Dust to Mud second edition launched at Crookwell Library

The book is a composition of letters sent home, photographs and diaries from WWI soldiers who lived in the Upper Lachlan Shire.

It includes the stories such as that of soldier George McDonald, who took his horse with him into battle. For McDonald, the worst part of the entire war was having to put the horse down.

“There’s nothing glorious about this book,” Cr Kensit said.

“It talks about VD, desertion, going AWOL; it talks about all the things these boys did. They chanced everything because there may be no tomorrow.

“The story I wanted to tell the people left behind what was going on at the front and what the boys were doing: enlisting, suffering and being killed.

“The lads went together, but the reality hit when one of the boys was killed.

“These are the people who make up the backbone of the country.”

Although Dust to Mud is a collection of stories from the Upper Lachlan, it would have been the same for any region, Cr Kensit said.

The book started from the letters that were kept by the Kensit family. This progressed to other local families, including the Gays, Wheelwrights and Kellys, Cr Kensit said.

This would eventually lead to Mrs Kensit’s diaries, 1899-1926. “Every single day her sons were away at the war, she wrote their names down,” Cr Kensit said.

And then to Frank Willis’ never before published negatives from Egypt. “Frank Willis came from Cloverleigh... his photographs are a brilliant ordinary on the ground troopers record of his time in Egypt,” Cr Kensit said.

Kevin King, president of the Crookwell RSL Sub-Branch, praised the book. “It is one of the most informative books I’ve ever read on war, the painstaking effort and concentration, and everything she put into it is wonderful,” he said. “It took her 16 years to do it, and it was 16 years well spent.”