On the Warpath: An Anthology of Australian Military Travel

By Robin Gerster And Peter Pierce Eds, Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2004, 350 pages, paperback, $34.95. Reviewed by Jim Wieland in the June 2004 issue.

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'Well Mother, a trip like this is worth pounds of anyone's money. You wouldn't believe you were on a boat, she glides through the water.... How would you like a trip over here?' So writes the prolific letter-writer, Will Dunn, from the Orvieto a couple of days after leaving King George Sound, steaming for Colombo. He can't believe his luck.

On 25 April 1915 Dunn was killed, a few yards up the beach at Anzac Cove. His great opportunity was over.

In their fine introduction, notable for its subtlety and authority, Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce are alert to this irony of the overseas military experience for, while '[w]ar and travel go together' and going to war is marketed as an opportunity to see the world, and while soldier narratives 'follow the basic conventions of the quest narrative', the ultimate destination ---- to what Joe Maxwell calls 'our new fragment of world' ---- reveals a landscape quite alien to the known. Nothing prepares the soldier for this experience, which is outside the learned and cultivated, whether it is suffering beneath the drum shelling of the battles on the Somme or the 'long travail' of the prisoner of war in Burma, or that silent ominous threat of jungle warfare.

Plunging towards his ultimate destination in the front line at Pozieres and steadying his nerve with whisky, Lawrence Raws, a young lieutenant, struggled to carry forward with him his 'hopelessly rattled [men] mad with terror'. As the editors suggest, tourist packages don't end like this! And yet, while the selection covers almost all aspects of the Australian military experience, readers are not taken into the wild seething world of the front-line experience: the ultimate landscape.

For the most part, however, On the War-Path is a beautifully balanced and conceived collection. For, while I might lament the absence of someone like Frank Partridge whose eloquence and compassionate understanding of the complexity of the first world war experience rivals that of Frederic Manning, or of the searing experiences of Lawrence Raws; or of the reluctant war correspondent Kenneth Slessor, struggling with his personal and public experiences in the Middle East in the second world war (although we have him reporting from New Guinea); or of the retrospective but intimate reactions of the young Reuters correspondent, Hugh Lunn, to the war in Vietnam, this is to quibble. In historical terms the collection reaches from the New South Wales Regiment's reactions to the exotic 'East' in 1885 to Irris Makler's poignant and ironic and penetrating response to the devastation she found in Kabul in 2003, taking readers in some 57 pieces through responses to the Boer war, to the first and second world wars and their various theatres of combat, to Korea and Vietnam, of course, and to that 'dirty little war' that John Marinkus found in East Timor. As one might expect the selections from the two world wars are extensive and, as elsewhere in the collection, the choice of voices and genres is diverse. 'War prose is a hybrid genre', warn the editors, as they draw from personal, factual and fictional, accounts of combatants, be they returned servicemen, among whom are the painful accounts of prisoners-of-war, or nurses, whose memories work to different rhythms resonant of the nature of their experiences, to the combatant; from the work of practising historians; from military memoirs and published letters; from reports from newspaper correspondents; and from the reminiscences of that growing horde of battlefield tourists, 'that hybrid collection of pilgrims and patriots, voyeurs and vandals', as the editors say, who, out of a mixture of nationalist, recreational, commercial and voyeuristic reasons, visit the battlefields.

While readers might contemplate how war and travel are differently conveyed through these various genre, the careful juxtaposition of the selections develop internal narratives within and between sections that invite explorations of that strange character, the Australian military tourist and, as a consequence, invite reflection on questions of national identity. The picture that emerges is complex and allows no easy definition. Naively eager to take their tour of duty, many Australians were confounded by what they saw and were either repulsed by the differences they found or saw it as an invitation to behave badly; in either case their responses suggested that rather than being broadened by their experiences one instinct was to retreat into a debilitating chauvinism and self-advertising that exposed an ugly racism and a pervasive adolescent egotism. Rather than widening their horizons they retreated into the comfortable knowns of an isolated society. At other times, of course, this egotism manifests itself as an endearing independence and can-do manner marked by a generosity of spirit.

As is the way of anthologies such as this, the selections may lead us back to read again or to discover in its entirety longer works from which these pieces are taken. For this reader, it means going back to Boyd, and to Frederic Manning who asks us to consider the existential facts of our being; to Monash's detailed and absorbing letters, mostly to his wife; to Louise Mack's compelling and profound reports from the Western Front; to George Johnston's 'vignettes ... incomplete and scattered' that make up My Brother Jack and invited us, in the sixties, to look at ourselves; to re-read Barney Roberts and find Ray Parkin's Into the Smother and Don Charlwood's No Moon Tonight; and to hunt out a bit more Hank Nelson. I hope it is like that for other readers; the reading need not stop at the end of this generous selection.

Citation

• Jim Wieland. 'Review: On the Warpath: An Anthology of Australian Military Travel by Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce eds' [online]. Network Review of Books (Perth, Australian Public Intellectual Network), June 2004. Availability: <please cite the web address here> ISSN 1833-0932. [accessed 21 May 2013].

Back Cover Blurb

• 'Travel is a political as well as recreational action. And one of the main avenues of travel has been military, both in the excursionary exploits of warring armies and in the massed battalions of war tourists--that hybrid collection of pilgrims and patriots, voyeurs and vandals--who follow in their wake.'
  
  This important anthology reveals the many ways in which going to war has formed a cultural bridge between Australia and the world. From the Sudan in 1885 to Afghanistan in 2001, the connection of war to travel is illustrated in the observations of writers as varied as 'Banjo' Paterson, George Johnston, Nancy Wake, John Pilger, Lily Brett and Peter Weir. Selecting writings from combatants abroad as well as the reflections of sightseers who travel to foreign battlefields and war sites, Robin Gerster and Peter Pierce reveal how the experience of war has both broadened and refined (and sometimes distorted) Australian views of the world. Their lively collection crosses the boundaries between literature, literary criticism, travel writing, war writing and cultural commentary.

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