IN Crack Hardy, Stephen Dando-Collins uses the letters and journals of his great-uncles, the three Searle brothers, reinforced by remembrances of other family members, to construct a deeply moving account of Australian soldiers so far away from home during World War I. All the conversations and quotations in this vivid and well-researched book are taken from wartime letters and diaries, as well as newspaper and oral history accounts.
The author of the justly acclaimed Captain Bligh’s Other Mutiny and the award-winning Pasteur’s Gambit, the Tasmanian-based Dando-Collins recounts the true story of how, during what was grievously misnamed as the “Great …