In this book, Garrie Hutchinson tells the moving stories of what some of our dads endured during World War II through the modern-day prism of a year of journeys to the battlefield sites in New Guinea, Borneo and Timor. He took his 78-year-old father back to New Guinea, where he served two years with a small forgotten artillery unit beyond Milne Bay at the eastern trail of New Guinea. He endured tropical disease, Japanese air raids and the sufferings inflicted on its own men by the Army.
Hutchinson walked the still-hard Kokoda Track and trekked around Wau and Salamaua, contracting malaria, which has flavoured his appreciation of what those heroic dads of 1942 went through. In Borneo, he landed at Balikpapan in the wake of an Indonesian riot and had an adventurous ride from Sandakan to Rinau on the track of the atrocious death march inflicted on Australian POWs in 1945. He visited East Timor in early 2000 and spent days on the border near Balibo with a platoon of the 5/7 RAR; our soldiers today helping repay the debts incurred by Australians in 1942.
Hutchinson travelled to make an emotional connection with the life of the generation that saved Australia. In 'Our Dad's Army' he tells these Australian stories of New Guinea, Borneo and Timor, then and now, with a memorable eye for detail and a real experience of our history.
