The cartoon character, ‘The little boy at Manly’, first appeared in a cartoon by the American born Livingston Hopkins in the Bulletin in early April 1885.
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Why Australians (and Brits and Indians, and Free French, and others) fought the French in 1941
In September and October of 1918 Australian and French troops had fought side-by-side against the Ottoman Empire as they advanced through Syria in the final stages of the Palestine Campaign. Twenty-three years later, in 1941, Australian and French troops fought each...
The radical military experiment that created Duntroon
Happy Birthday to the Royal Military College, Duntroon, which turns 115 years old on 27 June. Established in 1911, in a homestead on the edge of what is now Canberra (Duntroon being the name of the old Campbell family homestead, now the officers’ mess), it has been...
An Australian disaster in South Africa, Wilmansrust 1901
Australian military history often celebrates battlefield success. But this week I want to look at something different: Australia’s worst military defeat before Gallipoli. It was the costliest Australian engagement of the war, and the performance of the troops...
The uncomfortable question beneath Australia’s first overseas war
This time of the year, 141 years ago, the New South Wales Contingent to the Sudan was steaming home from its brief involvement in an ill-fated campaign that Britain’s Gladstone government had reluctantly launched in northeast Africa. The despatch and service of the...
Wars are not always popular
Wars are not always popular, despite claims from governments and rulers that they are just, necessary or being waged in the people’s interests. On 8–9 May 1970 what were then the largest street demonstrations in Australia’s history occurred around the country. They...