Life So Full of Promise: Further Biographies of Australia’s Lost Generation

Acclaimed historian and biographer Ross McMullin has again combined prodigious research and narrative flair in this sequel to Farewell, Dear People, the winner of multiple awards including the Prime Minister’s Prize for Australian History.

Life So Full of Promise, his second multi-biography about Australia’s lost generation of World War I, features a collection of inter-woven stories set in that defining era. There are extended biographies of the main characters, and their families and friends are also conspicuous in the narratives.

The rich cast includes a talented barrister whose outstanding leadership enabled a momentous Australian victory; an eminent newspaper editor who kept his community informed about the war while his sons were in the trenches; an energetic soldiers’ mother who became a political activist and a Red Cross dynamo; an admired farmer whose unit was rushed to the rescue in the climax of the conflict; the close sisters from Melbourne who found their lives transformed;

a popular officer who was more fervently mourned than any other Australian casualty; and a bohemian Scandinavian blonde who disrupted one of Sydney’s best-known families.

A feature of the book is its coverage of cricket and cricketers of the era. It reveals the untold story of an enthusiastic all-rounder who was chosen in an Australian national team to tour England, but did not go — and for an intriguing reason. There is also a superb biography of a brilliant yet practically unknown cricketer whose stunning feat has never been matched. Other prominent characters include the most versatile top-level sportsman Australia has ever known, and a Test prospect whose violent postwar death shocked the nation.

The storytelling is superlative, illuminating and profoundly moving.

Read the Preface Read praise for the book

The book has won The Age Book of the Year Award for nonfiction

Available in:

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Paperback: $49.99

Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Available in: Paperback, Amazon Kindle, Apple iBook
ISBN: 9781922585820
Published: April 18, 2023

**Doch took this photo of Margot to Gallipoli, and it was still in Doch’s little wartime case when Ross discovered it a hundred years later**

Praise for Life So Full of Promise: Further Biographies of
Australia’s Lost Generation

Life So Full of Promise is a “painstakingly researched and profoundly empathetic micro-history” that shows “how the full human cost of war goes far beyond those lives lost in violent conflict and the people immediately affected who are closest to them … in the hands of a leading historian, aspects of a nation’s history assumed to be familiar may yield new and deeper insights that help to explain the world we live in today”
The judges award The Age Book of the Year Award for nonfiction to Life So Full of Promise

Ross McMullin is one of Australia’s leading historians. This book shows his skills in so many different ways. He shows himself to be a sympathetic and skilled sports historian. He is also a skilled social historian dealing adeptly with the complexities of family, of community, of love, of boys growing to maturity, of all the arrangements of Australian society in the early years of the twentieth century.

He also writes so well about battle, one of the hardest challenges a writer can face … His account of the battle for Pozieres ridge where Doch Mackay died is a wonderfully clear account of a battle that was so dreadfully confused and profoundly difficult to step through …

Long though this book is, reading it will repay the effort in spades. Readers will appreciate the prodigious research which underlines it. They will marvel at McMullin’s skill as a writer … Not only was the nation denied its potential leaders — parents, wives and girlfriends were denied those around whom their lives revolved …

Life So Full of Promise is Australian history at its very best.
Michael McKernan

Ross McMullin has delivered an incredible book, which explores the lives of three extraordinary and talented young men, all with enormous potential … McMullin manages to inject family, social, sport, political and war histories into the mix, which not only makes the work interesting, but is done in such a way that it is an easy read. …

Excellently written, [the book draws] the reader … into the lives and dynamics of each man’s family. There are accounts of maiden aunts and their roles within the family and community. We see the three mothers who could not have been more different. …

What happens to each of these families in the aftermath is just as compelling. This book is all substance and detail, probably the most engaging book I have read. Highly recommended.
Lesley Smith
The Yorker, journal of the Melbourne Cricket Club

What makes this book truly remarkable as a multi-biography is that McMullin goes beyond retelling the three young men’s lives. He interweaves stories about their families, peers and communities, and the legacy of grief and loss felt in Australia during and after the First World War. Life So Full of Promise also features some swashbuckling writing about cricket and how the great game was played in town and city in early twentieth century Australia.

McMullin makes an important contribution to our knowledge of this little-known campaign [in New Guinea]. Pockley’s sudden death in one of the backwaters of the war was widely mourned by a public hungry for war heroes … What is so affecting about this book is the way in which McMullin painstakingly details the promise of each young man and the scale and commitment of kin, peers and institutions that nurtured their talent, only to see it eviscerated by war. …

Those who are willing to stay at the crease and watch the ball out of McMullin’s hand are likely to be richly rewarded with a deep reading experience … McMullin should be congratulated for having the courage to write such a densely packed narrative with the prose to match its noble themes. If one were merely to glance at this book on the shelf, they might easily misinterpret it to be simply a collection of biographies of Australian soldiers. It offers much more than that – it is a multi-biography of family and networks of people who nurture and support their young. It is also a multi-history of early twentieth century Australia spanning the country and the city – the working class and the ruling class. It is a pitch report on the wickets and the dusty tracks on which young gladiators armed with a willow bat and ball encased in leather strove to assert their status.
Dr Lucas Jordan
The Sydney Papers Online

This long-anticipated sequel to Ross McMullin’s award-winning book, Farewell, Dear People, has been well worth the wait. Meticulously researched and sensitively written, [it features] a tour de force family biographical study, a rare feat in biography genre … The tender love affair played out between Doch and his war bride, Margot, [is] sensitively told … I defy anyone to read Doch’s letter from ‘beyond the grave’ and still have dry eyes! … Ross weaves these so personal letters, military despatches, contemporaries’ reminiscences, and Charles Bean’s account of Doch deftly together to make readers understand that this young Bendigonian was a prime example of a man ‘of remarkable attributes and lost future’.
Michele Matthews
Pharos

Ross McMullin’s Life So Full of Promise is an impressive achievement, and a moving portrait of a generation lost to war. A sequel to his acclaimed Farewell, Dear People, it is a prodigiously researched multi-biography of those affected by the First World War. Through the stories of everyday people, McMullin constructs a fascinating social history of early 20th century Australia, as well as a moving account of the horrors of war. It contains a mass of detail, all of which is compellingly conveyed by McMullin’s lucid and engaging narrative style to very good effect. A major contribution to our understanding of Australia’s past.
Jeff Popple
Canberra Weekly

His scholarship is impeccable, he writes like an angel … and his narrative gift is Blaineyesque.
Barry Jones
The Age

Ross McMullin’s account of those who fought in World War I is a masterpiece of storytelling, weaving family, community, sporting and military history into a satisfying whole … The contrast in family background between Pockley and Callaway is stressed in a paragraph which offers an echo of Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities … Life So Full of Promise is a magnificent testament to the sufferings of an age.
Bernard Whimpress
The Newtown Review of Books

McMullin’s deep and wide-ranging research, together with his ability as a storyteller, ensures his prose sings. We experience on a sensory level Doch Mackay’s trudge through the apocalyptic landscape of the Somme. We also experience Norman Callaway’s early life in the evocation here of prewar Hay. McMullin’s expertise as a district cricketer aids in the clear reconstruction of the matches of entire cricket seasons in passages that devotees of the game’s rich history will find particularly fascinating.

McMullin is deft in handling a large cast [and] very effective in providing nuance to our understanding of, for example, reasons for enlistment, and he is especially good at laying bare searing emotional pain … Ultimately, the great power of this work lies in its revelation, at an individual level, of the terrible and profound waste of war. It is a message as relevant today as it was a hundred years ago: lives so full of promise are still being lost in conflicts around the globe.
Dr Janet Butler
Victorian Historical Journal

McMullin charts these three lives and deaths and their aftermath with extraordinary care and sensitivity. He reconstructs the social and political worlds that each inhabited through detailed descriptions of relationships, passions, and events … The reconstruction of their lives sheds light not just on their special qualities but on so many other aspects of Australian history, from rural development to private education, the role of professions, industrial conflict, politics, religion, and sport. [The] biographies necessarily feature important insights into the role of women in peacetime families and communities as well as during the war … Ross McMullin is to be commended on another impressive contribution to Australian social history.
Raelene Frances
Australian Book Review

Ross McMullin also has a flair for storytelling, and his narrative is of the highest standard … Life So Full of Promise is an excellent book, [suitable for] anyone with an interest in the Golden Age of cricket, certainly in relation to Australia. There is much on the way the game was played and organised in that era at all levels. Those with an interest in military history will enjoy the book as well … Those interested in social history will find the book an interesting read, as well as those with an interest in Australian history up to and including the Great War. For anyone with more than a passing interest in all of those subjects it is an essential purchase.
Martin Chandler
Cricketweb

We follow the three subjects’ ancestry, their life and careers prior to their enlistment, their war experience, and the reaction of their families and the wider community to their deaths. The research underpinning each of these topics is prodigious. As we would expect from McMullin’s early books … the writing is crisp, eminently readable and deeply sympathetic.

McMullin documents graphically the deep, and lasting, emotional connections that bound the men who went to fight and their families and communities they left behind. The case of Mackay is especially poignant because his correspondence with his adored young wife survived — and is extensively cited. It includes the letter he wrote to her in anticipation of his death … The message of this book remains powerful.
Professor Joan Beaumont
Australian Historical Studies

What is wonderful about Life So Full of Promise is that Ross McMullin quietly, but with the surety of thorough research, builds a sense of intimacy and connectivity … It’s a peculiar feeling when your own family stories, received as passing remarks or oral fragments, are assembled into a coherent narrative set against nation-building forces … Ross McMullin integrates intimate family dynamics with the wider forces of nation-building that flowed over and through people who are so cleverly drawn that they become us all.
Simon Pockley
Goodreads

There has been an enormous amount of research done in bringing these stories to life, and yet McMullin writes with remarkable style and clarity. With a storyteller’s gift he takes the reader from the homes, schools, sporting clubs and workplaces of Australia to the frontlines in German New Guinea, Gallipoli and the Western Front and back again … Ross McMullin has done an admirable job of resurrecting these Australian lives, recognising the contribution they had and could have made.
Jack Francis
Good Reading Magazine