Dr Don Longo: Rural SA and The Great War: the case of Yorke Peninsula

Dr Don Longo presents a rural South Australian perspective on the First World War through the experiences of a young soldier from Koolywurtie, Yorke Peninsula. Australian iconography of the 'Great War' privileges the volunteer from rural communities, the ordinary boy from the farm caught up in extraordinary, and frequently violent and tragic, events. The official historian of the War, CEW Bean, puts ‘rural values’ at the heart of the Australian digger. Yet until recently historians have rarely explored the war experience of rural communities, at home or at the front. Was it for them really ‘a different war’, as historian Michael McKernan has claimed? If so, how was it ‘different’? And were there variations in this experience among members of the one regional community? These issues are explored through the example of South Australia’s’s Yorke Peninsula using the battlefront experience recorded in the diary, letters and other memorabilia of Pte Sidney King, a young soldier from Koolywurtie (near Minlaton) who was a stretcher bearer on the Western Front; and the patriotic response at home reflected in the Peninsula’s newspapers. Both sources provide unique, sometimes dissonant, but always interesting insights into the question. Dr Don Longo is a graduate in History from the University of Adelaide (1980) and the Université de Paris VIII (1985). Don worked at Adelaide University from 1985 until his retirement in 2009, working mostly in management, but also in developing languages and multicultural policy for tertiary education. He has written on twentieth century French history, Australian immigration since the 1920s and the First World War. He is currently researching the history of rural South Australia through the settlement and growth of Yorke Peninsula as ‘the granary of South Australia’, and has concurrently begun a biography of Raffaello Carboni (of the Eureka Stockade). He also does part-time teaching in History at Adelaide University. In 2015, in collaboration with the Ardrossan RSL and with support from Federal and State Anzac grants, he published ‘The Ties that Bind: Southern Yorke Peninsula and the Great War 1914-1919', the War Diary and Letters of Sidney P King, of Koolywurtie. Don’s wife Lyn (née Klopp) is from Maitland and is related to King’s descendants. The latter, Sandra and Robert Klopp, are active members of the Ardrossan RSL and have lovingly preserved the King family’s documents and memorabilia from the Great War which form the basis of the book.