Second World War
The Second World War was a defining event in modern Australian history. This topic explores the experiences of servicemen and women, civilians, prisoners of war and internees, and examines how the conflict transformed Australia's society, international relationships and national identity.
War Crimes Trials on Morotai Island - WW2TV (video)
Pacific reckoning - Australian war crimes trials (video)
Sources for Japanese breakout from Cowra Prisoner of War Camp
Ashes and Sakura: an Australian story of the making of a Pacific nation
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.
Australia's first war crime trials
From Garage Experiment to Jungle Legend: How a young Australian created the Owen machine gun
Internment of Australian army nurses
In An Attractive Naivety, Armistice Darcy, a character inspired by Australian nurse, Betty Jeffrey, is one of 65 Australian army nurses evacuated from Singapore on 12 February 1942, just before its fall, on the SS Vyner Brooke. The following day, Friday the 13th, the ship was attacked by six Japanese bombers and sunk. Of those who made it to shore, 21 were savagely raped and murdered by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach, Bangka Island. One, Sr Vivian Bullwinkel, miraculously survived the massacre, having been shot through her side, and would live to testify against the perpetrators at the Tokyo trials after the war. Bullwinkel and the other surviving nurses were interned in a small village at Muntok and later transported to jungle POW camps on the island of Sumatra where they endured three and a half years of starvation, disease, ill-treatment and neglect at the hands of their Japanese captors.
An Attractive Naivety: Australia as a new nation in a complex world (Revised Edition)
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.