Dr. Aaron Pegram

Dr. Aaron Pegram is a senior historian in the Military History Section at the Australian War Memorial. Aaron has published on the First World War and other areas of military history in Wartime, The Journal of the Western Front Association as well as the Journal of First World War Studies. He is the recipient of an Australian Army History Unit Research Grant, and editor of both William Cull’s record of captivity, Both Sides of the Wire: the memoir of an Australian officer captured in the Great War (Allen & Unwin, 2011) and Beyond Surrender: Australian Prisoners of War in the Twentieth Century with Joan Beaumont and Lachlan Grant (Melbourne University Press, 2015). Aaron is an Honours graduate from Charles Sturt University, and in 2017, completed a PhD at the Australian National University on Australian prisoner of war in Germany in the First World War.

To many Australians, the narrative of the First World War is well known. The stories from Gallipoli, France and Belgium are told and retold and photos from Egypt, Turkey, and the Western Front have become so iconic, they are used to sum up the Australian experience during the Great War. In all, 61,514 Australians were killed in the First World War (4 August, 1914 – 21 March 1921), how then can one photo be used to describe the experience these men and women faced?

Military historian, Dr. Aaron Pegram, explores the experience of Australian men and women across the 4 year conflict.

Gallipoli, the most recognisable theatre of battle for Australian troops in the First World War. Lauded as Australia's "baptism of fire", but what were conditions really like and does the traditional narrative match the facts as told by first hand accounts.

Dr. Pegram follows the journey of Sir Keith Murdoch through Gallipoli and his writing of his infamous "Gallipoli Letter"