Abstract
This article uses a case study of Australian soldiers' personal narratives about the Anzac landing - diaries, letters, memoirs and tape recordings - to explore approaches to the use of personal testimony in war history. It aims to provide methodological advice to war historians working with life stories by focusing on five features of personal testimony: the genre and form in which a life story is narrated; the autobiographical impulse which motivates some people, in certain circumstances, to write or talk about their lives; the narrative relationship within which the story is recounted; the time of the telling; and the archival history of the text or tape
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