Australia's War 1914-18

Joan Beaumont

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000256307
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Australia's War, 1914-18 explores Australia's involvement in the First World War and the effect this had on the nation' s society. In this very accessible book, Joan Beaumont, Pam Maclean, Marnie Haig-Muir and David Lowe focus on: where Australians fought and why; the tensions and realignments within Australian politics in the period of 1914-18; the stresses of the war on Australian society, especially on women and those whom wartime hysteria cast in the role of the 'enemy' at home; the impact of the war on the country's economy; the role played by Australia in international diplomacy; and finally, the creation and influence of the Anzac legend.Once dominated by the battlefield and official accounts of the war correspondent and official historian, C.E.W. Bean, Australian writing on the war has acquired a new depth and sophistication. Studies of the home front reveal a society riven by divisions without precedent in the nation's history.This single volume will be invaluable to tertiary students and of enormous interest to the reader concerned with the social, political and military history of Australia.

1 Australia's war

Joan Beaumont

In terms of human suffering the First World War was the most traumatic conflict in Australia's history. From a population of less than five million, an army of almost 417 000 men was raised between 1914 and 1918; over 330 000 of them served overseas.¹ 58 132 servicemen died and 156 228 were gassed, wounded or taken prisoner of war.² In the Second World War, in contrast, although there was the unprecedented psychological trauma of Australia's being threatened and attacked, the death rate was significantly less: 27 073 service personnel were killed in action or died of wounds, when the population was just over seven million.³

Reasons for Australia's involvement in the war

Inevitably, studies of the First World War begin with the question of why Australia was involved in this appallingly costly conflict. Why were so many men willing to fight and die on battlefields which were thousands of kilometres distant, in Europe and the Middle East?

The answer to the first question is, on one level, simple. Australia was involved in the First World War because it had no choice but to be. In 1914 it was a British colony, not a sovereign state. Although the Australian Government had gained control at the time of federation in 1901 over what the Constitution called 'external affairs' in the decade before 1914, this had been taken to mean only relationships between Australia and Britain. Contacts with other countries outside the empire were controlled by London. In 1914, therefore, when Britain declared war, it did so on behalf of the whole empire.

Yet, being legally at war was not the same as supporting it enthusiastically. Australia had no choice but to follow Britain into war in 1914, but it did have a choice about its level of participation and the nature of its involvement. The more interesting and problematic question, therefore, is why the Australian Government and so many of its people embraced the war so uncritically. Why did they feel themselves intimately involved in a conflict which was essentially about the challenge of a newly industrialised Germany to the European status quo, and about the international ramifications of the ethnic tensions that were tearing apart the autocratic Austro Hungarian Empire? Why did Australians not chafe at the decision to involve them in a war being made in London? Why did Australian politicians rush to prove that their parties were deeply committed to the cause of war? In August 1914, when the tension in Europe was reaching crisis point, there was a general election in Australia. The Prime Minister, Joseph Cook, campaigning in Horsham on 31 July, stressed that 'all our resources in Australia are in the Empire and for the Empire, and for the preservation and security of the Empire'. The leader of the Labor Opposition, Andrew Fisher, declared at Colac on the same day (in a statement that entered Australian folklore) that 'Australians will stand beside our own to help and defend her [Britain] to our last man and our last shilling'.⁴

Shortly before war broke out the Australian Government had offered Britain a force of 20 000 troops. It agreed also to put the small Australian Navy, created only in 1909, under the control of the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, the prospect of war brought massive crowds into the streets of the major cities, and the news of war's declaration was greeted with public enthusiasm so unrestrained that in Melbourne it degenerated into rioting and violence. These instances of public euphoria, of course, cannot be taken as being representative of the views of all Australians. There were clearly many individuals who had reservations about the war, which sprang either from political conviction or private dread. Historians of the 1990s no longer accept the judgment of the official historian, Ernest Scott, who, writing from a pro-imperial and Anglophilic perspective in 1936, maintained that there was 'no group which did not approve' of Australia's involvement.⁵ Yet, it is equally clear that such Australians were in the minority in August 1914-at least in terms of public criticism of the war. The views of Christian pacifists, and those of members of the radical Left, who denounced the conflict as a sordid struggle between rival capitalist powers intent on commercial and industrial domination of the world, were drowned in the deluge of enthusiasm for the war pouring from the press, the churches, the universities and the schools.

Traditionally historians have explained this enthusiastic response of Australians to the outbreak of war in a number of ways. Firstly, there was the deep attachment to the British Empire, which operated on both the emotional and pragmatic levels. To quote L. L. Robson, for many Australians imperialism 'had all the depth and comprehensiveness of religion'.⁶ Britain, the centre of the empire, former home to the vast majority of immigrants and the source of Australia's cultural and political traditions, commanded a profound loyalty and affection, in the middle classes especially. Australians of the late twentieth century may find such an attachment incomprehensible, and certainly difficult to reconcile with any modern notion of nationalism and national interests. But as Avner Offer has said, 'nations have passions as well as interests',⁷ and to Australians of 1914 there was no conflict between their dual loyalties. They were, as an earlier prime minister, Alfred Deakin, put it in his celebrated phrase, 'independent Australian Britons', conscious of their own distinctive identity but also basking in the prestige and reflected glory that being part of the British Empire gave them. There are few dearer reflections of this than the name chosen by the first commanding officer of the Australian troops sent overseas in 1914, Major General WiHiam Bridges, for the expeditionary force, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF).

How universal such imperial sentiments were within Australian society has been debated. There is considerable evidence that in the late nineteenth century and at the time of the Boer War of 1899-1902, the working classes were generally less euphoric about empire than the middle classes. But in the decade before 1914 working-class children had been subjected to a barrage of imperial propaganda in the school curricula, and the stridently anti-British tone of the nationalism of the Bulletin and the radical Left in the late nineteenth century had been muted. In any case, a central element in the Labor political agenda which had emerged in the 1890s and after federation was the preservation of white Australia from the threat of cheap Asian labour, The British connection offered even those who, like Irish Catholics, remained resistant to uncritical Anglophilia, the comfort of being secure within a wider white, Anglo-Saxon race.

The link with Britain also offered Australians the advantage of a supposedly credible defence policy. In the years after federation, Australians of all political complexions had become anxious, and at times hysterical, about the growing power of Japan in the region and German penetration of the south-west Pacific. In Papua, which Australia had inherited from Britain in 1902, they actually shared a border with the New Guinea outpost of the German empire. Realising the impossibility of adequately defending their regional interests, even with the system of compulsory military service that had been introduced in 1911, Australians saw their salvation in the Royal Navy. The key to imperial defence was mutual help: the notion that if Australia helped Britain, no matter where the challenge to its interests might arise, then Britain would in turn support Australia against regional threats. In fact, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, the Australian Government had been cautious about giving practical substance to this theory. At the Imperial Conference of 1911 it had seemed that Australia and Canada would come only grudgingly to Britain's aid in the event of a European conflict; but all this was swept away in the flood of support for Britain in 1914. Were the 'mother country' to be defeated by Germany, Australians feared, they would be left vulnerable to the dictates of an expansionist German empire.

To these concerns were added many other reasons for enthusiasm about the outbreak of war. Widespread within the Australian community at this time, as within the European world, was a belief in pseudo-scientific theories about the biological struggle for survival among the races of the world. War was seen as a purifying and regenerative force in society. It was therefore welcomed by some as an opportunity for Australians to prove that they, as offshoots of the Old World, had not degenerated as a result of living in the antipodean climate. They would at last have the chance to prove themselves in war, the greatest of all games. The Sydney Morning Herald trumpeted on 6 August 1914 that the war would be Australia's 'baptism of fire'. The Protestant churches' leadership meanwhile adopted the line that the war was, literally, a God-given opportunity to bring the nations of the world, especially Australia, back to paths of righteousness through the experience of suffering.⁸

These, it should be stressed, were public views. It is more difficult to assess what motivated those thousands of individuals who volunteered for military service in the first months of the war. Within weeks the contingent of 20 000 men that the Australian Government had promised Britain had been filled and many thousands more volunteers had been rejected as being unable to meet the rigorous standards of physical fitness. What motivated these men to rush to war?

As Richard White has pointed out, we cannot assume that the publicly articulated reasons for Australia welcoming the war were the same as the private motives that inspired Australians to enlist. 'Australians did not necessarily join the war for the same reasons Australia did.'⁹ There is a danger, moreover, in assuming that values such as love of empire and patriotic duty, which were propagated through public institutions which embodied middle-class values, had the same resonance among the working classes. They may have, given that many within the working class are known to have been politically conservative, but we cannot take it for granted. Did working men volunteer because of their loyalty to Britain or hatred of the Germans? Or were they motivated by a complex mixture of more prosaic considerations? The outbreak of war led to widespread unemployment in industries that were adversely affected by the disruption of international trade. In the Australian countryside 1914 was also a year of drought. Obviously some men were attracted to the army by the promise of regular work and good pay. Receiving six shillings a day, Australian soldiers were the best paid of any army in the world. In 1914 the wage of a rural labourer was perhaps only half of this. Such research as has been done on the rural districts of Australia during the war suggests that this acted as an economic incentive to enlist. Rural labourers (if not farmers who had greater security of employment) were quicker to respond to the call for volunteers than their urban counterparts.¹⁰

In addition to economic motives, Australians, as Bill Gammage suggests, volunteered for 'a thousand particular and personal reasons'.¹¹ Many men seem to have been motivated to enlist by the desire to travel, to escape unhappy domestic circumstances, or in the case of recent British immigrants, by the wish to get a free trip home; 400 000 immigrants had arrived from Britain in the ten years before the war.¹² Other Australian volunteers seem to have been inspired by a sense of adventure, by the illusion that war was a romantic and exciting variant on sport, and by the belief that it would be over before Christmas.

Obviously these were motivations which faded as the war progressed and the full brutality of its nature became apparent. Then other motives seem to have inspired volunteers: community pressure, fear of social ostracism as the pressure to enlist every able-bodied man grew, concern to replace those killed in the carnage at Gallipoli or on the Western Front, war hysteria or a desire to avenge friends or family members who had died in action.

We shall never know the relative weight of these motives in the individual decision to enlist. The evidence about men's motivation is fragmenta...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and figures
• Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Contributors
• Chronology of the war
• Introduction Joan Beaumont
• 1 Australia's war
• 2 The politics of a divided society
• 3 War and Australian society
• 4 The economy at war
• 5 Australia in the world
• 6 The Anzac legend
• Select bibliography
• Index