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Donna McLean: First thing Peter, thanks for agreeing to this interview.
Peter FitzSimons: Thank you for having me. I'm already having a lovely time.
Donna: Would you explain your fascination with Australia and World War 11: 'Nancy Wake', 'Kokoda' and now 'Tobruk'?
Peter: I had, my mum and dad both fought in the Second World War and I was the youngest of seven children, so in many ways they were the age of my
friends' grandparents and so I grew up in a household where the Second World War was sort of all around me.
Not that Mum and Dad would tell war stories. To my eternal regret I never sat them down and said, 'Tell me your own stuff of what happened.'
But when I came across Nancy Wake who was the most decorated heroine of the Second World War, I met her
at midday up at Port Macquarie, I was back at the airport at half past two to catch my flight and I called my
publishers and said, 'Look, those other books, forget them. I'm not going to do them, I'm going to this and I'll get you the manuscript in a year'.
And I did and because the stories were so extraordinary, so fascinating, and I think, I have a view that
95 per cent of all military knowledge that we have in this country starts at dawn on April 25th and by sundown she's gone.
Why? Because the story of Gallipoli, we tell it every Anzac Day, we re-tell it.
We tell it to our kids and they'll tell it to their kids and it goes again and again and again and again and we focus
on that to the exclusion of just about everything else.
And I think what that has meant from the perspective of the 21st century, Gallipoli really well known, when I
started doing 'Nancy Wake', a lot of that had been forgotten.
Kokoda, personally I knew three-fifths of just about nothing.
I knew it was up in New Guinea, I knew the Japanese and the Australians and there was a track and we did well but that was about all I knew.
Tobruk, I couldn't have put my finger on it on a map. I knew it was North Africa.
I think Dad had talked about Tobruk a bit but I'd forgotten, or not forgotten, I hadn't learnt all the other stuff.
And yet when you get into it the theme for me I suppose is, first time the Japanese land army was stopped
in that Second World War Australians did it in New Guinea.
First time the Germans were ever turned around, land army in that Second World War, the Australians did it
in the lead-up to Tobruk, first contact, just before they got to, the Germans got to Tobruk.
And so, I don't know, I got into it. I liked writing it.
Donna: What do you see as the role of legends in the Australian psyche?
Peter: That's an interesting question. I don't know what it is, I mean I've lived in other nations, I've lived in three other nations.
I suppose every nation has their legends, their heroes.
Most Australian heroes are sports people, starting with Don Bradman, down through Steve Waugh, Dally Messenger, 'Up there Cazaly'.
We, I think as a nation, if we want to take a deep bow on the international stage for one thing it is we punch way above our weight in sport.
So there's a tendency to, for international acclaim, we get a lot of international acclaim for sport.
Therefore those who bring us that acclaim, we have the inclination to say, 'You beauty, you know by God we
ripped those Americans in that American Cup didn't we Bondy?'
And then when Bondy was in court not long ago he couldn't remember anything about any corporate affairs but by God he still remembers the America's Cup.
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Donna McLean: Your books are always a good read and very accessible to a wide audience, yet we often hear
'don't let the facts get in the way of a good story'.
How do you make sure that you write a good read but stay true to the characters and events?
Peter FitzSimons: Who from? Seriously I don't know. I don't think my facts have been challenged particularly have they?
Donna: No.
Peter: I mean I have a different way of writing, okay?
This may take longer than two minutes but I'll say it like this.
I don't want to, if you are my reader and I am your writer and I am describing to you this event, I don't want to
hand you binoculars and say, 'From the point of view of 2007 take these binoculars and look way, way, way back
to something that happened 60 years ago.'
I want to hand you a magnifying glass.
I want to take you in close, have a look at what happened and I want to make, I want to use the
techniques of fiction, the devices of fiction, and apply them to nonfiction.
So you have, so hopefully if it works, for the reader to judge if it works but make no mistake, my intent is
to take the reader in close so that at the moment that Hitler says, 'Right, it's war,' I want the reader to be in the room at the time it happens.
And to make that work, I can't pull it out of the top of my head, from behind my back wherever.
I need as much provable detail as I can possibly get and yet want the tiny detail, the footnoted fact for want of a better term.
To do that I devour long transcripts of interviews, of movies, of reputable books and I'm constantly taking
notes and researching and getting as much stuff as I can.
I do not pretend to be an historian. I am a 'storian'. I love the story part.
For others, for the eminent historians to judge the, whether it works or the perspective, the analysis of the times.
I love the times themselves.
And so what I want is to make the story live and breathe.
I, you know, part of my role as a writer is to look at as broad a mass of material as I can gather, to interview
as many people who were there at the time as I can find, who can understand what was going on.
And my job as a writer is to say, 'I'll take that, that and that, and I'll put them, no, no it'll work better like that.'
And you sort of shape it all up and then the great day comes and you go, rrrum, rrrum, rrrum, rrrum, does it - no, still doesn't work.
Wrong petrol. That doesn't work. I'll reconnect that and I'll reconnect that.
You work it out so that you've got something that will speak, will live, will breathe.
Now, I suspect this will be read by a lot of history students and will be watched by a lot of history students.
I should make the point that most history students I suspect won't be doing what I do. They'll be analysing.
They'll be, their job is not, for most essays, I wouldn't have thought, you'll tell me if I'm wrong, but is not to evoke, is not to do time and place.
Their job is to analyse.
Hopefully if I've done an accurate representation of what happened, they will be better able to analyse but
I don't particularly fancy myself as an analyst.
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Donna McLean: How much research goes into developing your work and how did you engage with the primary materials and blend them into your writing?
Peter FitzSimons: For, it seems to get bigger with every book. With 'Kokoda' I like to almost use my ignorance as a tool, if you know what I mean.
I like to display a refreshing ignorance, in that when I started writing 'Kokoda' I didn't know what, how many were in a platoon, a company, a battalion.
I wasn't quite sure where the colonels and the captains and the second AIF, what that was all about.
I had ignorance on that.
So when I'm researching 'Kokoda' I don't take for granted the knowledge of the reader because I as the
author didn't start out with great knowledge of what it was about and so the way I wanted to do it was, a lot of
books and you know, for each author to do it as they want, but if I am to describe to you such an event as
Kokoda or Tobruk, my instinct is to start with the spot.
Here is the spot where a great battle will take place.
And I like to do wide concentric circles starting out way, way back and getting closer and closer and closer,
looking at: What were the Japanese doing in New Guinea? What was that about? What were we doing there?
More to the point, what were we, what were Australian soldiers doing in that far-flung spot on the earth
called Tobruk and what were the Germans doing there?
I mean how many people know why Germany would send a force that strong with Rommel and the Africa Corps
to this tiny little spot in Africa, and they came up against who? Austrians? No, is this Australians? I mean what was that all about?
Why were the English there? Why were the New Zealanders there?
And so for me as an author, I wanted to understand the spot, the forces that brought everybody together at
this one spot at this one time and to understand why that battle at Tobruk and the battle along the
Kokoda Track to understand why it was so important.
To do that I read very, very widely.
I talk as widely as I can.
I go to the people that know, the historians.
And I must say, just about every man jack of them and woman jack of them have been fantastic to me.
You know to say, this is what happened and you should look at this and you should look at this and you know
the Australian War Memorial and these transcripts and have been very helpful in guiding me through a very thick jungle.
Donna: Did your interpretation of the Tobruk campaign change throughout your research process?
Peter: Well, my interpretation I say the truth of it is I started with a profound ignorance.
I didn't know what happened at Tobruk when I began.
All I knew was, it's a name that resonates.
It resonated with my mum and dad.
I knew that they knew, they felt that Tobruk was important.
El Alamein was important.
And so when the idea came, the way it worked was I'd done, I'd written the Kokoda Track, I'd done 'Nancy Wake'. It'd all, they'd both gone well.
And I was staying up at, in Tamworth just briefly passing through my aunt and uncle's place.
They put me in the guest room and sort of as dawn fell in this unfamiliar bed and I woke up there was this
sort of certificate, framed certificate on the wall and it said, 'Rats of Tobruk Association' and it clicked.
My Uncle Ted must have been a Rat of Tobruk.
And over breakfast we began to talk about what happened and he was moving the salt and pepper
shakers and from memory I think the pepper was Rommel and the Africa Corps and the salt was the
Australians of the 20th Brigade and I began to realise, gee this is a strong story.
This is a really strong story that the might of the German army led by Rommel falls upon these Australian
forces who held them off once, held them off twice and then held them out for the next nine months.
What a good story is that.
And as I say an historian may well judge that as, the significance of this was that they couldn't get
this therefore what followed afterwards was all affected.
What I most liked was the story part.
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Donna McLean: Does researching history make you think about the what if moments such as the soldier who had a chance to kill Hitler?
Peter FitzSimons: Certainly and it's a thing that I find when I'm reading good history, you look at the clock
on the wall and it says five past ten and the next time you look up it's half past two and you don't know
where the time's gone but you resent the fact that it has gone and you're coming across all this fabulous stuff and yeah, the what if moments.
I mean the one that I, there is the great man view of history which is of course what's known as the great
man view of history is that a great man de Gaulle, will change the course of history, now Churchill will change it, Hitler, etc etc etc.
And that's been countered by, there are strong forces in each society and it's not that Britain won the great
World, the Second World War because of Churchill.
In fact the Americans and the industrial might and the Australians and the British Empire.
They were always going to win.
Churchill had the chance to be at the front.
Now again, for the historians to argue which view is right but I do love those moments where a single decision
is taken and you can see it veer off to one side, or a single moment in time and the one you refer to is the story that came across in my research
with a soldier that had a chance to shoot Hitler when Hitler was a corporal in the First World War and couldn't do it, didn't do it and of course had
he taken that shot I mean Hitler was for his many, many sins I think it is universally agreed by the historians who studied him, he was a good soldier
in that First World War.
He did put himself in many dangerous positions.
So what if, what if a bullet had killed Hitler in that First World War?
Would the course of history have been different?
I don't know because there was no doubt that Germany was seething with resentment after the Versailles Treaty and there was no doubt that they were
prone to a leader arising to say, 'I will make you great again.' It happened to be Hitler. I don't know, I will leave that to the historians.
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Donna McLean: How would you describe your approach to history?
Peter FitzSimons: Story, I like the story part. I think you know too I've become fascinated with Australian history because, I'll tell you a story.
I mean when I was growing up and learning first about the exploration of Australia and so forth,
no doubt whatsoever, Captain Cook was a hero and he discovered Australia so that was what I learnt that
you know basically there might have been some Aborigines here I don't know but you know it was Captain Cook that discovered Australia.
Now about five or six years ago I was playing a game of chess with my oldest son and he started to cry.
And, you know, what was going on?
Well he was, he had black pieces and I had white pieces and I was playing an admittedly devastating game, take his rook, take his knight.
But what he said, in all seriousness he started to cry and he said, I said, 'Why are you crying?'
And he said, 'Because this reminds me of what happened to the Aborigines.'
And I thought, phwoah, the change in what I was taught and what he is taught, just one generation between us, is extraordinary.
I don't think when I was learning we were ever, there was no consideration of the situation with the Aborigines.
But it is in understanding our past that we can better understand our present.
I recently read a manuscript of a book that'll be coming out shortly on the Mile Creek Massacre and I read that account of the Mile Creek Massacre and
the 31 women and children that were massacred and it gave me an understanding I have never had before of the tragedy of black/white relations in this
country and it gives me a perspective I didn't have before of the situation today.
And so I suppose when I'm reading really good history, interesting history, I'm looking in the past and I'm understanding better the present and perhaps
can predict the future better, hopefully.
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Donna McLean: How did you as a writer capture the big picture sense of the Tobruk campaign while concentrating on the stories of individuals?
Peter FitzSimons: It's, I mentioned to you earlier I like, you know I want to give you the magnifying glass and not the binoculars but in many ways
what I want with that magnifying glass is pull back, go forward so that you go the concentric circles.
I have a thing in my head of wide concentric circle, you know let's go way back and look at the whole thing and then lets go right in tight, right in
close and so that, you know, an example of a detail that I love, that you talk to the diggers that have fought, that have been in the trenches and
facing fire and the line that I love and I can't remember where I first heard it, I think it might have been Nancy Wake where she said to me that the
sound of a bullet passing your ear sounds like a kitten meowing.
It just goes 'meow, meow, meow'.
And that tiny detail, love it because it gives some sense of what it was like.
When I interviewed the guys in the Africa Corps one guy, Rolf V?lker, told me a story of his best friend being shot and dying and lying on the ground
and screaming up at Rolf, 'Shoot me! Shoot me! Shoot me, you coward! Put me out!'
And so you want the whole horror of the war, the experience of war.
But by that account what I recognised in that when he told me that is, that is so powerful and that is so strong and that is the small part which
will tell the whole.
There was an account I remember reading in a transcript from the War Memorial of, well in fact there's many but there's one, Patrick Lindsay did a film
I think it was 1992, 'Kokoda', and he interviewed a lot of veterans of, from the Japanese side of the Kokoda battle too and one account that was so
powerful was the Japanese soldier who said, 'When we couldn't get to Port Moresby and we were going back down the track', he said, 'some wanted to get
back for the flag, some wanted to get back for the emperor.'
He said, 'I wanted to get back to my mother.'
And he said that before he left, his mother had held him by the shoulders and said, 'You must come home, you must come home, you must come home.'
And what I loved about that, why from the moment I see that account, why I love that is because that is the universal language of us all.
All of us, be we Christian, Atheist, Muslim, Japanese, Chinese, Australian, Kalathumpian, all of us understand when we're in trouble, we want to get
home to mum.
And so for me, that particular account may, didn't have huge significance on the course of the battle, just about no significance whatsoever.
But I want to take the reader into the experience and make them care about individual soldiers.
I suppose one of the things I do in writing, I don't think that the reader can particularly identify with the 39th Battalion or the 2nd 17th or the
2nd 16th but if you say, this is the experience of this soldier, these soldiers, in these battalions, and you can tell through them, their experience,
you can tell the whole.
So what I'm trying to do, what I've tried to do, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health is to tell the whole through the
experience of the few.
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Donna McLean: Could you comment on the different styles of writing for sport, history and journalism?
Peter FitzSimons: Everybody has their own style. I don't think, for me the way I like to write, be it sport, be it history, be it straight journalism
is, it's much the same.
I like, what I want to do is to make it live, make it breathe.
And it's taken me a long time to evolve or develop whatever style that I do and it doesn't please everybody.
There are people who read the stuff that I write that run screaming from the room, holding their nose. So be it.
I can't do it any other way.
The way that I want to do it, if I'm giving an account of Steve Waugh's last century at the SCG or what happened at Tobruk or what happened at Kokoda,
what I like to do is to take the reader in early, first paragraph, two paragraphs, I like to take them to that point, then put as much salient detail,
not as much but the right, it's the right details that you want.
I mean one of the ones that I love for example, Steve Waugh in sport.
I think it was January 2003, he was on 98 runs on the final ball of the day and there was a great bit of commentary between Kerry O'Keefe the Australian
and Jonathan Agnew for the BBC so it's going all over Australia, all over Great Britain and around and Jonathan Agnew says, 'Well what's he going to do
Kerry? Will he go for it or will he come back tomorrow, wait for a trundler down the leg side and be sure of scoring a century?'
And O'Keefe says, 'Stuff tomorrow Agas, tomorrow is for silver medallists, tomorrow is for Englishmen. We're Australians.
We want the gold and we want it now. He'll go for it.'
And sure enough Steve Waugh famously hit four runs off the final ball of the day to bring up his century.
Now for me that account, that transcript just speaks to me on so many different levels.
I love it as an anecdote.
I love it as a representation perhaps of the different approaches that the English and the Australians will take.
I probably love it because it appeals to my Australian sense of mythology - Who are we?
We are people who will have a go, you mug. I love it for evoking the time and the place. And, I just, I just love it.
So from the moment that I saw an account of that, that's what I want and it's something evocative is the thing that I'm looking for.
Donna: Peter, thanks for your time.
Peter: Is that what we call a wrap? Thank you.
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Summary:
Peter FitzSimons reads an extract from his book Tobruk (page 67 Hardback edition) where Elizabeth Edmondson is on her way from the family property at Bringelly to the city and stops at Liverpool Station. Her son John Hurst Edmondson has enlisted in the army. He was awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions in April 1941at Tobruk.
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Peter FitzSimons: 'On every trip to the city, Elizabeth Edmondson passed through Liverpool station, and every time it seemed like there were more and
more troops heading every which way, as the war had shifted from something happening in the distance to something happening now,
requiring massive movement.
Sometimes Elizabeth would sit there on one of the benches, examining the faces, wondering if perhaps one of them would be the best-loved face of all,
her son. But it wasn't easy, not by a long shot.
One day in early May she was there, knitting Jack some thick socks, and this wretched old fellow next to her kept watching the troops,
while lugubriously repeating, over and over, 'They won't come home, none of them.'
Elizabeth kept knitting, concentrating furiously on her needles, hoping he would either take the hint from the click-click-click that she didn't care
for that kind of talk or, failing that, it would take her mind off the wretched thing that he was saying.
But even as the soldiers kept going back and forth, the fellow kept saying it - 'They won't come home, none of them'- and finally Elizabeth could
stand it no more.
'My son is a soldier,' she said with some feeling, 'and he is going overseas too.'
Still the man would not be put off.
'Well I don't care,' he said. 'He won't come back either.'
In response, there was really nothing Elizabeth could say, so she simply kept knitting though managed to turn her back on him - lady that she was,
it was as much as she could do to indicate her extreme displeasure while maintaining her dignity.
Knit one, purl two, knit one, purl two. Drat that man!'
And I suppose the model for that was my mother, in the sense of that it's all there in the diary, this is exactly what happened, that my mother would say,
'Drat! Drat that man!' like that and you know, knit one, purl two.
And so as a writer choosing an image I suppose I worked with the way my mother would talk because they were similar, from reading Elizabeth Edmondson's
diary, not dissimilar at all to Elizabeth Edmondson.
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