Prof Michael Evans
Michael Evans is Emeritus Professor of Military Studies in the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Deakin University at the Australian Defence College, Canberra. He also holds international positions as a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, Washington, DC, and as an Honorary Professor in the New Zealand Defence Force Command and Staff College, Trentham. From 1995-2023, he held senior positions in the Australian Department of Defence including the General Sir Francis Hassett Chair of Military Studies (2013-23), and headship of the Land Warfare Studies Centre, the Australian Army’s research and analysis organisation (2001-06).
Born in Wales, and educated in Rhodesia, England and Australia, Professor Evans holds a BA Hons History (First Class) (Rhodesia), an MA War Studies (King’s College London) and a PhD from The University of Western Australia. He was a Sir Alfred Beit Fellow in the Department of War Studies at King's College London and has held Fellowships at the University of York in England, the University of Cape Town, and the University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy (ADFA) where he remains an Adjunct Professor. He is member of the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a member of the editorial board of several leading international journals including, The Journal of Strategic Studies, Defense and Security Analysis and Small Wars and Insurgencies.
Professor Evans’ was a regular officer in the post-civil war Zimbabwe National Army where he worked alongside the British Army in the integration of two rival guerrilla armies into a conventional land force. He was the lead author of the Australian Army’s Land Warfare Doctrine 3-0-1, Counterinsurgency (December 2009); a lead consultant on the Army’s 2014 capstone doctrine, Land Warfare Doctrine 1, The Fundamentals of Land Power (May 2014) and a principal consultant on ADF-P-O, Philosophical Doctrine, Command (2024). He is currently the convener of the Australian Army’s Apex Course in Professional Foundation Studies at the Royal Military College of Australia, Duntroon.
His publications include Vincible Ignorance: Reforming Australian Professional Military Education for the Demands of the Twenty-First Century (2023); Civil-Military Relations in Australia: Past, Present and Future, (2021) and The Tyranny of Dissonance: Australia’s Strategic Culture and Way of War, 1901-2005 (2005) and Future Armies, Future Challenges: Land Warfare in the Information Age (2004 (co-editor). His latest work, The Wretched of the Empire: A Novel of Southern Rhodesia, (Shangani Publishing House)is due to be published in early 2026.
Contact email for Michael Evans: shanganipublishing@gmail.com
Are we to be a momentous or a momentary people?’ Should Rhodesians, for the sake of moral conduct, risk political suicide or should we abandon moral principles in favour of self-interest and our civilisational survival?
This is a novel about how these questions tormented the white inhabitants of the self-governing British colony of Southern Rhodesia in 1962.
Faced by the collapse of the British Empire in Africa and Zimbabwean nationalists demanding their surrender, anxious white Rhodesians must choose a destiny. They must decide between yielding to the uncertainties of a multiracial compromise to win independence from Britain, or to continue as a minority racial regime, leading to the certainty of an armed confrontation with the African majority.
In Sebakwe, a town deep in the heartland, an array of characters favouring either compromise or conflict confront each other in an ideological struggle for the soul of Rhodesia. Sir Ralph Fitzgerald, the ‘Lion of Marimba’ a titan of the liberal Anglophile United Federal Party (UFP) Establishment seeks to navigate a middle course between black revolution and white counterrevolution by supporting reform from above. Fitzgerald confronts two adversaries. The first is Tommy ‘Watchman’ Burroughs, a proponent of rebellion against the British Crown, and a leader in the newly formed populist Rhodesian Front (RF) party. The second is Alfred Kanengoni of the Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU), an unrelenting revolutionary of armed struggle to overthrow the Rhodesian state.
The struggle for supremacy by these three men in Sebakwe becomes a microcosm of Southern Rhodesia’s political crisis. The dramatic result of the 1962 election sets Rhodesians on the road to being the ‘momentous people’ of the Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, followed by the blood-soaked bush war of the 1970s that ends in the creation of Zimbabwe in 1980.
The Wretched of The Empire
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