Charles Bean wrote the first two volumes of Australia's official World War I history at a place of healing and picturesque diversion he chose over Yarralumla, a historian said on Friday.
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Jenny Horsfield said the journalist who had spent eight months in Gallipoli and four years with the Australian soldiers embraced the rural setting at Tuggeranong Homestead as a home for himself and his small staff.
"The property was remote enough from big settlements to make unwelcome interruptions unlikely, well-served by the railway connection fo Goulburn, and there were regular postal deliveries from Queanbeyan," she said.
"Bean found the clear views of the distant Brindabella Mountains uplifting to the spirit but also distracting when he was working; he moved his study to a room with a different view."
Ms Horsfield was one of the historians and scholars gathered at the University of NSW Australian Defence Force Academy campus on Friday as part of a unique two-day conference to honour the nation's most influential war correspondent. Bean spent nearly five years at Tuggeranong before moving on doctor's advice to the warmer climate of Sydney in 1924.
Professor Tom Frame said it was 100 years ago this weekend when Bean had the vision for what became the Australian War Memorial, and his legacy for Australian history remained strong.
"What people are seeing in the Memorial bears to Bean's egalitarian approach to history, our approach is a story not of great men, but of ordinary men and their struggles," he said.
"His prose is probably as widely quoted as any Australian writer, and he always keeps the audience in mind."
The conference included the first public performance of award-winning composer and pianist Ian Munro's commissioned composition which unites Bean's 1915 poem Non Nobis – an affirmation the randomness of death in battle must have some purpose – with some melodies from the war period and the original Latin prayer of the same name.
"There were probably about 200 people in the room and I got a lot of positive feedback," Mr Munro said.
Peter Rees, the journalist who wrote Anzac Girls, told the conference crowd Bean was "quiet, modest and introverted" and saw himself as one of the troops' friends, later writing 10,000 letters to returned soldiers to get their war memories.
Mr Rees said Bean knew he had to toe the line when filing articles from the battlefield, including after disasters such as at Fromelles. "He was appalled by the disaster, and wanted to get the essence of what happened back to Australia, but he knew he couldn't write it as you would see it today in sensational terms – '5500 Australians killed or wounded' – he knew he had to play the system," he said.
