Set in 1916, Beneath Hill 60 is the never-before told story of the Australian and German miners who served at the Western Front during the First World War. After enlisting in the Australian Imperial Forces, Queensland mining expert Oliver Woodward is sent to the front to take charge of a small group of miners during the one of the bloodiest battles in history. The soldier-miners from both sides drive their narrow tunnels under no man's land, attempting to out-manoeuvre and undermine each other as they create a great labyrinth of tunnels. It's a silent and savage war where one tiny sound can turn a man from hunter to hunted, where skilled listeners are more sought after than fighters.
The War Story of Oliver Holmes Woodward, Captain 1st Australian Tunnelling Company, Australian Imperial Force
Adelaide
:
Oliver Holmes Woodward
,
1932
Z1683198
1932
single work
autobiography
'The World War I Gallipoli campaign in modern Turkey in April 1915 was calamitous from the outset, with the amphibious assault by British and Allied forces landing well off course. Australia's first major military engagement since achieving nationhood in 1901, its chief success would become their stealth evacuation, which saw seventy thousand men covertly withdrawn over nine days and nights in December 1915. The campaign was ultimately futile and deemed immaterial to the outcome of the war. Such an ignominious defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Empire would seem an unlikely source for a national myth. It lacks, for example, “the psychic reassurance of triumph over the sources of threat” and the defeat of enemies that Graham Dawson identifies as a key psychic and social function of adventure narratives and soldier heroes (282). Yet, the ill‐fated Gallipoli campaign is popularly held in Australia's cultural imagination as the “birth of a nation” for a former colony then still under the yoke of the British Empire. In Australian politics and culture, the youthful nation's presumed character was forged in war and embodied in the deeds of its young men, in spite of ultimate defeat.' (Introduction)
