Devil in the detail
It was with a sense of resignation that I turned to page 42 of the last Eureka Street (July–August 2005) where, I had been informed, ‘Jeffrey Grey challenges some of Cameron Forbes’s conclusions in Hellfire: The Story of Australia, Japan and the Prisoners of War.’
I began to read. Immediately I saw a mortarboard peeping over the palisade. I glanced at the endnote. Ah yes, ‘Jeffrey Grey is a professor of history at University College, Australian Defence Force Academy, Canberra.’ Another academic/historian was defending his turf, the tone set by his quoting of Peter Stanley’s question in a Eureka Street review of another journalist’s book: ‘Why are there so many long, bad war books written by journalists just at the minute?’
I have nothing against academics. Some of them are among my best friends. Indeed, I resisted pressure from Professor Solomon Rufus Davis to become one at Monash. I have no objection to academics writing books about anything and I hope they are reviewed on their merits. I am delighted, on the whole, with the way in which Hellfire has been reviewed (Stanley’s review of my book was indeed generous). But now, for the third time, a major portion of a review has been given over to whether journalists should write history books. This I regard as a waste of space.
Both Stanley and Grey then segue into two basic criticisms. One is that Hellfire ‘tells us nothing that we don’t already know’. The ‘we’ is the royal plural of the academic/historian. Grey says that what ‘we don’t already know’ can be found in the fairly extensive literature. I take his point. At the La Trobe library, for instance, where Hellfire will humbly nestle, there is a row or two of books, many of them admirable: Ray Parkin’s majestic trilogy, for instance, and Stan Arneil’s marvellous One Man’s War.
However, if ‘we’ want to garner what appears in Hellfire, ‘we’ will need to consult another 50 or so books, gather unpublished diaries, spend much time looking at primary sources in the Australian War Memorial and the National Archives, talk to more than a score of those incomparable primary sources, the survivors, and travel along both the railway trace in Thailand and further down the Burma trace than Europeans have been since 1946.
Similarly with the development of the Australia–Japan relationship and the making of the World War II