“Life So Full of Promise” at Hornsby Library

Ross spoke about Life So Full of Promise at Hornsby Library in Sydney on 18 April 2024.

Life So Full of Promise is a collection of interwoven family stories about forgotten Australians who had radiant potential. 

The rich cast includes a barrister whose leadership enabled a momentous Australian victory; a newspaper editor who kept his community informed about the war while his sons were in the trenches; a soldiers’ mother who became a political activist and a Red Cross dynamo; 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. 

It illuminates what the war was like at home and at the sharp end, providing insights into the experiences of Australians, whether they were combatants or civilians, or soldiers’ wives or parents.