My Dear Mother
Australian History Biography Military History World War I Family History War Memoir ANZAC
My Dear Mother is a deeply moving Australian biography that reconstructs one ANZAC family’s Great-War story through the eyes of Muriel Clampet. Assembled from original letters, diaries and battalion records, the book follows Muriel’s brother “Jack” from enlistment in 1914 to the Western Front and Gallipoli, while at home his mother waits for the post each day, praying the next envelope will not begin “Dear Mother, I regret to inform you…”. Clampet weaves these intimate primary sources into a fast-paced narrative that captures both the mud, gas and shell-fire of the trenches and the quiet courage of women who held farms, families and hope together 12,000 miles away. The result is a dual-front war memoir—battlefield and home-front—that fills a gap most WWI titles leave empty.
Collectors prize this hardcover first edition (ISBN 978-1-6460-9415-7) for its large-format maps, rare battalion photographs and extensive footnotes that link every soldier mentioned to his National Archives service file—an invaluable shortcut for genealogists tracing AIF ancestors. Because the book was privately printed in small numbers for regimental reunions, clean unmarked copies are scarce; the tight, unwritten-in pages and intact jacket of this copy make it an ideal gift or research copy. Keywords such as “Australian WWI letters,” “Gallipoli biography,” “ANZAC genealogy source” and “true military stories” all surface naturally in Clampet’s text, ensuring the volume ranks high in online searches by family historians and military enthusiasts alike.
Above all, My Dear Mother is a tribute that still feels urgent a century later: it restores names to the missing, records the slang and humour of the AIF before it vanished, and reminds modern readers that every casualty statistic began with a knock on a cottage door. For anyone compiling a family archive, teaching Australian history, or simply wanting a gripping, factual read that honours both the fallen and the mothers who waited, this carefully preserved hardcover delivers an emotional punch no mass-market reprint can match.
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