The foot-soldiers of history.(Ryan)(Viewpoint essay)

IN LAST NOVEMBER'S Quadrant I ate a rather large slice of humble pie on behalf of us journalists. It proved so indigestible that I'd like here to have another bite at the cherry. (How's that for mixed metaphors.)

I called us the "pick-and-shovel brigade of writing ... literature's coarse and common foot-soldiers". After re-reading Les Carlyon's splendid new book The Great War, it was plain that I should not merely r reflect, but also repent.

Carlyon is quintessentially a journalist. (If progression through the Melbourne Age from racing writer to editor doesn't qualify him, what could?) His book chiefly tells the story of the Australian soldiers fighting in France and Belgium in 1916-1918. Hard upon Federation, these cruel years were an early part of the formation of Australia's national being; Carlyon, after prodigious research, presents those times to present-day Australians with insight, immediacy and great clarity. Was he a coarse and common foot-soldier of literature? Clearly not.

Thinking the matter over, I began absent-mindedly to jot down at random the names of other journalists who had published books which, from between the one set of covers, had enriched both the history and the literature of our country: that is to say, books based on thorough and accurate research; meticulous as to facts; insightful as to interpretation, and written in an accessible English style such that any educated reader might enjoy. It startled me to find that, without really trying, I had produced a column of names which climbed down twenty-nine lines of an ordinary A4 notepad. There must be a lot more to our journos than their knockabout day jobs.

For a start, towering monuments of Australian history/literature are the two series of highly readable multi-volumes of the official history of our participation in the two world wars. In neither case was the author (or general editor) a professional or academic historian: Charles Bean (First World War) and Gavin Long (Second World War) were journalists. Both had been leader writers on the Sydney Morning Herald. (Later, Melbourne University conferred an honorary doctorate on Bean, specifically for his work as a historian.)

Still in military mode, Chester Wilmot's Tobruk is expressly distinguished by H.M. Green as history, not journalism. Then Wilmot wrote his classic The Struggle for Europe.

An understanding of the New Guinea fighting in 1942 begins with reading Raymond Paull's Retreat from Kokoda, and continues with Osmar White's Green Armour. Both authors were journalists straight from central casting. None of this is to suggest that our journos are limited to hairy-chested wartime. Ray Paull, for example, went on in peacetime to write Old Walhalla, still a little gem of history/literature about this pioneering gold town, back today in the news amidst Victoria's terrible bushfires.