ANZAC Memories
New book announcement: ANZAC Memories
Living with the Legend
(New Edition)
By Alistair Thomson
With a new foreword by Jay Winter
‘...a masterly study of how Australians remember, forget, invent and imagine their experiences of war.’
— Ken Inglis
Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994, and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of oral history and war memory.
Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave ‘as good a picture of
the impact of the Great war on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in
this generation’. Ian McGibbon concluded that 'anyone interested in the limitations and potentialities of oral testimony will find Anzac Memories an absorbing study'.
Michael Roper wrote that ‘an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by’.
In this new edition Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has transformed
over the past quarter century, how a ‘post-memory’ of the Great War creates new
challenges and opportunities for making sense of the national past, and how
veterans’ war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies.
In three new chapters he returns to a family war history that he could not write about twenty years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly-released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans’ post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory, and about oral history.
About the author:
ALISTAIR THOMSON is Professor of History at Monash University in Melbourne and was previously Professor of Oral History at the University of Sussex in
England. His books include: The Oral History Reader (1998 and 2006, with Rob Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), Moving Stories: an Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries (2011) and Oral History and Photography (2011, with Alexander Freund).
Publication: October 2013
Monash University Publishing
RRP: AUD/US $34.95
ISBN (print): 978-1-921867-58-3
ISBN (online): 978-1-921867-59-0
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How can narrators and interviewers reach a common understanding?We asked several researchers and activists in the field of oral history to express their views on oral history questions. The names of each participant are listed at the beginning of their answers, and the text of all answers will be published on this portal by the end of the week.
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