ISSUE 182 : Jul/Aug - 2010 - Australian Defence Force Journal

There is also a chapter on early volunteer military service, using the experiences of PercyFaithfull as a means to describe what it meant to be a part of a volunteer unit in Australia. Thischapter includes a detailed description of the transition through various colours and stylesof volunteer uniforms, including how red coats waxed and waned in favour, depending—according to Wilcox—on the degree to which Australia dreamed of the appropriateness ofthe red coat as an expression of its links back to Britain and of professional military service.Australia’s experimentation and attachment to red coats finally ended with the just-in-timeissue (because of a shoddy initial introduction in 1912) of khaki coats and slouch hats to theAIF before its departure to Gallipoli.Wilcox also provides a chapter on Spicer Cookworthy, who purchased a commission andgarrisoned with the Royal Scots in Ireland before being sent to Crimea to experience most ofthe campaign. Wilcox uses Cookworthy’s story to provide a wider social commentary on thedevelopment and changes to Australian attitudes to combat and distant military campaigns.Wilcox also provides details of how battles, such as Waterloo, shaped Australian placenames,including Wellington, Alma and Salamanca. This approach forms the basis of much of Red CoatDreaming, with each chapter a self-contained vignette being used as a specific, sometimeshighly-constrained example in order to demonstrate a wider social and historical context.Because Wilcox has explored his themes along specific lines, the book’s chapters are notstrictly chronological, with some overlap of historical context and events. However, Wilcox inthe most part avoids repetition and so, while having historical placeholders such as Rorke’sDrift and the Crimean war presented a number of times, the context in which such placeholdersare used is different, if only subtly so.Wilcox provides the reader with a proposal of how colonial Australia embraced the BritishArmy and its red coat as its symbol and that this ‘Red Coat Dreaming’ was only eventuallysupplanted as a result of the ‘mythicising’ of Australia’s military following World War 1. Inparticular, that the forge of Gallipoli was an event that reinforced the Australian character toourselves at a time when the British Empire was collapsing and so it has become such a vitalpart of the cultural self-evaluation that reduced Australia’s preoccupation with the role playedby its red-coated military predecessors.103