Airdate: Charles Bean’s Great War

The History Channel has often been on the ball with premiere Australia documentaries screening on key dates including Anzac Day and Remembrance Day.

This year it has a docudrama that traces the remarkable life of Australian war correspondent Charles Bean, to air on Remembrance Day Thursday, November 11.

Written and directed by accomplished writer/director Wain Fimeri and narrated by Australian actor Nadine Garner, it looks at Australia’s official correspondent during the First World War and his quest for the establishment of the Australian War Memorial.

Bean wrote a monumental 12 volume history which is still recognised as one of the best histories of the Great War ever written.

He was also instrumental in initiating the collection of war relics from the First World War. As a result the Australian War Memorial now holds a comprehensive list of artefacts from all Australian conflicts.

The cast includes Nick Farnell and Margot Knight.

Born in 1879 in Bathurst, Bean moved to England where he completed his education, studying classics and law at Oxford University. He returned to Australia, joining the Sydney Morning Herald as a junior reporter in 1908. In 1913, he was appointed the Herald’s official correspondent to the Australian Infantry Forces.

Accompanying the first Australian convoy to Egypt, Bean landed at Gallipoli on April 25, 1915, and began to make his name as a remarkably thorough and brave correspondent. He was wounded in August but remained in Gallipoli until just a few days before the last troops were evacuated. He then reported on the Australians on the Western Front. Bean filled hundreds of diaries and notebooks, all with a view to writing a history of the AIF when the war ended.

Bean returned to Australia and began work on the official history series that would consume his next 20 years. He wrote clearly and passionately about what Australia could become if it learnt the lessons of the war. Planning, education and community participation were his mantras. But he was to be bitterly disappointed as the Great Depression and political instability destroyed his dream.

In his later years, he had the wisdom, anger and pessimism of a man who had passed from the Victorian, to the Modern world. He declined a knighthood three times and on one of these occasions said “the system encourages false values among our people… Our generation needs above everything to see and aim at true values.” Charles Bean died in Sydney in 1968.

Charles Bean’s Great War airs 7:30pm Thursday, November 11 on History.