Book review: Bearing Witness, by Peter Rees

Peter Rees offers us another biography of C.E.W. Bean to add to those by Dudley McCarthy (1983) and Ross Coulthart (2014). McCarthy dealt only with Bean's experience of World War I itself and, although he made extensive use of Bean's papers, he deliberately avoided any assessment of his importance or influence. When asked whether he was writing a "warts and all" biography, he replied in the negative, on the grounds that Bean "had no warts". My review of Coulthart's effort has already appeared in these pages.

Rees has also used Bean's papers extensively, reflected in the frequent quotation from them. He provides a full biography, in the sense that he treats the whole life and discusses Bean's development pre-war and his work as historian, journalist and public figure in the decades after, albeit unevenly. The weight of the book, nonetheless, is most heavily on the war years again.

Bean's significance lies not in what he did and saw during the war, but in what he made of it in the decades afterwards as he fashioned a particular view of Australia and the war experience that was, and remains, hugely influential. The balance here is wrong, compounded by the fact that the author, a journalist, is generally happy to narrate events and, when he does offer judgments, tends to follow established lines or to take Bean's views as gospel.

Thus he revisits the "Murdoch letter" and accepts at face value Bean's assertion that it was "the main agent in bringing about Hamilton's fall". In fact, Hamilton would have been relieved of command at Gallipoli in the same manner and for the same reasons whether Murdoch had circulated his letter or not, and the authorities in London did not need the views of an obscure Australian journalist to inform their deliberations. Hamilton's fate was sealed before Murdoch had even arrived on the peninsula and the key figure informing that decision was a British staff officer, Guy Dawnay, not Murdoch.

There is much more along these lines. Rees' bibliography is generally confined to Australian writers, which merely reinforces his adoption of Bean's views without appreciating that there were other ways of seeing the issues which were, at the least, equally legitimate. His brief discussion of the push for an Australian Army shows no awareness of the organisational and manpower issues and implications, and his increasingly unsympathetic treatment of British officials and the British Army more generally is dated and simplistic.

In similar vein, his portrayal of the writing of the official history is strong on narrative detail and colour, and weak on analysis. The discussion of the disagreements between Bean and his British counterpart, Edmonds, is given from behind Bean's desk and there is no indication that he has read the voluminous files generated by the British official history to test its validity. Various criticisms of the British series can be made, and have been, but Rees seems unaware of relevant work by Alistair Thomson at Monash University or the important book on Edmonds' history by Andrew Green.

Bearing Witness could be said to embody its title. It offers us a full account of Bean's life and experiences heavily weighted to the four years of his war service. We are unlikely to get a better account of what Bean did, said and thought and, indeed, we probably do not need one.

What none of his major chroniclers have been able to do is grapple with his influence and why he and his history mattered. After all, the other official histories produced in the British Empire are now known only to a research audience and their authors are similarly obscure. As with much other and recent writing on Australian war history, the big questions are the hard ones, but they are also the ones that matter most. Is it too much to hope as the centenary proceeds that we might engage more often and more directly with them?

Jeffrey Grey's most recent book is The War with the Ottoman Empire (OUP, 2015).