The Second World War catapulted more than 70,000 young Australians into a war in Indonesia in mid-1945. More than sixty years later the questions remain about why Australians were ever involved, and why nearly 700 had to die.

Tim Blue’s book examines the attack on Tarakan, a small island off the northeast coast of Borneo, once part of the Netherlands East Indies. Oil from the island was a key target for Japanese forces in their sweep south three years earlier. Yet one week after Australian forces landed on Tarakan, the war in Europe ended, and war in the Pacific was heading towards Japanese defeat.

Why were Australians fighting and dying so late in the war, in a country that few of their countryman knew about and much less cared about? Tarakan: A personal war, is the story of the men at war, as recorded in letters home, diaries and recollections from the perspective of time.