With both pen and sword: a biography of Sir Henry (Harry) Gullett (1878-1940)

The centenary commemorations of the First World War (1914-1918) have inevitably brought with them a re-evaluation of the conflict and its enduring impact. It has also stimulated further investigation into the means by which societies have come to understand the war, a process characterised by Samuel Hynes as a ‘war imagined’.1 This ‘imagining’ is not synonymous with the creation of a falsehood; it merely emphasises that a view of war is socio-culturally situated. Competing views, as Hynes observed, are merely different versions of the same reality. This biography of Sir Henry Somer Gullett (1878-1940) explores the extent to which pre-war conceptions of a powerful Australia within a powerful Empire within a powerful Anglo-Saxondom shaped both his ‘imagining’ of the war and his subsequent contribution to the creation of a national identity that ‘transmuted the unpleasant particulars of modern combat into an epic model of national achievement’.2 For in one sense, though Gullett worked as a journalist, war correspondent, military historian, and politician, the roles did not define the man. He is better understood as an immigration propagandist who had very fixed ideas on how conditions in Australian had created a self-reliant, egalitarian society connected to the Empire by bonds of blood and culture. Though his career coincided with World War One and the opening months of World War Two, these momentous events wrought little impact on Gullett’s world view, let alone acted as catalysts. They legitimised a commitment to immigration which bordered on an obsession. To understand Gullett, one must ask how his views on immigration informed his imagining of the war rather than the reverse. Biography is a methodology well able to answer that question