Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend, Monash University Publishing, Clayton, Vic., new edition, 2013; first published Oxford University Press, 1994
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. 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. (blurb)
The author talks here about doing oral history.