The ridge at the end of the world: Flanders, 1917, as an Australian disaster (ISR Lunchtime Seminar Series)

The Australian memory of the First World War is dominated by Gallipoli. By comparison, the two great military disasters of the 1917 Flanders campaign, and the three even bloodier "victories" in between, are familiar only to military history buffs - and even they don't really understand their significance. In the book I am writing about disasters in Australian history, I will explore the 1917 Flanders offensive, the peculiar combination of memory and denial which surround it, and the effects of these on Australian society. This seminar presented as part of the Institute for Social Research lunchtime seminar series for 2009