The late Graham Wilson delighted in his self-appointed role as the AIF’s myth buster. In this, his second and final
volume of Bully Beef and Balderdash, he tackles another eight popularly accepted myths, exposing the ‘Water Wizard’ of Gallipoli who saved an army, dismissing the old adage that the ‘lions of the AIF’ were led by British
‘donkeys’, debunking the Gallipoli legends of the lost sword of Eureka and ‘Abdul the Terrible’, the Sultan’s
champion marksman sent to dispose of AIF sniper Billy Sing, and unravelling a series of other long-standing
fictions. Finally, he turns his formidable forensic mind to the ‘lost’ seven minutes at The Nek, the early cessation
of the artillery barrage which led to the slaughter of the Light Horsemen immortalised in Peter Weir’s Gallipoli.
Wilson’s crusade to debunk such celebrated fictions was born of the conviction that these myths do very real
damage to the history of the AIF. To demythologise this nation’s Great War military history, he argues, is to
encourage Australians to view the AIF’s record on its own merits. Such are these merits that they do not require
any form of embellishment to shine for all time. This book is a tribute to Graham Wilson’s extraordinary passion
for truth and fact and his drive to set the historical record straight.
