Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War
Authors: Bongiorno Frank , Mansfield Grant 
Published: February 2009

Authors’ Introduction

The article is an attempt to assess a body of historical and polemical writing on Australia's entry into the First World War. It also offers, from page 70 through to page 74, an alternative to the kind of understanding of Australian participation in the war with which we take issue elsewhere in the article. The piece was inspired by our engagement with the important writing of John Moses, who was for some years a valued colleague at the University of New England; in Frank's case, as a university lecturer teaching a course on War and Society in Twentieth‐century Australia and a scholar with a long‐standing interest in Australian historiography, and in Grant's, as a doctoral candidate being supervised by Frank and researching a thesis on Australian responses to the outbreak of the war. Grant, who was in the process of completing his thesis when we published this article, has since finished and is revising his work for publication. He also produced an earlier historiographical piece arising from his doctoral work : ‘“Unbounded Enthusiasm”: Australian Historians and the Outbreak of the Great War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 3/3 (September 2007): 360–74.

Like any piece of academic historical writing, our article represented an attempt to solve a ‘problem’. The ‘problem’, as we saw it, was why a group of historians and political commentators had spent so many words contesting a view which they presented as mistaken historical orthodoxy, but which we were unable to find articulated in the major writings on Australia and the Great War with which we were familiar. The writers with whom we argued suggest that, contrary to the claims of radical‐nationalist historians, the Great War was truly Australia's war, and one in which Australia's vital interests were at stake. Our purpose in writing our article was not to contest their particular claims about the national interest, but rather to interrogate aspects of their own methodology and assumptions, and to suggest an alternative. In particular, we argued that their work came out of a focus on ‘high politics’ and diplomacy, and that a closer look at the contemporary discourse suggests greater complexity and ambiguity about the significance of the war for Australians. We suggested that it was wrong to impose a single meaning on Australian participation in the war derived from an understanding of diplomatic history, and that attempts to do so needed to be understood in the context of modern Australian conservative intellectuals’ affirmative attitude towards the nation's imperial inheritance.

Authors Recommend:

Here, we have included readings that are not dealt with in any detail or at all in our article. These come out of the tradition of social and cultural history or ‘history from below’ that, we argue in our article, has been marginalised by the stress on high politics and diplomacy. Many of these historians are participants in those ‘liveliest conversations’ to which we refer in our concluding paragraph.

E. M. Andrews, The ANZAC Illusion (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

An outstanding study of Anglo‐Australian relations during the war. Andrews did not argue that Australia should not have been involved in the war, but rather that the extent and manner of Australian cooperation was not in Australia's interests. ‘The Anzac Illusion’ to which he refers is the idea of the superiority of Australian soldiers to those from other parts of the British Empire, and the notion of a ‘special relationship’ between Australia and the United Kingdom. Andrews explores the interests that these ‘illusions’ actually served. His is a wide‐ranging study that examines diplomatic, administrative, economic and social history. His eye catches topics as diverse as the organisation of the Australian Imperial Force, wheat sales, military discipline and British war brides.

Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992).

A powerful examination of the legend of the Simpson, the Man with the Donkey at Gallipoli. Simpson became famous for carrying the wounded on the back of his donkey to safety, and his name became synonymous with selfless sacrifice, as well as a range of other qualities Australians like to associate with themselves and especially their soldiers. Cochrane attempts to separate the known facts about John Simpson Kirkpatrick's life from the uses to which his image was put during the First World War itself, and in the decades that followed. Like Andrews, Cochrane's is a ‘critical’ history that seeks to contextualise the stories that some people have told about the war by exploring the purposes that they have tended to serve.

Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

One of a new group of histories concerned with issues of memory and bereavement. Whereas books such as Ken Inglis's Sacred Places (see below) concentrate mainly on the public expression of community bereavement, Damousi is more concerned with writing a history of private emotions. At the same time, she examines how those who experienced private grief as a result of the war fared when they sought public recognition of their suffering. People's grief became the basis for a re‐fashioning of their identity. The book examines both the world wars.

J. N. I. Dawes and L. L. Robson, Citizen to Soldier: Australia before the Great War: Recollections of Members of the First A.I.F (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1977).

An account of the generation that went to war in 1914–18, based on interviews carried out with the men themselves. This book provides a useful indication of the motives of those who enlisted or, at the very least, how they recalled their motives in their old age. The drawing of this kind of distinction, and reflection on the way in which memories are made and re‐made in the course of a single life, have become especially important in the increasingly sophisticated oral histories produced about Australia and the war (see Thomson, Anzac Memories, below).

Raymond Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty: Social Conflict on the Queensland Homefront, 1914–18 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987).

There are several regional or state‐based studies of the Australian home‐front experience of the war, and Raymond Evans's study of Queensland in among the best. Evans's book comes very much out of a left‐wing critical tradition of writing about the war, in which there is a strong emphasis on its socially polarising, rather than unifying effects. Evans's argument is not that the war created such class, ethnic and ideological divisions – they were already fundamental to Queensland society – but that the stresses of war sharpened them, leading to violence and state repression of dissent.

Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996).

A major study of the impact of three wars, the First World War, Second World War and Vietnam, on those who fought and returned, and the society to which they belonged. Like many recent Great War histories, Garton's explores the intersection of individual memory and experience with larger cultural patterns. He is especially concerned with the problems faced by returned men, such as mental trauma, physical disability and the difficulty of settling back into ‘normal’ community life after the rupture caused by the war. He also examines the role played by governments and key professionals such as doctors in attempting to manage this complex process.

K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1999).

One of the most important books written by any Australian on the experience of war, Sacred Places was the culmination of more than three decades of professional reflection by one of the country's leading historians on Australia's experience of the First World War. A detailed and beautifully written and illustrated study of Australian war memorials – from the nineteenth century through to the present – it is an exploration of the complex ways in which Australian communities expressed their grief and gratitude to those who had served the nation in war.

Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People's Experiences and Memories of Loss and the Great War (Fremantle, WA: Curtin University Books, 2004).

Here is another contribution to the literature on memory and loss, a book that like those by Garton, Damousi and Scates, draws attention to the more personal and intimate aspects of the First World War experience for those left behind to grieve. For instance, Luckins includes an account of women's practice of wearing mourning black in memory of the fallen. In much of this recent cultural and social history, there has been a growing recognition of the ways in which the experience of war not only touched the lives of those left behind during the conflict itself, but continued long after the last shots were fired, as loss was reconstituted as memory. There is also an attempt in these histories to recover experiences that have been lost or neglected in histories with a traditional focus on battlefield sacrifice and national identity. Women's experiences, in particular, have been brought into clearer focus by historians such as Luckins.

Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

Macleod's book is the first cultural history to set the Australian and British understandings of the Gallipoli campaign carefully alongside one another. Her interest is in the rather different ways in which the campaign has been recalled in the two societies. Macleod traces this process of cultural representation and memory back to the earliest descriptions of the campaign by war journalists such as Ellis Ashmead‐Bartlett and C. E. W. Bean, through the Dardanelles Commission and accounts by Sir Ian Hamilton, as well as soldiers’ tales and the later historiography.

L. L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: a study of its recruitment 1914–1918 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1970).

This book remains the standard account of the First AIF, although much work still remains to be done on the social history of this large body of men. Robson used both qualitative and quantitative techniques in building up a profile of the soldiers, an account of the efforts to recruit them, and the effects of the successes and failures of recruitment campaigns on Australian society and politics.

Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (Nelson: West Melbourne, 1980).

This is a pioneering social history. McKernan's focus is on the home front, where he examines a range of topics, from the experiences of women, country folk and German‐Australians, through to the war's impact on the churches, schools and sporting activities. McKernan later produced a sequel on the Second World War.

John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: from Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2001).

This book's scope is somewhat narrower than its title implies, for it is a regional study of north‐eastern Victoria. It is nevertheless a significant social history by an accomplished rural historian, suggestive of the experiences of rural Australians more generally. Rural Australia and the Great War is very much a modern ‘history from below’, in the Australian First World War historiographical tradition pioneered by the likes of Lloyd Robson, Bill Gammage and Michael McKernan. Indeed, McQuilton covers some of the same topics that featured in these histories, such as recruitment, conscription, schools, churches and the experiences of women and German‐Australians, but in relation to a particular regional and rural context.

Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Visiting Gallipoli or the Western Front as a tourist is now a common experience for many Australians, but Scates explores not only this recent phenomenon – via surveys and interviews – but the much longer history of battlefield pilgrimage from the 1920s. Return to Gallipoli is a contribution to the growing body of Australian historical literature on the history of the emotions and the memory of war. Moreover, like Ken Inglis's Sacred Places, this moving book explores the feelings that attach to place and the complexities faced by Australians whose daily lives continued so far away from the bodies of their loved ones.

Graham Seal, Inventing ANZAC: the Digger and national mythology (St. Lucia, Qld.: University of Queensland Press in association with the API Network and Curtin University of Technology, 2004).

There are many studies of the Anzac Legend as an aspect of national identity, but some scholars have been especially interested in the impact of the Great War experience on Australian popular culture. While there was an ‘official’ culture of Anzac commemoration, there was also a more everyday, informal digger culture that emerged especially out of the stories that soldiers told one another, and the outside world, about their experiences. Graham Seal, a leading folklorist and social historian, examines this culture in its wartime and postwar manifestations, and the way in which it diverged from, yet also contributed to, the national myth that has grown up around Anzac.

Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Based on interviews with old diggers carried out in the 1980s, Thomson's study explores the relationship between the private memories of a number of returned soldiers, and the more public memorialising and mythologising that has accompanied Australia's experience of war. He discusses the difficulties and frustrations some of these men experienced when their own memories and understanding of the experience of being a soldier contradicted the authorised public memories.

Online Materials

http://www.awm.gov.au/

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra

This is an outstanding Web site for Australian war history. For instance, the multi‐volume Official Histories of Australia in the two world wars have been digitised and appear on this site. There is also the Journal of the Australian War Memorial, available online for all issues since 1996, as well as an encyclopaedia of Australians at war.

http://www.naa.gov.au/

The National Archives of Australia

This Web site contains a vast collection of records relating to Australia and the First World War, including service records of individuals. Some of its records are now available online in digital form. Fact Sheets for the First World War can be seen at: http://www.naa.gov.au/about‐us/publications/fact‐sheets/on‐defence/index.aspx#section3

http://www.firstworldwar.com/posters/australia.htm

The First World War.com

This site contains images of Australian World War I recruitment posters, which can be compared with those of other nations, also available on the site. This is part of a larger site devoted to the international history of the First World War.

http://www.australiansatwar.gov.au/

Australians at War

This Web site is the companion to a television series on Australians at War that first appeared at the beginning of this century. The Web site contains text, pictures, sound and video clips, including reminiscences of people interviewed for the program.

http://www.firstaif.info/anzac‐book/

The Anzac Book

There is a copy on this site of The Anzac Book (1916), edited by the Australian Official War Correspondent and Official Historian, C. E. W. Bean, and based on contributions from the men themselves. For a critique of the original text, see D. A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean as Editor and Image‐Maker’, Historical Studies, 21/84 (April 1985): 376–90.

Sample Syllabus:

Australia and the First World War: Experience and Memory

Week 1: ‘She is Not Yet’: Warfare and Colonial Australia

Reading

Tom Griffiths, ‘The Frontier Fallen’, Eureka Street, 13/1 (March 2003): 24–30.

Robert Hyslop, ‘War Scares in Australia in the Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Historical Journal, 47/1 (1976): 23–44.

K. S. Inglis, The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History 1788–1870 (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1993), 250–80.

Week 2: Reahearsal? Australia and the South African War, 1899–1902

Reading

C. N. Connolly, ‘Class, Birthplace, Loyalty: Australian Attitudes to the Boer War’, Historical Studies, 18/71 (October 1978): 210–32.

C. N. Connolly, ‘Manufacturing “Spontaneity”: The Australian Offers of Troops for the Boer War’, Historical Studies, 18/70 (April 1978): 106–17.

K. S. Inglis, Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1999), ch. 2.

Craig Wilcox, Australia's Boer War: The War in South Africa 1899–1902 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002), ch. 15.

Week 3: Waiting for War, 1902–1914

Reading

Bob Birrell, Federation: The Secret Story (Potts Point, NSW: Duffy and Snellgrove, 2001), ch. 6–7.

John Mordike, ‘An Army for an Empire: Britain and Australia's Military Forces’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 9 (October 1986): 27–38.

Craig Wilcox, ‘Relinquishing the Past: John Mordike's An Army for a Nation’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 40/1 (1993): 52–65.

Week 4: Whose War Was It Anyway? Australia's Entry into the Great War

Reading

Frank Bongiorno and Grant Mansfield, ‘Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War’, History Compass, 6/1 (2008): 62–90, doi: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00500.x.

F. K. Crowley (ed.), Modern Australia in Documents 1901–1939, vol. 1 (Melbourne: Wren, 1973), 214–33.

Gerhard Fischer, ‘“Negative Integration”: And an Australian Road to Modernity: Interpreting the Australian Homefront Experience in World War I’, Australian Historical Studies, 26/104 (April 1995): 452–76.

John A. Moses, ‘The “Ideas of 1914” in Germany and Australia: A Case of Conflicting Perceptions’, War & Society, 9/2 (October 1991): 61–82.

Jurgen Tampke and Peter Overlack, ‘Documentation: Imperial Germany's Military Strategy in the South Pacific’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 40/1 (1993): 98–102.

George Arnold Wood, ‘The British and the German Empires: Two Opposing Cultures’, in John Anthony Moses (ed.), Prussian‐German Militarism 1914–18 in Australian Perspective: The Thought of George Arnold Wood (Bern: Peter Lang, 1991), 115–18.

Week 5: The Anzac Legend and Digger Culture

Reading

Ellis Ashmead‐Bartlett, Argus (Melbourne), 8 May 1915, in Harry Gordon (ed.), An Eyewitness History of Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1988), 195–200.

C. E. W. Bean, The Story of Anzac: From the Outbreak of War to the End of the First Phase of the Gallipoli Campaign, May 4, 1915 (Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd., 1938), 605–7. (Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–18, vol. 1)

D. A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean as Editor and Image‐Maker’, Historical Studies, 21/84 (April 1985): 376–90.

Alistair Thomson, ‘“Steadfast Until Death”? C. E. W. Bean and the Representation of Australian Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies, 23/93 (October 1989): 462–78.

Week 6: Women and the Great War

Reading

Jan Bassett, ‘Ready to serve: Australian women in the Great War’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial, 2 (April 1983): 8–16.

Bruce Scates and Raelene Frances, Women and the Great War (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 2.

Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (West Melbourne: Nelson, 1980), 65–93.

Judith Smart, ‘Feminists, Food and the Fair Price: The Cost of Living Demonstrations in Melbourne, August‐September 1917’, Labour History, 50 (May 1986): 113–31.

Week 7: Conscription

Reading

Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: The Anti‐Conscription and Anti‐War Campaigns of 1914–1918’, Labour History, 60 (May 1991): 1–15.

J. B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Reassessment (Part 1)’, Historical Studies, 25/101 (October 1993): 608–27.

J. M. Main, (ed.), Conscription: The Australian Debate, 1901–1970 (North Melbourne: Cassell, 1974), 49–59, 83–4, 87–92.

L. L. Robson (ed.), Australia and the Great War 1914–1918 (South Melbourne: Macmillan, 1970), 73, 76, 98.

Week 8: A Divided Australia

Reading

Verity Burgmann, ‘The Iron Heel: The Suppression of the IWW during World War I’, in What Rough Beast? The State and Social Order in Australian History (Sydney: Sydney Labour History Group, 1982), 171–91.

R. J. W. Selleck, ‘“The Trouble With My Looking Glass”: A Study of the Attitude of Australians to Germans during the Great War’, Journal of Australian Studies, 6 (June 1980): 2–25.

Lucy Taksa, ‘“Defence not Defiance”: Social Protest and the NSW General Strike of 1917’, Labour History, 60 (May 1991): 16–33.

Week 9: The Costs of War

Reading

Joanna Bourke, ‘The Battle of the Limbs: Amputation, Artificial Limbs and the Great War in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies, 29/110 (April 1998): 49–67.

A. B. Facey, A Fortunate Life (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin Books, 1985), ch. 58–62.

F. B. Smith, ‘If Australia had not Participated in the Great War? An Essay on the Costs of War’, in Craig Wilcox assisted by Janice Aldridge, The Great War: Gains and Losses – Anzac and Empire (Canberra: The Australian War Memorial and The Australian National University, 1995), ch. 8.

Week 10: Remembering

Reading

Peter Cochrane, Simpson and the Donkey: The Making of a Legend (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1992), ch. 1.

Graeme Davison, ‘The Habit of Commemoration and the Revival of Anzac Day’, ACH: Australian Cultural History, 22 (2003): 73–82.

Bruce Scates, ‘In Gallipoli's Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Australian Historical Studies, 33/119 (April 2002): 1–21.

Focus Questions

How does the controversy over Australia's entry into the Great War illustrate E. H. Carr's idea of history as ‘a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts, an unending dialogue between the present and the past’? (E. H. Carr, What is History?, 2nd ed. (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 30)

Which kinds of evidence might be used for a study of Australians’ attitude to  the outbreak of war in 1914?

Why did Australia go to war in 1914?

What does Australia's entry into the war reveal about its people's identity and  sense of their place in the world in 1914?

In what ways is distance significant in explaining Australian attitudes to the  war?

Seminar/Project Idea

For Undergraduate Students

Individual Project: Designing a World War I Poster

It is July 1915, the middle of a major recruitment drive, and your task is to design a recruitment poster to persuade young Australian men to enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. Give some thought to the kinds of appeal that you will make. In particular, consider such factors as nationalism, imperialism and masculinity.

Once you have completed your poster, compare your effort to some actual Australian Great War recruitment posters. You will find some examples at http://www.firstworldwar.com/posters/australia.htm.

What themes in your own poster are echoed in those from the First World War? Are there any themes in the World War I posters that you didn't consider? Are there themes in your own poster that don't occur in those on the Web site. Try to account for these differences.