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Soccer is rarely remembered as a vital part of Australia's military history and the Anzac legacy. Yet, soccer contributed greatly in the First World War. In terms of moral support, enlistment, participation and ‘sacrifice’, soccer was at the forefront of sporting-body commitment. Using recently digitised newspaper archives, this paper will outline soccer's place in the Australian armed forces during the First World War, especially in relation to the Australian Rules states of Western Australia and Victoria, as a part of an overall project intending to reveal soccer's place in Australian culture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In late 1960s a powerful myth developed in the United States that Vietnam veterans were spat on when they returned home. A parallel myth survives in Australia with widespread claims that paint or even blood was routinely thrown at returning soldiers. In a 1966 incident, red paint was thrown on Lieutenant Colonel Alex V. Preece as he led the First Battalion through Sydney. The Australian myth remains central to perceptions of Australian Vietnam veterans as despised outsiders and feeds into contemporary demands that Australians support their soldiers and the wars in which they are involved. This paper explores connections between cultural politics in the Unites States and Australia, particularly as they pertain to the contentious legacies of the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the rise of comparative and transnational history writing, histories of the Great War have remained remarkably bound by the nation-state. This is especially the case in Australia and New Zealand, where there has been, arguably, a recent entrenchment of the view of the Great War as a nation-making moment. This article offers the provocation that the creation of vast numbers of records during the war did make the nation: files demanded a new bureaucracy and they made the state material. The files also became materials for historians who went on to equate the national army with the nation at war. Another foray into the archives, however, suggests that despite military files being designated national heritage, they can reveal the tensions of belonging and exclusion present during and after the war. Abbreviations: AIF Australian Imperial Force ANZ Archives New Zealand BR Base Records NZEF New Zealand Expeditionary Force [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1917 the Australian Imperial Force suffered thirty-eight thousand casualties in Flanders, far outstripping those endured at Gallipoli. Despite this, the AIF's campaign in Belgium has received relatively little attention from historians or the public. As Australia's official war correspondent and historian, C.E.W. Bean has long been recognised as one of the principal Anzac mythmakers. Scrutinising his correspondence, diaries and Official History, this article argues that Bean struggled to integrate the third Ypres offensive into his vision of the Anzac legend and this may have helped marginalise Belgium's place in the Australian memory of the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at one episode during the conscription debates of 1916-17, concerning the defeat of the Labor member for Corio, Alfred Ozanne, in the federal election of May, 1917. Prior to the election, Ozanne was a soldier serving in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in the United Kingdom, but was about to be medically discharged from the Army. Archival research suggests Ozanne was the victim of a smear campaign by Prime Minister Hughes, journalist Keith Murdoch and Australian Army leaders including John Monash, who colluded to falsely accuse him of desertion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Official Australian photography of the military occupation of postwar Japan provides a significant modern case study of photography as a medium of neo-colonial and Orientalist representation. Asserting its dominance of the combined British Commonwealth Occupation Force supporting the Americans, the Australian military revelled in the role of occupier of a wartime enemy who was still widely loathed. Sometimes compared with the British Raj in Imperial India, the Occupation became a historically familiar exercise of the white man’s power and privilege over the conquered and colonised Asiatic. It was marked by the rituals and practices of tourism, including the taking of photographic images. Photography was the main medium by which the event was recorded and circulated to the public back in Australia. Keen to convey images of a force enjoying the privileges of victory while in firm control of a still distrusted people, official photographers affiliated with the Australian military sought to capture a picturesque, feminised and ‘traditional’ Japan. This was a Japan that the war had made obsolete and which the Occupation was intended to modernise. The photographic appropriation of Japan reveals the ambiguity of the Occupation project, and the shallowness of Orientalist representation more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The issue of class remains strikingly absent from much of the historical literature on the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War. This article briefly explores the pre-war class backgrounds of soldiers, the traces of class in their writings and their experiences, the class-based selection processes of soldiers’ writing by post-war archives, and how key historians of the AIF have paid insufficient attention to class. It argues that as a result of middle-class hegemony, before, during and after the war, the memory of the First World War in Australian popular culture and much historical writing is largely a memory based upon skewed sources and a lack of recognition of class in the AIF. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Between 1964 and 1972, the National Service Act 1964 required Australian men turning twenty years old to register for national service. Unlike most scholarship on the national service scheme, which focuses on opposition to the scheme and its unpopularity, this article examines the reasons why most Australians supported the reintroduction of national service and why so many young men complied with its provisions. It argues that compulsory military service was seen as essential in the context of the Cold War, and as a way of ensuring that young men now coming of age were inducted into models of masculinity, citizenship and duty considered essential for a cohesive society. It was the scheme's break with accepted traditions of compulsory military service in Australia that is an overlooked, and important, element of the criticism it generated. In that sense, it was the legacy of earlier wars that fed into the contemporary response to national service. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews the history of military reserves in Australia with particular reference to the Army Reserve. It shows how the importance of reserves in Australia has waxed and waned across the past two centuries, from an early situation of primacy in the colonial period. The importance of reserves has reemerged in the post–Cold War era, with new forms of reserve organization evolving alongside ‘‘conventional’’ reserve forces. The authors discuss the extent to which these developments need to be accompanied by attention to cultural and personnel management issues and to enhanced reserves–regular integration. Despite the challenge of juggling civilian employment with reserve commitments, most reservists appear to welcome a greater, rather than a token, obligation to serve. There is a viable and meaningful role for the reserves provided that the Australian Defence Force and the government are prepared to devote sufficient effort to them and to assign them appropriate tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1918 Armistice signalled the end of the First World War, but it did not mark the end of war-related deaths. During the 1920s and 1930s thousands of Australian ex-servicemen died from their war wounds. This article examines families' experiences of grief and loss as a consequence of post-war death, and considers how these deaths were privately and publicly memorialised. It argues that the kin of the post-war dead constituted a community of mourners that was distinct from the bereaved kin of the 1914-18 dead. It reveals how the grief of the post-war bereaved was disenfranchised within Australia's national public commemorative traditions of war which reified the 'supreme sacrifice' of the battlefield dead, but rendered invisible the 'lingering sacrifice' of deceased ex-servicemen. By identifying and historicising families' experiences of post-war death and bereavement, this article asserts the distinctiveness and importance of that history, and demonstrates its capacity to enrich and challenge our understanding of 'war death' and patterns of grief and memorialisation after the Great War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on Australia's involvement in the fight against insurgency in Southeast Asia and the role of tactical nuclear weapons in those wars in 1945-1967. Air defense of Australia; Atomic strike force of Australia; Atomic war planning of Australia, New Zealand and Malaya; Development of tactical nuclear weapons for the British Royal Air Force.