I can certainly improve the book if I draw on the letters I've had offering additions, corrections and reflections. Elizabeth Willis of Museum Victoria, sending me her illuminating article on honor certificates issued to returning soldiers by local authorities during and after World War I, goes on to describe the memorial at Jeparit, Victoria. In Western Australia, Lachlan Irvine, a former national secretary of the Vietnam Veterans Association, is pleased that I have come across the Vietnam memorial in Nannup. So is the story, new to me, of the WA memorial, a chapel saved from demolition in Perth's Karrakata cemetery by Mr Irvine and comrades, and installed near memorials to earlier wars in King's Park, on a slope overlooking an area where families picnic and children play. A polished granite wall records the names of Western Australians killed in the war.
Some correspondents are sorry, and even reproachful, about omissions.
Why indeed, except that the book was already more than 500 pages long. That was also my response to the Hay War Memorial High School Ex-Students Association. They are certainly proud of their school in Hay, the only one in Australia founded as a war memorial. It was created to honor 103 men from the town and district who died in the Great War, and opened on Anzac Day 1923. I knew little about the school.