Historical fiction - 20th century Australia

In September 1945, on a sweltering parade ground at Morotai, Australian troops watch as General Sir Thomas Blamey accepts the surrender of the Japanese Second Army. For Corporal Tom Davis, the ceremony brings neither triumph nor relief. The war has ended—but something within him remains unsettled.
Ashes & Sakura is a sweeping work of historical fiction set in the uneasy aftermath of the Second World War. Moving from the battlefields of New Guinea and Borneo to the shattered cities of occupied Japan, and from rural New South Wales to the political chambers shaping Australia’s post-war ambitions, the novel explores what happens when the guns fall silent but the reckoning has only just begun.
Tom Davis has survived campaigns that killed many of his mates. He has endured jungle warfare, seen the brutal treatment of prisoners, and lived with the absurdity of survival. Now stranded on Morotai among thousands of battle-weary Australians waiting for transport home, he finds himself adrift—caught between the life he left behind and the man the war has made him.
Around him, others wrestle with their own burdens. Eric Jenkins, a gentle scholar-soldier and pigeon handler, volunteers for service with the newly formed British Commonwealth Occupation Force, drawn by a fascination with Japan’s culture even as bitterness toward the enemy lingers among the ranks. Les, a hard-bitten veteran of the Middle East, Greece, New Guinea and the Philippines, longs only for home and rails against the Army’s indifference. Army nurses return from captivity in Japanese prison camps, carrying scars less visible than their emaciated frames suggest. Italian prisoners of war working on Australian farms leave behind complicated attachments and broken loyalties.
As Australia commits itself to occupying Japan and asserting a new regional role in the Pacific, its soldiers enter a land reduced to ash—Hiroshima’s ruins still smouldering, cities flattened, civilians hungry and defeated. Amid the rubble, unexpected encounters unfold between occupier and occupied. For Tom, a tentative relationship with a young Japanese woman forces him to question what victory truly means.
Grounded in official war diaries, contemporary newspaper accounts, and personal memoirs, Ashes & Sakura recreates the lifeworld of 1945–47 with meticulous detail. Real historical events—the Morotai surrender, the war crimes trials, the formation of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan, the repatriation of prisoners—interweave with imagined lives shaped by duty, shame, love, and disillusionment.

A companion to An Attractive Naivety, it continues the Becoming Australia series by David Gormley-O’Brien, author and historian based in Victoria.

An Attractive Naivety is a historical novel of war, identity, and endurance, set against Australia’s first half-century as a nation.

At the dawn of the twentieth century, Australia is newly federated – ambitious, proud, and unsure of itself. The novel traces that coming of age through the lives of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary events. From plague-stricken Sydney to the battlefield of Palestine, from the Cowra Breakout to the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, it follows the pressures that shaped both private lives and public myths.

Fictional characters move alongside real figures and documented events. David Gormley-O’Brien turns his attention away from the usual centres of power to the margins that sustained the country – ratcatchers and tram drivers, nurses and labourers, unionists and returned soldiers. These are lives rarely foregrounded, yet essential to the national story.

Their struggles are practical and human. A young widow raises a child after the plague. A family is divided by class, shame, and loyalty. A boy knits socks for soldiers while his brother avoids the front. A nurse, inspired by Florence Nightingale, becomes a prisoner in a Japanese internment camp deep in the jungle. A labourer risks his life on the Harbour Bridge to feed his family. A tram-driver returns from war carrying the weight of his role as a guard during a violent mass breakout.

Grounded in careful research and rendered with close attention to period detail, the novel examines the contradictions of nation-building – idealism and inequality, duty and prejudice, pride and grief. Language and attitudes are presented as they were, without modern varnish, but with care.

For readers of serious historical fiction, An Attractive Naivety offers a measured, intimate portrait of Australia in the making, and of the people who bore its costs.

Revised Edition (2026) with maps and images.