mentions of ‘frontier conflict’ and ‘Alfred Hearps’. I found ‘frontier wars’, but not poor Alfred Hearps: more on the significance of those subjects presently.'  (Introduction)

'Australia's official war correspondent during WWI, Charles Bean was also Australia's first official war historian and the driving force behind the creation of the Australian War Memorial. Famously criticised for his deliberate myth-making as editor of The Anzac Book, Bean was also a public servant, institutional leader, author, activist, thinker, doer, philosopher and polemicist. 

'In Charles Bean, Man, myth, legacy Australia's top military historians - including Peter Stanley, Peter Burness, Michael McKernan, Jeffrey Grey, Peter Edwards, David Horner, Peter Rees and Craig Stockings - analyse the man, the myth and his long-reaching legacy. 

'Contributors include Peter Stanley, Peter Burness, Michael McKernan, Jeffrey Grey, Peter Edwards, David Horner, Peter Rees and Craig Stockings.'  (Publication summary)

'Firozpore, The Punjaub, December 1845: a man, a woman, a war

'The Seikhs, the last unconquered state in India, and the East India Company are on the brink of war, a war that embroils a man and a woman.

'Sergeant Major Nelson Mansergh, Bengal Horse Artillery, is given the job of searching the Punjaub for a conspiracy among the Company’s European soldiers. Julia Bracken, his unrequited love, becomes caught up in his quest for the Cunning Man.

'Mansergh’s search culminates on the battlefield of Feroz’Shah. His journey spans friendship, romance, loyalty and betrayal, exploring the hidden world of the European soldiers who created Britain’s Indian empire.' (Publication summary)

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'Australians remember the dead of 25 April 1915 on Anzac Day every year. But do we know the name of a single soldier who died that day? What do we really know about the men supposedly most cherished in the national memory of war?

'Peter Stanley goes looking for the Lost Boys of Anzac: the men of the very first wave to land at dawn on 25 April 1915 and who died on that day. There were exactly 101 of them. They were the first to volunteer, the first to go into action, and the first of the 60,000 Australians killed in that conflict.

'Lost Boys of Anzac traces who these men were, where they came from and why they came to volunteer for the AIF in 1914. It follows what happened to them in uniform and, using sources overlooked for nearly a century, uncovers where and how they died, on the ridges and gullies of Gallipoli – where most of them remain to this day. And we see how the Lost Boys were remembered by those who knew and loved them, and how they have since faded from memory. ' (Publication summary)

'The Black Saturday bushfires killed 173 people — wreaking a greater human toll than any other fire in Australia’s history. Ten of those victims died in Steels Creek, a small community on Melbourne’s outskirts. It was a beautiful place, which its residents had long treasured and loved. By the evening of 7 February 2009, it felt like a battlefield.

'Prize-winning historian Peter Stanley tells the dramatic stories of this small piece of country on that one terrifying evening — of epic fights to save houses, of escapes, and of deaths. He also tells the tale of a community — of people’s attachments to the valley and to each other — and how, over the weeks and years that followed, they lived with the aftermath of the fire.

'The most detailed account of any one community to emerge from the fire, Black Saturday at Steels Creek shows what Black Saturday means not only for Steels Creek, but also for Australia as a whole.' (Publisher's blurb)