Aussie historian, author & entertainer Jim Haynes joins Overnight each week for his unique knowledge of the not-so-famous characters from Australia’s history.

This week Jim shines the spotlight on Oliver Hogue – Aussie soldier, journalist & poet.

Oliver Hogue (29 April 1880 – 3 March 1919) wrote under the pseudonym of Trooper Bluegum and published a collection of letters home in 1916.  Love Letters of an Anzac is a beautifully written series of letters from Hogue to his wife at home in Sydney.

There is only a thin veneer of fiction attempted and the letters are, in effect, a wonderful series of short stories which trace the course of the campaign. Oliver Hogue was born and raised in inner Sydney, at Glebe. It is a sign of a different age that this inner-city dweller was an excellent horseman.

He enlisted at the outbreak of war and served as an officer in the 2nd Light Horse Brigade and, later, in the famous Camel Corps in Palestine, where he attained the rank of major. Hogue was a journalist in civilian life and an excellent writer with an eye for detail and mood.

Tragically, having survived the war, he died of pneumonia in England in 1919 and never returned to his beloved ‘Bonnie Jean’, to whom he often signed his letters, ‘Yours till the end of all things’. He also wrote and published another account of his experiences at Gallipoli, Trooper Bluegum at The Dardanelles, and stories from that collection also appear in this volume.

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