The late Graham Wilson delighted in his self-appointed role as the AIF’s myth buster. In this, his second and final volume of Bully Beef and Balderdash, he tackles another eight popularly accepted myths, exposing the ‘Water Wizard’ of Gallipoli who saved an army, dismissing the old adage that the ‘lions of the AIF’ were led by British ‘donkeys’, debunking the Gallipoli legends of the lost sword of Eureka and ‘Abdul the Terrible’, the Sultan’s champion marksman sent to dispose of AIF sniper Billy Sing, and unravelling a series of other long-standing fictions. Finally, he turns his formidable forensic mind to the ‘lost’ seven minutes at The Nek, the early cessation of the artillery barrage which led to the slaughter of the Light Horsemen immortalised in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli. Wilson’s crusade to debunk such celebrated fictions was born of the conviction that these myths do very real damage to the history of the AIF. To demythologise this nation’s Great War military history, he argues, is to encourage Australians to view the AIF’s record on its own merits. Such are these merits that they do not require any form of embellishment to shine for all time. This book is a tribute to Graham Wilson’s extraordinary passion for truth and fact and his drive to set the historical record straight.

‘I do feel the loss of my two boys, they was my all …’ wrote grieving father Ernest Watts following the death of his two sons. Like thousands of Australians during World War I, Ernest Watts received his tragic news through the office known as ‘Base Records’. This letter was just one in a series of correspondence that lasted the duration of the war and well into the post-war period. Every letter was answered with patience and courtesy and every response carried the same signature: J.M. Lean. The Man who Carried the Nation’s Grief describes the extraordinary work of James Lean, whose office at times received over 100 letters a day from distressed families. The letters selected by author Carol Rosenhain are quoted verbatim in all their rawness, the grief, anger and disbelief of the writer signifying wounds that would take years to heal while others never would. Like those of Ernest Watts, the letters often form part of a chain of correspondence that lasted well beyond the Armistice of 1918. For one shattered father, the fate of his missing boy would never be resolved, his son’s final resting place only discovered in Pheasant Wood almost a century after he met his death. Given his crucial role as the link between anxious families and the bureaucracy of the AIF, James Lean’s remarkable work is a surprising omission from the vast body of World War I literature. Carol Rosenhain’ s book rectifies this omission with a portrait of Lean himself and the grim task at which he excelled. This is a book that describes the impact of war on families in all its devastating reality.