The First World War in Australian History

Abstract

This article introduces the first volume of AHS Classics: Australia and the First World War. It surveys the critical scholarship on the Australian experience of war, taking its cue from Ken Inglis' seminal article, ‘The Anzac Tradition’ (1965), and tracing the development of his challenge to Australian historians over the following five decades. It argues that the adaptability of the Anzac legend, and its assimilation of varied experiences of the First World War, requires both investigation and caution in the production of new histories of events almost a century distant.

Notes

¹ Jonathan King, ‘Charge of the Rewrite Brigade’, Australian, 20 December 2002, 11; Martin Crotty, ‘War Stories in Australia: Scholarship, Memory and Public Intellectualism’, Australian Historical Studies 42, no. 1 (2011): 154.

² Phillip F. E. Schuler, Australia in Arms: A Narrative of the Australasian Imperial Force and Their Achievement at Anzac (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916).

³ C. E. W. Bean et al., Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, 12 vols (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1921–42).

⁴ Sir John Monash, The Australian Victories in France in 1918 (London: Hutchinson, 1920); F. M. Cutlack, The Australians: Their Final Campaign, 1918: An Account of the Concluding Operations of the Australian Divisions in France (London: S. Low, Marston & Co., 1918).

⁵ Ernest Scott, Australia during the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936).

⁶ Carolyn Holbrook, Anzac: The Unauthorised Biography (Sydney: NewSouth, 2014), 60, 91–115. See also Michael McKernan, Here Is Their Spirit: A History of the Australian War Memorial (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1991), 85–6.

⁷ L. L. Robson, ‘Behold a Pale Horse: Australian War Studies’, Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 90 (April 1988): 116.

⁸ K. S. Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin Quarterly 100 (1965): 33.

⁹ K. S. Inglis, ‘The Anzac Tradition’, Meanjin Quarterly 100 (1965): 29.

¹⁰ For a fuller exposition of Inglis' challenge, see Carolyn Holbrook, ‘Marxism for Beginner Nations: Radical Nationalist Historians and the Great War’, Labour History 103 (November 2012): 123–44.

¹¹ L. L. Robson, The First A.I.F.: A Study of Its Recruitment, 1914–1918 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1970).

¹² Robson, ‘Behold a Pale Horse’, 116.

¹³ Robson, ‘Behold a Pale Horse’, 116.

¹⁴ L. L. Robson, ‘The Origin and Character of the First A.I.F., 1914–1918: Some Statistical Evidence’, Historical Studies 15, no. 61 (October 1973): 747.

¹⁵ John Barrett, ‘Reviews’, Historical Studies 18, no. 72 (1979): 479; Alan D. Gilbert, John Robertson and Roslyn Russell, ‘Computing Military History: A Research Report on the First AIF Project’, War & Society 7, no. 1 (May 1989): 106–13. See the AIF Project website: www.aif.adfa.edu.au/index.html

¹⁶ Bill Gammage, ‘War Recalled’, Quadrant (April 1979): 66.

¹⁷ Tony Stephens, The Last Anzacs: Gallipoli 1915 (Sydney: Allen & Kemsley Publishing, 1996); Jonathan King, Gallipoli: Our Last Man Standing; the Extraordinary Life of Alec Campbell (Milton: John Wiley & Sons, 2003).

¹⁸ Kevin Fewster, ed., Gallipoli Correspondent, the Frontline Diary of C.E.W. Bean (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).

¹⁹ Alistair Thomson, ‘Reviews’, Historical Studies 21, no. 82 (April 1984): 148.

²⁰ D. A. Kent, ‘The Anzac Book and the Anzac Legend: C. E. W. Bean as Editor and Image-Maker’, Historical Studies 21, no. 84 (April 1985): 380.

²¹ David Kent, ‘The Anzac Book: A Reply to Denis Winter’, Journal of the Australian War Memorial 17 (October 1990): 54.

²² ‘History Week speaker re-opens Anzac “myth-making” file’, UNE News and Events, 14 September 2005. www.une.edu.au/news/archives/000345.html (accessed 9 October 2013).

²³ John Barrett, ‘No Straw Man: C. E. W. Bean and Some Critics’, Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 90 (April 1988): 102–14.

²⁴ Alistair Thomson, ‘Steadfast until Death? C. E. W. Bean and the Representation of Australian Military Manhood’, Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 93 (October 1989): 477.

²⁵ John Barrett, ‘Communications’, Australian Historical Studies 24, no. 94 (April 1990): 1.

²⁶ Dale Blair, Dinkum Diggers: An Australian Battalion at War (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001); Denis Winter, ed., Making the Legend: The War Writings of C. E. W. Bean (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1992); Martin Ball, ‘Re-reading Bean's Last Paragraph’, Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 122 (October 2003): 231–47; Jenny Macleod provides a thorough analysis of the literature surrounding Bean in her Reconsidering Gallipoli (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 221–30.

²⁷ Jeffrey Grey, ‘Cuckoo in the Nest? Australian Military Historiography: The State of the Field’, History Compass 6, no. 2 (2008): 456.

²⁸ Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688–1980 (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 125–39; Bill Gammage, ‘Anzac’, in Intruders in the Bush: The Australian Quest for identity, ed. John Carroll (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1982), 54–66; Richard Ely, ‘The First Anzac Day: Invented or Discovered?’ Journal of Australian Studies 17 (November 1985): 41–58; Graham Seal, Inventing ANZAC: The Digger and National Mythology (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2004).

²⁹ Inglis, ‘Anzac Tradition’, 34–6.

³⁰ K. S. Inglis, ‘Conscription in Peace and War, 1911–1945’, in Conscription in Australia, eds Roy Forward and Bob Reece (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1968), 22–65.

³¹ L. L. Robson, ‘Reviews’, Historical Studies 15, no. 58 (April 1972): 313–14.

³² Marilyn Lake, A Divided Society: Tasmania during World War I (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1975), 195.

³³ For example, Ina Bertrand, ‘The Victorian Country Vote in the Conscription Referendums of 1916 and 1917: The Case of the Wannon Electorate’, Labour History 26 (1974): 19–31; Jenny Tilby Stock, ‘Farmers and the Rural Vote in South Australia in World War I: The 1916 Conscription Referendum’, Historical Studies 21, no. 84 (April 1985): 391–411; Alan D. Gilbert, ‘The Conscription Referenda, 1916–17: The Impact of the Irish Crisis’, Historical Studies 14, no. 43 (October 1969): 54–72; Michael McKernan, ‘Catholics, Conscription and Archbishop Mannix’, Historical Studies 17, no. 68 (April 1977): 299–314; Jeff Kildea, ‘Australian Catholics and Conscription in the Great War’, The Journal of Religious History 26, no. 3 (October 2002): 298–313.

³⁴ Glenn Withers, ‘The 1916–1917 Conscription Referenda: A Cliometric Re-Appraisal’, Historical Studies 20, no. 78 (April 1982): 36–46.

³⁵ Judith Smart, ‘Conscription, Class Conflict and the Community: Victoria in the Year of 1917’, Recorder (Australian Society for the Study of Labour History) 178 (April 1993): 8.

³⁶ Judith Smart, ‘The Right to Speak and the Right to Be Heard: The Popular Disruption of Conscriptionist Meetings in Melbourne, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies 23, no. 92 (April 1989): 203–19.

³⁷ Raymond Evans, ‘“All the Passion of Our Womanhood”: Margaret Thorp and the Battle of the Brisbane School of Arts’, in Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century, eds Joy Damousi and Marilyn Lake (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 239–53.

³⁸ J. B. Hirst, ‘Australian Defence and Conscription: A Re-Assessment, Part I’, Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 101 (1993): 608–27; Jeremy Sammut, ‘“Busting” the Anti-Conscription Legend’, Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society 91, no. 2 (December 2005): 163–83.

³⁹ John McQuilton, ‘Doing the “Back Block Boys Some Good”: The Exemption Court Hearings in North-Eastern Victoria, 1916’, Australian Historical Studies 31, no. 115 (October 2000): 237–50; Bart Ziino, ‘Enlistment and Non-Enlistment in Wartime Australia: Responses to the 1916 Call to Arms Appeal’, Australian Historical Studies 41, no. 2 (June 2010): 217–32.

⁴⁰ Marilyn Lake, ‘On History and Politics’, in The Historian's Conscience, ed. Stuart Macintyre (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2004), 94.

⁴¹ Joan Beaumont, ‘Whatever Happened to Patriotic Women, 1914–1918?’, Australian Historical Studies 31, no. 115 (October 2000): 273–86.

⁴² Carmel Shute, ‘Heroines and Heroes: Sexual Mythology in Australia 1914–1918’, Hecate 1, no. 1 (1975): 11; Pat Gowland, ‘The Women's Peace Army’, in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia 1788–1978, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle (Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1980), 216–34; Joy Damousi, ‘Socialist Women and Gendered Space: The Anti-Conscription and Anti-War Campaigns of 1914–18’, Labour History 60 (May 1991): 1–15; Annabel Cooper, ‘Textual Territories: Gendered Cultural Politics and Australian Representations of the War of 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies 25, no. 100 (April 1993): 403–21.

⁴³ Margaret O. Young, ed., We Are Here, Too: The Diaries and Letters of Sister Olive L.C. Haynes (Adelaide: Australian Down Syndrome Association, 1991).

⁴⁴ Marilyn Lake and Joy Damousi, ‘Introduction: Warfare, History and Gender’, in Gender and War, 5.

⁴⁵ Judith Smart, ‘Homefires and Housewives: Women, War and the Politics of Consumption’, Victorian Historical Journal 75, no. 1 (April 2004): 97.

⁴⁶ Melanie Oppenheimer, ‘“The Best P.M. for the Empire in War”? Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and the Australian Red Cross Society, 1914–1920’, Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 119 (2002): 108–24; Bruce Scates, ‘The Unknown Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War’, Labour History 81 (November 2001): 29–49; Melanie Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross 1914–2014 (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014).

⁴⁷ Janet Butler, ‘Journey into War: A Woman's Diary’, Australian Historical Studies 37, no. 127 (April 2006): 217.

⁴⁸ Susanna de Vries, Heroic Australian Women in War: Astonishing Tales of Bravery from Gallipoli to Kokoda (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2004).

⁴⁹ Jay Winter, ‘Ken Inglis on Language, Culture and Commemoration’, in Anzac Remembered: Selected Writings of K. S. Inglis, ed. John Lack (Melbourne: History Department, University of Melbourne, 1998), 7.

⁵⁰ Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1994).

⁵¹ Stephen Garton, The Cost of War: Australians Return (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1996).

⁵² Joy Damousi, The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Pat Jalland, Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2002); Tanja Luckins, The Gates of Memory: Australian People's Experiences and Memories of Loss in the Great War (Fremantle: Curtin University Books, 2004); Bruce Scates, Return to Gallipoli: Walking the Battlefields of the Great War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Bart Ziino, A Distant Grief: Australians, War Graves and the Great War (Perth: UWA Press, 2007).

⁵³ Marina Larsson, Shattered Anzacs: Living with the Scars of War (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009).

⁵⁴ John McQuilton, Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).

⁵⁵ Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), xv–xxiii.

⁵⁶ Frank Bongiorno and Grant Mansfield, ‘Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War’, History Compass 6, no. 1 (2008): 62–90.

⁵⁷ Michael Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Martin Lyons, ‘French Soldiers and Their Correspondence: Towards a History of Writing Practices in the First World War’, French History 17, no. 1 (2003): 79–95; Martha Hanna, ‘A Republic of Letters: The Epistolary Tradition in France during World War I’, The American Historical Review 108, no. 5 (2003): 1338–61.

⁵⁸ Christina Spittel, ‘Remembering the War: Australian Novelists in the Interwar Years’, Australian Literary Studies 23, no. 2 (2007): 121–39; Amanda Laugesen, Boredom is the Enemy: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).

⁵⁹ Michael Piggott, ‘War, Sacred Archiving and C.E.W. Bean’, in Archives and Societal Provenance: Australian Essays (Oxford: Chandos, 2012), 119–31.

⁶⁰ Anne-Marie Condé, ‘Capturing the Records of War: Collecting at the Mitchell Library and the Australian War Memorial’, Australian Historical Studies 36, no. 125 (April 2005): 150. Also Tanja Luckins, ‘Collecting Women's Memories: The Australian War Memorial, the Next of Kin and Great War Soldiers’ Diaries and Letters as Objects of Memory in the 1920s and 1930s’, Women's History Review, 19, no. 1 (2010): 21–37.

⁶¹ Alistair Thomson, ‘Anzac Stories: Using Personal Testimony in War History’, War & Society 25, no. 2 (October 2006): 1–21.

⁶² http://foundersandsurvivors.org/project (accessed 17 October 2013).

⁶³ Bill Gammage, ‘Australians and the Great War’, Journal of Australian Studies 6 (June 1980): 26–35.

⁶⁴ Robin Prior, ‘Old Paradigms: Received Versions of the Great War’, Australian Book Review (May 2011): 56.

⁶⁵ See the ‘Serving Our Country’ project. www.ourmobserved.com (accessed 2 July 2014).

⁶⁶ Peter Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Sydney: Pier 9, 2010).

⁶⁷ Graeme Davison, ‘The Habit of Commemoration and the Revival of Anzac Day’, Australian Cultural History 22 (2003): 73–82; Joan Beaumont, ‘The State of Australian History of War’, Australian Historical Studies 34, no. 121 (April 2003): 168.

⁶⁸ Bruce Scates, ‘In Gallipoli's Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 119 (2002): 1.

⁶⁹ Bruce Scates, ‘In Gallipoli's Shadow: Pilgrimage, Memory, Mourning and the Great War’, Australian Historical Studies 33, no. 119 (2002): 21.

⁷⁰ Mark McKenna and Stuart Ward, ‘“It Was Really Moving, Mate”: The Gallipoli Pilgrimage and Sentimental Nationalism in Australia’, Australian Historical Studies 38, no. 129 (2007): 151.

⁷¹ Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What's Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: NewSouth, 2010), 22.

⁷² Joan Beaumont, ‘War and Remembrance: Anzac under Fire’, Canberra Times, 17 April 2010.

⁷³ Christina Twomey, ‘Trauma and the Reinvigoration of Anzac: An Argument’, History Australia 10, no. 3 (December 2013): 85–108.

⁷⁴ See http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/anzac-remembered (accessed 2 July 2014).

⁷⁵ Beaumont, ‘The State of Australian History of War’; Grey.

⁷⁶ Craig Stockings, ed., Anzac's Dirty Dozen: 12 Myths of Australian Military History (Sydney: NewSouth, 2012), 3.

⁷⁷ Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Jay Winter and Jean-Louis Robert, eds, Capital Cities at War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). See also Alan Kramer, ‘Recent Historiography of the First World War (Part I)’, Journal of Modern European History 12, no. 2 (2014): 5–27.

⁷⁸ Pierre Purseigle, ‘A Very French Debate: The 1914–1918 “War Culture”’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 1, no. 1 (2008): 9–14.

⁷⁹ Tammy Proctor, Civilians in a World at War, 1914–1918 (New York: New York University Press, 2010).

⁸⁰ Grey, 458.