Joan Beaumont

Highly Commended in the 2022 NSW Premier's History Awards Some generations are born unlucky. Australians who survived the horrors of the Great War and the Spanish flu epidemic that followed were soon faced with the shock of the Great Depression. Today we remember long dole queues, shanty towns, and destitute men roaming the country in search of work. With over...

The Great War is, for many Australians, the event that defined our nation. The larrikin diggers, trench warfare, and the landing at Gallipoli have become the stuff of the Anzac 'legend'. But it was also a war fought by the families at home. Their resilience in the face of hardship, their stoic acceptance of enormous casualty lists, and their belief...

The members of the Australian battalion of Gull Force endured some of the harshest prisoner-of-war conditions of any Australian during the Second World War. In February 1942, on the remote island of Ambon in Indonesia, 1131 Australian soldiers were preparing for invasion by Japanese forces. Outnumbered and ill-equipped, theirs was an impossible mission. After their defeat, over 200 Australians were...