52. Field Notes 2: When the War is Over – Military Histories

Episode Description

Military history in Australia carries a weight that few other subfields do — it sits at the intersection of popular memory, national identity, and institutional commemoration in ways that make it both unusually accessible and unusually prone to distortion. Maggie Hutchison and Tom Rogers make a case for what serious military history looks like. It demands an active voice — soldiers don’t “lay down their lives”; they are killed by someone, with something, for reasons that can be named. And it insists on the connections between home front and battlefield that have too often been treated as separate stories.

The conversation includes the Australian War Memorial’s 2022 decision to reverse its long-standing position about the frontier wars — a change, Rogers argues, that came directly from decades of academic research, not popular opinion. They discuss the centenary wave and its aftermath, the digitisation of First World War records, and the way genealogy pulls people into military history and then requires them to understand the broader context.

Voices

Maggie Hutchison is a Senior Lecturer in History at UNSW Canberra. Her research covers war art, commemoration, and the long-term costs of military service. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary project on veteran suicide.

Tom Rogers is a historian in the Military History section at the Australian War Memorial. His research focuses on the colonial period and the frontier wars. He is currently working on soldiers’ letters published in newspapers during the South African War.

Credits

Recorded and edited by Lachlan D’Acourt. Executive producers: Michelle Arrow and Kate Fullagar. Executive producer, Impact Studios: Sarah Gilbert. History Lab is made by UTS Impact Studios and the Australian Centre for Public History. Field Notes is made in collaboration with the Australian Historical Association.

Further Reading

• Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (2013)
• Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (2019)
• Evan S. Connell, Son of the Morning Star (1984)
• Andrew Gordon, The Rules of the Game: Jutland and British Naval Command (1996)