Charles Bean's Great War Synopsis

In this dramatised documentary, Charles Bean, war correspondent, obsessive historian and reluctant mythmaker; tells us all about his remarkable life, from the playing fields of England via the Australian outback, to the maelstrom of the Great War.

Charles Bean was a lawyer of no success, a writer of no great promise, and a journalist of no great talent. It was to be the greatest war the world had seen that made him. He was a war correspondent and he wrote a history. The best history written about that war anywhere, any time, from any nation. It took him 23 years.

Bean loved Australia the way most people love another person. And as so often happens in love, Australia let him down.