page_title: Military recruitment in Queensland in World War I
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Military recruitment in Queensland in World War I / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Most emphatically I say No! - military recruitment poster in World War I by the Queensland Recruiting Committee
context_page_description: During World War I, extensive military recruitment took place in Queensland. Although many enlisted voluntarily, there was considerable pressure for the unwilling to enlist, including two unsuccessful attempts to introduce conscription in 1916 and 1917. Overall, more than 57,700 Queenslanders fought in World War I and over 10,000 of them died.
context_section_description: The recruitment of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War has been called "the greatest effort that Australia ever made as a nation". Approximately 417,000 Australians enlisted voluntarily between 1914 and 1918, of which more than 57,700 were Queenslanders. This figure constituted about 40 per cent of all men aged between 18 and 45 years of age. The recruitment initiatives during the war involved a considerable degree of state, social, media and moral pressure brought to bear on eligible males to enlist ("take the king's shilling"), especially in the later years of the war.
  Britain's declaration of war against Germany and Austria-Hungary in August 1914 was greeted in Australia with popular enthusiasm. Though artificially high fitness standards were set by army doctors at the outset, more than 52,000 men had enlisted by the end of 1914. Accounts of extraordinary individual efforts to join up are legion. A Queensland grazier rode nearly 500 miles to the closest railhead to offer himself to the Australian Light Horse in Adelaide. There the quota was filled. He sailed to Hobart and once again faced disappointment. He eventually enlisted in Sydney as a private. Enthusiasm for the war was high and no special recruiting agencies were required. "Everything went with a swing", an official report at the time recorded.
  After a lull in the early months of 1915, national excitement around the Gallipoli landing in April, indignation and horror around the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, and an imperial call for reinforcements – in the form of a letter from the King George V to state premiers – kept the recruiting officials busy. In September 1915 the federal government undertook a war census which required completion by all males between the ages of 18 and 60. The census was followed in December by a call to arms – an enlistment appeal in the form of a letter from the Prime Minister addressed to all eligible men inviting them to enlist and asking "If they were not prepared to do so, why not?". The Queensland Recruiting Committee – which included members of parliament, clergymen and local government officials – was formed in June 1915, and, unlike their counterparts in other states, was initially an independent and privately funded body of citizen volunteers. It was chaired by prominent Brisbane lawyer Andrew Joseph Thynne. In October 1915 it came under the aegis of the recently appointed Queensland War Council.
  National enthusiasm for enlistment was on the wane by the later half of 1915. July 1915 was the highest enlistment month of the war, but as rates declined in the subsequent months, recruiters employed a variety of methods to increase numbers including extensive press advertising and billboards. Soapbox recruiters sought to gather a crowd on street corners. Recruiting trains were organised as were snowball marches. One example of a snowball march in Queensland was that of the March of the Dungarees, a group of enlistees who left Warwick in November 1915 to march to Brisbane, and who gathered other recruits on the way. However, the ongoing publication of casualty lists meant that the naïve enthusiasm for war evident in 1914 was increasingly replaced by a sense of hardened resolution and grimmer purpose.  Most willing volunteers had already joined the colours by the end of 1915.
  By May 1916 the Queensland Recruiting Committee had instituted a centralised and cross-referenced filing system. This filing system provided the Committee with detailed records of 120,000 eligible males in Queensland and used a classification system to show availability in terms of family responsibilities, work commitments and other factors. This elaborate and detailed organisation was informed as much by the expectation of conscription as it was by the ongoing campaign for voluntary enlistment. Recruiting organisers increasingly believed that the voluntary system had reached its limit and invested in the success of compulsory conscription which had been publicly advocated by the Universal Service League and others since Septem
caption: "Most emphatically I say No!" - recruitment poster by the Queensland Recruiting Committee
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