The latest issue of the British Journal for Military History is out, and with it my peer-reviewed article ‘Constructing the enemy within: rumours of secret gun platforms and Zeppelin bases in Britain, August-October 1914’: This article explores the false rumours of secret German gun platforms and Zeppelin bases which swept Britain in the early months […]
A drawing by an Australian, John T. Collins, perhaps as a student exercise. Unlike in Britain, there was no dominant ‘aerial pageant’ here but rather many local ones, so it seems like a generic advertisement. It’s dated to 1932 or 1933, but assuming the context is Australian then those would be Hawker Demons and it
2016 has been a terrible year in many respects, but finally there is some good news for everyone! Well, for everyone who wants to buy a copy of my book, anyway; because in January 2017 The Next War in the Air will be republished in a much cheaper (if not quite cheap) paperpack edition. To
Exactly three years ago I was visiting the National Aerospace Library at Farnborough, the historic home of British military aviation going back to 1904 through the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Cody’s first flight, and the Army’s Balloon Factory. The site now seems to consist largely of a series of business parks — though the famous air
The previous post in this series was supposed to be the last. But in the course of taking two months to write it, I managed to forget about another, earlier association between a White Australia and an Australian airship. This one wasn’t a real airship; it was a fictional one which appeared in Randolph Bedford’s
I ended the previous post in this series with the tease: In a final post, I will discuss what [Alban] Roberts called his airship, and what it might mean. That was over two months ago! I think it’s time to finally reveal the answer to this question. Errol Martyn, who has written what must be
Earlier this week I had my first article published in The Conversation, on the actual original context for the Keep Calm And Carry On poster, as opposed to the assumed original context. The Conversation is a great platform for academics to get their work and ideas out to the public, and to provide expert analysis
Australia has never had much to do with airships. In recent decades you might be able to catch a glimpse of an advertising blimp or a camera drone. You have to go back many decades to find anything else, and what you do find didn’t amount to much. There would have been airship bases in
Apropos of nothing, here’s a (somewhat cropped) c. 1943 painting by a Japanese artist named Shori Arai. (Sometimes called Maintenance Work aboard Aircraft Carrier II, though clearly it’s not maintenance that’s going on there.) The original is held by the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. It was also issued as a postcard by the
I have a new publication out — at least, it’s out electronically, I haven’t seen a physical copy yet! It’s a chapter in a collection published by Melbourne University Press and edited by Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology. My chapter is entitled ‘The enemy
