Peter FitzSimons - Breaker Morant: The Epic Story of the Boer War and Harry Breaker Morant - Drover, Horseman, Bush Poet - Murderer or Hero?

To my late grandfather, Trooper Frederick Harper Booth, No. 128 of the 2nd Victorian Mounted Rifles. No less than 120 years on, I hope this book does justice to encapsulate the truth: the good, the bad and the ugly of both your experience and that of those you fought with and against.

Throughout

War correspondent, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Great Boer War

Breaker Morant was one of the type the Colonies used to know well years ago the family neer-do-well, sent out here to steady down or go to the devil. The life of the bush exactly suited him; its freedom and unconventionality appealed to the wild, indomitable spirit he inherited from his Irish forebears. He feared neither God nor man, acknowledged no authority, and reckoned that his passions were given him to be gratified. Generous to a fault and lenient to other mens failings, he would lend his last shilling and screen the veriest outlaw.

Wilhelmina (Mina) Rawson, author, columnist and friend of Breaker Morant

I t was on a May day in 2017 that I journeyed to Canberra for the unveiling of the beautifully conceived and executed National Boer War Memorial.

I had voted in favour of its construction when Id served on the Council of the Australian War Memorial, and had a personal connection. On that Wednesday morning, approaching the newly finished memorial, just a couple of minutes walk down the boulevard from the Australian War Memorial itself, I was immediately impressed. The essence of the memorial is the larger-than-life bronze statues of four mounted Australian soldiers, on patrol. At the base are a series of bronze plaques, with the moving extracts from the letters of a soldier of the 2nd Victorian Mounted Rifles to his mother.

At the Sand River we had a terrible fight. The Boers had blown up the bridge and when we crossed they opened fire. The Boers have some very good guns and they make good use of them. We had to fight all day. It was a terrible strain when the shells are screaming amongst you and burst We ride company behind company and if we bunched up at all there would be terrible slaughter everyone admits how terrible artillery fire is, yet no one attempts to move till he is told and no matter how good your horse, you never move to get cover any quicker than the regiment, such is British discipline.

Those words sounded a little familiar

I looked closer.

Goodness! They were from my grandfather, Trooper Frederick Harper Booth, to my great-grandmother, Maria Sofia Craigie McPherson Dunn Booth.

Grandpa, who lived to the age of 94 and who we all adored, never forgot the horror of the Boer War and when, in 1967, my brother Andrew turned up at his house after cadet parade still in khaki uniform, Grandpa burst into tears at the memory of other fine young men, dressed like him, who never returned to Australian shores. He would have been most honoured to have such words as these preserved in bronze. But, once again, it prompted another brother, James, to say to me, It is your family duty to write a book on the Boer War.

I had always resisted on the grounds that the Boer War was an Imperial war, and while the Australians may have been on the winning side of the conflict, I was never comfortable with a war that was essentially white fellas battling over black fellas land.

Nevertheless, the more I learnt, the more I came to realise that, horror aside, the Boer War was a foundational conflict in Australian military history and the characters at play were undeniably fascinating, none more than Breaker Morant himself. It also linked nicely with an extraordinary Boer War battle at a place called Elands River Id heard about many years ago from a history buff by the name of Phil Hore the first time I realised just how remarkable some of the events in the Boer War were from an Australian perspective.

A further encouragement to do the book was that my researcher and cousin, Angus FitzSimons, proved to be a long-time aficionado of the Breaker Morant story, and was already familiar with the minutiae of the saga, and not just with all the conspiracy theories that abound around it

Even more usefully, he had some strong theories of his own and successfully insisted that this was the book for me. As ever, I owe his work across the board a great debt, even though on a couple of issues dont get me started we came to different conclusions! Nevertheless, I could always draw on his intellect and insights, and his passion for the story, which helped breathe life into every page. With his pure pedigree law degree from the University of Sydney, he also understood many of the esoteric details of the legal aspects of this story that defied me.

As to the rest of my team of researchers down Bunbury way in WA, Barb Kelly trawled as mightily as ever through every document she could get her digital hands on to bring precious and often previously unrevealed detail to the account. She, too, became wonderfully obsessed with the story Breaker does that to you and was at her strongest in sifting through endless layers of legend and lies to get down to what actually happened. On three aspects she was able to blow away what had been long-accepted fact, and show me it simply wasnt true. As with my books on Catalpa and Captain Cook, both her son Lachlan and my son Jake were able to lend valuable assistance throughout. I wont spoil the story here by revealing the details, but when it came to a particular endlessly repeated myth concerning what Breaker Morant and his friend Captain Percy Hunt were doing between late 1900 and early 1901, Lachlan was also able to definitively prove it never happened that way by coming up with facsimiles of original documentation thus ending a century-long fallacy, started by Breaker Morant himself. (I might note, in passing, how extraordinarily powerful those myths were. I work with the best researchers in the business, and I have never worked on a project where they disagreed more, often with passion, over what happened. It was, nevertheless, through that intellectual jousting that previously hidden truths were teased out. We finished as happy Vegemites because the final, last layer of documentation generally proved it definitively, but it was a long process to trace the byzantine deceptions of the Breaker.)

My warm thanks also to Dr Peter Williams, the Canberra military historian who first started working with me on my book on Gallipoli, and has stayed with me thereafter. He, too less surprisingly was a devotee of the Breaker story, and an expert on the Boer War. Time and again his four decades of learning in the field of Australian military history made this book stronger, not the least of which was his ability to instantly call in other experts.

On that subject, I offer my thanks once again to Colonel Renfrey Pearson for finding rare documents in archives in the United Kingdom, and Gregory Blake for his expert advice on all things to do with the weapons of the time. In South Africa, I thank Audrey Portman, Lourens Etchell and most particularly Charles Leach. In Australia, the expertise of Robin Droogleever and Nigel Webster was greatly appreciated.

As ever, and as I always recount at the beginning of my historical writing, I have tried to bring the story part of this history alive, by putting it in the present tense, and constructing it in the manner of a novel, albeit with 2000 footnotes, give or take, as the pinpoint pillars on which the story rests. For the sake of the storytelling, I have occasionally created a direct quote from reported speech in a journal, diary or letter, and changed pronouns and tenses to put that reported speech in the present tense. When the story required generic language as in the words used when commanding movements in battle, I have taken the liberty of using that dialogue, to help bring the story to life.