Anthony Hill

In recent historical fiction, women authors have explored the Australian past from a female viewpoint, as in Kate Grenville’s A Room Made of Leaves (2020), focusing on Elizabeth Macarthur, and Anita Heiss’s Bila Yarrudhanggalangdhuray, River of Dreams (2022), about Wagadhaany, an Indigenous woman from the Murrumbidgee River. As if in response to such potent novels, now comes a trio expressing historical masculinity.

Anthony Hill begins his biography of Jim Martin by describing Martin’s death. Beginning the story of a person’s life by going straight to the end is unusual but wholly appropriate in this case because Jim Martin’s fame lies solely in the fact that his death at the age of fourteen, at Gallipoli, makes him the youngest known Australian soldier ever to die in a war.