Voices from the Air

The ABC War Correspondents Who Told the Stories of Australians in the Second World War

By: Tony Hill

Narrated by: Chris Winter

An untold tale of Australians at war: the first ABC war correspondents and how radio broadcast from the battlefields to those at home waiting for news.

With the outbreak of the Second World War, a new breed of reporters joined the ranks of war correspondents - and through the reach and power of radio, Australians back home heard their voices and their stories shaped from the sounds of battle, out of the white noise of the ether.

Australian forces defended our long shoreline against the threat of invasion, and more than 500,000 Australians went into battle overseas. They fought on the dusty soil of the Middle East and North Africa, in the snow-topped hills of Greece, on the beaches of the Pacific and in the sweltering jungles of Malaya and New Guinea. And the first ABC war correspondents were on the front lines with them.

The story of these correspondents is a story of Australians at war and a tale of personal struggle, humour, tragedy and achievement. From Chester Wilmot's gripping accounts of the Siege of Tobruk to Dudley Leggett trekking with the diggers through the mud of the Kokoda Trail, Haydon Lennard helping to free Australian nurses from a Japanese prison camp and John Elliott's shocking death in the final campaign in Borneo, ABC correspondents shared the highs, the lows and the dangers of the front line with the troops.

Tony Hill's own experience as a foreign correspondent led him in search of the first ABC war correspondents and to a compelling and largely untold story. He is passionate about telling this story of the war, about a remarkable group of men and how they reported from the warfront - how they changed the reporting of war and how the war changed their lives.

©2016 Tony Hill; First published in English by HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Limited in 2016. This audio version produced by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers Australia Pty Limited. (P)2016 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd