Anzac Memories - Living with the Legend - Revisited - ABC Interview with Monash Uni Historian Alistair Thomson

Anzac Fred Farrall - one of the subjects of Alistair Thomson's book.

ABC Radio National broadcast a very interesting interview with Monash University historian Alistair Thomson on the release of the updated version of his great book Anzac Memories - Living with the Legend, originally published on 1994. It is a great interview and shows how research into the history of Anzac is continuing and being enriched by historians such as Alistair. Enjoy.
He will launch his book at Readings Bookshop in Kew at 6.30 on 11 November - For details click the following -  Kew Launch

Here's the intro for the interview from the ABC:
In the early 1980s, the historian Alistair Thomson began recording the oral histories of veterans of the First World War, with particular focus on how these men remembered their wartime experience.  These interviews formed the basis for the book ‘Anzac Memories –Living with the Legend', published in 1994.
Thirty years after it's first publication Alistair Thomson decided to return to this history. The three key veterans with whom he'd recorded oral histories, and written about in his book, were no longer alive, but, in recent years, a new source of information had become available to researchers and historians of war - the records of the Repatriation Department (now known as The Department of Veterans Affairs). The 'Repat' was responsible for the medical assessment and care of veterans, as well as for the provision of pensions. These case files offer new ways of understanding the post war lives of soldiers, and how these men, and often their families, tried to make sense of the legacies of their war time experience. The 'Repat' files also offer rich insights into the history of medicine, psychology and the treatment of mental illness, and reveal the shifts and changes in the way the state responded to veterans of war.
An updated edition of 'Anzac Memories' has just been released, and in this interview Alistair Thomson discusses the findings of his research into the Repatriation Department case files of one of the veterans he recorded and wrote about in the first edition of the book, the late Fred Farrall.
His book is published by Monash University Press and available in most good bookshops. You can find out more about the book by clicking this link.
Click on the link below to listen to the interview:
Anzac Memories Interview - ABC Radio National