He took leave and in several weeks wrote and published his tract, In Your Hands, Australians, exhorting Australians to pursue the aims of peace with the dedication, organisation and tenacity with which they had fought the war. The last and longest chapter was about the importance of education: "We must plan for the education of every person in the State, in body, mind, and character". He argued that the "big thing in war...was the discovery of the character of Australian men". Bean was a proponent of the White Australia ideology and envisaged a future Australia as being an agrarian society with millions of farmers. Aboriginal Australians are excluded from his vision and are not mentioned or referred to by Bean in his text. Bean urges the readers of In Your Hands, Australians to create "An Anglo-Saxon nation of free, happy, brilliant people". In London prior to his departure and on the boat voyage home, Bean put into writing his proposals for the official history and for a national war museum which he envisaged not only as the repository of official pictures, photographs, maps, records, dioramas and relics from the battle field but also as a national memorial to Australians who had died in the War. The Australian Historical Mission In February–March 1919, on his homeward journey, Bean led a group of eight Australians including artist George Lambert and photographer Hubert Wilkins on a visit to Gallipoli. The aim of the group, the Australian Historical Mission, was to carry out research on the battlefields of the 1915 Anzac campaign; create new works of art and photographs to help convey the story of the trauma and tragedy; collect sacred relics; discuss a plan for the Gallipoli war graves, and to obtain from the Turks their story of the fighting. Bean returned to Australia in May 1919 after an absence of four and a half years. The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 With a small staff, Bean took up his appointment as official historian in 1919, based first in the rural setting of Tuggeranong homestead, near the then unbuilt Federal Capital, Canberra, and later at Victoria Barracks in Sydney. The central stipulation that Bean laid down when he became official historian was that the history was to be free from government censorship, though he had to yield when the Australian Commonwealth Naval Board insisted on removing critical passages from