Life So Full of Promise

Further biographies of Australia’s lost generation
by Ross McMullin

Published by Scribe
RRP $49.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781922585820

UPDATE 13/7/24:
WINNER OF THE 2024 AGE BOOK OF THE YEAR PRIZE FOR NONFICTION
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War inevitably devours the youth of a nation.

In Life So Full of Promise, Ross McMullin has written a sequel to the award-winning Farewell, Dear People (2012) in which he wrote ten extended biographies of young men who exemplified Australia’s gifted lost generation of World War I.

With this latest book he returns with a further three biographies of gifted individuals – Brian Pockley, Norman Callaway and Murdoch Mackay – whose lives, so full of promise, were cut short by war.

Within the grim statistics of war, there are many tragic stories of loss.

For families, the loss of a loved one is catastrophic. For a nation, the loss too is catastrophic as the cream of a generation never lives long enough to fulfil its potential.

The biographies go far beyond the simple recounting of young men’s lives cut short.

We get a chance to contrast Dr Brian Pockley’s affluent family with that of Norman Callaway, whose cricketing exploits at a young age had excited the pundits. But all that potential was lost at Bullecourt, his head sliced away, killed instantly, having been asked only moments before by his companion how he was going.

Murdoch Mackay completes the trilogy of biographies. He signed the roll of Victorian barristers on 1 August 1912. He married he long term girlfriend only days before enlisting in 1915, shortly after the Gallipoli landing. Sadly by the next year, he lay dead, aged 25, at Pozieres, bravely leading his men against the entrenched Germans.

McMullin’s research is impressive, his storytelling compelling.

More than a hundred years on from these events, the grief of loss and the futility of war remain the salutary lessons.