Great at Heart

Gavin Merrick Long, Australia’s official Second World War historian

By Garry Hills

Published by NewSouth
RRP $39.99 in paperback | ISBN 9781761170201

Garry Hills, a man with a passion for the preservation of history, was struck by Professor Peter Stanley’s remark at a UNSW Canberra forum that ‘Gavin Long awaits his biographer’.

Why is it, Hills wondered, that his celebrated predecessor in official war histories of Australia, Charles Bean, was so well known compared when Long, the editor and principal author of the official history of the Second World War, remained largely unknown beyond military history circles.

Hills was immediately determined to rectify the oversight.

Hills explores Long’s career as a newspaper correspondent during the 1920s and as a defence correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald until the outbreak of war in 1939. With the outbreak of war, Long became war correspondent attached to the British Expeditionary Force in Europe until the evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940 and then with the 2nd AIF in North Africa, the Middle East and Greece.

It was 1941 when Charles Bean began advocating for an official history of the war then in progress. His was the most influential voice in having Long appointed General Editor.

Over a twenty year period between 1943 and 1963, Long oversaw the development of what became a 22 volume history, writing three of them himself, thus becoming one of Australia’s most eminent historians and perhaps the least remembered.

There were of course criticisms of his work, as there had been with Bean’s, including that he fell prey to the so-called ‘Anzac myth’. But for all that, Hills has presented a picture of a man dedicated to his task who left ‘a priceless gift to the nation’.

He did not outlive the end of the project by very much, dying in 1968, just as he was finishing work on the condensed single volume publication, ‘The Six Years War: Australia in the 1939-45 War’ (still available in second hand bookstores).

LISTEN:

Author Garry Hills joined Philip Clark on Nightlife to discuss the book. Click below for the audio link:

Interview on Nightlife in ABC Radio