Slaves Of The Samurai: An Australian Odyssey, Which Gives an Account of the Life and Thoughts of a Slave of the Samurai, During His Three years and Seven Months as a Prisoner of War in the Hands of the Japanese. (1946) By W. S. Kent Hughes
 
One of the defining features of the early Liberal Party was the large number of ex-servicemen it attracted. Indeed, one of the myriad of centre-right parties that were created during the disintegration of the UAP was even called the ‘Services and Citizens Party’, and it subsequently attended the Non-Labor Unity Conference and was absorbed into the Liberals. A handful of the so-called ‘49ers’, the large cohort of new MPs that came in with Menzies’s election victory in 1949, had not only fought in the war but even survived harrowing internment in Japanese prison camps. This makes it all the more remarkable that the Menzies Government was able to spearhead Australia’s reconciliation with Japan.
One such individual was Wilfrid Selwyn (Billy) Kent Hughes. Born in East Melbourne in 1895, Kent Hughes had enlisted in the AIF at the start of World War One. Ultimately joining the famous Light Horse, he would see action at Gallipoli, Sinai, Palestine and Syria, winning the military cross in 1917.
 
A talented sportsman who belatedly learned that he had won a Rhodes Scholarship after he enlisted, after the war Kent Hughes studied at Oxford and competed in the 1920 Olympic games. On returning to Australia he worked for his father’s publishing firm, and took a keen interest in politics, joining the conservative ‘Constitutional Club’ where he met and befriended Menzies. Despite being a year younger, Kent Hughes beat Menzies in the race to enter Victorian Parliament, and both would become members of the McPherson Government before jointly resigning to protest a sordid deal with the Country Party. The two men world later form the Young Nationalists, though Kent Hughes’s politics were to the right of Menzies’s and he even had a short flirtation with fascism.
 
Staying in Victorian Parliament throughout the 1930s, Kent Hughes was Deputy Opposition Leader when World War Two broke out, and resigned the post (but not his seat) to rejoin the AIF. He would be captured during the Fall of Singapore and survive three horrific years in Changi, Formosa, and Manchuria. As a way of coping with the trauma, in captivity Kent Hughes would write an epic poem that was later published as Slaves of the Samurai.
 
Hard Cover
295 pages
In Good Condition