Defending Country President Peter Stanley on Late Night Live on Australia's military history obsession

Defending Country President Professor Peter Stanley's latest book, Beyond the Broken Years: Australian Military History in 1000 Books, has been published by NewSouth.

Professor Stanley discussed it and military history generally with David Marr on ABC RN's Late Night Live on 14 November.

Runs for 37 minutes.

Some highlights:

Australian governments have always been eager to fight Other People's Wars;

Charles Bean's pervasive influence led to stress on how Australians fight, rather than why;

there has been a broad spectrum of writers on Australian military history but a strong fellowship between them;

the Australian War Memorial has to get serious about the Australian (Frontier) Wars, including the deaths in them of settlers and military;

the Memorial's current space allocation for Frontier Wars is completely inadequate compared with the importance of these wars in our history;

there is no doubt that Australians at the time thought frontier conflict was war but, later, embarrassment took over and White Australia tried to forget what had happened;

war memorials after the Great War were substitute graves for grieving families (because almost no dead soldiers were repatriated);

over the years, sombre Anzac marches have turned into jolly, nationalistic parades (as actual participants in our overseas wars have died);

the War Memorial post-Brendan Nelson has tended to commemorate in a noisy, bombastic way, with less emphasis on truth-telling;

access to the Memorial's Research Centre has been greatly curtailed during the current redevelopment;

among the top military historians have been Bill Gammage, Jeff Grey, Ken Inglis, Lloyd Robson;

journalists doing good work have included Peter Rees, Paul Daley, Mark Willacy, Nick McKenzie, Chris Masters;

there has been a greater willingness recently to understand rather than celebrate, but myths persist;

the 50-year flood of Australian military history books shows signs of diminishing;

Ben Roberts-Smith should be portrayed at the Memorial in a way that tries to explain and understand his actions.

Earlier post.