Reproduction of the original: Australia in Arms by Phillip F.E. Schuler

At dawn on 1 November 1914, HMAT Orvieto, flagship of the First AIF convoy, embarked from Albany to begin the long voyage to the desert training camps of Egypt and the carnage that lay in wait in the Dardanelles and on the Western Front. Aboard was a twenty-four-year-old reporter on special assignment for the Age."The coast faded to a dim blue, more distant once the sun rose over the hills, but soon vanished over the swelling horizon," he wrote of that moment. "It was the last link with the homeland, and who knew how many would see those shores again."Unlike thousands of the men he followed to the camps at Mena, in the shadows of the pyramids, and into the trenches at Gallipoli, Phillip Schuler would return briefly to his home in Lisson Grove, Hawthorn. But by June 1917 he, too, would be dead - cut to pieces by a stray salvo on a battlefield in Belgium.Yet between the stirring departure from Albany and the horrors of Flanders, Schuler was to assemble an extraordinary body of work in words and pictures that would distinguish him as one of the greatest Australian war correspondents.But it was Schuler's evocative and compassionate dispatches from Gallipoli that most eloquently captured the horror and the heroism for Australian newspaper readers, and it was those dispatches that first revealed the scandalous neglect and mistreatment of wounded Australian soldiers during the early weeks. It was Schuler's 1916 book, Australia in Arms, that gave the first full account of Australia's role in the Dardanelles campaign. And it was Schuler the amateur photographer whose hundreds of images from Egypt and Gallipoli remain our most precious pictorial archive of the era.

The author of this book, Phillip Schuler was one of Australia's key First World War correspondents. He was both a soldier and a journalist. His legacy was Australia in Arms, an extraordinary and evocative account of the Australian Imperial Force and their achievements, and the first complete published account of Australia's role in the Dardanelles campaign.

The whole Allied front was barely four miles, swept by a terrible inferno of shells. The air was filled with the white woolly clouds that the Anzac men—old soldiers now—knew meant a hail of lead. Published soon after the evacuation from Gallipoli, Australia in Arms is a vital early account of the Dardanelles campaign. The young journalist Philip Schuler, later killed in battle, witnessed ‘the whole of the August offensive from...trenches at Lone Pine’. He saw the valour of the Anzacs, and recognised too the strength of their Turkish opponents. Vivid and incisive, his book is one of the great achievements of Australian military writing. Phillip Schuler, born in Melbourne in 1889, is one of Australia’s most significant World War I reporters. The son of the editor of the Age, he volunteered in 1914 to sail to Egypt as the newspaper’s war correspondent. In 1915 he travelled to Turkey, where he was embedded with Anzac soldiers. Written on Schuler’s return home, Australia in Arms was the first full-length account of the Australian Imperial Force’s Gallipoli offensive. By the time it was published, in early 1916, Phillip Schuler had enlisted with the AIF. He died in 1917 of injuries sustained in the Battle of Messines. ‘The best and fullest story yet of the whole Anzac campaign.’ General Sir John Monash ‘Remarkably fresh, compelling and dispassionate.’ Mark Baker

Since the end of their involvement in the Vietnam War, the Australian Army has been modernized in every respect. After peacekeeping duties in South-East Asia, Africa and the Middle East in the 1980s–90s, 'Diggers' were sent to safeguard the newly independent East Timor from Indonesian harassment in 1999, and to provide long-term protection and mentoring since 2006. Australian Army units have served in the US-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Australian Special Forces are currently operating alongside US and British elements against ISIS in northern Iraq. During these campaigns the Australian SAS Regiment and Commandos have fully matured into 'Tier 1' assets, internationally recognized for their wide range of capabilities. The book, written by an Australian author who has written extensively about modern warfare, traces the development of the Army's organization, combat uniforms, load-bearing equipment, small arms and major weapon systems using specially commissioned artwork and photographs.