Ross McMullin

The wartime letters and diaries of Pompey Elliott, Australia's most famous fighting general, are exceptionally forthright. They are also remarkably illuminating about his volatile emotions. Pompey not only wrote frankly about what happened to him and the men he was commanding; he was also frank about what he felt about both. Having arranged a no-secrets pact with his wife for...

One of the last undiscovered personal accounts of an Australian soldier fighting to survive WWI. Philip Owen Ayton was working on the Sydney tramways when the call to join the fight against Germany came. Keen for action, he found himself in the First Field Company Engineers in the First Division of the Australian Imperial Forces. Shipped to Egypt, Ayton soon...

WINNER OF THE 2024 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE FOR NONFICTION Acclaimed historian and biographer Ross McMullin has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in this sequel to Farewell, Dear People, the winner of multiple awards, including the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History. Life So Full of Promise, his second multi-biography about Australia's lost generation of World...

For Australia, a new nation with a relatively small population, the death of 60,000 soldiers during World War I was catastrophic. It is hardly surprising, then, that Australians evaluating the consequences of the conflict have tended to focus primarily on the numbing numbers of losses—on the sheer quantity of all those countrymen who did not return. That there must have...

Will Dyson (1880-1938) was a brilliant and versatile artist, and much more besides. His prodigious talents struggled to find a niche in Australia, but he burst into prominence with cartoons of extraordinary vigour and resource on the London Daily Herald. These whole-page cartoons with wordy, witty captions were revered by workers and intellectuals alike. Dyson was also a talented writer,...

Ross McMullin's masterly work retrieves a significant Australian from undeserved obscurity. It also judiciously reassesses notable battles he influenced—including the Gallipoli Landing, Lone Pine, Fromelles, Polygon Wood, and Villers-Brettoneux—and illuminates numerous aspects of Australia's experiences during his lifetime, particularly the often-overlooked period of the aftermath to the Great War. Pompey Elliott was a remarkable Australian. During the Great War he...

A revised and updated edition of award-winning historian Ross McMullin's acclaimed history of the Australian Labor Party - an entertaining, action-packed, warts-and-all narrative full of illuminating pen-portraits and vivid anecdotes. The story is told through the people who made it. All Labor's prime ministers feature - Watson, Fisher, Hughes, Scullin, Curtin, Chifley, Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Rudd, Gillard, and Albanese. The...