Martin Crotty

Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence

his collection of chewed-off fingernails’’ (41). Tiffany’s book is also a commentary on the sexual restraints and social mores of the period. In these more enlightened times, it’s hard to imagine what Betty’s life was like in a small country town in the 1950s. There was no single parents’ pension, and women earned much less than men in all industries, especially aged care. (Even now the average wage for an aged care worker is less than

History as service teaching : Possibilities and pitfalls

20 an hour.) Betty, however, finds opportunities for small pleasures; for example, at lunchtime, she applies lipstick and a dab of perfume and visits her elderly widowers, relishing her opportunity ‘‘to be a wife to them all’’ (43). Tiffany employs various methods to tell the story, including Harry’s written observations of a family of kookaburras, Little Hazel’s ‘‘Nature Diary’’, Betty’s notes about her children’s health, and Harry’s letters to Michael written with ‘‘a sharpened pencil on several sheets of Basildon Bond’’ (119). Mateship with Birds is Tiffany’s second novel. Her debut novel Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living was shortlisted for numerous awards and was described by the Age as ‘‘a highly accomplished, adroit and funny-serious novel’’. Mateship with Birds is equally funny and serious. For me, the most poignant passages are Harry’s advice on sex education to the adolescent Michael, what Harry stumblingly describes as ‘‘things with girls . . .details of the workings’’ (60). My favourite piece is when Harry describes one of his mother’s friends as ‘‘a big woman with an energetic bosom. I’d just seen her run across the street and she looked like she had a litter of puppies down her blouse’’ (86). Tiffany has clearly undertaken considerable research into 1950s rural life and the fascinating hobby of bird watching, and this is effortlessly woven into the text. Mateship with Birds is a good yarn, evocative of a different time and place; I felt I was right there, in Cohuna, watching the many minor dramas unfold.

The role of sport for Australian POWs of the Turks during the First World War

This article considers some of the potential possibilities and pitfalls in teaching History as a compulsory course for professional degrees in areas such as education and journalism. It considers two quite different models for curriculum design based on distinct student cohorts, and suggests some of the dangers that need to be avoided, and some of the arrangements that need to be considered for desirable outcomes, in such service teaching situations.

Introduction: Sport, War and Society in Australia and New Zealand

Nearly 200 Australians were taken prisoner by the Turks during World War I, some 76 of them during the Gallipoli campaign and the remainder over the succeeding three years during the ongoing campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. Approximately a quarter of them died in captivity. In contrast to the experiences of Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Pacific War, Australian history and collective memory, and Australian commemorative activities, have almost totally overlooked the Australian prisoners of the Turks. This article redresses the balance somewhat by looking at an important aspect of the prisoners’ lives; the games they played while in captivity. The article suggests that sports and games were an important part of their methods for coping with the captivity experience, although there were some significant differences in the role sport played for captives of the Turks as compared to the role it played for those taken prisoner by the Japanese in the next World War.

War stories in Australia

The papers in this special collection had their genesis at ‘Sporting Traditions XIX’, the biennial conference of the Australian Society for Sports History (ASSH). Held in Canberra over three days and four nights in July 2013, the event was ambulatory in that each day of the conference was held at a different location in the nation’s capital. On Thursday, July 4, the proceedings were hosted by The International Journal of the History of Sport as part of its commitment to regional workshop/conferences designed to foster new scholarship in the discipline. The theme for this day of the conference was ‘Sport, War and Society in Australia and New Zealand’, and, fittingly, all papers were delivered within the confines of the iconic Australian War Memorial (AWM). Dr Brendan Nelson, Director of the AWM, was on hand to welcome delegates and he officially opened the programme by offering a reflection not only on his leadership role at the Memorial but also on his own experiences as the former Minister for Defence (2006–2007) in the Australian federal government. This address set the scene for the keynote lecture of Professor Wray Vamplew, and the varied range of papers that followed. Part of the impetus for the day was the fact that the conference was being held on the eve of commemorations associated with the centenary of the Great War, hence the title of ‘Anzac Centennial’ for this collection of papers. However, even though the first units of the Australian Imperial Force were raised in August 1914, it has been the grouping together of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (Anzacs) in Egypt prior to the landing at Gallipoli in April 1915, and their subsequent involvement in the conflict at Anzac Cove and more broadly on the Western Front, that has attracted ongoing attention from writers and historians. While a growing band of scholars have taken an interest in the sporting and recreational activities of Australian and New Zealand military personnel (either behind the lines or in prisoner-of-war camps), and there have been some significant explorations of the impact of war on sport in the domestic sphere (especially in terms of the recruitment of athletes and the backlash against the continuance of organised sporting competitions), no collection of academic essays has ever been dedicated to gathering together the latest work on these topics from an antipodean perspective. In this context, it is important to note that the papers are not narrowly restricted to themes and issues associated with sport and the Great War. True to our original brief as editors, this collection encompasses the gamut of inter-connections between sport, war and society in Australia and New Zealand across time, hence the inclusion of relevant organisational histories and biographical material related to World War II.

Making the Australian male: Middle-class masculinity 1870-1920

Historians of Australians at war carry an unusual burden of responsibility. The involvement of mainstream media and partisan bodies such as the Department of Veterans’ Affairs in the promulgation of celebratory Anzac rhetoric, and the flooding of the book market by journalists and non-specialists such as Peter Fitzsimons and Les Carlyon, has perpetuated widespread misunderstanding and ignorance about Australia’s war experiences. The promotion of illusions and partisan and self-congratulatory (mis)understandings of Australians at war matters more than in many other areas of Australian history because of the centrality of Anzac to Australian understandings of self and because of public