New Australian history book ‘Where Are Our Boys?’ shows how newsmaps won the Great War – advance copies & extracts available!

Have you ever wondered how Australians followed the progress of WW1? The outbreak of war coincided with new technology that made geographical images available on a mass scale, introducing the newsmap into wide circulation across newspapers and providing readers with daily war updates. However, the printed war was often very different from reality, as war censorship rules dictated what could be published.

Where Are Our Boys? (NLA Publishing, 1 August, $49.99) tells the story of the Great War and how it was fought and won from the reader’s perspective, with over 200 map images. Day by day, for every campaign and battle, readers across the nation followed Australian exploits through these maps, both in the pages of newspapers and pasted to walls on city streets. As the war went on, the whereabouts of our boys were being discussed, with growing expertise, over these maps in homes, pubs, churches and clubs. Drawn from scant news cables, out of date cartography and often the writer’s imagination, a semi-fictional war story emerged, of Anzac successes and, sometimes, disasters.

However, Where Are Our Boys? is not just about propaganda. Maps in newspapers tracked the war’s many campaigns and the journey of our soldiers, but most importantly they allowed those at home to feel closer to their brothers, husbands, fathers, uncles, cousins, neighbours and friends. Maps became central to commemorating events, people and places, and helped readers to understand the conflict and comprehend the human cost of war.

Additional Information

• Provides a different view of WW1—history seen through maps reproduced in newspapers on the home front
• A fascinating insight to how Australian newspaper readers in 1914–1918 saw the war unfold
• Includes over 200 map images

Author Martin Woods is available for interview and extracts are available. Martin is the Curator of Maps at the National Library of Australia. In 2007, he edited the book Australia in Maps: Great Maps in Australia’s History. He was co-curator and consultant editor for Mapping Our World, Terra Incognita to Australia, the exhibition of Australian and world cartographic treasures held in Canberra in 2013–2014. Martin is President of the Australian & New Zealand Map Society, and Secretary of the Hakluyt Society (Australia).