Author: Patricia Skehan
Publisher: Hachette Australia, 2025; RRP: $34.99
Reviewed by: Rhonda Cotsell, Ballarat Writers Inc. book review group
Despite what its title suggests, this work is centred on a small town called Steenwerck, located near the site of the Battle of Fromelles. Steenwerck was the base for the 2nd Australian Casualty Clearing Station, a military hospital which played a major role in receiving and treating casualties from Fromelles and transporting them to the nearby railway for evacuation from the front. (Anzac Ridge was an important site in the Third Battle of Ypres, casualties from which would also have passed through the Steenwerck clearing station.) A feature of the area was the duckboards put down to make walkways over the muddy ground, an innovation my grandfather, who served as a soldier and stretcher bearer, would have been familiar with.
Patricia Skehan, author of The Secrets of Anzac Ridge: In Flanders Fields, was a founding executive member of the City of Canada Bay Heritage Society, who has toured Australia speaking and lecturing for organisations such as Probus and U3A, VIEW clubs and historical societies.
The story of The Secrets of Anzac Ridge: In Flanders Fields draws on a compilation of raw material extracted from Trove, the National Library of Australia (NLA) newspaper database, which contains digitised newspapers and newsletters. Other material is sourced from family-held letters, diaries, and the NLA catalogue. Much use is also made of material from the diary of General Sir John Monash, and another held by the family of a young enlistee, James (Jim) Armitage.
The material has been organised into sections grouping specific themes, colourfully headed such as Shattered Humanity, Strong Language, Cobbers, Mademoiselle From Armentieres, and more. Because it’s not organised chronologically, it presents as a series of short and highly colourful, always emotionally charged, snapshots of that very much larger and vastly more complex field. Hearing these voices rising out of this period of history is effective, but highlighting certain aspects while showing them out of that larger context, hence omitting much, and connected only by what the author chooses to say about them, risks skewing the reader’s awareness of the events.
Similarly, reviewers are susceptible to bias when they review a book. It’s hard to avoid sometimes. As this reviewer, I acknowledge my bias from growing up hearing WW1 stories my grandfather, Angus McSwain, told my father. Angus was a private in artillery, fought in the trenches and was also a stretcher bearer, first at Gallipoli and later the Somme.
My father told me about seeing the strange whiteness of his father’s feet, a result of trench foot Angus suffered for the rest of his life, and showed me the word neurasthenia on his discharge papers. He told me Angus’s story about walking on duckboards across mud at the head of a line of men, a bomb falling, and looking behind to discover he was the only one left standing. One day while out rabbiting together, he asked his father innocently as a curious boy whether he had killed any Germans, and his father just wept silently all the way home. The shame he suffered from hurting Angus lasted till he died.
Consequently, there were areas of The Secrets of Anzac Ridge that left me cold. Almost voyeuristic, the book reads as trapped in an unpleasant and unnatural excitement, like a closed bubble in time where emotions are huge and the events filtered by the author’s presence. There is also at times a strong sense of the author wanting to present a cheerful light that felt both invasive and manipulating. There is much about the Australian Digger spirit, their ‘good cheer and revelry’ despite dreadful suffering, and many extracts which seem to have little to do with what the title offered.
One extract the author chose to include really threw me. It is the author’s choice of material to give a picture of British Field Marshal Douglas Haig compared to that of Australian Brigadier General Harold ‘Pompey’ Elliott in relation to Fromelles and the Battle of the Somme. Haig responsible for the needless death of thousands, and Australians specifically, and the other, also aware, who had to send his men into it. Angus among them.
General Haig … what struck me more than anything when he came into the room was his firm, healthy appearance and his keen, but sympathetic, eyes. His skin was clear, and he looked what he was, a clean-living man of action … (p158)
This is followed by more of the same. No mention of the horrendous death toll and inevitability of defeat that his ‘action’ would result in, nor the fact that opinions about Haig are still disputed today.
There is little re Elliott, the strict disciplinarian devoted to his men first and foremost, who, when the order was made, as a professional soldier and leader of the Australian 5th Division, was forced to obey despite his fears.
In Trove, I found mentions of Pompey’s role everywhere, for example, an article in a 2006 issue of Army about an exhibition at the Australian War Memorial cites curator Peter Burness:
“The 5th Division, the most recently arrived and the least prepared for battle … was put into the front line at Fromelles, resulting in 5500 casualties overnight and no ground gained at all,” Mr Burness said.
…
“Brig ‘Pompey’ Elliot [sic], one of the great fighting generals in the Australian Army, saw his brigade destroyed in front of his eyes,” Mr Burness said. “He greeted the survivors coming back off the battlefield with tears running down his face.”
Skehan’s only reference to the Australian leader is roughly three sentences, referring briefly to his popularity with his men, nothing about his role, and a brief comment re his postwar suicide, suggesting it due to an unnamed financial matter involving letting people down.
I located this unnamed financial matter in Trove – bad investments adding to his depression over feeling he had failed to provide for his family properly – along with an inquest report and an item quoting the sister-in-law and attending doctors referring to deep depression caused by wartime suffering, shell shock and the suffering of the men under his command, plus copious records referring to the sort of man he was and his role in Fromelles, and his ongoing work postwar protecting the rights of those men who made their way home.
Central Highlands readers may also find it interesting that Pompey Elliott was from the Victorian Wimmera town of West Charlton, attended Ballarat Grammar and began law studies at university before leaving to fight in the Boer War.
However, though playing a massive role in the Gallipoli landing, in this work he is as good as invisible, while Haig glows, and this is what the reader will be left with.
Easy to read and entertaining as it is, I therefore would strongly recommend readers make sure to follow up with other reading on the same topic.
Review copy provided by the publisher.
If anything in this article has disturbed you, please know that Lifeline is available 24/7 on 13 11 14 (https://www.lifeline.org.au/), as is Open Arms, assisting those in the armed services, veterans, and their families – 1800 011 046 (https://www.openarms.gov.au/)
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