The Secrets of Anzac Ridge is partially based on the unpublished diary of Gunner James Armitage who enlisted in May 1917 and saw service during the great Australian offensive of July August 2018, which is often credited with breaking the German will to resist.
As such Armitage’s diary is of considerable interest and includes quite detailed descriptions of daily life in the trenches. As a gunner, Armitage had a lot to say about the positioning of guns and how to camouflage the emplacement. Enemy reconnaissance flights would pick up shoring timbers left undisguised and that would lead to counterfire or strafing attacks.
Much of this book however is comprised of contemporary news reports about the Flanders’ sector and interviews with, or diary entries by, Monash, Commander of the Australian Corps on the Western Front. The effect is rather uneven as the citations for each section are supplied in a footnote but with little other information about the source. Not all war reporting is of equal interest and there are many good books on Monash who it has to be said knew how to run an agenda – so care is needed when interpreting his utterances.
That said, Armitage’s diary is of real interest and is deserving of a wider readership.
Reviewed by Grant Hansen
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patricia Skehan is a founding executive member of Concord Heritage, now City of Canada Bay Heritage Society ion Sydney. Patricia conducts tours at Yaralla and Rivendell estates in Concord West. Since 1999, Patricia has travelled across NSW to give over 1000 heritage talks on 16 different subjects. She travelled to Britain in 2001 and 2005, researching the Thomas Walker family’s royal connections at the University of Cambridge.
In 2013, Ethel Turner’s granddaughter asked Patricia to transcribe letters from Jean Curlewis to her famous mother, written while a volunteer nursing aide during the 1919 Spanish Flu epidemic. Sourcing rare archives from Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, the Red Cross, Sydney University, Trove newspaper collections and museum sources, she found clues about Anzac secrets when given the seemingly unrelated diary of a young WWI soldier.
Patricia was guest speaker at the Cenotaph in Sydney on Armistice Day 2020; her talk on the impact of the Spanish flu epidemic was televised nationally.
Born on Armistice Day, 1946, Patricia is married to a retired police sergeant. They live on the Central Coast.
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