Stanley exposes, with a wealth of examples drawn from court-martial files and soldiers' letters, how the war turned some men into criminals, but also how bad characters made the AIF the superb force it was. In Bad Characters military historian Peter Stanley surveys indiscipline in the Australian Imperial Force, on a spectrum ranging from bludging and dumb insolence, though malingering and shirking, to military offences going beyond the force s celebrated larrikinism. This frank history-the first book on the AIF's indiscipline-shows that it became one of the war's most effective fighting forces in spite of its record for military misbehaviour.

These were men who went absent and deserted, caught or concealed VD, got drunk and fought their comrades, who stole, malingered, behaved insolently toward officers or committed more serious offences, including rape and murder. Disney and Hollywood itself still have a long way to go when it comes to diversity, but the film has made massive progress since the original Peter Pan in 1953. In 2011, his book Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force was the joint winner of the Prime Ministers Prize for. Leading war historian Peter Stanley reveals the citizen soldiers the army regarded as its 'bad characters'. The original Peter Pan featured Tiger Lily and her Native American tribe but was otherwise all white characters. Peter Stanley is a prominent Australian military historian, who specialises in the military-social experience of war in the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Australians have celebrated the Anzacs for nearly a century-but what do we really know of what war did to them? Charles Bean, historian of the citizen soldiers of the Australian Imperial Force, wrote that its history spanned 'the good and the bad'-but so far Australians have only looked at the good.

Bad Characters by Peter Stanley