Although the shadows of war had receded somewhat compared to those of the year before, there were still dark days ahead for Australia in 1943. It was the year in which Australia and its key ally, the United States, moved from the gripping struggle to defend the Southwest Pacific to the offensive.

My family, like many of the period, had its members serving in the various theatres of the war. My grandfather, Arthur Beercroft, had left home in 1941 serving in New Guinea and the Pacific Islands as a pilot officer in the airfield defence guards, and would not return home until 1945. One of his brothers, having been captured at Tobruk, was imprisoned in Italy for four years before escaping. Another brother had returned from the barren-desert carnage at Tobruk to fight in the jungles of Milne Bay and on the coast of New Guinea. The youngest brother had in 1943, at the age of just sixteen, convinced his mother to sign enlistment papers allowing him to join the Royal Australian Navy to serve on HMAS Hobart in New Guinea and beyond. Two of his sisters joined the Women’s Auxiliary in Launceston, giving their all until the war’s end. My family’s experience symbolises just one small part of how every facet of Australian life, after the nation’s ill preparedness for war, was now deeply immersed in it – overseas, on the borders and at home.