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Take a look. Take a look inside the book. Take a look.
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Hello and welcome to Hear This. I'm Frances Keyland and you're listening to the Vision Australia Radio show. Today I'm revisiting an interview that was conducted way back in 2009. And it was with Barry Heard, who is an Australian author, though he is much more than that. And this is an interview about a fiction book that he had just released called Tag. Tag is the name of a man who travels across overseas with the Light Horse because he was a wonderful horse handler, horse whisperer, and Barry tells his story wonderfully. And in this interview he talks about this man, the inspiration, and also the history of the light horse and and what they had to cope with when they endured battles in the First World War. I do hope you enjoy this revisiting of author Barry Hearrd.
Our special guest today is Barry Heard, and we're very proud to have Barry on the show. It's a very busy year for him working for legacy and giving talks on World War 1. Barry was conscripted in Australia's first National Service ballot and served in Vietnam as an infantryman and radio operator. After completing his national service, he returned home and like many returned soldiers, he suffered post-traumatic stress syndrome that eventuated in a breakdown thirty years after the war ended, and writing about his experiences has given hope to thousands of men and women who have endured the atrocities of war and the crippling side effects that linger long in its wake.
Barry has written two books in our collection - Well Done Those Men, which is used now in over 150 high schools throughout Australia in both history and English, and in 2009 he was appointed Australian Ambassador for Libraries Victoria. He has been involved with fundraising for Hope Foundation, the Fred Hollows Foundation, Oak Tree Books for Bhutan and two orphanages in Vietnam. But Barry's interest in World War 1 began back on his home farm in country Victoria, and in this interview, Barry talks about his novel Tag, which is based on the life of a man in his neighbourhood of country Victoria - so basically the next farm along.
So for Anzac Day, Barry talks to us a little bit about the very loving and assiduous research he did to research this, this childhood friend and veteran of the Light Horse Brigade. It's a wonderful story in itself, how he came to write the book. So I do hope you enjoy it. And we join Barry as he talks about the man the book was based on.
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His side of his face was basically missing. He had a great big hollow where his eyes should have been. He was very badly injured in World War 1, but he had a very big flap across his face, sort of like a glove to hide all his wounds. But invariably the wind would blow it up in the air, and he'd have it sticking up in the air like a peaked cap. And it was so funny after a while. I don't know why he wore it, but anyhow, yeah, he wrote me a letter. I was in Vietnam at the time as a young conscript when he wrote the letter, and it didn't say anything other than when you come back, we should meet up.
And I understand now, as an old man, what he was saying, because it would have been nice to talk to someone quite intimately at the time. And he was a good friend, but he died not long after he wrote that letter in 1967. And the end result was it was put away somewhere, and it was lucky it was kept, actually. And then I'm not sure how they found it, but the family found the letter and next thing I had a knock on my front door. And grandpappy wanted you to have this letter. And I read it. And I was quite stunned by reading it so long after it was written. Beautiful handwriting.
And so I decided to follow his trail or his journey. And I sought local advice from very old people, almost his age, and had no accurate luck. They all had stories, but they weren't. I could see they were different. It meant to me that Jack never spoke. Jack Campbell was his name. And so I went to the State Library because I love research. I've always been into research, and that's my academic background. I found his unit that he went into initially, which was the Light Horse. And so then I went to the war memorial and asked permission, and I got a lot of access. I was very lucky to get that. And and I had him in the Light Horse going to Into Cairo, on the Wilkshire - or it wasn't actually going to Cairo, it was a ship that left Williamstown going to London, but it was redirected to Cairo with all the horses on.
And I read these stories about the way the horses were treated on the ships, which was appalling. They were locked up in steel cages. I was quite distressed reading all that, and on the first part of the trip, before they even got to King George Sound, which is now called Albany, they lost 200 horses out of 15,000 on this big sort of massive ships and through dehydration. Oh no. No. Scouring and rearing in the stalls and scouring is like having diarrhoea, but eventually they end up in Cairo. And then I won't go into too much detail, but the end result was all the horses and the men, the Light Horse were put off. And then about five months later, Gallipoli started.
What a lot of people don't realise is after the battle at Gallipoli from the 25th of April had been going for almost a month. They had a massive problem where they were fighting, which was called No Man's Land. It was covered in bodies two and three deep. And so to get up and charge, I had to run over bodies. And I'm not exaggerating. And so the end result was the Turks and the allies got together and stopped the war. And the reason they stopped it was two: one was to bury all the bodies, and the second was that they were so depleted in everything food, troops, aid, etc., that that's when they came back.
The Australians came back to Cairo and got all the Light Horsemen and took them to Gallipoli on the 24th of May, and that's the first day of armistice. It the war stopped. Wow. And all those light horsemen buried the Turks and the Australians and the French and the. They all did it together. Wow. And to read about it, it just shocked me. I had no idea. And of the comments and the... if there's any Turkish person listening, the thing that stunned me was that the Turks loved the Australians, because the Australians just bloody well got on with it and did it, whereas the Australians loved the Turks. All they wanted to do was hug and cry and, and bought them coffee and, and they were very emotional, very feminine, whereas the Australians were the opposite.
But then the next day they went back to war and, and in the unit that Jack went in with, which was roughly 60 men, 63 I think - only seven walked out at the end of Gallipoli. And then he came back to Cairo and was ordered, along with the men that survived, and the new Light Horsemen that had arrived, to take all the horses to France. Because the mud was so bad, they had to replace all the vehicles with horses. And so the horses became the ambulance, the food going out, the wounded coming back, the weapons going out was all done with horses.
Just there's so much to tell. But just briefly, what happened after they'd only been there a matter of a couple of months, was the first time gas was used, and on the day the gas was used they lost 15,000 horses. And what a lot of what they didn't realise is when the gas is heavy and it goes down low and the men without gas masks were asked to stand up. But when a horse goes to sleep, where does his head go? On the ground, almost. He stands up and lowers his head. Yeah. And so came the massive effort of attempting to put a gas mask on the horse.
And even when they were able to do that, and this is where I go into a lot of detail in what I wrote... the thing that was fascinating is that it took loving and caring and animal love to be able to do it, whereas the Army would normally use force and discipline, and the only people that could actually enable the horse to have a mask on were the men who cared for horses and had a horse background, which was Jack Campbell, this man I knew, and he got very involved and often very emotional to read about the struggles. And then even with a gas mask on, the most trips a horse could do into the battlefield was four trips, and either the horse would get so panicky or get so stressed that he would die very young or they'd shoot him.
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And so none of them, of course, made it back. They wouldn't have transported.
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Oh no, they didn't. But that was another major issue. And that was, I haven't mentioned in the book, but that was lack of food for the horse. And what a lot of people don't realise is in northern France and Belgium, there was no animals left. Even the cattle and everything died from gas. It was such a terrible, terrible... not everything, but most, you know... and the end result for these is that Jack, during a massive campaign of trying to get wounded out, was wounded himself very badly.
Ironically, in the book, I've got it wrong, I assumed he was hit with artillery, but because of the wounds he had in the hospital, they I never did like if you get injured in a car accident, they don't say what sort of car it was or anything. They just say, you've got a broken leg... and I got that very wrong. I found out much later after the book was published, but yeah. And so I went from there to the hospital in England, where he was looked after for quite a while and very seriously injured and lost it all, as I said, the side of his face and had a shorter leg.
And in the story of the hospital, I bring in the nurses because they were just worked to exhaustion. They never had a break. They had no leave, they had no holiday, they had nothing. I've never been acknowledged properly, in my humble opinion. And I went to the opening of the Nurses Memorial 12 years ago in Canberra. Yeah. And then Jack comes home to Australia, struggles to fit in with a normal community and and most of the returned servicemen did. And I came across a paper, a PhD that a local where I live and where Jack lived had done a thesis on or a paper on it, and it was just staggering to read what we believe happened and what actually happened.
A lot of them were arrested. A lot of them were jailed. They refused to adhere to the drinking laws in those days... they were very angry. The only heroes were the dead soldiers. The ones that came home were a problem and the public didn't know how to handle them. And reading this document this young man did for a PhD is just staggering. I couldn't believe what I was reading. And why didn't we tell the world this was a reality of coming home from war? And it was never. It was. Although there has been an article in the paper in about 1924 and the local paper about... they opened a war memorial in their local town. Not many returned servicemen turned up. A massive crowd.
But the returned servicemen went there a week later and defaced it. They were so angry with all the words of honor and bravery and... all they saw was suffering and... appalling injuries and wounds and deaths and sorrow and, you know, big good words. Yeah, yeah.
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There's... the Association for the Blind in which was the beginning of Vision Australia, one of the organisations I used to work there in South Yarra, there's a portico leading into the building and... after the Second World War, blinded soldiers... First World War, sorry. The blinded soldiers... would gather there of a morning, you know, smoking their roll ups and things and listen to the morning paper being read. Someone would come out and read it. They had the frustration of saying, look, we're we're blinded, but we're not sick. We're, well, we're young men. And... sort of a social gathering sort of started to happen out that way because they wanted to have fun.
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Yeah. That's interesting. And... because that was the gas. The gas was sort of like capsicum spray today multiplied by ten, because it would not only blind you, it would burn out your throat. And if you got it into your lungs, God help you. And... it was just... and the poor old horse, It was just terrible. And a lot of people don't realise not only the horse, but the dogs, but even the pigeons. For a pigeon to be released to send a message, they had it in a gas-proof cage. And I'd take it up in the air with a balloon and release it. And when they estimated they'd be coming back, they'd have it back up in the air, the cages and the pigeons would go in and they'd bring it down. And it was a massive problem.
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So your writing of this book, you've obviously got a love of animals as well.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah. And that's from your background?
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Yes, exactly. Yeah. I grew up with horses and dogs, and always particularly a horse. A lot of people would not be aware of what a great friend a horse can be. Because you can't live in Melbourne, have a horse in the backyard where you can have a dog and a cat and a bird and. But yeah, I wrote in that other book, the Connors book. I had a horse who... he was a bit of a rebel.
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So that's part one of our interview with Barry Heard. Next week, we look at the work that he's written about his own life, the View from Connor's Hill. Wonderful stories, and also the book about his harrowing journey in Vietnam and beyond. Well done, those men. Now, if anybody would like us to see if we can get in audio or Braille or both... the book Tag that Barry was talking about today, just let us know if you're a member of the library and you'd like to see if we can get that book, because it sounds like a wonderful... history of... men and animals in the First World War.
Now, to a reader recommended. And this is from Karen in a... thank you, Karen. And this is the book... Back on Track - How One Man and his Dogs are Changing the Lives of Rural Kids. This is by Bernie Shakeshaft and James Knight. Karen writes...
I think I heard about this man in Australian Story. It's a really fascinating book about his life, which shows us how to assist unfortunate young people who have fallen between the cracks in society. It is refreshing to hear how he completes these outcomes in ways that are completely different from what we expect. I feel for those who are misfits, and I applaud Bernie and his attempts and success with so many. Sadly, it is probably a drop in the ocean with the numbers of disadvantaged youngsters and the system that meters out the punishments. Anyway, read the story and decide for yourselves.
Thank you so much, Karen. So I'm going to play a sample of this book. So Back on Track - How One Man and his Dogs are Changing the Lives of Rural Kids. As a kid, Bernie Shakeshaft's mischievous, mischievous and reckless behaviour led him to become known as the wild one of his devout Catholic family. It isn't surprising that his path led him to the Northern Territory, a place where people often go to either lose themselves or find themselves. Bernie, a searcher for his purpose in life, found himself. He had many jobs, firstly as a ringer on a cattle station owned by the Packer family, and later as a dingo trapper for the Parks and Wildlife Service.
Throughout it all, he drank, he swore, he fought and took chances with his own well-being. But crucially, he also developed deep connections with the indigenous people. And it was these connections that helped him lay the foundations for what was to come. He worked for youth welfare organisations, and all the while he built up his knowledge about helping wayward youths, particularly those from indigenous communities. Years later, Bernie was living in Armidale. He'd been visiting too many kids in prison and going to too many funerals. The usual methods weren't working, so that reckless, reckless, mischievous kid inside him decided he could do better.
He started a youth program called Backtrack, with three aims: to keep them alive, out of jail and chasing their hopes and dreams. For most, this was their last chance, combining life skills, education, job preparedness with rural work. Bernie threw in one other factor: dogs... and it works. With the help of these working dogs, the lost boys and girls find their way back on track. Let's hear a sample of this book Back on Track - How One Man and his Dogs are Changing the Lives of Rural Kids by Bernie Shakeshaft. It's narrated by Graham Brennan. Oh, and just a bit of a warning. There is the F word in this. Some small sample of the book.
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The nor'wester blows across the hills. It scuffs up dust, bends yellowing grasses, and sends a shiver through the lustreless leaves of the eucalypts. A few clouds hurry by. Earlier in the morning, some had teased the earth, but the rain that fell wasn't enough to wet a pebble in the middle of a long winter. It has been a much longer drought. A dark grey Holden, Colorado dual cab heads out of town. Its driver wears a black puffer jacket, a blue woollen jumper, blue shirt, blue thermal vest and dusty grease stained blue jeans. His eyes are also blue. So is his language.
I'll fucking sort it out later, he says to someone over his phone's loudspeaker. His delivery is direct but not brusque. He holds a steaming cup of coffee that has failed to wash away the nicotine gravel in his voice, even when sitting. He appears lanky, skinny legs, long arms, bony fingers. His skin is scarred and blotchy, and his reddened face is framed by wrinkles across his forehead and a grey speckled, gingery beard on his chin. He drives further out of town, occasionally easing his work boot off the accelerator to look at a shed, a business, a paddock, a fence.
He knows them all. Finally, he heads over a crest on the bitumen and finds what he has been looking for. A small mob of pregnant Angus cows, as black as the morning, are dawdling along the side of the road. Behind them, a teenage boy sits on an idling motorbike. When the boy notices the Colorado pullover, he stops, starts on the throttle until he reaches the vehicle. The driver winds down a window. Good to see you. Got the warning signs out. Well done.
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And that was a sample of Back on Track - How One Man and his Dogs are Changing the Lives of Rural Kids by Bernie Shakeshaft. Bernie is [spells name]. That book goes for ten hours and 36 minutes, and it's a fairly new release in the library. And it comes under the categories of Animal stories, Autobiography... Australian Stories, Indigenous Non-fiction and Inspirational Stories. Sounds like a really nice one. And thank you Karen for that.
Now the next two books are topical and they're not all that new, but one is called Jonestown - the Power and Myth of Alan Jones. This is a 2006 biography of radio personality Alan Jones by Chris Masters. How do we rank a man who raises millions for people in need, but whose actions waste millions in support of unworthy mates and poor public policy? How do we define someone who, on his own, finds jobs for the out of work, but who routinely trashes the careers of others? These are some of the many paradoxes of Alan Jones.
Why is he adored? Why is he reviled? Why does this talk radio host have the power to dine with presidents, lecture Prime ministers and premiers and influence government ministers. And how is it that he could not only survive a scandal such as the cash for comment affair, but go on to greater reward? Chris Masters seeks the answers to these questions and in doing so reveals a complex individual and the potent relationships he has with both Struggle Street and the big End of Town. Jonestown explores the hazardous, hazardous intersection of populism and politics. It reaches deep into a powerful industry and exposes the myth and the magic of a very powerful man. Let's hear a sample of Jonestown The Power and Myth of Alan Jones by Chris Masters. It's narrated by Francis Greenslade.
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Alan Jones is an angry man. The rage has exploded without warning, like terrorist bombs. There are many moments when he detonates in sudden fury before production staff, hotel receptionists, chauffeurs and airport clerks seething and manic. It is as if competing personalities join joined forces egging each other on, Jones the motivator inspires himself to greater fury. The rage is are sometimes caught on tape when an interview displeases, a slow burn erupts into uncontrolled wrath. You are scumbag guttersnipe stuff. What a joke. Just a moment. You are in my office, up and down from his chair, pacing, pouting, glasses on and glasses off, discharging the inner fury.
Just shut up for a moment and listen. I'm half minded to grab you and ram you against the wall, you absolute scumbag. When friends are caught in the middle or on the sidelines, they stare, mute and aghast, wondering how this anger builds after witnessing withering attacks, some vow to forever keep their distance. When Alan Jones loses members of his loyal audience, it can be for a similar reason. They tire of the harping between 5:30 and 10 a.m. as the sun rises over Sydney and the airport, noise curfew lifts. Alan shrills, whines and roars like the arriving aircraft, venting his irritation, agitation and anger at all who continue to so wilfully disappoint.
The primary industry minister, John Anderson, is still suffering from a serious kick in the head. Some cow must have got onto him. It is clear Police Commissioner Peter Ryan is no longer capable of doing his job. Carl Scully's political career is vanishing in front of him. He has only himself to blame. That Amanda Vanstone could not run a pig sty. Australia's loudest voice in commercial radio is rich, famous and at war with his own life.
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So that was Jonestown - the Power and Myth of Alan Jones by Chris Masters Chris is [spells author's name]. And as I mentioned, that book was published originally in 2006, and it goes for 18 hours and 20 minutes, quite a long one there. There is also another book by Chris Masters in the collection. Oh, actually, there's a couple... the first one is an interesting one, Flawed Hero - Truth, Lies and War Crimes. Another very... topical and probably controversial book.
With the Victoria Cross and Medal for Gallantry. Ben Roberts-Smith was the most highly decorated Australian soldier, the best of the best. When he returned to civilian life, he became a poster boy for a nation hungry for warrior heroes. He embodied the myth of the classic ANZAC, seven foot tall and bulletproof. But as his public reputation continued to grow inside the army, rumours were circulating. So that's an interesting one. That's called Flawed Hero by Chris Masters. And there is also no Frontline - Australia's Special Forces at War in Afghanistan.
And I'm looking at Wikipedia here... Christopher Wayne Masters... was born in 1948, in Grafton, New South Wales. He's a multi-Walkley-Award-winning and Logie Award-winning Australian journalist and author. Yeah, looking through here... Masters' work also played a key role in bringing down Ben Roberts-Smith. So the history of Jonestown, the publishing of the... book Jonestown is interesting in itself...
On the 29th of June 2006, ABC enterprises decided to cancel publication of Masters' manuscript, stating that the publication was being withdrawn because it would almost certainly result in commercial loss, which would be irresponsible, but this was widely believed to be a veiled reference to the fact that Jones' lawyers had threatened an expensive defamation lawsuit if the book reached publication. Many ABC personalities criticised the board's decision and wrote a petition against it, with signatories including Richard Glover and Phillip Adams.
Allen and Unwin ended up taking the book on and releasing it in October 2006, and lengthy excerpts were also published in The Sydney Morning Herald. With regard to the Ben Roberts-Smith book... Masters spent more than seven years investigating and reporting on Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith. Flawed Hero was shortlisted for the 2004 Victorian Premier's Prize for Non-fiction.
Thank you for joining us on Hear This today. I've done a bit of research about where Tag is available. It's not available in audio from anywhere, but it is available from many different libraries, and it is available as an e-book from... Overdrive. And a shout out to Gina. Hi, Gina. I know you're listening and it was lovely catching up with you to see Kate Grenville In Conversation in the Melbourne Writers Festival - and the wonderful Nardi Simpson as well, two great interviews, and we had a good chat. And you've recommended a book that I'll have on next week.
And a lovely shout out to Tony in Western Australia, who... contacted Vision Australia to say that he really enjoys listening to the show. Thank you Tony - if you've got any recommendations, send them through. And that's an invite to everybody. If you have read a book that you enjoy, if you've listened to a book that you enjoyed, just let us know and you can always contact the library on 1300 654 656. That's 1300 654 656. Or you can email library@visionaustralia.org - that's library at Vision Australia dot org. Have a lovely week and we'll be back next week with a fresh lot of books.
