Behind the angels of war: Timely homage to a national treasure
He was the protege of revered WWI Australian war historian Charles Bean but his name is little known – until now, with a new biography finally honouring the WWII legacy of Gavin Merrick Long.
May 1901 was a momentous month in Australian history – and not just because on the ninth day of the month the first parliament of the freshly federated nation convened in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building.
May was a momentous month for Australian history and for its historiography, the study thereof. On May 15, Xavier Herbert, the great white chronicler of black dispossession, was born. Next day, Clyde Fenton, pioneer of the Royal Flying Doctor Service who would, like Herbert, become a Territorian and write of key milestones in the story of Northern Australia, was born on the other side of the country.
Then, on the last day of the month, a greater historian than either of them – someone you are unlikely ever to have heard of – entered the world.
Allow me to introduce Gavin Merrick Long. Chances are most educated Australians recognise the name of Charles Bean, our official historian of World War One. Until now – and it an oversight that defies belief – there has been no biography of the man who inherited Bean’s mantle in recording Australians’ involvement in the second murderous world war of the last century.
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Garry Hills’ compact, fact-filled and eminently readable work, Great at Heart: Gavin Merrick Long, Australia’s official Second World War historian, has at long last rectified that oversight in magnificent style.
Like Bean, a Bathurst-born newspaperman, Long worked as prodigiously as his mentor, whose recommendation of Long for the job was inspired. And, rather like Webster’s Dictionary or Chambers’s Encyclopaedia, Long’s Australia in the War of 1939-1945, running to 22 volumes (10 more than Bean’s masterwork), took many more people to compile than the man ultimately responsible for its publication.
In a mere 166 pages, Hills manages to capture the Australian fighting spirit as neatly in a line as Long did across thousands of pages. Bishop George Long of Bathurst, a chaplain to Australian troops dug in on the Western Front, reacts sardonically to a British colonel who’d regarded Australian soldiers as disrespectful of authority. The bishop’s defence of the Diggers’ character is sublime: “They don’t know how to salute and they don’t know how to surrender.”
As a journalist on Melbourne’s Argus, the young Long soon came to the notice of his superiors by being, in Hills’ words, “that rare combination of a good reporter and a good writer – not necessarily the same thing”.
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For a subject as sobering as war (Australia suffered 40,000 dead in WWII, compounding the loss of 60,000 in WWI), this is a serious narrative, but there is brightness in the way Hills unfolds it. Where he finds humour lurking in the shadows, he lures it into the open.
For example, with federal funding enabling him to hire the cream of available contributors, Long had engaged Hugh Groser, an army cartographer. Groser’s workload was crushing. The complete work contains thousands of his maps. Memoirist Sgt Bill Sweeting, the project’s senior research officer, described Groser as a man sometimes found asleep at his desk with pen in hand and someone prone to making minor errors owing to concentration lapses. Sweeting wrote: “None of Hugh’s mistakes … was as mortifying as one detected at a late stage in a map of the Middle East in which ‘Red Sea’ was designated ‘Red Hill’.”
Other pearls are more philosophical in nature. Going to the problematic issue of discerning truth amid the fog of war – the Ben Roberts-Smith case being the most recent case in point – Long prized the observation of Sir Ian Hamilton, the British general in charge at Gallipoli, that “on the actual day of battle, naked truths may be picked up for the asking; by the following morning they have already begun to get into their uniforms”.
an important landmark work on Gavin Merrick Long, a self-effacing national observer
The first volume of the Official History was published in 1952, the year an RAAF navigator and bomb aimer by the name of Edward Gough Whitlam entered federal parliament as the member for Werriwa. The last volume appeared in 1977, the year Whitlam exited parliament and nine years after Hills’ death (six weeks after Bean’s).
The complete work, “the largest historical project ever undertaken in Australia”, runs to seven million words. That’s a word for every man, woman and child in Australia in 1940.
And 85 years later there’s a word in it for every Australian. This is an important landmark work on Gavin Merrick Long, a self-effacing national observer who Hills rightly calls “a national treasure”.
The man who created this monument to the better angels of the Australian character should be regarded in the same light.
Great at Heart: Gavin Merrick Long, Australia’s official Second World War historian by Garry Hills, NewSouth Publishing,$39.99.