In the Shadow of Gallipoli: The Hidden Story of Australia in WWI

By Robert Bollard

The fighting Anzacs have metamorphosed from flesh and blood into mythic icons; the war they fought in is distant and the resistance to it within Australia has been forgotten. This book corrects such historical amnesia by looking at what occured on the Australian home front during WWI, showing that the war was a disaster and many Australians knew it. It not only considers the wartime strike wave resulting from the discontent and dissent, such as the Great Strike of 1917, but also the impact of international political events, including the Easter Rising in Ireland and the Russian Revolution. Demonstrating that the first year of peace was tumultuous, as strikes and riots involving returned Anzacs shook Australia throughout 1919, this book uncovers the history that has been obscured by the shadow of Anzac.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Apr 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781742241449

Book preview

IN THE SHADOW OF GALLIPOLI

Robert Bollard is an historian who has researched and published extensively on the labour movement in Australia during the Great War. His PhD thesis on the Great Strike of 1917 was runner-up for the Serle Award (a biennial prize for the best history thesis in Australia) in 2008.

IN THE SHADOW OF GALLIPOLI

ROBERT BOLLARD

The hidden history of Australia in World War I

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Robert Bollard 2013

First published 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Bollard, Robert.

Title: In the shadow of Gallipoli: the hidden history

of Australia in World War I/Robert Bollard.

ISBN: 978 174223 324 6 (pbk.)

           978 174224 633 8 (ebook: pdf)

           978 174224 144 9 (ebook: epub)

           978 174224 389 4 (ebook: mobi)

Subjects: War and society – Australia.

           World War, 1914-1918 – Social aspects – Australia.

           Australia – History – 20th century.

           Australia – Social conditions – 20th century.

Dewey Number: 940.30994

Cover Xou Creative

Cover illustrations TOP Railway staff waiting for dinner during 1917 strike, State Records NSW: 15309_a015_a015000014

BOTTOM 1st Division Australian troops near Hooge, Belgium.

Photograph: Frank Hurley, Australian War Memorial: E00833.

Contents

Abbreviations

Introduction

1 ‘To the last man and the last shilling’: Patriotism triumphant

2 ‘If you want the 44-hour week, take it!’: The strike wave begins

3 ‘Wherever green is worn’: Irish discontent

4 ‘I will curse the British Empire with my dying breath’: The first conscription referendum

5 ‘Fifteen years for fifteen words’: The empire strikes back

6 ‘Solidarity for ever’: The Great Strike of 1917

7 ‘We’ll burn the town down!’: The second referendum

8 ‘Plunge this city into darkness’: The peace turns ugly

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index

Abbreviations

Introduction

Every April, the shores of Gallipoli witness a fresh invasion as patriotic Australian tourists throng to Anzac Cove. Young backpackers make the journey to the Dardanelles in everincreasing numbers. For a nation with little regard for its own history, this is one episode that has clearly established its grip on the popular memory, a grip which grows stronger rather than fading with the years. Two decades ago it appeared as if the Anzac myth was on its last legs, destined to fade into curiosity alongside bush ballads, drovers and archaic slang. In the words of Eric Bogle: ‘Someday no-one will march there again’. And yet they do still march, and in great numbers. Young Australians in particular make the journey to distant Turkey to commemorate a national ceremony that, for the most part, their parents experienced simply as a day off work, usually paid for by a television schedule filled with 1950s war films. Anzac Day has defied all predictions of its demise: it grows every year in popular significance.

It helps, of course, that the grand old tradition of fighting other people’s wars has been given a booster shot in recent years, and that Afghanistan is even now providing new casualties to mourn. This is, however, not a sufficient explanation for the resurrection of the Anzac myth. The backpackers at Anzac Cove are not motivated by enthusiasm for recent wars: it is Gallipoli they remember – World War I – not more recent imperial excursions.

At one level, this patriotic tourism is easy to understand. Nearly one in twelve Australians served in ‘the Great War’, and half of them became casualties. This means that, between 1914 and 1918, almost one in twenty-four Australians were wounded or killed. Given that the victims were overwhelmingly young men, aged between 18 and 35, the impact on that particular demographic almost defies imagination. This is unarguably a conflict worth remembering and understanding. And yet the annual pilgrimage to Gallipoli, as it has evolved in recent years, has become more than simply commemoration. Remembering has been replaced by remembrance, something far more totemic and ritualised. Understanding has been increasingly limited by the abstract nature of such commemoration.

Most obviously, popular memory of this disastrous war has been distorted by the fact Australians generally commemorate only one campaign among many. Gallipoli wasn’t the bloodiest battle or campaign which the Anzacs endured in that war. It cannot compete in that regard with the bloody triangle of Pozières, the catastrophe of Fromelles or the mud and horror of Passchendaele. The Gallipoli campaign was, moreover, a defeat, and a defeat in a war in which Australian troops otherwise achieved many significant victories, particularly in Palestine and Flanders in the war’s final year. But this was the first battle of the Anzacs’ war. It was at Gallipoli that the legend began, its birth announced in the purple prose of Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett. Only a year later, in 1916, as the Anzacs were still awaiting their introduction to the industrial horrors of the Western Front, the date of the first landing at Gallipoli was chosen to commemorate Anzac Day. Ever since, there has been one thing at least that Australians are guaranteed to know about World War I. If they know nothing else, they know about Gallipoli.

Again, this distorted, or at least unbalanced, view of World War I is explicable – but that doesn’t make it acceptable. A war that was so devastating needs to be understood. Misunderstood history is forgotten history and forgotten history, famously, is ripe for repetition. The national legend of Gallipoli has cast the rest of that war into a deep shadow, and that shadow covers some of the most significant history that our nation possesses.

The sentiment, the pride and solemnity on display every April in Anzac Cove are no doubt sincere, but one can’t help but wonder how much the thousands of young backpackers who congregate for the dawn service actually know about the war they are commemorating. Media vox pops reveal some curious notions about the ‘War to End All Wars’, reinforced by the commentary of reporters and anchor-persons. They suffered and died, we are informed, to defend our freedom. They were brave and looked after their mates. They had it tough. Moreover, they died for us; they died to make Australia a nation. In all these rather abstract intonations one obvious thing is missing: the reason for the war. What, for instance, did the Turks ever do to us? How, in particular, did they threaten our ‘freedom’? Why did we have to land on an obscure beach on the other side of the world to become a nation? More importantly, why did we have to sacrifice so much of a generation of young men to achieve nationhood, and is the abstraction of nationhood worth such a sacrifice?

There is a scene in the movie Gallipoli that sums this up beautifully. Two young men are racing across a Western Australian desert in 1914, determined to enlist. They encounter a camel driver. They explain what they are doing, and he asks them why – for he hasn’t heard of the war. The conversation is almost surreal, as they talk about an Austrian archduke and Belgium, and they try to explain to this simple man what the war which they are so eager to join is all about. They cannot, and it becomes clear that, whatever their motives may be for enlisting, the supposed causes of the war are irrelevant.

The popular understanding of World War I is layered with multiple levels of ignorance. The first layer is created, as we have seen, by the way in which the iconic campaign at Gallipoli crowds out the rest of the war – and a good part of our other wars – from our national memory, so that comparatively little is remembered, most obviously, about the Western Front. Take Passchendaele in 1917, where 38 000 Australians became casualties in a few weeks of fighting and around 10 000 died. These numbers alone are staggering, comparable to the casualty figures from all of World War II, greater than the combined total of casualties from every other war (apart from the two World Wars), from the Boer War to Iraq and Afghanistan, in which Australians have fought. And yet, how many Australians have heard of Passchendaele?

Below this is another layer of ignorance. One version of the Anzac myth contrasts the Vietnam War with those that preceded it. The assumption is that previous generations cheered on the diggers and welcomed them upon their return, while only the selfish and ungrateful baby boomers turned their backs on those who had served, even, in one particularly persistent urban myth, spitting on them in the street. Quite apart from the argument about whether this is an accurate description of what happened in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it conveniently forgets the way in which World War I was understood towards its end. It is related to the ignorance about the causes of the war so superbly illustrated by the scene from Gallipoli. Those who have not asked themselves the question about why World War I was fought are unlikely to know that many at the time asked that question. As the casualties mounted in 1915 and 1916, many Australians began to ask why they were dying. The patriotic consensus of 1914 rapidly dissolved, and by the war’s end it was, arguably, as unpopular as the Vietnam conflict would be by the early 1970s.

To those more familiar with history, at least as it is taught in universities and in some secondary schools, there is some knowledge of this other side of World War I. Most obviously, the conscription referenda and the split in the Australian Labor Party (ALP) are widely known. Some will also be aware (most commonly through a description of the career of Melbourne’s Catholic archbishop, Daniel Mannix) of the effect the rebellion in Ireland had upon Irish-Australians. And yet, even here, as we peel off the surface layers of the onion, there are yet more layers of forgetting. The final layer, one that has eluded not just popular understanding of history but many academic accounts as well, is an ignorance of the full nature and extent of the radicalisation of the Australian working class between 1916 and 1919.

It wasn’t just that the casualty lists were posted and the telegrams began to arrive, and the horror of war began to be felt – although that was clearly important. It wasn’t just that one in five Australians were of Irish-Catholic descent or that the vast majority of those were working class, and condemned to remain working class by the sectarian divisions that still cleaved Australia in this period. At the time of the war’s declaration it was clearly understood as a war for ‘our’ British Empire. After the Easter Uprising in Dublin in 1916 was brutally suppressed by the British authorities, for many Irish-Australians it became instead a war for an empire that was persecuting their relatives and countrymen. It wasn’t just that, in late 1916, when Billy Hughes attempted to introduce conscription with a referendum, the growing feeling against the war had a chance to be expressed at the ballot box, and the referendum was defeated after a tumultuous, often violent campaign. What has also been forgotten is the fact that underlying these political crises, and making them in turn more powerful, was an economic crisis, and that the cost of the war for working-class Australians was not just measured in deaths and injury but in hunger.

To understand this it helps to take a step back and deepen the historical focus; to compare Australia before 1914 with the Australia of the 1930s. During World War II, Australians were both delighted and horrified to witness the abundance that accompanied the friendly invasion of Australia by American GIs: ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’. General Macarthur notoriously had a low opinion of Australian troops whom he viewed as still demoralised by the impact of the Depression. Perhaps he saw in their gaunt visages and shabby uniforms a visual echo of the bonus marchers he drove out of Washington in 1932. Yet, before 1914, Australians had enjoyed the highest living standards in the world, higher even than in the United States. The fact that the Anzacs in World War I were paid nearly twice as much as British soldiers is a reflection of this economic fact. But that war itself was an essential part of a process which was to transform Australia from a country that many still believed to be a ‘working man’s paradise’ to the country it became in the 1930s. Australia was the hardest hit of all the English-speaking nations during the Great Depression. But, even before that economic catastrophe, the decline had begun, most dramatically with a severe decline in working-class living standards during World War I itself.

This decline, although now largely forgotten, was selfevident to everyone at the time. In Melbourne, the Age ran a series of articles in 1917 about the rise in the cost of living. In 1919 a conservative federal government felt obliged to appoint a Royal Commission under the aegis of the liberal judge, AB Piddington, to investigate what had happened to working-class living standards during the war. Piddington concluded that wages would have to be raised by 30 per cent to achieve their 1914 purchasing power. Prime Minister William ‘Billy’ Hughes responded by pointing out that such a rise would eliminate the profit margin of all Australian business.¹ Needless to say, no wage rise was forthcoming.

The refusal of Billy Hughes to implement Piddington’s recommendation in 1920 was and is hardly surprising. Australian workers, who had by then suffered five years of plummeting living standards, had long abandoned any faith they may have had in the possibility of relief from their distress being delivered by benevolent judges or prime ministers of any political stripe. Beginning in Broken Hill in the closing months of 1915, a strike wave of unprecedented scope and fury had convulsed Australia. In late 1916, the coalminers struck and won a wage rise – and, for good measure, the eight-hour day. The strike wave then reached its first peak in the autumn of 1917 when, even as the Anzacs were being slaughtered in the mud of Passchendaele, a mass strike ripped through the eastern states of Australia. Usually referred to as the ‘New South Wales General Strike’ (although it wasn’t quite general, nor was it confined to New South Wales) this action was an explosion of solidarity with the employees of the railway workshops of New South Wales who had been subjected to the imposition of a new set of ‘Taylorist’ time-and-motion working conditions. Coalminers, wharfies, timberworkers and storemen, the teenage employees of Melbourne soap factories and even the young women who served tea to passengers at Sydney’s Central Station – in all nearly 100 000 workers – walked out on the basic principle that they would not work with scabs or with goods delivered by scabs. The miners at Broken Hill struck and attempted to draw into the dispute the workers at the Port Pirie smelter – an establishment of some importance given that it produced most of the lead needed to supply the Allied armies with ammunition. The miners failed, but a refusal by wharfies at Port Pirie to unload coal for the smelter went close to closing it down.

Not surprisingly for a strike in wartime – and one which so dramatically threatened the war effort – this insurgency was met with ferocity and organisation by the government and the employers. Armies of ‘volunteers’ recruited from the bush and from the urban middle classes kept essential services running. Eventually the union officials, most of whom had been as horrified as anyone by the newfound militancy of their members, felt able to call the strike off. This defeat emboldened Hughes, who understood the power of the labour movement he had once been a part of and the role it had played in the defeat of the first conscription referendum in 1916, to call another conscription referendum in December 1917. Despite the defeat of the trade unions and their inability to fund another vigorous campaign against conscription, the referendum was defeated by an even larger margin. Such was the deepening hostility to this war.

In 1918 the labour movement drew its breath. The waterfront in Sydney, Melbourne and Fremantle had been flooded with scab labour, as had even some of the New South Wales coalmines. But it is dark down a coalmine, and the wharves too became a dangerous place for scabs, especially when wharfies who had served on the Western Front began to return and found scabs who hadn’t served in the war given automatic preference ahead of them. 1919, the first year after the armistice, was a boom year. It was also a year of rampant inflation and a year marked by an influenza epidemic that killed more in its course around the planet than had the war. The return of over 300 000 diggers, half of them carrying physical wounds of some kind and all in some way scarred mentally by their time in the slaughterhouse, was viewed with alarm by the authorities. The spectre of Bolshevism was haunting Europe. In Germany, Austria and throughout Eastern Europe, the war had ended in revolution as returned soldiers brought their rifles and their martial skills home with them. There was a fear that something like this could happen in Australia. Leaflets were distributed on one of the troopships bringing the Anzacs home urging them not to turn their guns on striking workers. This caused a degree of panic in official circles, and the panic was more justified than one might assume, despite the subsequent reputation of returned soldiers and of their representative bodies such as the Returned Services League (RSL) for