An Awfully Big Adventure

An Invitation

Please join us at Manatu Taonga,  L4 ASB House, 101 The Terrace at 12.15pm on Wednesday 1 May to hear author Jane Tolerton on:

From ‘Our Boys’ to Hard Men

New Zealand newspapers almost uniformly styled New Zealand’s First World War soldiers ‘our boys’ – and that was the atmosphere when the almost 8500-strong Main Body sailed away in October 1914.

But then there were almost four years of war – a war quite different from the one ‘our boys’ were still fighting in the newspapers.

They changed, and by the time the bulk of them were home again (well into 1919) the attitude to them in New Zealand had changed too.

In this seminar Jane Tolerton explores this change using material from the World War One Oral History Archive interviews she and Nicholas Boyack conducted in the late 1980s.

In her latest book, An Awfully Big Adventure: New Zealand World War One veterans tell their stories, published for Anzac Day, the oral history material is organised chronologically.

The talk will include audio clips from the interviews, which are held at the Turnbull Library.

Jane  is a Wellington writer - author of Ettie: A Live of Ettie Rout, which won a New Zealand Book Award, the best-selling Convent Girls and three other books of oral history.