“This is the highest recognition I have received to date,” said Charles Leach, author of the book The legend of Breaker Morant is dead and buried. He referred to a positive review of his book in a prestigious military history journal in Australia.

A pre-eminent historian from Australia, Dr Craig Wilcox, reviewed the book for issue 60 of the Australian war memorial’s magazine, Wartime.

The Bushveldt Carbineer commander, Breaker Morant, was shot by a British army firing squad in 1902 for murdering prisoners of war. All books on his life and times “have been arguments for the defence or prosecution, excusing a hero or damning a villain,” says Dr Wilcox.

“Leach’s book favours the prosecution … Yet Leach is no history warrior, mounting his case at all costs. His book’s real contribution to the debate lies in presenting the Morant affair as an episode in the tragic history of a specific place, the Zoutpansberg region near the Zimbabwe border,” writes Wilcox.

Wilcox makes special mention of the times and the social climate in the days of Morant as revealed in Leach’s book. On the eve of the Boer War, the Zoutpansberg was “a playground for poachers, cattle thieves and highway robbers - a judicial black hole where you could literally get away with murder, perhaps the real reason Morant and his comrades thought they could, or even should, kill with impunity,” writes Wilcox.

In his book, Leach succeeded in revealing the human interest in the episode. “With blunt honesty and candid emotion, it offers a new, human angle on a significant episode in the military history of Australia and - as Leach reminds us - of South Africa too,” reads the review.

Leach’s book, launched in March this year,  is one of only two books offering a South African view, the other one being Arthur Davey’s Breaker Morant and the Bushveldt Carbineers, published in 1987.

The Morant “legend” gained international attention when Commander Jim Unkles, a military lawyer, from Australia, approached the British throne for a posthumous pardon. His first campaign did not succeed, but Unkles has apparently not given up. Wilcox says that the book’s 24-page appendix by Andries Pretorius “offers the sharpest counter-blow yet to the campaign by Commander Jim Unkles from Melbourne to win Morant an official, if somewhat belated, pardon.”

Leach thanked Wilcox for his service to the South African history and heritage and to Australians “who still have a mindset of those seven months of the Anglo-Boer War in our region that was created by fudged and false ‘facts’ and cowboy movie images.” The Australian wartime movie ‘Breaker’ Morant produced in 1980, did much to shape the Australian mindset that Morant was treated unjustly. In Leach’s book, readers discover what actually happened, according to thorough research.