A selection from the war diaries of Dan Davin

Abstract

This thesis is an edited selection from Dan Davin's wartime diaries, running from 1940-1941 and covering training in England, travel through Egypt, and fighting in Greece and Crete.

The selection is a scholarly edition combining the two extant versions of the diaries (Davin's original manuscript and a typescript copy he made some years later) with heavy annotation.

The diaries themselves are examined in two ways; as a historical record, showing the lives of many New Zealand soldiers; and as an attempt to explore how the inchoate material of the diaries is transformed into Davin's later fiction.

The first draws particular interest from Davin's perspective as both a junior officer, with an account of events from below, and a self-conscious outsider who after escaping provincial New Zealand feels he has returned to its traveling manifestation. He observes with a sense of detachment from his counterparts and from responsibility for events outside his own sphere of command. This gives new insight into what has become part of national mythology.