Author(s): Keith Maxwell; belinda Kerr ((various roles)); Michael Keats

Blue Mountains Travel Guides

started with a bloody campaign with soldiers, the fallen we remember at Splendour Rock from all the services, mostly RAAF. Casualty rates were very high in WWI. Yet, far more bushwalker servicemen came home in 1945 than were killed. My view of Splendour Rock is part of a bigger picture of a history of enormous social change taking place before and during WWII. Australia after WWII was very different to after WWI. It was no longer agriculture based but industrialised and was starting to stand more as an independent country rather than as a dominion of empire. Australia better planned the peace time recovery after WWII with far less debt. We should be proud of the Australia of WWII when we achieved so much. A WWI / AIF lens is the wrong way to view Splendour Rock.This book is not about this big picture. Bushwalkers are welcome to reflect at Splendour Rock in their own way. Splendour Rock is a memorial of the recent past (not a century ago) of a modern Australia that is also so much a part of recent bushwalking history. At the end of WWII, the RAAF was the fourth largest air force in the world. In many ways modern Australia evolved out of this time".