After Australia’s withdrawal from Vietnam in 1972, Australian military history seemed to cease. It appeared that Australia would never again send major forces overseas on warlike operations in support of allies. Australia’s limited and relatively few peacekeeping commitments in the 1970s and 1980s did not warrant the intensive study and recording that had followed the nation’s earlier conflicts. By the time the first edition of The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History appeared, in 1995, events had occurred that suggested that Australian military history had not completely ended. More than 600 soldiers had taken part in a peacekeeping mission in Namibia in 1989–90. In 1990, following Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, the government had deployed three naval ships to the Persian Gulf region, and a second rotation of ships had taken part in the 1991 Gulf War. Other commitments followed in northern Iraq, Western Sahara, Cambodia and Somalia, where a battalion group conducted warlike operations against bandits and local militias.

The first edition of the Companion tried to account for these developments with a substantial entry on peacekeeping, but only the Gulf War and Somalia were afforded entries of their own. So the first edition, impressive, scholarly and comprehensive, remained focused squarely on the established story of Australia and war, hinting that, if military history had not stopped, it might have at least slowed to a crawl. Nonetheless, the long articles on the traditional military campaigns at Gallipoli, the Western Front, Palestine, Libya, Greece, Tobruk, Alamein, Syria, Malaya, and New Guinea were particularly well done, with useful and balanced assessments. It would have been easy to accept the view that the 1945 New Guinea battles were unnecessary, but John Coates reminded us that when they started, ‘the end of the war was not in sight and some Allied leaders, including Churchill, believed it might continue into 1948’.

Likewise, the entries on individual personalities were full of comment and sage judgement. We were told that Robert Menzies’ ‘wartime prime ministership was more important than some historians have suggested’. The authors thought that it was ‘probably fair’ to regard Curtin ‘as the greatest of Australia’s prime ministers’, but acknowledged that, as the war continued, his mastery ‘became less sure’. We were advised that John Monash’s reputation as Australia’s greatest commander was ‘secure’, but we learned that Thomas Blamey faced far greater challenges, and it was fitting that he ‘remain the highest ranking soldier in Australia’s history’.

One of the strengths of the original Companion was the series of imaginative thematic essays on topics such as the Anzac legend, conscription, humour, literature, official histories, and repatriation. Other features were the articles on the hardware of war: ships, aircraft, tanks and guns. But perhaps the most engaging feature was the huge and disparate range of entries on unusual or lesser known characters and incidents.

Taken together, the articles did not just provide a ready guide to the many activities and personnel of two centuries of Australian military history, but made a serious assessment of what and who were important during this period. The entry on Aboriginal armed resistance to white invasion made it clear that the authors considered this to be a legitimate part of Australian military history; so the volume actually went beyond the traditional story.

he new edition has built on the strengths of the first to provide an even more complete picture of Australian military history. But whereas the first edition was published at a time when few Australian military personnel were serving overseas (the substantial peacekeeping commitments had concluded) and focused primarily on events before 1972, the new edition has needed to take new wars, conflicts and peace operations into account. In 1999, Australia led the international force that sought to secure peace in East Timor, and also led peacekeeping efforts in Solomon Islands, Bougainville, and East Timor again. Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Australia invoked the ANZUS treaty and joined what the Companion calls the ‘Global War on Terror’. This was followed by Australia’s involvement in the US-led attack on the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the continuing commitment in Iraq and the return to operations in Afghanistan.

The new Companion therefore includes competent and informative articles on East Timor, Afghanistan, and the Second Gulf War, the latter two by Albert Palazzo; but they suffer inevitably from the fact that many of the details of the operations have not yet been released, and some of them are continuing. These recent activities have also caused many other articles, such as the one on the Special Air Service, to be rewritten or extended. There is clearly an overlap between military history and current defence issues. By recognising these conflicts, the Companion takes account of the new strategic environment. But in another respect, it fails to bring out the context in which Australia’s commitments have developed. Minor military deployments, such as to the waters off Fiji following the coup in 1987, and the decision to send clearance divers to the Persian Gulf later that year (Operation Sandglass), were only ripples in the great story of Australian military history, but they set the scene for later deployments. The Sandglass decision made it easier to send ships to the Gulf in 1990; that decision made Australia’s continuing naval deployments to the Middle East after 1991 almost inevitable. That, and Australia’s involvement in the UN Special Commission on Iraq, led to the Special Forces deployment to Kuwait in 1998, which made it harder to avoid involvement in the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Peter Londey’s comprehensive article on peacekeeping covers some of these activities, but Fiji, Sandglass and Kuwait (1998) were not peacekeeping operations, and one looks in vain for mention of them in the volume. There are further inconsistencies. Australia’s involvement in Rhodesia/ Zimbabwe (1979–80) and Somalia (1992–93) are given separate entries, but there are none for Cambodia (where Australia initiated and led the peacekeeping mission) or for Namibia, Rwanda, Solomon Islands or Bougainville.

The new Companion also tries to take account of the changing understanding of, and attitudes to, war. There is a substantial and thoughtful article by John Connor on Australia’s frontier wars, and Carl Bridge has written engagingly about the developing place of Anzac Day in Australian society. Joan Beaumont’s article on war and memory highlights an area of research that has grown considerably in the past decade. These articles also remind us that, while most of the work on the Companion originated in the Australian Defence Force Academy, long the leading centre of Australian military history research, it has also called on the expertise of some of the nation’s other leading military historians.

The Companion has a changed format. The photographs and bibliographic references of the old edition have been dispensed with, while the text is clearer and cross-referenced subjects are in bold letters. A major change is the inclusion of an index, the lack of which was a major fault with the first edition. Unfortunately, with its completely random selection of subjects, the index is not particularly useful. General Gration and Admiral Barrie, both Chiefs of the Defence Force, appear in several articles, but not in the index. Similarly, the article on the strategic debate in Australia written by Coral Bell, one of Australia’s leading strategic studies scholars, mentions a string of influential academic strategists, yet more than half do not make it to the index. For that matter, there are no entries on Bougainville, Cambodia, Iraq or Namibia.

It is always great sport to try to find errors and omissions in a compendium that claims to be an authoritative reference work. This work is remarkably free of errors, but there are enough of them to entertain a pedant. Some are just irritating, such as spelling ‘Blackhawk’ helicopter as one word, even though the aircraft’s maker and the Australian Defence Department insist that it is Black Hawk. Others are more important. Conscription was introduced in 1939, not 1943 (p. 34); it is not quite true to say the 39^th Battalion under Honner fought a series of delaying battles waiting for reinforcements (p. 300); Honner’s first battle started only a few hours before the first AIF troops arrived; Joint Operations Command was formed in 2004, not 2000 (p. 327); Blamey was never Chief of the General Staff, he was Commander-in-Chief when dismissed (p. 422); Shedden did not serve overseas until the end of 1919, he was home before the end of 1917 (p. 492).

Generally, the Companion deals with the contentious issues. The entry on the Japanese threat states that, while we now know ‘that the Japanese military never planned to invade Australia ... there was no way of knowing this in 1942’. Less satisfactory is its silence on the continuing, if admittedly sterile, debate over the name of the Kokoda Trail. While there is no separate entry on the Kokoda Track or Trail, we gather from the text that the editors have decided that the term is Track. We could, at least, have been informed that many Australians still call it Trail – the name of the battle honour given to the units that fought there, and also used by the Australian War Memorial.

One is induced to make these criticisms because the scholarship of the Companion leads the reader to expect perfection. And it is indeed an outstanding piece of scholarship. It will be used as a reference source, but it can also be read for pleasure. Even more so than its predecessor, the new edition is a very significant contribution to military history in Australia, a subject which did not end thirty-five years ago but lives and grows still.