It's a book that calls into question one of the most cherished aspects of our national identity - the Anzac legend.
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But judges for one of the country's top history prizes described Canberra historian Peter Stanley's work as a ''salutary corrective to the romanticisation of the digger''.
![Dirty diggers: prized book corrects record Dirty diggers: prized book corrects record](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/silverstone-ct-migration/5262fefb-340e-4a69-b669-73e345c32926.jpg/r0_0_729_431_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Dr Stanley, who was flabbergasted to be named the joint winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History on Tuesday, alongside fellow historian Jim Davidson, said the positive response to his controversial work, published last year, meant that Australians were more willing to question aspects of accepted history.
The book, entitled Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Great War, shows that while many of the soldiers who fought in World WarI were the fine, upstanding men who endure in the public imagination, many others drank too much, contracted sexually transmitted diseases, stole from civilians and other soldiers, raped and murdered.
Dr Stanley, who heads the National Museum's Centre for Historical Research, told The Canberra Times yesterday that the aim of the book was not to sensationalise, but rather to understand some of these men's actions. ''The thing is that these offences come from different causes. Some are because men are men. Some are because they're young men under extraordinary stress, men who believed they were going to die in the next battle. Sometimes it's because they were Australian men of the early 20th century - they behave in ways that men today don't necessarily behave,'' he said. ''I want it to be seen as a book that's actually very sympathetic to these men ... The epigraph of the book is 'to know all is to forgive all', and I think that's a really important part of our attitude towards people in human history - you have to understand them.''
He will share the $80,000 prize with Professor Davidson, who won for his biography of renowned historian W.K.Hancock.
''It's not the Nobel Prize, but history doesn't need a lot of money. You need travel money and you need research money, but you don't need expensive equipment. You can do a lot with relatively little,'' Dr Stanley said.
The winners were selected from a field of more than 110 entries - a heartening figure, DrStanley said, in a time when the publishing industry is supposedly in crisis.
''Australian publishers have got behind Australian history, and that's something, [when] too often we focus on overseas books and the crisis that publishing is in,'' he said. ''The diversity and quality of the awards was heartening, because when you go to book launches and seminars and conferences, a lot of the talk is about how hard it is to get published and how e-books are taking over. Well, here is a terrific example that showed that traditional book publishing is strongly supported.''
+Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny and Murder in the Great War, by Peter Stanley, is published by Murdoch Books.