From crossing cultural barriers with a cake, to starvation used as a brutal tool of war, Australian soldiers’ letters and diaries reveal an urgently important relationship with what they ate.
A new exhibition gives us an insight into the daily life – and language – of Australian soldiers in World War One.
Courtesy of University of Melbourne Archives, University of Melbourne.
When Australians went to the Western Front, language failed them. So they invented slanguage: a mix of slang, French words and creative swearing that, among other things, gave us the word “Aussie”.
The century since the first world war is littered with the broken promises of Muslim rulers to bring about a transition to more representative forms of government.
AAP/Asmaa Abdelatif
The rise of Islamic State and its declaration of the caliphate can be read as part of a wider story that has unfolded since the formation of modern nation states in the Muslim world.
A flag-waving Islamic State fighter takes part in a military parade along the streets of Syria’s northern Raqqa province.
Reuters/Stringer
How far back in history does one have to go to find the roots of the so-called Islamic State? The first article in our series on the genesis of the terrorist outfit considers some fundamentals.
Dicken’s great anti-hero has monopolised festive literature for too long. Here are the alternative takes on the season of goodwill that you have been missing.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s tale of rural Scottish change between the world wars is anything but narrowly focused. It speaks to our universal sense of injustice and fairness.
Presidents Hollande and Obama. Is it still possible for nation states to build a global alliance against organisations such as Daesh?
Reuters/Jonathan Ernst
To save mankind from the scourge of war… These eight words drawn from the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations have been ringing in my head for the past week. Most believe that they were penned…
Keith Murdoch (right) with Prime Minister Billy Hughes during the first world war.
AWM
Tom D.C. Roberts has crafted a book full of remarkable insights into a central figure in Australian corporate and political history, a figure hitherto enveloped in family mythology: Keith Murdoch.
The life Adams was leading 100 years ago was far from a Hollywood fantasy.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.
This Remembrance Day, spend some time with Claire Adams Mackinnon – the silent Hollywood movie star who stole the heart of Melbourne bachelor and lived the last 40 years of her life in Victoria.
Thinking about Australia’s war experience in comparison with others will soften some of the hyperbole surrounding Anzac.
AAP/Jake Sims
Armistice Day provides a moment to reflect on Australia’s self-identity in comparison to other nations that experienced the first world war and commemorate it to this day.
Every year thousands of students read George Orwell’s 1984 and are doubtless convinced that its perspective on language and power is “definitive”. Except that it’s not; and hasn’t been since at least the 1970s.
Manuel Harlan/Melbourne Festival
Many still regard George Orwell’s 1984 and its message about the nature of language and power “definitive”. But globalisation has revolutionised how we communicate; 1984 tells us nothing about our future.
Before World War I, science was considered a novelty in Australia. But the War triggered the realisation that the government needed to invest in scientific research.
Henry James renounced his American citizenship in 1915 in response to his country’s inaction.
Wikimedia
When Henry James renounced his American citizenship in 1915 in response to his country’s inaction, he spearheaded a movement of writers who refused to sit on the sidelines amid turmoil in Europe.
People attend the remembrance of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre on the Plein, in The Hague last week.
EPA/ Martijn Beekman
Genocide has occurred throughout history, from the very beginnings of the social organisation of human communities until the present. But working out what do about it is no easy task.
Prior to world war one, many more soldiers died of infection rather than combat.
Navy Medicine/Flickr
Rupert Brooke was commissioned in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as a Sub-Lieutenant. Without seeing combat, he died aboard a French hospital ship, from a mosquito bite that turned septic.
The tragedy at sea captured by a London Illustrated News artist
Norman Wilkinson
The torpedoing of the passenger liner in 1915 was abhorrent but the story behind the story reveals one of the first effective government propaganda campaigns