Debate: "Australia and the Great War"
Finding the men of AE1

On 20 December 2017 shortly after 10 am, the coral encrusted bow and forward hydroplanes of AE1 appeared on the display, relaying images from a video camera suspended from the search vessel Fugro Equator, hovering more than …

The Battle of Beersheba, 100 years on

In Australia’s memory of the Great War, the Sinai–Palestine Campaign gets comparatively little thought after Gallipoli and the Western Front. The exception is the Battle of Beersheba, fought on 31 October 1917, which has lodged …

Flanders 1917 (part 2): victory to defeat

The three great attacks by the British Second Army in Flanders—on the Menin Road on 20 September 1917, at Polygon Wood six days later, and at Broodseinde on 4 October—revived the Third Ypres offensive after …

Flanders 1917 (part 1): defeat to victory

In May 1917, the French Army on the Western Front mutinied after the collapse of yet another ill-conceived offensive and the British Expeditionary Force assumed the main burden of the fighting. Its commander-in-chief, Field Marshal …

Leaders and led: Bullecourt 1917

Flares, shell-bursts and burning tanks bathed the snow-covered battlefield in a surreal light as the 4th Australian Division attacked the Hindenburg Line near Bullecourt in the early morning darkness on 11 April 1917. Dense barbed …

From the bookshelf: the AIF in Battle

Generations of Australians have been told that the Australian Light Horse Regiments, which distinguished themselves from the Sinai to Syria during the Great War, were not Cavalry. They were Mounted Infantry. Jean Bou, an historian …

1917: our costliest year at war

A century ago, in early 1917, Australian troops had already seen heavy fighting, on Gallipoli in 1915 and even more on the Western Front in 1916, which had cost some 23,000 lives. In July 1916 …