Cirrus@Austlit

Kenneth Stanley Inglis died of pancreatic cancer on 1 December 2017. He continued to write until a few days before his death, imparting careful instructions to Jay Winter and Seamus Spark, on their collective two-volume biography of the 'Dunera Boys'. It says much about Ken Inglis that his last work was a collaborative endeavour, and a project that profiled the talent of both established and early career scholars. As Frank Bongiorno, one of many grateful students, has noted, the measure of Inglis' scholarship is not just the distinctive contribution he made to our discipline, but the opportunities he created all his life for others.'  (Introduction)

'This article examines Ken Inglis’s journey to Gallipoli in 1965, marking the 50th anniversary of the Landing. It involves a detailed consideration of his earliest writings on this subject, drawing on unpublished manuscripts held by the National Library. The article uses this study as an opportunity to examine the character and method of Inglis’s historical writing and situate this early work within the corpus of a larger body of scholarship. It contrasts Inglis’s nuanced and carefully argued account – his ethnographic approach to the gathering of testimony, close observance of ritual and language and the bold sweep of his writing – with the less searching and more reductionist approach taken by some subsequent critics of Gallipoli pilgrimage. One of the article’s key concerns is to consider how the character of commemoration has changed over time: it compares and contrasts this first large-scale return to Gallipoli (over 300 World War One veterans embarked on the ‘Jubilee Pilgrimage’) with more recent journeys to Anzac. It argues that with the passing of the generation that witnessed the Great War, ‘Anzac’ has lost much of its historical specificity and that the increasingly performative aspects of commemoration have served to overwhelm its original meanings.' (Introduction)

'World War One: a history in 100 stories remembers not just the men who fought, and those who lost their lives in during the battles of WWI. We hear the stories of the women and families who were affected, and those who returned to Australia: the gassed, the crippled, the insane - all those irreparably damaged by war.

'There has been no shortage of heroic stories over the course of the Anzac Centenary: stories of courage and sacrifice, fortitude and endurance, mateship and resolve. But a hundred years on, there is a need for other stories as well - the stories too often marginalised in favour of nation-building narratives.

'Drawn from a unique collection of sources, including repatriation files, these heartbreaking and deeply personal stories reveal a broken and suffering generation - gentle men driven to violence, mothers sent insane with grief, the hopelessness of rehabilitation and the quiet, pervasive sadness of loss.

'This is an unflinching and remarkable social history that makes an important contribution to the way we remember. Telling the whole truth about war requires its own kind of courage.' (Publication summary)