On 6 September 2026, acclaimed journalist and author Chris Masters delivered the 6th CEW Bean lecture, titled 'CEW Bean, the AWM and BRS VC, MG'.
Welcoming us, the Chair of Minders of Tuggeranong Homestead, Jenny Horsfield, explained the background to the lecture series and the links with the property where Bean worked for many years on the First World War official history. She also reprised the saga behind this year’s event, summarised by the Sydney Morning Herald headline 'Invited, uninvited, reinvited'. Following initial fears the author and topic would undermine Tuggeranong Homestead’s relations with the Australian War Memorial, the lecture was held at the nearby St Mary MacKillop College.
Masters’ lecture was worth waiting for: an impressive synthesis linking the three themes in the lecture title. Appropriately, he was introduced by Peter Rees, a Bean biographer and inaugural CEW Bean lecturer.
One hopes the entire lecture script will be made publicly available. In summary, Masters argued that two things needed a reset.
One was soldierly mateship, too often corrupted and exploited when one is loyal to 'personality not principle', when to say someone has your back means they’ll lie to protect you. Masters said ideas of mateship had deeply affected those who took sides for and against Ben Roberts-Smith, noting that Andrew Hastie MP was 'still suffering' for the stand he took. A related instance was the behaviour of an SAS veteran, Scott Jones, who, when attending the opening of a War Memorial exhibition, was photographed giving the middle finger to the (veteran) wife of a veteran because her husband had given evidence against BRS, the photo subsequently being reproduced in The Australian.
The second thing in need of a reset was the War Memorial itself, in particular the way it had used 'weasel words' to represent BRS, a 'perfect posterboy', particularly under the leadership of former Memorial Council Chair (and Roberts-Smith's employer), Kerry Stokes and 'chief cheerleader', Brendan Nelson, Memorial Director then himself Council Chair.
To Masters, the War Memorial’s identity was split between, as he put it, the historians in the backrooms and the tourist bean-counters out front. It was no longer the institution envisioned by Bean, who certainly helped define and promote the Anzac legend, yet knew the ordinary soldier shunned skiting.
Masters was also scathing about the complicity of politicians including Defence Ministers and, from his own experience as an embedded war correspondent, said the blown-up image of the Anzac 'offended soldiers'.
Masters confessed he too was something of a 'captive of Anzac', that he had great respect for the ordinary Australian Defence Force member - adding several telling incidents from East Timor - and that he was anti-war, not anti-soldier. Equally, he greatly admired Charles Bean, despite his limiting cultural background, for his writing and truth-telling ethic. Bean was a 'good citizen' and a 'good public servant'.
Finally, on Australia’s involvement in Afghanistan, Masters left us in no doubt what he thought, noting our US ties underpinning our initial involvement and very late withdrawal. The country needed, but never did see, a 'non-kinetic army', that is, one built around cyber and electronic warfare. He deplored enemy casualty body counts as a measure of success (a 'confused metric'), agreed the Australian SAS was overused and that senior command and Defence ministers were culpable. Finally, he argued the allocation of some awards for valour were questionable, and what was often lacking was the 'courage of restraint'.
In short, it was a thoughtful, thought-provoking lecture worthy of the name it memorialised.
*Michael Piggott AM, archivist and historian, is a distinguished Supporter of Defending Country and committee member of its predecessor site, Honest History. He has been short-listed for the Anzac Memorial Trustees Military History Prize for his book New Feller Master: Beyond the Trenches; Australia's Neglected WWI Story, about the Great War in New Guinea from 1914.
For earlier articles about Masters' lecture, the non-award of his Les Carlyon Prize by the War Memorial, and Ben Roberts-Smith, use the Search engines on this website and on our predecessor site, Honest History.
Picture credit: Near Martinpuich, France, 26 February 1917, Captain CEW Bean, the Australian Official Correspondent, watching the Australian advance through a telescope (HF Baldwin/AWM).
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