Cirrus@Austlit

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has produced a number of programs for radio and television to commemorate and engage with the centenary of the beginning of World War One.

Click here to access a list of programs first broadcast on ABC Radio National on 28 and 29 June 2014.

They include discussion about the Literature of the War.

Click here to access 'Laughing at the Front,' broadcast on Hindsight (Radio National) on 24 April 2011.

The program includes interviews with Professor Richard Fotheringham, Professor Graham Seal, Dr Lisa Trahiar and Dr Clay Djubal.

The ABC has made available a collection of poetry readings by prominent Australians

Wesley Enoch, Artistic Director of the Queensland Theatre Company, reads a letter from the aunt of Aboriginal soldier, William Castles, who died in service.

Australian War Artist in 2011, Ben Quilty, reads Vance Palmer's poem, 'The Farmer Remembers the Somme, and reflects on his experience of the Afghanistan war.

Writer and translator, Linda Jaiven reads the poem, 'Night duty', by British VAD nurse, Eva Dobell.

Here, former Australian Governor General, Dame Quentin Bryce, reads Dame Mary Gilmour's poem 'The Measure' from her collection The Passionate Heart

Governor General, Sir Peter Cosgrove reads Banjo Paterson's poem 'We're all Australians Now'.

Mike Ladd, producer of Radio National's Poetica, talks about and reads from C J Dennis's Ginger Mick.

Brendon Nelson reads the famous war poem, 'In Flanders Fields', by Canadian war doctor, John McCrae.

And here, Les Murray reads Harley Matthews's poem 'Women are Not Gentlemen'.

Feminist Social Activist, Eva Cox, nee Eva Hauser, reflects on her Austrian heritage and reads the poem 'Corpses in the Woods' by the German poet, playwright and activist, ErnstToller, who served in World War I.

Official Australian War Artist to East Timor in 1999, Wendy Sharpe 'Lamplight' by May Wedderburn Cannan.

Finally, playwright Michael Gow reads Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est', a poem Gow was learned in high school through the encouragement of a teacher who had seen active service in the Second World War.

In April 2019, The Conversation published Kevin Brophy on Victorian women poets of WWI.

The ABC's Conversations program included a number of segments specifically focused on World War I:

• Stephen Dando-Collins returns to talk about Viv, Ned and Ray Searle who all joined up, but only one returned and his mother bitterly resented him. Listen here

• Head of Military History at the Australian War Memorial, Ashley Ekins finds the truth of Australia's war history more moving than the myths of Anzac. Listen here

• Historian Ross McMullin has uncovered the previously untold stories of ten extraordinary Australian soldiers lost in WWI. Listen here

• Writer Les Carlyon is renowned for his novels that brilliantly capture WWI, one of which has been described by former Prime Minister John Howard as 'a masterpiece'. Listen here

• Historian Paul Ham argues that the outbreak of WWI was not caused by the assassination of an obscure Austrian aristocrat. Listen here

• Artistic director of the Queensland Theatre Company, Wesley Enoch, talks about his play Black Diggers. Listen here

• Mephisto, the only German A7V tank from WWI still in existence was captured by Australian troops on the Somme in 1918 and brought back to Australia. Listen here

The ABC has put together an interesting list of little known facts about World War I that can be seen here.

A collaboration between the National Film and Sound Archive (Australia) and the Nga Taonga Sound & Vision (New Zealand), the site was built 'to commemorate the centenary of Australia and New Zealand’s involvement in World War One by showcasing audio-visual material related to the war held by both archives.'

View the site here.

The National Film and Sound Archive has made available on its Flickr page more than two dozen high-quality stills from Paulette McDonagh's anti-war film.

View the images here.

Australian Screen, a website run by the National Film and Sound Archive to showcase clips from their audiovisual collections, offers the following overview of Gallipoli on Film, including the only known movie images of the Dardanelles campaign.

Gallipoli on Film at Australian Screen.

As part of the centenary of World War I–and in addition to physical exhibitions in the library itself–the State Library of Queensland has been publishing regular blog posts on aspects of Queensland's war service.

See the full list of blog posts here.

As part of their World War I exhibition, the Fryer Library digitised the diary of a Turkish officer, Refik Bey, who had kept the diary at Gallipoli in 1916.

Publically launched on 24 September 2015, the diary is now available to explore online here.

Librarian Kerri Klumpp outlines the history and contents of Refik Bey's diary (including some translations into modern Turkish) in this blog post, published on 21 April 2015.

Read the blog post.

A series of stereoscopic slides (presented side-by-side) of the encampment at Gallipoli in May 1915. Note: the slides do contain images of the dead.

Explore the series here.

A Flickr collection of World War I cartoons from the Daily Telegraph: beautifully drawn and fervently patriotic.

See the collection here.