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The issue of class remains strikingly absent from much of the historical literature on the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. This article briefly explores the pre-war class backgrounds of soldiers, the traces of class in their writings and their experiences, the class-based selection processes of soldiers' writing by post-war archives, and how key historians of the AIF have paid insufficient attention to class. It argues that as a result of middle-class hegemony, before, during and after the war, the memory of the First World War in Australian popular culture and much historical writing is largely a memory based upon skewed sources and a lack of recognition of class in the AIF. |
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