Peter Stanley, ed.
Charles Bean: Man, Myth, Legacy, UNSW Press, Canberra, 2017
Proceedings of a 2016 conference at UNSW Canberra.
Australia’s official war correspondent during WWI, Charles Bean was also Australia’s first official war historian and the driving force behind the creation of the Australian War Memorial. Famously criticised for his deliberate myth-making as editor of The Anzac Book, Bean was also a public servant, institutional leader, author, activist, thinker, doer, philosopher, and polemicist. In Charles Bean, Man, myth, legacy, Australia’s top military historians – including Peter Stanley, Peter Burness, Michael McKernan, Jeffrey Grey, Peter Edwards, David Horner, Peter Rees and Craig Stockings – analyse the man, the myth, and his long-reaching legacy. (blurb)
Chapters cover Bean’s life and work and the Australian official war history tradition down to the present day. There are extracts and a list of chapters here. See also Michael Piggott’s chapter in The Honest History Book (where he questions the Australian War Memorial’s uncritical approach to Bean and his legacy) and John Myrtle’s commentary on and links to the official histories. A long extract by Anne-Marie Condé on Bean and the Australian Archives.
9 August 2017
