Media Release

October 30 2009

Narratives of War Symposium brings war history to life

War history will be brought to life at Magill next month History will be brought to life at UniSA’s Magill campus on November 19-20 with a unique community event, the Narratives of War Symposium.

The event brings together historians, literary scholars and the general public to celebrate, remember and learn from the past, while some of Australia’s leading researchers will present a series of lectures on this year’s theme ‘Memories, tracing, narratives’.

Dr Richard Reid, from the National Museum of Australia, will present the keynote address on ‘Hard to trace, even with maps: a journey across Australian battlefields and historic sites on the old Western Front’.

Other top scholars will talk about tracing the battlefields of Normandy, Prisoner of War experiences in Colditz and Italy, South Australian soldiers training in World War I, and music and literature that commemorate or portray conflict and its aftermath.

The event’s creator and organiser UniSA’s Professor Claire Woods says the symposium offers participants an opportunity to “engage with how we record and remember the experiences of people just like us who have been caught in dramatic events not of their own making”.

Prof Woods said UniSA was delighted to have secured Dr Reid for the keynote address, along with guest speakers Ross Eastgate OAM and Dr Paul Collier, deputy chair of Arts Access SA, who will discuss his recent book on the campaign in North Africa during World War II.

UniSA creative writing lecturer Dr Nigel Starck will present on the topic ‘Putting away childish things: the realities of conflict’.

“Youthful readers in the 1950s were assailed by military memoirs of the escapist kind, literally,” he said.

“The charge was led by prisoner-of-war escape stories of extraordinary valour and inventiveness. The voice of these memoirs was often that of the irrepressible, if nominally grown-up, school boy (the captive serviceman) who simply will not capitulate to the dictates of the schoolmaster (the commandant). The genre developed apace to embrace Changi and the Burma Railway, the concentration camps of Europe, and eventually the Cold War too. The mood became darker, but the fascination – for an impressionable and impassioned readership – was sustained.”

Dr Starck will consider how the now-mature reader reacts when encountering Colditz and Dachau and the Berlin Wall in iron and stone rather than on the page. His presentation will investigate the journey from “juvenile imagination to adult incarnation”. Dr Starck is a former journalist and television producer whose current project in the field of military history is a biography of the Australian prison-of-war author Russell Braddon, whose memoir The Naked Island has achieved sales of two million and, 57 years after publication, remains in print.

Others presenting from UniSA will be Prof Claire Woods on ‘Biography of the Dinkums: men of Mitcham camp’, lecturer Sharon Mascall-Dare on ‘An Australian story’, Associate Prof Peter Bishop on ‘Playing in the wreckage: a family visit to Normandy and the site of D-Day’, and Prof Kerry Green on ‘War comes to the Tableland: how the Yanks changed Australia’s far north’.

The symposium will include also the launch of the book, Remnants – Retracing Conflict and Commemoration, edited by Dr Paul Skrebels from UniSA, on 19 November. The launch will be attended by representatives from the Defence Reserve Support Council, which is sponsoring the symposium.

Entry to the two-day symposium is free. The keynote address will be held from 3.30pm on 19 November in the Amy Wheaton Building, H1-44 lecture theatre, Magill Campus, with refreshments provided.