 Good evening everybody and welcome to the 13th Annual Archives lecture. We acknowledge and celebrate the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and whose cultures are among the oldest continuing cultures in human history. My name is Maggie Shatley and I'm the University Archivist here at the ANU. This event is sponsored by the ANU Archives and the Friends of the Noel Butler Archives Centre. The Friends manage a conservation fund on behalf of the archives to conserve valuable material. Our 19th Century Minute Books of Trade Unions are listed on the UNESCO Memory of the World Register. And the Friends are funding conservation work on these priceless volumes. Nine have already been done, three are with the conservator right now and we only have 199 to go. For a very modest subscription you can join the Friends and you can contribute to their tax-deductible fund and there's forms out in the foyer. So that's a message from the sponsor. It's my pleasure to introduce Professor Joan Beaumont tonight. A special pleasure because Joan is both a researcher at the Noel Butler Archives Centre and a friend of the Noel Butler Archives Centre. She is also the winner, not just the shortlisted but she's actually now won the New South Wales Premier's Prize for Australian History for her book Broken Nation. And today we had news that she's just been shortlisted for the Council of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, Australian Book Prize. So another short listing. Tonight she draws on her research for that book to speak to us about the real war, battles on the Australian home front. So please join me in welcoming her. Well thank you very much Maggie, it's a great pleasure to be here and a great honour to deliver this lecture particularly because as you'll see from my PowerPoint presentation I became a great fan of the Australian worker while I was writing Broken Nation and was given very generous support and help by the Noel Butler Archives of which I'm also a great fan. Well if you still venture into bookshops rather than buying books online you'll know that the centenary of World War I is spawning a torrent of publication on this conflict. So why did I write Broken Nation? Well quite simply because despite all the books that have been published in the past three decades on Australians at war there was no single comprehensive history that drew together the battles, the home front, diplomacy and memory. Not surprisingly the vast majority of books have been on battle. But I thought it was time that we acknowledged that World War I was about much more than fighting and killing. Sometimes called the first total war it was a conflict in which civilians mattered. Well certainly in the case of Australia a remarkable number of Australian men enlisted and served overseas but most Australians stayed at home. Many of these were women and children but even among men at the age bracket 18 to 60 years nearly 70% did not enlist. In essence then the story of Australians at war must be seen as much more than the Australian imperial force at war. And this is particularly so since it was the Australian population on the home front who underpinned the national war effort. Yes they did not fight but they mobilised their labour, gave their money and suffered from rising prices and a reduced standard of living and most critically despite almost unimaginable casualties most Australians continued to support the war believing that the causes for which their men were fighting and dying were just. We sometimes forget that some domestic populations of World War I ultimately lost the will to fight most notably Russia in 1917. But even though as we shall see Australian society was profoundly divided by the war the will to continue fighting survived if perhaps only just. The home front therefore needs to be seen as an essential part of the national experience of war and I like to imagine it as being in a kind of dialogue with the battle front by which I mean that we cannot understand the domestic politics of 1914 to 18 without recognising that every dimension of political and social life was infused by the potential intensity of Greece, grief and mass loss. And we cannot ignore the impact of domestic politics on the resilience of the AIF in the last years of the war. Now tonight my focus will be on the first of the dialogues that is the dialogue from the battle to the home front rather than the reverse. We are particularly at the impact of the war on the political and industrial labour movements given the Noel Butler Archives Association. The first I want to make a few simple some ways almost banal points about the battles in which Australian forces were involved. Firstly there were many of them. I mention this because Gallipoli is so dominated national memory that some Australians particularly young Australians think that's the only place in which the AIF fought. Or failing that they seem to think this is where the war began. Yet Australians played a major role in a long campaign in Palestine the political outcomes of which I think still haunt us today. And on the western front the battle honours that are listed on this national memorial which was unveiled in 1938 were as following as follows. I shan't read them all out but what is striking about this list is how few of these battles feature in today's inevitably selective national commemoration. I don't usually have a voice like this. The second point to make about battles is that they weren't constant. The popular image of World War One is a member patchily under fire wading through the mud of the trenches. But as this slide shows, and the red slide shows total battle casualties, the blue enlistments, the AIF casualties peaked and ebbed in a series of major campaigns. The peaks are the Somme, the two battles of Boulacourt, the 30 April which is popularly known as Passchendaele and finally the stopping of the German spring offensive in March 1918, March April 1918 and the breaking of the Hindenburg Line later in that year. Please note the blue line. It was the yawning gap between casualties and voluntary enlistments which are depicted by the blue line which I think explains more than any other factor what happened in Australian domestic politics. It's no coincidence that both conscription referenda were held towards or at the end of a massive battle, the 1961 after the Somme and the 1917 after Passchendaele. And with casualty lists in the tens of thousands and victory seemingly nowhere in sight, Australians deflected their mass grief and anger at a war which seemed beyond any politicians or commanders control onto their opponents at home. A final point that I must make about battles as we approach an orgy of commemoration in 2015 is that in none of these did Australians fight alone. In every context from Gallipoli to the last great offensives against Germany in 1918 Australians were part of a huge multinational alliance. Six times as more British Gallipoli than Australians and by one estimate in September 1918 when the Australian divisions were perhaps totaling 40,000 men because they were so under man and it set last peak on the right it is estimated that there were 40,000 Australians but perhaps 6 million Allied soldiers poised to push the Germans back to their border. So whatever the reputation, it was a deserved reputation of the IAF for tactical brilliance, we did not win the war. And I know that points often made but I refer you to the recent episode of the war that changed us, which does argue essentially that we won the war. To turn now to the battles on the home front which is my main point, as is well known there was very little debate about Australia's going to war in 1914, August 1914. And this was despite the fact that the British government which conducted foreign policy on behalf of the whole empire at that time made the decision to declare war on Germany without consulting the Dominions even though it had promised to do so in earlier imperial conferences. But when the British declared war, the leaders of both federal political parties the Liberals under Joseph Cook and the Australian Labour Party under Andrew Fisher outdid each other in protestations of support for Britain. It was Fisher who coined the immortal phrase the last man and the last shilling and who supported the Liberal government fully when it offered Britain not only the use of the vessels of the small Royal Australian naval but also a force of 20,000 infantry to be paid for by Australia but deployed as the British command wished. What's notable about the timing of this Australian offer is that the cabinet decision was communicated to the British cabinet which as it happened was racked with in decision about whether to go to war or not some 40 hours before Britain declared war on Germany. Even more strikingly the decision to go to war did not cause the ALP the anguish that was experienced by its Labour counterparts overseas whereas in Britain, France and Germany there were very public anti-war protests from the left about going to war. In Australia the ALP not only offered no opposition to the decision to go for war but fully supported it. Well why? Well one answer is that war came while Australia was involved in a federal election and as Douglas Newton has argued the Fisher could not afford to allow the ALP to be painted by his Conservatives opponents as disloyal or soft on defence and unreliable as a wartime government. Does this sound at all familiar I might ask? Secondly the ALP which had led the world in gaining power in its own right the Watson government of 1904 was the first Labour national government in the world and had in the pre-war years embraced and driven sorry the Labour government had in the pre-war years embraced and driven an agenda for Australian defence planning and this planning had been based on the assumption that it would be firstly conscription for home defence and that Australia's regional security of necessity had to be part of a wider imperial defence system. And finally and here I'm drawing on Robyn Archer's recent article in Labour history the very strength of the ALP in 1914 seems to have predisposed it to compromise that is because it was holding power and had held power at the national level it needed to be attuned to popular enthusiasm beyond its own power base and to be able to appeal to the swinging voter but there were others within the wider political and industrial Labour movement who thought differently. Indeed Labour in inverted commas in 1916 was a broad church with views ranging from anarchism, Marxism and syndicalism to a much more pragmatic socialism. Hence the Australian worker, the organ of the Australian Workers Union whose editor was Henry Boote argued in August 1914 actually October 1914 that the real war was between Labour and capital. Capital you notice is depicted as a bloated plutocrat that was this very common image Labour as a muscular man contending for the world. And on the far left the industrial workers of the world are Wobblies an international syndicalist movement which had gained a significant presence in the Australian trade union movement before the war which has spokenly condemned war and imperialism in 1914. Meanwhile in Melbourne the women's political association called for international arbitration and soon formed a women's peace army led by that remarkable trio I'm afraid I can only find two photos of women by the Goldstein, Adela Pankerst and Cecilia John. Now for many on the left opposition to the war was anchored in ideology but it was soon fuelled by the anger at the impact of the war on the Australian economy. Very rapidly there was increased unemployment and price inflation but while losses in the war itself were low these voices of dissent on the left remained marginal and the fractures that were there within the Labour movement and which were represented by these dissenting voices what we might call the fault line between pragmatism and ideological purity were also masked over in the early years of the war the early months I shouldn't say really because all began to change in 1915 with the Gallipoli campaign not only did this produce the first terrible casualty lists and bring home the first boatloads of seriously wounded men and sufferers of venereal disease who were hurried away it triggered on the conservative forces part the demand for a far more systematic recruitment of manpower now enlistments had continued at a pretty healthy rate without much government coordination the first nine months of the war and voluntary enlistments raised more than four times the original promise of 20,000 men by mid-1915 but in response to Gallipoli the Victorian and New South Wales governments went into overdrive spurred I think by some residual colonial competitiveness and in June in 1915 they launched sophisticated recruitment campaigns ensuring that in July 1914 the total national enlistment was 36,575 which as you'll see from this graph it is the huge pillar towards the left was the highest month of re-enlistments of the war and at the same time the federal government created a bipartisan federal parliamentary war committee the primary role of this committee was to coordinate these recruitment efforts across the country but it was also assigned the role of integrating Commonwealth and state government initiatives to provide employment medical care and land settlement for returning soldiers for the Australian authorities it's interesting that repatriation benefits and recruitment were two sides of the one coin as they saw it you could not persuade men to volunteer if they feared that they and their families were to be left destitute in the event of their death or injury put another way the Australian state was embracing the principle which was to last throughout the famous repat to Veterans Affairs today that it had an obligation to care for the men and women who fought and died for the nation but for the lawless forces such inducements to men to enlist were not enough as they saw it all citizens had a moral duty to serve in defence of the nation and empire and so from mid-1915 on the battle lines began to be drawn within Australia on the question of whether there should be conscription for overseas service conscription for home defence was permissible under the compulsory military training scheme which had been introduced in 1911 but the defence act of 1903 prohibited the deployment of the regular army and other men overseas without their consent as we know conscription was the issue that would blow the labour movement apart but it took another year really for that to happen Fisher who had become prime minister when he won the federal election of September 1914 was for a variety of reasons to contemplate conscription for Billy Hughes his attorney general however it was quite another matter this is Hughes in fine form typical form on the right having built his career in the trade union movement where the closed shop was the basis of solidarity and effective industrial action Hughes saw no problem with compulsion in military service and that being the foundation of national security Hughes as it happened had been a foundation member of the Australian National Defence League which had lobbied for compulsory military service for home defence and so now when there was what he thought was a dire threat to imperial interests he had no doubt to quote him that the state has the power to take away life itself however many in the political and industrial arms the labour movement disagreed strongly so Hughes at first tried to increase voluntary enlistment through a war census now this was a government survey of which I'm particularly fond that required Australian males between the age of 18 and 60 to complete questionnaires about their age occupation, amount of military training and state of health the census also asked questions about personal wealth including assets, property and income questions that were included in the survey to try and meet the growing demand that was coming from the labour movement by this time that there should also be a conscription of wealth whatever that might have meant by the time the war census was actually conducted in late 1915 replete with this kind of propaganda that the Royal Kangaroo serves many purposes Hughes had become prime minister because Fisher had weary of being war leader and had taken up the role of High Commissioner in London now when introducing the legislation for the war census Hughes gave assurances that quote this was a quote that haunted him in no circumstances would I agree to send men out of this country to fight against their will but those who suspected Hughes of foul play were hardly reassured by the fact that the war census included the following questions one, are you willing to enlist now? reply yes or no two, if you reply yes you will be given up fortnight's notice before being called up three, if not willing to enlist now are you willing to enlist at a later date? reply yes or no and if willing state when four, if not willing to enlist state the reason why as explicitly as possible well you did not need to be a rampant civil libertarian to see this as an invasion of privacy and an implied threat to the eligible who was holding out against volunteering and to add to the mood of growing paranoia Hughes then aggravated many in the labour movement by taking the decision in late 1915 to defer a referendum on constitutional change that would have allowed the Commonwealth government to have greater powers over trade business and the control of monopolies the rising prices of essential commodities in the first year of the war had by this time become a key issue for the left and throughout 1915 the Australian worker had been publicly publishing data on food prices and also a stream of emotive cartoons depicting hungry Australian families in the thrall of profiteering capitalists here we have the plutocrat raiding the larder while the soldier is distracted by fighting the enemy outside the title of the enemy of course is a play on the term that was used to describe Australians as being an extraction so the enemy within here is the plutocrat the capitalist not the Australian German in 1911 and 1911 and 13 there had been two referenda that had been held with the aim of conferring greater powers on the Commonwealth government in trade and commerce but both had failed and labour was committed to trying again in October 1914 of control of trade Hughes had scheduled a referendum for December 1915 but just a few weeks before he was not confident that he was actually going to win and he accepted assurances from the state premiers that they would introduce legislation in their own parliament to transfer the required powers to the Commonwealth for the duration of the war Hughes had the deferral referendum became public Hughes' critics exploded because they believed with good cause that there was a little chance of the hated state legislative councils agreeing to propose transfer of power to the Commonwealth and they accused him of capitulating to the interests of the dominant economic class as the Victorian labour corps put it every day shows Hughes in a less favourable light he has become, if we may judge him by his recent utterances a doddering Tory and the Australian worker was almost apoplectic arguing that the issue of prices had been shifted from the polling booths where people prevailed to the non-elective branches of the state legislatures where the trusts and combines, the food monopolies the sweaters of industry and the whole vile crowd of capitalistic huns have made their citadels I think something's gone and happened to Australian journalism in the last century while this unrest on the left was kept under control but only just while Hughes was away in London for the first half of 1916 lobbying interestingly he was away for six months a prime ministerial absence, it's hard to imagine today much as we might enjoy it and in his absence the labour movement mobilised trade union congresses and political labour leagues against conscription but when Hughes returned in late July 1916 he was convinced that the losses that Australia was experiencing in the first major engagements on the western front meant that conscription was inevitable Britain and New Zealand had both introduced conscription in the first half of 1916 and why should not Australia follow suit but given the divisions within his own party he could risk introducing legislation but even though labour had a majority in both houses the labour caucus would almost certainly split he considered issuing a regulation under the emergency powers of the war precautions act but this too would have failed to gain endorsement in parliament and the chief justice Samuel Griffith advised Hughes that this course of action might be unconstitutional so finally Hughes decided to put the vote to the people it seems hoping thereby to get a popular mandate with which to silence his political colleagues well I don't have time tonight to tell the full story of the conscription referendum of 1916 and 17 but in summary the debates I think are striking for the sophistication and emotional intensity with which they were the arguments were positioned the fault lines along which Australian society divided were complex and are not entirely clear given that there were no real means of testing public opinion in these years however it's clear that the yes vote was generally championed by the political and social elites including the leadership of the Protestant churches, the majority of the press, business leaders and the opposition liberal party and for these people the military case for conscription seemed indisputable there was no other way they thought that the AIF could be supplied with the reinforcements it needed to continue fighting effectively here is the famous Norman Lindsay campaign God bless dear daddy who is fighting the hunt and send him help the whole conscription was about more than this it was also about principles as they saw it the war was a just cause a righteous struggle in the defence of the British Empire against a brutal enemy whose perfidy was manifest in its atrocities in occupied Belgium all Australians in their view had the obligation as citizens to defend the nation and empire if Australia were to continue to rely on volatilism the future of the race would become degenerate it was assumed that only the most virile and morally sound of men would volunteer and even more alarmingly this weakening of the race would leave Australia exposed in the post four years to threats in the Asia Pacific region particularly from Japan and if Britain were defeated now the arguments for no in many ways I found were in some ways a mirror of the arguments for the S case the no campaign was dominated by the industrial labour movement but was not confined to it and these anti conscriptionists also spoke of loyalty and equality of sacrifice but for them this meant loyalty to class as well as to nation and while equality might be used by the yes case the no case thought that it meant that the plutocrats and capitalists should also bear the economic cost of the war the argument about the most emotional argument of the no case of course was depicted in the famous blood vote which you're probably aware of brought up a number of times by the Australian worker which argued that you did not have the right to force another man to kill beyond this the trade unions feared that military conscription would be a harbinger of industrial conscription and the workers rights that had been so hard won in the previous decades would be lost as Henry boot put it the unscrupulous capitalists waxing fat on the ghastly prophets of war will have the multitudes at their mercy with men drafted overseas the trade unions argued women would take their place on half the pay or even worse Asian laborers would be imported thus threatening not only Australian wage structures and working conditions but white Australia which was a core value of the labor movement and the wider Australian society and like their opponents the no case also claimed the high moral ground they argued that it was a violation of civil liberties to force men to kill against their will and that the decision as to whether to kill or not was a vote of conscience individual conscience and this is what the blood vote speaks to that you do not have the right to force someone else to kill you are in effect killing that man by imposing that obligation upon him and civil libertarian arguments were given considerable weight during the campaign by the heavy handness of Hughes who used the emergency powers the war precautions act in a manifestly partisan way the government censored discussion of conscription in the press unless that discussion was by Hughes monitored the correspondence and raided the homes of anti conscriptionists and denied the no case to many public speaking venues the IWW or the Wobblies were particularly target and in late 1916 12 of their leaders were arrested and jailed on charges of sabotage, treason and felony and ultimately the IWW would be prescribed as an unlawful association and crushed in mid 1917 and to this already febrile debate about conscription was added a noxious sectarianism as Catholics who constituted 22% of the Australian population and were mostly a working class and a virus extraction seemed to have turned against Hughes although the Catholic hierarchy in 1916 at least did not adopt a formal position on conscription the laity it seems largely opposed it possibly and this has been much argued many were radicalised not just by the declining standards of living during the war but by the ruthless suppression by the British government of the Easter uprising in Dublin well as we all know on the 28th of October 1916 Australians voted no if only by a very small margin and given that the whole apparatus of the state and most of the press had been campaigning for years it was a remarkable victory for grassroots activism trade union organisation and the journalism of the left wing press when researching broken nation I was particularly struck by the brilliance of Henry Boots invective in the Australian worker and some of the cartoons of this paper Harry this is probably my favourite of all during the conscription campaign it happened that a boatload of Maltese workers arrived and they were seen as a great threat to white Australia so here you have the Trojan horse, you have the plutocrats waving their soldiers goodbye as they get on the ship called Australian conscription and coming out of the Trojan horse are people who are supposed to be Maltese but really look like some sort of pygmy figure to terrorise the Australians sometimes you think there's not much new in Australian debate and you'll see the plutocrat ripping down the sign of white Australia and the Australian worker ran a very I think powerful campaign about how Hughes said he would only call up single men but in time he would certainly call up married men and here you have of course mother regretting her decision because she believed Mr Hughes but if the left one on conscription the ALP itself was shattered because even before the vote was taken the party had started to fragment several ministers resigned from the federal cabinet and a block of federal labour MPs came out in opposition and those who seemed to be favouring conscription were threatened by their local constituencies for the loss of endorsement in future elections Hughes himself was expelled from the various trade unions that had formed his power base for many years and from the New South Wales political labour league and all this was before the vote when the vote was finally taken Hughes was then faced with a vote of no confidence from the parliamentary caucus and being Hughes walked out followed by 24 supporters before the vote was taken now those who were left behind presumably thought that they might form government but they had misjudged their man Hughes who was a brilliant political tactician immediately i.e. that day, that afternoon and evening formed a new labour party and got the Governor-General to approve his leading new government with the support of the Liberal opposition and two months later after some prolonged jostling for position Hughes's new labour and the Liberals formed a new coalition the Nationalists this depicts the labour party removing the barnacles the labour movement removing the barnacles you probably can't see all the barnacles but their Hughes the labour party and here we have the nuptials between Hughes and Joseph Cook the priest is capitalism labour is scaling on the left and the figure that's the cat is the Tory press, now I want to know tonight why the Tory press was a cat because I don't know the answer meanwhile the ALP unraveled at the state level it took some months for this to happen in different ways in different states Holman himself was expelled, New South Wales Premier and he too formed a coalition only in Queensland where the Premier Ryan had opposed conscription from the start did the party remain reasonably intact now Hughes interestingly blamed the split of the ALP not on the referendum or his own confrontation as politics but on the pre-existing tensions within the labour movement and particularly the growth of syndicalism he argued that if the split had not come now it would not have been delayed for more than a few months at most well he may have been right but it's almost certain that a different leader might have managed to control the centrifugal tendencies within the labour movement and as it was Hughes' political style is in temperance and his bitterness, authoritarianism and intolerance for dissent played into his opponent's hands he was vilified for the rest of his political career within labour as the rat the traitor who had destroyed the very movement had been instrumental in founding here he is about to have his head so the Australian worker hoped ensnared by the electorate now this bitterness of the labour movement was so profound because Hughes proved to be a consummate political survivor in May 1917 and this cartoon refers to this he led the new nationalist coalition to the polls assuring that the public that conscription was not the issue but you see conscription is not the issue at the back the wolf is conscription and the red writing course is Australia he actually won this election with a majority on a win the war ticket so it turned out that the vote against conscription had not been a vote against the war and in the months that followed the ALP struggled to neutralise accusations that it was disloyal and the ALP which in 1914 was poised to dominate Australian politics at the federal level was pushed to the margins at that level, though less so at the state level and really I think we can see 1916 is a major shift to the right at the federal political level well you might ask why after all this Hughes chose to take the issue of conscription to the electorate again and Neville Manning I think has argued persuasively that he did so because his own position within the new coalition was not very strong and his nationalist colleagues would not let the issue rest but it was primarily because he returned to the slide of this dissonance between this yawning gap between the casualties and enlistments which kept trending down 1917 accounted for one third of Australian deaths in the war yet in October 1917 voluntary enlistments were 2,761 compare that with over 36,000 in June 1915 still Hughes went electorate on conscription again very reluctantly because it was clear that Australia was already divided into war and camps because in August 1917 a great strike had erupted all along the eastern seaboard now for the first years of the war the trade unions voluntarily held back from industrial action but as this slide showed their patience was exhausted by 1917 this dispute in the New South Wales Tramways Workshop in Sydney triggered strikes and sympathy all over the country in a broad range of industries in Melbourne there was great violence as women who were angered at high food prices stormed down the streets smashing the windows in Collins Street now the Hughes government response was very authoritarian deregistered unions mobilised a volunteer scab labour force and locked out unionists to work and ultimately the unionists were defeated in what has been described as the most cataclysmic event of the class struggle in early 20th century Australia and it's interesting how little is known of this event today while we are routinely exhorted to remember the maidship of the digger the solidarity of the worker is scarcely recalled and this is no doubt in part because as Marilyn Lake has argued the dominant narrative to emerge from the war the Anzac legend has sidelined narratives of social justice and democratic equality by emphasising nation-building but I think the erasure of the national strike the general strike from contemporary memory speaks to how the present shapes memories of the past that is how we remember the past and today when only one in five full-time employees if that is a member of a trade union class warfare and millenarial visions of the destruction of capitalism a tale from a past that is indeed a foreign country so the battle lines were drawn even before the second conscription campaign began and if anything it was more emotional and violent than in 1916 even Hughes was pelted with eggs when campaigning in Queensland but he didn't really mind that he took the opportunity to create a Commonwealth police force supposedly to intervene and impose Commonwealth law when a state failed to enforce it but Hughes was driven to distraction by the opposition of the Catholic Archbishop Daniel Manix in Melbourne and by Ryan in Queensland and under that pressure he resorted to very draconian responses this is Hughes emerging from that incident where he had been attacked but it was not his hand but his face that was bleeding and so Hughes said thank heavens I have saved my face this is another depicting Hughes with the whip of conscription I think this is in some ways a play perhaps on the famous Kitchener poster with the demanding and accusing finger still for all this on the 20th of December 1917 the no vote won again by a slightly larger margin now during the campaign Hughes gave an undertaking if the vote were no he would resign this however proved to be what a later politician called a non-core promise Hughes hung on to office over the Christmas break and when the government general had failed in January 1918 to find another leader that anyone could agree on Hughes formed a new government and he stayed prime minister till 1923 and whatever judgment you may form with him and there's much about his political style and values that is deeply distasteful he has to be recognized as one of Australia's most remarkable politicians I'm looking from in some of the documentaries that we're now having but without much success and although individuals cannot be held accountable for major historical change it's certain that Australian politics would have been radically different had Hughes not led the country during the war and so too with the history of the labour movement the tensions within the movement continued in 1918 and indeed the labour movement ultimately got to a position where it wouldn't even support voluntary enlistment as some of its political leaders did and by June 1918 it is calling for an end to the war here is Mars pouring the blood into all over the place and the labour movement saying or him saying say when and some have argued that if the war had not ended at the end of 1980 the labour movement may again have split over the question of support for the war now in choosing my title for this talk I chose the real war question mark and the question mark may be an example of a common academic artifice but I chose it to emphasize the fact that Australians lost much more than the men killed on the battlefield and of course nothing can care in terms of human suffering with the deaths and the wounded which are on such a scale that I think no modern democracy would ever tolerate them and we need to add not just to the war dead the men who died prematurely in the interwar years and also those who died of the Spanish influenza in early 1919 this killed at least another 12,500 Australians and significantly a disproportionate number of the people who died of the flu were younger men who seemed unusually susceptible to the virus at the time the flu was seen as part of the war I clue the dead man's penny because my grandfather died of the Spanish flu having not gone to the war and my grandmother was given a dead man's penny to honour his contribution to the war now the demographic impact of these losses on Australian societies was 29 but the national census showed that whereas in 1911 there were 109 men for every 100 women in the age bracket 25 to 44 in 1933 there were 98 men for every 100 women between 35 and 39 but beyond this Australian society and community was left deeply divided between along the fault lines of the war had spawned the insults and personal very personalised accusations that had been traded in town and community meetings were not forgotten they echoed down the years and even in 1939 Robert Menzies had to defend himself against attacks for his failure to enlist in World War I and it seems to that the war had unleashed a xenophobia an insularity that continued beyond the peace the Australians who had been in turn because they were of enemy extraction or birth the enemy within were not reintegrated into Australian society at the war's end but were rather hounded out of the country and the paranoia about left wing radicalism which Hughes and other lawyers had very effectively exploited during these conscription debates also persisted after the war the IWW was crushed but there was now a new enemy in the form of communism and the internal security apparatus that the government had created reportedly for the duration of the war was not completely dismantled under surveillance now were communists non-british immigrants, Irish nationalists left wing radicals and trade unionists and the loyalist forces in Australian society themselves flush with victory remained mobilised against the threat as they saw it vigilante style attacks were launched against meetings of the left Russian Australians in 1918 and 19 and then in later years more civilian forces were raised as they had been during the great strike supposedly to defend the interests of Australia and as in the famous New Guard which came in the Great Depression these groups really were willing at times to try and take the law into their own hands they were in some ways I think more of a dad's army than an essay but they were symptomatic of the degree to which the war had left a potential for violence within the Australian political culture so there is an historiographical consensus I think that World War I had the effect of truncating the reforming energies of Australia which in 1914 had an international reputation for political and social innovation that conclusion probably needs some qualification though I do agree with it because the non-labour parties that dominated politics during the war the federal level did initiate agendas of national and infrastructure development and at the state level power alternated between labour and non-labour yet despite this the image of Australia as an inward looking society focused on grief and the ranker of the war years I found impossible to dispel so hence I chose the title for the book Broken Nation signaling with the harm that World War I inflicted went far beyond the emasculation of men's bodies to include the rendering of the social and political fabric of the whole nation however I sense that such a negative verdict verdict on World War I won't find much of a place in the tsunami of chemical activities that awaits us in the next four years