Interview with Bill Gammage, 28 October 2013

Abstract

Bill Gammage is a historian and Adjunct Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He taught history at the University of Papua New Guinea, the University of Adelaide and the ANU. His books include The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the First World War (Canberra: ANU Press, 1974), Narrandera Shire (Narrendera: Narrandera Shire Council, 1986), The Sky Travellers: Journeys in New Guinea 1938-1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1998) and The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011). I met Bill at his office at the ANU on a coolish morning in October 2013 and started our interview by describing how I had first encountered his work through his role as military advisor on the film Gallipoli (1981), directed by Peter Weir. I recorded our interview and the following transcript matches the recording with very little intervention. I cut some tangential asides, and Bill and I occasionally added words in square brackets to clarify the discussion where words were implied rather than said. But what follows is our conversation - unedited.