Good Campers: The History of Australian War Reporting

Abstract

When the Chief of British Intelligence told Australia’s First Official War Correspondent, C.E.W Bean in October 1914 that war reporters were a ‘dying profession’, Bean recorded in his diary that on the contrary, he thought it was the beginning of a new era. Bean proved prescient. Since 1863 Australia has had over 750 journalists, photographers and cinematographers covering international conflicts. Despite this tradition, the history of Australian conflict reporting has been neglected by historians. This article will provide an overview of the Australian historiography and the corresponding scholarship in the US and UK. It will also consider seminal issues such as censorship, the mythology and self‐mythology surrounding war reporting, media power and the Anzac legend.

Media rhetoric of post-heroic leadership: Julia Gillard, Barack Obama and Press Gallery journalists, 2010–2013©

“…A Gallery analyst portrayed her as a symbolic matriarchal figure by referring to her advisor’s observation: ‘The Prime Minister put a metaphoric arm around us … She has great empathy and knew exactly the right thing to say to provide comfort and to steel us for the challenge ahead’ (Dusevic, 2011). A journalist of The Sunday Mail contributed to the portrayal of a reassuring leader who was ‘humble, proud, resolute and heartfelt’ (Anderson, 2010: 31). Other journalists constructed a narrative of Gillard as a change agent.…”

“…Australia’s parliamentary Press Gallery is a central agency in shaping debates on the value of sacrifice in a conflict (Anderson, 2010; Ericson et al, 1987). This role has become more apparent in the reporting of the war in Afghanistan, the nation’s longest military conflict to date.…”

Social memory and battle names: Exploring links between travel, memory and the media

“…The notion was first attributed to the official historian Charles Bean who wrote that ‘In no unreal sense it was on the 25th of April, 1915, that the consciousness of Australian nationhood was born’ (Bean, 1941a: 910). As Anderson (2010) argues, the press has put up little resistance to these notions over the past century. Clearly, the high public profile of Gallipoli has been sustained for a century, even though as Inglis (2005) notes, the battles were by no means the most deadly of those fought by Australians, with three of every four men having been killed on the European Western Front.…”

“…Charles Bean, the official Australian war historian, who published many letters and articles in addition to his later histories, is accredited with creating the myth of Anzac which strongly influenced the way in which Australians regarded the war. This image largely remains unchallenged by the press (Anderson, 2010), and according to Stauber (2013), little has changed since 1914–1918 with respect to rules governing how the public obtains images of war from the mass media.…”