Peter Thompson’s Shanghai Fury – A Great Review of the Aussies in China

Every time I visit Australia (happen to be spending a week in Melbourne at the moment) I find China books that I’d hadn’t been aware of. Peter Thompson’s Shanghai Fury: Australian Heroes of Revolutionary China is one such – probably deemed hard to promote outside Australia the title was always going to make me sit up and pay attention. I stumbled across it in a bookshop here and snapped it up straight away.

Among many attributes the book is a nice production, striking cover and a great set of photo plates inside

Shanghai is a city defined by war. The city and its armed struggles were central to the relationship between China and Australia from the fall of the Manchus in 1912 to the Communist victory in 1949. Yet with the notable exception of George ‘Chinese’ Morrison, the Australian contribution has been largely neglected and no single volume covers the experiences of the many remarkable Australians caught up in the drama.

Set against a backdrop of imperial splendour and abject squalor, Shanghai Fury examines one of the seminal periods of the 20th Century in a compellingly readable narrative that mixes personal memoir with combat action to complete a powerful trilogy on Australians at war.