Australian Military

For the first time, The Australian Wars brings what for too long has been considered the historical past into connection with its reverberations in the present. It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. But there are few memorials marking these first, domestic wars.

On 31st October 1917, as the day's light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What...

Australia's contributions in the Pacific War are often forgotten in history lessons today. However, Australia faced the bombing of its cities and invasions of nearby islands much like the rest of the world, and stood up to fight as needed. They placed a central role from 1942 to 1943 in the New Guinea Campaign and defended Japanese forces invading Port Moseby. Japanese forces then invaded the Australian mainland, trying to cut supply lines, but were fought back by valiant forces. Take to the ground and skies during this mix of intense land and air battles.

Established after World War I by the Royal Australian Navy, the Coast Watchers were a loose organisation of several hundred European settlers, missionaries, patrol officers and planters living in British and Australian Pacific Island territories whose job it was to observe and report on the enemy. They were mostly all unpaid volunteers whose job it was simply to observe and report on foreign shipping and aeroplane movements. It was never envisaged that the Coast Watchers would do any fighting, nor operate inside enemy-occupied territory.

Facing not onlt the astounding courage they displayed amid death and chaos but also on the triumphs and pain of their personal lives, Susanna reveals how these 11 Australian women were as influential and heroic in civil life as they were in war.