Australian History

Retrieving Passchendaele

The long neglect of the Flanders battles

by Robin Prior •

July 2021, no. 433

The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory: Passchendaele and the Anzac Legend by Matthew Haultain-Gall

Monash University Press, $34.95 pb, 324 pp

Australian History

Retrieving Passchendaele

The long neglect of the Flanders battles

by Robin Prior •

July 2021, no. 433

This book is about the battles in which the First Australian Imperial Force took part between June and November 1917. It is not, however, a battle history. Rather, it takes the interesting approach of investigating how Australians remember these battles. Spoiler alert: they don’t.

This is a significant finding. The author contends that while we (endlessly) remember Gallipoli, Pozières, and the final battles in 1918, we are uncomfortable about including in our collective memory the battles of 1917 (Messines and the battles of what is popularly known as the Passchendaele campaign). In The Battlefield of Imperishable Memory, Matthew Haultain-Gall demonstrates why this forgetting took place and makes a strong argument that it set in very early.

Robin Prior

Robin Prior was born in rural South Australia. He studied at the University of Adelaide, completing a doctorate in 1979. He was an ARC Fellow at Adelaide for three years before taking a position with the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy. He was Head of the School of History from 1998 to 2004 and Foundation Head of the School of Humanities and Social Science from 2004 to 2007. He is now Visiting Professorial Fellow at the University of Adelaide. He has published widely on World War I: Command on the Western Front, Passchendaele: The Untold Story (1996) and The Somme (2005) with Trevor Wilson, and Churchill’s ‘World Crisis’ As History (1983) and Gallipoli (2009), as sole author. He is an editor of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History (1995). He is working on a book on Britain in 1940.