It is one of life’s ironies that war can bring out the best in people, and writers are no exception. Picture Australian seaman Ray Parkin as he toiled like a slave for the Japanese on the Thai–Burma railway during World War II. Despite the brutality and privations, Parkin felt that the experience would ‘not be entirely wasted’ if he could somehow get his diary and drawings home when it was all over. These were crucial, for, as he wrote, ‘Memory is not enough’. Parkin’s reflections go to the kernel of oral versus written memory, and why humans write in the first place: to make a record that can speak by itself, even when the writer is dead. His words could also serve as an appropriate epigraph to Eyewitness, a collection of diaries, memoirs, correspondents’ reports and analysis, all composed by Australians at ‘the front-line’ of wars and conflicts.
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