On writing about Australian military history after the Second World War: the need for integration

So much writing of Australian military history has been about what happened-and to whom. All too often the exercise has been to respond to a public need to celebrate, commemorate or at least remember key episodes of past conflict. Not surprisingly, given the numbers involved, military conflict has been seen from the perspective of the Army. Even though the Second World War was marked by the dominance of air power and science, the historiography is dominated by the great land conflicts in the Western Desert and South West Pacific. Despite the use of nuclear weapons in 1945, military conflict since the war has also been seen almost totally as conventional land conflict, except that the wars were limited to counter-insurgency operations. The other dominant theme in Australian writing has been the role of Allies. Whether there has been some sort of expeditionary force impulse or whether Canberra genuinely believed that joining with Great and Powerful Friends served Australian needs, there has been virtually no recognition that Australia had quite distinctive views of conflict, even if there were few opportunities to see these views actually carried to the point of operations