Life So Full of Promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation
McMullin’s second book about talented men who did not survive the First World War underlines his point that the deaths of these men deprived Australia of potential sporting, professional and civic leaders in the trying years that followed.
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Life So Full of Promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation
ross mcmullin | 2023
Life So Full of Promise, a sequel to Ross McMullin’s earlier Farewell, Dear People (2012), chronicles the lives of three additional men of undoubted promise, all part of the lost generation who did not survive the First World War.
Brian Pockley, a talented sportsman and University of Sydney graduate, began his working career as a doctor, like his father before him. Norman Callaway, originally from Hay in rural New South Wales, was touted as a future Australian test cricketer, particularly after making a world record 207 runs in his initial first class innings. Murdoch Mackay, originally from Bendigo in country Victoria, was another handy sportsman who garnered many prizes and accolades at the University of Melbourne and became a Melbourne barrister.
Why was this sequel needed? The earlier book already featured elite sportsmen, professional people and others whose deaths undoubtedly deprived Australia of future high achievers and leaders in many branches of society. A case can certainly be made for the inclusion of Brian Pockley, who died on 11 September 1914 in a little-known episode of the First World War. He was part of a small force sent to capture a German wireless station in New Guinea at the outbreak of the war, before other Australians became involved in the European conflict. Pockley was the first Australian officer to be killed in the Great War and his death received wide coverage in Australia at the time. The deaths of Callaway and Mackay received no such widespread notice, though war historian Charles Bean acknowledged that Mackay’s leadership was instrumental in ensuring the success of an attack at Pozières in August 1916. Mackay was only one of more than 600 casualties suffered by his regiment during the action. Callaway was killed by shrapnel while sheltering in a bomb crater when his company advanced near Bullecourt soon after he had arrived in France. He had enlisted in May 1916 and was killed a year later on 3 May 1917.
The answer lies in the fact that Life So Full of Promise is far more than the story of the short lives of three men. It reveals how the war touched all Australians, immediately and long afterwards. The book includes details of family members, friends and colleagues, and illustrates social conditions in rural and suburban Australia in the period prior to the war and after. Neither Pockley nor Callaway married. Mackay’s enlistment finally persuaded his girlfriend, Margot, to marry him immediately before embarkation. His death meant that she became one of innumerable war widows; Margot later remarried but many other widows did not. Brothers of both Pockley and Mackay, and numerous friends, also enlisted. Mackay’s father, George, was the owner and manager of the Bendigo Advertiser and used his position to foster the Australian war effort. Mackay’s mother, Mary, was an avid Red Cross volunteer, a supporter of the war effort and a staunch advocate for conscription.
Cricket features prominently in the lives of Pockley, Callaway and Mackay; their stories together highlight aspects of amateur sport in Australia − most notably cricket − in the pre-war period. It was a major factor in uniting local communities, both rural and suburban, with universities fostering many promising international players. Unfortunately, their amateur status and the need to earn a living meant that not all could take advantage of the invitation to represent Australia: Mackay’s father was one of these. But cricket was incidental to the anticipated careers of Pockley and Mackay. Callaway, who worked as a clerk, was a talented cricketer whose rise to prominence McMullin chronicles in great detail. He could have excelled after the war — had he survived.
While cricket, with its interstate and international tours and matches, is common to the stories of the three men, it is a somewhat disjointed theme in the book, which treats each of its main subjects separately. Pockley and Calloway played in New South Wales; Mackay’s experience was in Victoria. Perhaps another volume could flip the main script and emphasise how cricket — and other sports — suffered because of the loss and impairment of so many promising sportsmen. One of those was Jack Massie, a friend and contemporary of Pockley at university. Massie graduated as an engineer, enlisted, was wounded, and could not return to first-class cricket after the war.
This volume could have been more tightly edited. Many paragraphs have multiple subjects and unnecessary detail. McMullin writes best when focused on the war and the actions that took his subject’s lives. In addition, there are some unfortunate word choices. McMullin lapses into journalese, referring to Callaway’s cousin, Bill, whose ‘lack of altitude’ (height) made early enlistment unlikely, and elsewhere saying that Mackay’s parents ‘created another sister’ for him to replace one who had died at three months old. And it would be appreciated if background was given to issues taken for granted, such as the Agadir Crisis and the Triple Entente.
But these infelicities do not detract from the appeal and value of the stories. McMullin succeeds in illustrating features of Australia’s social history prior to the First World war and in bringing to prominence otherwise forgotten men who, in all likelihood, would have become leaders in post-war Australia.
Life So Full of Promise: further biographies of Australia’s lost generation is published by Scribe.
Reviewer: Peter Donovan, PHA (SA)