Grant’s rich life is worthy of biography, but the challenge confronting historians are the many gaps and inconsistencies in his story. John Ramsland deploys speculative biography to reconstruct a life narrative in The Legacy of Douglas Grant. Drawing on available sources and the wider historical context, Ramsland imagines Grant’s emotions, personal interactions, and vignettes from his life.

Grant was born sometime around 1885 in north Queensland. As an infant he survived a massacre perpetrated by Queensland’s Native Police. The most common narrative says that his adopted father, Robert Grant, stopped a Native Policeman from smashing the baby against a rock. Ramsland notes that this was likely a fabrication from Douglas himself; indeed, Grant’s rescue was even contested in his lifetime. Ramsland thus imagines Robert finding Douglas suckling his dead mother’s breast. Robert and his wife then smuggled the baby to Sydney, where they raised him as their son.

Grant had a typical middle-class education and trained as a draftsman. He enlisted in World War I in 1916 and was captured in the Battle of Bullecourt. Grant survived as a prisoner of war in Germany and showed leadership by advocating for other non-European prisoners or war at the prison camp. He was also the subject of scientific study among German anthropologists. Famously, the sculptor Rudolf Marcuse made a bronze bust of him, which was only tracked down in 2019.

After the war, Grant worked in a small arms factory near his family home in Lithgow. He was a celebrity, often described as the only Aboriginal soldier of full descent, and became active in the Lithgow Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (present-day RSL). In the early 1930s, Grant spoke out on behalf of Aboriginal people. As the years passed, the intersecting traumas of war, racism, and the Great Depression sent him into a spiral of alcoholism, unemployment, and hospitalisation.

Perhaps the most original aspect of Ramsland’s book is his reimagining of Grant’s later life, particularly the mysterious death of Grant’s adopted brother and how this compounded his loneliness. Grant spent the final two years of his life in a War Veterans’ Home at La Perouse; he died in 1951.

Speculative biography is an innovative approach. Ramsland brings Grant to life by imagining encounters in France, Scotland, and across Australia, based in part on newspaper and other reports on his life. At times, it is hard to separate fact from fiction. Ramsland explains in the coda that some characters’ names have been  changed but that they are all based on real people. Ramsland acknowledges that there was much mythology and hyperbole around Grant’s life. It would have been good to see this addressed in the text.

A surprising omission from the book is the wider context around Aboriginal military service in World War I. Regulations adopted early in the war prohibited enlistment of persons ‘not substantially of European origin or descent’. Newspaper accounts point out that such regulations and broader restrictions on Aboriginal rights nearly precluded Grant from enlisting. Ramsland overlooks this context and omits the story of Grant’s being forced off a ship.

The material on Grant’s advocacy in the 1920s and 1930s would have benefited from more historical context around what was happening in Aboriginal affairs. Humanitarians and anthropologists were concerned about frontier violence in northern Australia. They advocated for segregated reserves in places like Arnhem Land to protect Aboriginal lives and culture. It was this context that prompted Douglas Grant’s public support for reserves.

Ramsland notes Grant’s role as secretary of the Lithgow RSL and his unsuccessful offer to oversee the design and construction of housing for Aboriginal residents at La Perouse. Yet there is no mention of how Grant specifically invoked military service to combat the daily segregation and discrimination facing Indigenous Australians. For instance, in 1929 Grant protested the segregation of public facilities and sport by writing, ‘The colour line was never drawn in the trenches’ (Hobart Mercury, 24 June 1929).

Historians, myself included, have written articles about Douglas Grant, whose life was the inspiration for the character Nigel in Tom Wright’s 2014 play Black Diggers, but Ramsland’s is the first book-length biography. There are no references in the book, but the bibliography gives the reader an indication as to what sources Ramsland used to reconstruct Grant’s life. The appendices – reprints of numerous newspaper articles and a 1957 ABC radio broadcast about Grant – are particularly valuable. Having these documents assists the reader to understand what we know about Grant, where the hyperbole lies, and where Ramsland had to imagine the gaps.

Douglas Grant’s life is certainly worthy of study and popular dissemination. Notwithstanding some historical gaps and outdated terminology (the book uses ‘Aborigines’ instead of ‘Aboriginal people’), Ramsland’s book is an opportunity for readers to explore wider questions about Aboriginal history, World War I, and the broken promises of assimilation.