Alan Moorehead (Alan McCrae Moorehead) Biography

Australian journalistand historian, born in Melbourne, where he was educated at the University and spent six years with the Melbourne Herald. He arrived in Britain in 1936 and joined the Daily Express. The courage and distinction with which he worked as a war correspondent from 1939 to 1945 gained him an international reputation. His accounts of the North African campaigns were collected as African Trilogy (1944); Eclipse (1945) deals with the war in Europe. After a period in Florence, during which he produced the novel The Rage of the Vulture (1948), he established himself as a modern historian with Gallipoli (1956). The Russian Revolution (1958) and No Room in the Ark (1959), reflecting on post-war developments in Africa, followed before the appearance in 1960 of his most widely acclaimed work, The White Nile, on the nineteenth-century expeditions to find the source of the Nile. Notable among his numerous other publications are Cooper's Creek (1963), dealing with the first crossing of the Australian continent, and The Fatal Impact (1966), a treatment of the cultural and ecological effects of the arrival of Europeans in the South Pacific. The autobiography A Late Education (1970) was the only work he published after suffering a stroke in 1966. Alan Moorehead (1990) is a biography by T. Pocock.