Media Release

Wednesday, 8 March 2000

FEDERAL Opposition leader Kim Beazley is making a special visit to Adelaide on Thursday, 9 March, to launch a new book on World War One.

The First World War has been written by Adelaide University Professor Emeritus Trevor Wilson and Adelaide University graduate Robin Prior, now Associate Professor and Head of the School of History at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra.

The book is part of The Cassell History of Warfare series, a multi-volume history of war and warfare from ancient to modern times.

Mr Beazley is making a flying visit to Adelaide solely for the purpose of launching the book, having read and enjoyed a previous war book by Professors Wilson and Prior titled Passchendaele: the Untold Story.

Adelaide University itself has strong connections to World War One: more than 500 staff and students fought in the war, with the first South Australian to be awarded the Victoria Cross, Captain A.S. Blackburn, being a Law graduate.

Nobel Prize winner William Lawrence Bragg's work on the technique known as sound-ranging during World War One saw him awarded an OBE.

Sound ranging was used to locate enemy guns from the sound of their firing, with Bragg helping to develop a microphone which distinguished between the report of a gun and the shockwave of the shell.

Bragg learnt of his 1915 Nobel Prize while he was setting up a sound-ranging station near Ypres in November 1916.

Where: Mitchell Building foyer, University of Adelaide.
When: 5.45pm-7pm on Thursday, 9 March.