The first work devoted entirely to Australian war reporters, Witnesses to War encompasses every war that they have covered since 1863, when Howard Willoughby reported on the Maori Wars. The authors, with dedication and discipline, create a work that is coherent as well as lively, though such a large framework has produced a slightly unwieldy fabric, with a few inevitable inaccuracies.

Like The First Casualty, the new book underlines the ongoing struggle of war correspondents with censors. In so doing, it paints some warts-and-all portraits, pulling no punches concerning their failings or the censorship issue. An undercurrent of racism in their behavior, for example, reminds us that correspondents can be representative of the wider Australian community.

Some of the portraits stand out above others, such as those of photographer Frank Hurley, who, like Charles Bean, covered both world wars. Other veterans on this honour roll are A.B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, ‘Chinese’ Morrison, Keith Murdoch, Damien Parer, the poet Kenneth Slessor, Chester Wilmot, Wilfred Burchett, Lorraine Stumm, Kate Webb, Osmar White, Richard Hughes, Neil Davis, George Johnston, and the much-admired Alan Moorehead. The new generation of Australian war correspondents is also included, but more time is needed to assess their contribution.

Hurley, born in Glebe in 1885, was official photographer on two Antarctic expeditions – with Douglas Mawson in 1911 and Ernest Shackleton in 1914 – before joining the AIF in 1917. He was a larger-than-life character who expressed his disgust with war in his diaries, as in his photographs. During World War I, Bean clashed with Hurley over the ethics of his photographic practices. Bean had won the post of official war historian by ballot in September 1914, narrowly beating Keith Murdoch, founder of the media dynasty. Bean saw his mission at the front as being to provide an historical register of the war in images and words. A gentle, slight, bespectacled man educated at Oxford, he had begun his career with the Sydney Morning Herald six years earlier. In 1917 Bean was joined at Ypres by Hurley, as official war photographer. Their differences concerned the latter’s unorthodox methods:

Enormously creative, Hurley produced composite photographs, combining negatives in order to convey the multiplicity of action. Bean, who believed the official record should be scrupulously genuine, regarded Hurley’s efforts as falsifying it.

Hurley was in reality employing methods that are commonplace today, when photographs are routinely cropped, retouched, and dramatised.

During World War II, Parer also tackled Hurley, now head of the AIF photographic unit in the Middle East. Parer had sought the post, and disliked Hurley. He complained the composites were phoney, boasting: ‘I stage nothing.’ This proved to be false, however, because Parer staged material in Portuguese Timor when filming the Australian guerrilla campaign a year later. According to his biographer, Neil McDonald, Parer, having missed a clash between pro-Allied Timorese (described as ‘boongs’), who had driven off pro-Japanese locals, persuaded the former to repeat actions from the clash, which he presented as an authentic battle.

The authors honour Bean with a well-rounded portrait. They puncture the myth and demonstrate what an admirable character Bean was. They credit his key role in creating the Anzac legend through his Gallipoli reporting, but take issue with John Howard’s adulation of the myth. Bean was, they point out, not always an effective journalist. One Australian commander described his ‘inability to rise to the occasion’, adding: ‘His pen was cold.’ Bean shared racial prejudices common among Australian soldiers. Writing in his diary of perceived shortcomings of General John Monash, newly appointed Australian Corps commander, he added: ‘Besides, we do not want Australia represented by men mainly because of their ability, natural and inborn in Jews, to push themselves.’

Despite these flaws, Bean was dedicated to documenting the war faithfully, and his peers respected his approach. Murdoch wrote: ‘No accounts of actions could be more accurate than his – no descriptions of the men’s suffering and gallantry could be more sympathetic. He is always in the place where he can see and help most, however dangerous it may be.’ Privately, Bean anguished over the carnage. He wrote of ‘gallantry’, but voluntarily suppressed the suffering of the Anzacs, partly to save their families. One diary entry reads: ‘There is horror and beastliness and treachery, on which the writer, anxious to please the public, has to throw his cloak.’ Australian authorities emerge from this history as the worst of the censors encountered by the correspondents. Military bureaucrats created a file on Kenneth Slessor after he described Australian POWs in Germany as ‘hungry and in rags’; they accused him of giving an ‘unexaggeratedly untrue picture’.

Embedding is not a new concept: during both world wars journalists were embedded with the armies on the fronts they were covering; they wore uniforms and bore the rank of captain. All stories were submitted to commanders. In some cases, Australian journalists had to go through Australian and British censors before their stories reached home, where Commonwealth authorities could censor them again. Their newsworthiness was often reduced by publication long after events. Bean’s first report of the Gallipoli landing was only published on 14 May 1915. Correspondents who worked on fronts under American commanders found their censorship rules liberal and enlightened by comparison.

In discussing the Pacific war, the authors’ first reference to Timor is as belonging to the ‘islands of the Netherlands East Indies’, failing to distinguish between the western, Dutch-held side of the island and Portuguese Timor. This is relevant because the pre-emptive Australian force that landed in the west in December 1941 was effectively wiped out in the Japanese attack two months later, whereas those that landed on the Portuguese side survived a similar attack and fought on until 1943. When Parer arrived in 1942, the only war in progress on the island was thus in Portuguese Timor.

The authors also repeat the common error of referring to the ‘Geneva Convention’ rather than the ‘Geneva Conventions’, of which there are four (adopted in 1949, with updating protocols added until 2005). Similarly the book describes Wilfred Burchett’s dramatic scoop from Hiroshima soon after the bomb was dropped, but does not mention his presence in Korea, apparently ducking the controversy it entailed.

These are quibbles, however, about a landmark work that exposes a foolish brand of military censorship, which rarely served those it claimed to protect.