ABSTRACT
The pressing reason for seeing the war novel in its Australian context as distinctive and worth examining, while acknowledging debates over what constitutes fiction, lies in its phenomenal popularity. Lawson Glassop is best known as a war novelist though his soldiers show few of the radical characteristics that are evident in Lambert's works. Since the First World War the soldier had emerged as a key figure in attempts to understand the nature of Australian society. The need to find some anchorage in a warrior past is not hard to explain in the Australian context. In the Australian literature of the Second World War, the battle to maintain respectable usage in the face of the obscenities of war was a constant problem. War dichotomises; it creates 'others', to use a term introduced by anthropologists to identify anyone construed as foreign, and enemies.
