Philip Payton. Regional Australia and the Great War: ‘The Boys from Old Kio’. Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2012. I was surprised to see that Philip Payton is giving a paper at AHA 2012 on ‘The 1916-17 Conscription Crisis in Regional Australia’ because I know him as a leading historian of Cornwall and Cornish emigration. That […]
If the threat from Germans outside Australia during the First World War was small, the threat from Germans inside Australia was non-existent. There is no credible evidence at all of any espionage, subversion or sabotage activities by German-Australians. But you wouldn’t know it from the way the Australian people and their government behaved. It’s not
It’s been more than two weeks since I’ve posted anything on my current mystery aeroplane research, but it’s not because I haven’t been working on it. In fact it is coming along pretty well. There are still some frustrating gaps in my understanding of the archival records, but the writing is coming along. I’ve written
The indefatigable Ross Mahoney, a PhD student at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for War Studies, has written a briefing paper proposing the creation of an Air Force Records Society (AFRS), which he has circulated among some of the senior academics studying the history of British airpower, and has also posted on his blog. Briefly,
Norman Stone. The Atlantic and its Enemies: A History of the Cold War. London: Penguin Books, 2011. After often picking up Gaddis’ The Cold War and then putting it down due to its obvious ideological biases, I bought this on a whim — not that Stone has ever hidden his own politics! Probably should get
It has happened before that while I’m focused on some research topic but read something seemingly unrelated, that unanticipated connections serendipitously appear between the two. In this case it was while reading a collection of short stories by Arthur Machen, an influential writer of supernatural horror who wrote his greatest, and most disturbing, works in
So, to the mystery aeroplane sceptics. Again, there are some sceptical opinions to be found in the press and police reports, but relatively few. Very early on, the Age, one of Melbourne’s leading newspapers, wrote on 25 March 1918 that the defence authorities are inclined to laugh at the story told by Police Constable Wright,
