I think my fellow Australians, particularly on Anzac Day, see the First War as an event which was not only a founding event of our nation but a unifying, nation-building thing. Yet no-one who lived at the time would agree with us – World War I, and the Hughes government’s management of it, divided and embittered Australian society for decades.
When the guns finally fell silent in Flanders and France on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Allied side rejoiced, but in a very quiet and sober way at the front. The soldiers couldn’t quite believe it was over, and, at the end, some wondered what it had all been about.
I’m sure most German soldiers were also relieved. But not all. Many German people absorbed the stab-in-the-back story put out by the High Command, Ludendorff and Hindenburg, who wanted to blame Jews, Communists – anyone – for their defeat, and to avoid responsibility. Even the revered Kaiser had to go.
A 31-year-old corporal – a recipient of the Iron Cross – lying in a hospital bed, with his eyes bandaged because of a gas attack, believed the stab-in-the-back story and it shaped his life – and the world’s history – for three decades. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Germany was hugely politically divided after the Armistice, and even more so after the treaty of Versailles when it was economically eviscerated by the savage war reparations. William Morris Hughes, the Prime Minister of Australia, was one of the architects of that evisceration and of that division. He wanted to “bleed Germany white” whilst making sure a White Australia was not threatened by any racial equality provisions of the peace treaty or the setting up of the League of Nations. Such provisions had been suggested by the Japanese delegation to Versailles.
. . .
But we are getting ahead of the story which I wish to tell of how toxic and blinkered politics, during the war, divided Australia for decades. This was on both sides, but the jingoistic rhetoric of the conservatives was, in my view, particularly damaging.
Hughes had gone to Britain in 1916 to reinforce ideas of Empire solidarity, and because of his enthusiastic support for the war effort he had been feted and lauded. He had been banqueted and received by royalty. The left of the Australian Labor Party thought that he had been “duchessed”, but no-one could duchess Billy Hughes. He, for better or worse, was his own man. He had participated in a conference on the war in Paris and visited the Australian troops at the front. They loved his enthusiastic support for them and christened him The Little Digger.
Such was his prestige on this visit that he was even made privy to the plans for the upcoming offensive operation on the Somme by Haig.
When Hughes returned to Australia, his ideas of Empire had become immensely strengthened, as had his support for the war and his – admittedly creditable – desire to do all he could for the Australian troops. He was now such an enthusiastic supporter of the war that “war-monger” would not be too strong a term. He actually thought that the war was a philosophical “good” – a thing which was converting a flabby citizenry back to manly Empire virtues.
But in this, Hughes was now very much out of step with the left wing, and even the mainstream thinking of his own Labor Party. The one-time very successful labour organiser, who had revived the waterside workers and created the Carters’ Union, was now the darling of the middle-classes and the flag-waving press. The industrial arm of the labour movement was aghast, but the political wing – the party - was divided.
From a high point in 1915, driven by the perceived glory of the Anzac landing, military recruitment, despite various schemes and drives, was falling drastically, and struggling to replace casualties. There were just not enough young men willing to go: most of those willing had gone. And then, for the Australians, came the disastrous battle of Fromelles and the actions on the Somme in 1916. This created vastly more casualties, and suppressed recruitment further. Men who enlisted after the Australians were engaged on the Western Front were called “fair dinkums” because they fair dinkum knew what they were in for. And that was hell.
But, somehow the drive for war, and the men to feed the mincing machine of the fields of Flanders and France, went on.
Hughes wanted to introduce conscription for service overseas. (It was allowed for service in Australia.) Against the vehement opposition of the left-wing of his own party, Hughes knew that he could not get legislation through the parliament, so he hit on the idea of a referendum. What actually took place was a non-binding plebiscite, but Hughes calculated that if he could get such a thing passed, he would have the moral authority to pass conscription legislation in the parliament. And so began the destruction of the Labor Party as it had been, and the beginning – or at least the widening – of deep social rifts in Australia.
. . .
The Irish Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, was, as one would expect, a naturally socially conservative man. But, he had been radicalised by the brutal treatment of the Irish rebels of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 and now was vehemently opposed to the war and to conscription. He campaigned strongly against conscription and this exacerbated divisions between Catholics and Protestants. These were to last for decades. As late as the 1960s, a “mixed marriage” in Australia was not one between people of different races, but between a Catholic and a Protestant. And, on the whole, it was considered unwise.
The left wing and the industrial arm of Hughes’ Labor Party were also opposed to conscription. They too campaigned against conscription, claiming that stripping Australia of its men would allow foreign and even non-white workers to come in, take Australian jobs and destroy unions: conscription was a capitalist plot!
In the face of this opposition, Hughes campaigned all over Australia, and made life very difficult for the No case. He was widely expected to win, but then he made a serious blunder. Anticipating victory, and to have men on hand to ship overseas, Hughes (quite legally) called up for service all eligible men aged between 21 and 35. And finger-printed them to ensure their identity.
Half his cabinet resigned, and the Labor Party split into pro and anti-conscription factions.
. . .
Tasmania’s role in this was idiosyncratic. On the one hand, the religious split was not as evident. On the north-west coast a prominent Catholic, Father Connolly, was a passionate supporter of Yes to conscription, and two Protestant pastors were on the official committee campaigning for Yes. And just as in the rest of Australia, Anglicans were, on the whole, strong supporters of Empire and thus, conscription. The Quakers, of course, were opposed.
In a parallel with events on the mainland, the leader of the Labor Party in Tasmania and ex-Premier, John Earle, joined the Yes committee, and was duly expelled from the party.
The political split was just as deep and vehement as anywhere in the commonwealth. A bomb went off at a pro-conscription rally in Beaconsfield, injuring two people, and when a group of Maltese workers arrived on the west coast, the radical miners were outraged. Here was proof that big capital was using the war to destroy organised labour. Conscription, they said, will allow the bosses to dominate.
Yet Tasmania voted Yes to conscription, even on the supposedly radical west coast. Voting in those days was not compulsory, so it’s hard to judge the trends which led to this surprising result. It was observed that many of the miners had left the coast in search of work. Before the war, Germany had been a major market for the west coast minerals: that market was now shut off, and so jobs, and workers, had gone. This was despite the establishment of the zinc works in Hobart in a public/private partnership designed to take up some of the slack, and keep the mines open.
Australia-wide, the No vote narrowly won. But, just as on the mainland, in Tasmania the Labor Party split, with pro-conscription members joining Hughes’ new Nationalist Federation. The Nubeena branch of the party – the members being pro-conscription – didn’t split; the branch just dissolved itself. The new conservative, pro-war, pro-conscription and very pro-Empire coalition of Hughes’ ex-Labor Nationalists and the Liberal Party swept all before it in Federal and State elections. (This Liberal Party was not the same as today’s Australian Liberals – more small-L, like Asquith’s Liberals in Britain.)
. . .
In these tumultuous times – exacerbated by a coal strike which effectively cut Tasmania off – one anecdote serves to illustrate how divided Tasmanian society had become.
A prominent Labor politician, David Dicker, was drinking in the Freemason’s Hotel in Hobart when he was heard, by two visiting actresses, to utter disloyal words. These patriotic ladies were presumably the sort who handed white feathers to “shirkers” (men who hadn’t joined up). The actresses reported Dicker as having said he’d just as rather live under German rule as British and that Britain would not defend Australia.
(A rather prescient thought if one looks forward to Churchill’s Far East policy during World War II. Keeping India – the “Jewel in the Imperial Crown” – British was the object; Australia could go hang.)
For uttering words prejudicial to recruitment, Dicker received a substantial fine and extreme public opprobrium. A parliamentary committee of which he was a member refused to sit with him; there were calls for his expulsion from parliament and even for his be-heading! The actresses, by contrast, were feted for their patriotism, and a public fund was started for them by The Mercury. It was hugely successful. The ladies did very well out of their loyal denunciation.
Defending Dicker in his trial and subsequent appeal – both unsuccessful – was WM (William) Hodgman. Hodgman became nearly as reviled as Dicker for doing his legal duty in appearing for him. His practice was boycotted and he lost work, but when another Labor man, Percy Smith, appeared on similar charges, Hodgman defended him as well; also unsuccessfully.
This William Hodgman was the father of a fine barrister and independent politician, Bill Hodgman - who did much pro bono criminal work when the Legal Aid Service was rudimentary. WM was also the grandfather of Michael Hodgman, another barrister and politician. When he was a federal politician, Michael was known as the “mouth from the South” and thought a bit light-weight, but he was the only Australian main-stream politician – on either side – to denounce the invasion of Timor by the Indonesians. This fine trait – of the defense of democracy – ran through the Hodgman generations.
There was another conscription referendum in 1917 – again lost – and these referenda, along with the splitting of the Labor Party and the General Strike, also of 1917, created a schism in Australian society which lasted for decades. After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Australia, far from being united in victory, was very much a divided nation – divided along class and religious lines – and sometimes violently divided. We remained so for decades; in Tasmania, just as on the mainland.
The author would like to acknowledge his use of Marilyn Lake’s A Divided Society: Tasmania During World War One (Melbourne, 1975).
James Parker is a Tasmanian historian (but with deep connections to Sydney), who writes and talks on mainly colonial subjects – especially convicts, women and the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
This is the final article in James Parker’s November 11 triptych. The other two articles can be found here:
