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 actually helps explains this book: 'Kio' is a nickname for Moonta, a mining town in the Yorke Peninsula 'Copper Triangle' which was a magnet for Cornish migrants. But it also, as the title suggests, follows in the footsteps of John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War, as a regionally focused history of how the war affected one part of Australia (in McQuilton's case he examined northeastern Victoria). One major difference, though, is the way Payton seeks to integrate the story of the northern Yorke Peninsula in the war with the story of its men fighting overseas, for example through the letters sent home describing their experiences and often published in the local press. Anyway, I'll have to say hello!

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://airminded.org/copyright/.