Interview with Paul Ham

Interviewer: What influence do you think a writer's background has on a history writings?

Paul Ham: Well, I think that it's a complex question because it is very difficult to quantify or qualify the extent to which a writer's past – his or her experiences in life – have driven him or her to write about a particular subject. Why is it that I wrote about Kokoda? My background? What is it about my background that informed me to write that subject? I'm not a soldier, I'm a writer. I've no experience, through my family, of the Second World War. My grandfather wasn't a soldier, he was a doctor; my father was a doctor; they didn't go to war. So you could say that I don't have any experience of the subjects that I've chosen to write about.

However, what does come through, when I think about that question, is my sense that, throughout my life, I've always felt a sense that we haven't been told the full story as a journalist and as a historian. I was just in Burma, in Myanmar, and you knew we weren't being told the full story –- we were getting told nothing of what was happening. And it’s always driven me to actually find out the full story – just that natural curiosity, an intellectual curiosity, a desire to know the truth, an educational curiosity, so that we know what happened. When I looked at Kokoda, I'd been living in England for many years, so this bears on the question: what was my experience? How did that impinge on my writing of 'Kokoda'? I was living in England for many years. I was so conscious of the way that their history impinged upon their present consciousness. Even on the terraces at a football match, they're singing songs which invoke you know Britain's at war, the Blitz, when they're playing Germany. You'd see the football hooligans bringing up the Blitz again and the Dam Busters. So, even at that most basic level, you're seeing their history impinge upon their present.

I came back really intrigued, based on my schoolboy experience of Kokoda, or lack of experience of Kokoda, because we didn't go over the track, to know more about that, to know exactly what happened there. I didn't feel we'd been told the full story. So, that was a sense of my experiences, my own personality I suppose, wrestling with a subject and being determined to find out what happened. And so my books are about really what happened, not simply to the soldiers, although they are central obviously to the narrative, but to all the other people who are involved in war. I don't see myself as a military 'historian' in the purer sense of the word; I'm a writer of history, of events that occurred. They happened to be war but they occurred, they happened, they impinged upon the entire nation. All Australians were touched by World War II, all Australians were touched by Vietnam in some way or form. And that's the story that I sought to uncover and I suppose my experience has been that I have a natural curiosity, through my experiences, to find out the truth, or a truth.

Interviewer: Writers have different methods of organising their information. How do you organise your research findings?

Paul: Well, I think that certainly they have different methods and I know of many writers’ approaches; I certainly have a distinctive one of my own, which is to have a good idea of how the book will work based on a first reading of the primary sources; not just the primary sources: the essential texts, the main books that we have. So you draw up an outline, a chapter-by-chapter outline which is endlessly changeable; you're always shuffling the pack. And then you start off on your research proper, but you have this skeleton in place and into that skeleton you put the flesh on the bones as you go. I feed in my information as I'm reading: I'm feeding in quotes, statistics, experiences, diary extracts, letters home extracts, into their particular place in the narrative. So I have a sense of the narrative from the beginning.

And so as you're researching, you're in fact in a way writing the book. It is building slowly and at the end of that process, after three years in the case of 'Vietnam', you have this immense, immense document with each chapter which has been changed around, shuffled around with a whole string of sources – source material. Some people use cards in the old way, but a lot of people would do all their reading first and then think, 'Now, what should I write about?' Now that doesn't work for me at all because you've got to be putting things in their place. You've got to understand how the narrative is going to emerge almost viscerally from the information. So you're almost like a sculptor in a way – you're sculpting the document all the time and it is growing and taking on flesh as you go.

Then once I've got to that stage, one chapter might have twenty pages of notes, all referring to different documents. So I sit down to write. My office then has a great fan of these documents out before me and I have to distill that, to grind that into the narrative and that's where my skills as a writer have to emerge. Because obviously I’m not going to use everything and the danger is that I feel compelled to use everything, because I really must tell that story, but I've got to be quite ruthless in chopping off and cutting off stuff that I believe is extraneous, or is merely anecdotal, or doesn't really inform the basic narrative drive. It has to be a narrative drive, a voice. So when I've got that far, a voice has to emerge, my voice, the narrative voice, the author's voice has to come out of that somehow. You're there in amongst it and the reader wants to be taken by the hand and led through this immensely complex terrain in the case of 'Vietnam' and I've tried to do that.

It maybe a little bit strident that voice, at times, in 'Vietnam'. Critics have said that perhaps I've been a little bit too strident: I’ve let my own attitude impinge on or take control of the narrative. And I accept that that criticism may be fair in a couple of chapters. But you do need a strong voice when you're surrounded by so much information and to know how to distil it into the essential story.