John Monash: a biography
ISBN: 9780522850161
Platform/Publisher: ACLS / Melbourne University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Ten pages at a time; Download: Ten pages at a time
Subjects: Australasian/ Oceanian;

A major Australian university and a great Victorian freeway are named after Sir John Monash, but many people-especially younger generations-know little about him.



Monash was one of Australia's greatest men, and probably the greatest of its soldiers. The son of Jewish immigrants from Prussia, he graduated from the University of Melbourne in three faculties-Arts, Law and Engineering. He was a man of wide-ranging intellect, and especially devoted to literature, music, theatre, languages and Jewish scholarship.



He achieved fame as a soldier-a citizen-soldier-in World War I. His baptism of fire occurred at Gallipoli, and he was almost the only senior allied general to emerge from the agony of the Western Front with his reputation virtually unspotted.



Before the war, Monash pioneered the Australian use of reinforced concrete, then a revolutionary construction material. On his return, he became the first chairman of the State Electricity Commission of Victoria, putting his gift for leadership to harnessing Gippsland's huge brown coal deposits. Monash spent his energies lavishly on the public affairs of his native Australia and placed his immense prestige at the service of many great causes.



Geoffrey Serle's award-winning and best-selling biography of John Monash is much more than a military study. It offers a revealing portrait of a confident leader and public figure, and of an intensely inward-dwelling and sensitive private person.

" Geoffrey Serle was one of Australia's most distinguished historians. He won a Rhodes Scholarship in 1947 and completed his doctorate at Oxford University. From 1955 to 1963 he taught in the Department of History at the University of Melbourne, where he edited Historical Studies. He became Reader in History at Monash University, and was later a Professorial Fellow at the Australian National University. He was General Editor of several volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and his influential books include The Golden Age , The Rush to be Rich and Robin Boyd- A Life . Dr Serle died in 1998."

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