The seven volumes do not – emphatically not – aspire to be a military history in the ordinary sense, covering in narrative all Australia’s battles of the last one hundred years. The essential nature of this project is a showing forth of ‘defence’ as an Australian concept: where we are located in the world; what dangers we have faced (and face); how we have risen (or not risen) to the challenges; how we have organised (or failed to) our forces; how we operated for so long under overseas tutelage (or dependency); how our armed forces have adapted (or not adapted) to the circumstances of changing Australian society and the realities of modern warfare.

Yet the three individual volumes devoted to the navy, army and air force are sufficiently studded with the deeds of their members to make the reading anything but academic, or bloodless; indeed, ‘bloodless’ would be the last word.

We read, for example, of Flight Lieutenant Bill Newton, VC, the downed pilot in New Guinea, going with unexampled bravery and dignity to his beheading by the Japanese on the beach at Salamaua. We read of Ordinary Seaman ‘Teddy’ Sheean of the corvette Armidale; wounded already, he went back to his 20-millimetre gun, strapped himself to it, and went down with his ship, still firing.

One would have welcomed even more anecdote. There is, for example, something charmingly and typically Australian about the story (had there been room for it) of Sir John Cresswell, first commander of our navy: the government’s request to this sailor to take up the appointment was delivered to him ashore, in the saddle. He was droving. It is upon such things as these that a fighting service builds its traditions – and (no matter how well-trained and how well-armed) a force without its own pride and ethos amounts to little.

That appreciation (second nature to any serving warrior) seems ungraspable by Australian politicians. A happy exception was Sir George Pearce, acknowledged by Robert Menzies as the wisest cabinet minister he had ever known. This quiet and competent carpenter entered our first parliament as a senator in 1901, and was Minister for Defence for many years, including the whole of World War I. Pearce had long foreseen the coming of that conflict, and even while it was raging, he foretold that Japan, then our ally, would turn and try to conquer us in World War II.

Such studious prescience is a rarity among Australian politicians, who give defence small study, spend on it as little money as they dare, and ‘snow’ the public with specious reassurances. Most Australian ministers for defence fall well and truly under the epitaph Kipling wrote for ‘A Dead States-man’ in 1918: ‘I could not dig: I dared not rob: / Therefore I lied to please the mob. / Now all my lies are proved untrue / And I must face the men I slew. / What tale shall serve me here among / Mine angry and defrauded young?’ And so, at Rabaul in 1942, we had RAAF pilots sent aloft in obsolete ‘Wirraway’ training aircrafts to fight the then-incomparable Japanese ‘Zero’ fighters; and so we had hard-pressed infantrymen on the Kokoda Track taking delivery of their first modern Bren light machine gun. They unpacked it from its factory grease, and went into action, still working out how to fire it.

This slaughter of our servicemen in the field begins at the top – with governments and the senior defence organisation, both uniformed and civilian. In defence, as one of our present authors puts it: ‘Ill feeling, and failure to coordinate aims and policies – indeed, having different aims and policies – have been the norm [my italics].’

Yet, as General Baker once pointed out, all Australia’s military forces would fit comfortably into the Melbourne Cricket Ground. That was in 1997, and since then they have shrunk. A senior service officer told me the other day that, in his view, we have a reform-fatigued, punch-drunk, bureaucrat-ridden defence force. Perhaps he was just having a bad day, and certainly we do some things right. It seems, for example, likely that Australia’s much-maligned submarines will turn out to be a formidable addition to strategic naval resources in our region. In East Timor, we turned in a highly creditable professional performance of which we may be proud. But we should also be grateful that the pressure lasted no longer than it did; that relations with Indonesia did not become ultimately ugly; that no other incident arose that may have required our simultaneous attention elsewhere.

Any student of Australian defence faces a bewildering array of questions, but one would at least assume that all of them would arise from a common acceptance of our strategic location — an essentially maritime milieu. We have one of the longest coastlines and one of the largest ocean areas of vital concern of any county on the globe. We are a ‘trading nation’ every bit as much as Britain was in the nineteenth century. Our defence thinking seems never to have produced a mature and coherent body of doctrine. We seem to stagger from one trendy slogan to another, and even those are not well under-stood during their currency. I seem to remember ‘fortress Australia’, ‘layered defence’, ‘forward defence’, ‘regional co-operation’, ‘defence in depth’ and ‘reliance on great and powerful friends’. And so on. One thing remained steady: any of those phrases in the mouth of a politician usually turned out to be a shibboleth of which the real meaning was: ‘We won’t be spending any more money.’ Against such a bumpy background, momentous decisions were made: was air power (i.e. the RAAF) or naval power (i.e. the RAN) the way to command our vast surroundings and approaches? Does the Australian army really need a tank force? Should we manufacture our own equipment and ammunitions, or rely on imports in time of war?

Many of our senior servicemen were of high intellectual calibre – Brudenell White, Wynter, Sturdee – but we still await our own equivalents of the US Navy’s Admiral Mahan on sea power, or Britain’s General ‘Boney’ Fuller, apostle of armour – let alone our own Clausewitz. Fresh lines of Australian studies now developing have yet to deliver that deeper layer of intellectual understanding, and spread it among the electors.

The seven authors of these volumes, and the two general editors, have done their work with an engaging fairness and even tone. They do not hesitate to criticise, and are not niggardly with praise when it is deserved. With exemplary clarity, they lead us through the century that saw both the adoption and the retirement of the short Lee-Enfield .303 rifle; the end of the heliograph and the arrival of electronic communications in the field; the replacement of horse-drawn transport by the truck and the track; the disappearance of the hand-held prismatic compass and the ordnance map by satellite equipment that tells the soldier instantly where he is on the earth’s surface, accurately to a matter of inches. They have done a noble job as a labour of love – none of them drew a salary.

No old soldier lacks his grouch, and mine is that the magnificent Atlas seems neither to mark nor to mention the Bulldog Track, surely one of the most extraordinary lines of communication of the Pacific War. For months in 1942, the only offensive land operations against the Japanese in the vast south-west Pacific area were fought by Australian commandos, as they raided the enemy strongholds of Lae and Salamaua. These troops were based at Wau, the goldmining town in the mountains. As we then had no transport aircraft, all supplies for Wau had to be shipped from Port Moresby in tiny coastal vessels to the beach at the head of the Gulf of Papua. Transferred to whaleboats, the cargo was taken north-ward up the Lakekamu River to Terapo, loaded on to canoes, and taken a further two days upstream to the old mining camp at Bulldog. From here, native carriers shouldered each fifty-pound load for the seven-day walk over the Owen Stanley Mountains, higher and steeper here than at Kokoda. Thus sustained, Wau remained, by the narrowest military margin, in our hands throughout the whole Pacific War; our reconquest of the northern side of the New Guinea was greatly assisted thereby. Not just for those very few Australians who are today survivors of that epic journey, but for the many descendants of the PNG carriers and constabulary who were the real soul and substance of the Bulldog Track, recognition would have been appreciated.

Oxford University Press has done the project honour. Each volume conforms to a bold overall series of design whose editorial conventions and apparatus are reader-friendly. The binding is stout and taut, yet the volumes lie open for reading. The use of a semi-glossy art paper throughout enables the many photographs and illustrations to be printed alongside the relevant text. Less happily, a side-effect is the reflection back at the reader of more shine or dazzle than a tired eye welcomes at the end of a day. The RAN volume boasts the additional charm of fold-out ‘exploded’ diagrams of some of the navy’s new ships – an exciting illumination for mere landlubbers. Trust the navy to go one better.

In short, a scholarly and publishing triumph. And it reaches the Australian public at a time in our history when even blind Freddy – maybe even politicians – can see that defence is something we can neglect no longer. Any senior school whose library lacks its set of The Australian Centenary History of Defence has ceased to be an educational institution.