Hi, Mr Tate
I was not aware of your wonderful memoir for a number of months after it was published, and actually came across it unexpectedly.
I wrote a review of it, but unfortunately, it was too late for media.
However, I'd like you to have the review anyway for your records.
The War Within is a haunting book. It changed my life.
It also affected my reading of other memoirs for many months.
I kept coming back to it for many reasons, not the least of which was your writing style. So unique.
It is a work of great substance. I kept looking for it to win various prizes and can't believe it wasn't nominated.
I think your publisher may have let you down in that regard.
Best Wishes
L. Olssen

THE WAR WITHIN-
AND WITHOUT

©

L. Olssen

Has there ever been a memoir in Australian literature like Don Tate’s The War Within (Murdoch Books)? It is a complex, virtuoso analysis of his world- an utterly compelling and profoundly unsettling mosaic.

On the one hand, it is an acidic dissection of the role environment and family have in developing a person’s character, and on the other, it is a sauntering chronicle of social analysis and injustice. Either way, it is told brilliantly. At times, one is almost left breathless.

Let me say, Tate spares neither himself, nor the reader in this tome. He is unabashed, and unrepentant. His is the voice of a generation past, delivered with scant regard for political or sexual correctness. There are astonishing sequences- from sexual and physical abuse; sexual awakening and deviation; teenage delinquency; violence; the clamour of jungle warfare and gut-wrenching descriptions of the aftermath; war atrocities; the corruptions of history (and the human cost); love- pure and simple, and lust; and the simple joys and tragedies of life. And underpinning it all, the pervasive fear that there is a spiritual force manipulating it all.

At its simplest, The War Within is about the evolution of a man’s mind and character, and of those events and characters that influence those processes. Thus, we grow with him as he struggles to make sense of the most intriguing series of apparently, unrelated events ? a life, criss-crossed with drama, trauma, and controversy.

We first meet Don Tate at age ten ? a shy, yet capricious ingénue living in the dystopian Brisbane suburb of Ellen Grove, and then grow up and old with him in turn, as he comes to terms with being a disaffected youth; a patriotic, but naïve infantryman fighting in the Vietnam War; an alienated, disabled, returned serviceman battling to readjust to a new world; and a man struggling with male status anxiety - a condition apparently inexhaustible in its capacity to cause suffering.
 
Along the way, Tate examines the dark crevices of the male psyche as the morally bankrupt adult is forced to confront and battle both his inner demons and the dazzling decency of his long-suffering Christian wife, Carole. Ironically, although she enters late in the narrative, it is his wife- physically and spiritually beautiful, whose goodness under fire provides the most striking counterpoint to the author’s rogueishness. It is her unconditional love that provides the social and psychological safety net that keeps the author sane in the face of incredible adversity.

Part of this memoir’s richness lies in the fact that although there is a simmering anger beneath the text, Tate can find hope and colour in the worst of the greyness in his life. Yet, above all, this memoir is a celebration of the human condition, of a man with a can-do, cavalier attitude to life and his desire to rise above mediocrity.

The War Within deserves to stand apart as an outstanding contribution to this country’s rich heritage of memoir. As at least one other viewer has commented ? a must read for every Australian.