Red Coat Dreaming

Description

In Red Coat Dreaming art, artefacts and life stories combine to evoke a period when the British Army was also Australia's army. From the first British settlement to the First World War, some Australians were indifferent to and even disdainful of the military force that fomented the Rum Rebellion and shot down gold miners at Eureka. Yet many were proud of the British Army's achievements on battlefields far from Australia. Hundreds of Australians enlisted in the army or married its officers and rankers; thousands had served in it before settling in Australia, and hundreds of thousands barracked when the army went to war. Red Coat Dreaming challenges our understanding of Australia's military history and the primacy of the Anzac legend. It shows how few Australians were immune to the allure and historic associations of the red coat, the British Army's sartorial signature, and leaves readers thinking differently about Australia's identity and experience of war.

Craig Wilcox is a historian who lives and writes in Sydney, Australia's oldest city. He studied under Beverley Kingston and K. S. Inglis, has had fellowships at the National Museum of Australia and the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London, and has worked at the Australian War Memorial. His books include Australia's Boer War (2002) and his professional interests lie in the intersection of war, art and literature, and in good writing.

'This is an impressive book that reclaims the lost inner life of at least some colonial Australians.' History Today 'British Army is a fun, very short book, not so much intended to leave a mark on the research or analysis of Australia's military history, but to promote an idea, a particular vision of the legacy of British imperial history on Australia, and, perhaps, to give historians ideas for future research topics.' Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research