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The Second World War saw a sharp rise in bigamy prosecutions in Australia. A variety of factors contributed to this phenomenon, from the whirlwind nature of romances contracted during wartime to increased detection resulting from investigations into military spousal support. This article explores the connections between bigamy prosecutions, war and military enlistment through archival records and media coverage of 159 cases committed for trial across 1914–1945 that involved active or returned servicemen as either bigamy defendants or victims of bigamous spouses. These cases also reveal shifting attitudes towards and experiences of bigamy, marriage, and gender in twentieth-century Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some Australian historians still fail to acknowledge that the young Commonwealth faced an existential threat in the First World War. Such an assessment is untenable in the light of the evidence available in the German archives. The German Naval Intelligence System was central to the economic warfare planning of Germany's East Asian Cruiser Squadron, which aimed to interdict raw material and food exports from Australia to Britain in the event of war and bombard port infrastructure. Australian defence capabilities and economic production were reported on, and assessed, at the highest levels in Berlin. This required the establishment of an intelligence gathering network managed by the various German consulates in Australasian cities who employed leading businessmen loyal to the German empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the period between the outbreak of war in August 1914, and the first major engagement for Australian troops in April 1915 on Gallipoli, the Queensland press in Australia articulated a vision of the conflict framed by binary opposites. The most pervasive of these was the positioning of German militarism and lust for conquest as the antithesis of the civilized values embodied in Pax Britannica. The approach of the newspapers over the course of these nine months can be divided neatly into two distinct though overlapping themes—why the Germans fought and how they fought. In its exploration of these issues, the Queensland press demonized the Germans for their perceived barbarism and disregard for civilized norms. In contrast, the perceived righteousness of the British cause facilitated a celebration of Australian nationalism and imperial loyalty as complementary imperatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During his stay in Australia and Melanesia from 1914 to 1920, the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski frequently experienced dichotomous and contradictory attitudes to people, places, and events: the contrast between the 'civilized' Australia and the 'savage' Melanesia; the background of the Austria-ruled Poland in which he grew up and the British-dominated Australia, Austria's enemy in the First World War; the emotional tension of simultaneous attraction to two women - Nina Stirling of Adelaide and Elsie Rosaline Masson of Melbourne; the dilemma of the 'heroic' versus the 'unheroic' related to the war. Most of the dualities of Malinowski's Australian-Melanesian experience, reflected in letters to his mother Józefa Malinowska, Elsie R. Masson, and in Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term (1989), were resolved at the end of the period, which became a turning point in his life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centenary of the First World War (2014–2019) expanded and reinvigorated the historiography of this conflict. In particular, the war's cultural legacy generated an outpouring of publications between 2013 and 2020 that re-evaluated its traditional cultural representations and explored fresh avenues of inquiry through analysing contemporary interpretations of the conflict in films, books and television series. In this way, the centenary afforded historians the chance to engage in a broad conversation about the significance of the cultural history and, notably, memory of the war in an unprecedented way. This article explores the development of recent scholarship on representations of the First World War in Australia and New Zealand, exploring how this body of work not only refreshed the field but also shaped and extended understandings of the war's commemorative and cultural legacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians have long sought to compare Australian and New Zealand Anzac commemoration, finding that Australian commemoration tends to be more nationalistic and celebratory, while New Zealand's is more solemn and inclusive of Māori, women's and pacifist perspectives. This article examines war commemoration in Australia and New Zealand during the centenary of the First World War through the medium of four Anzac-themed television productions: Australia's Gallipoli and The Power of Ten and New Zealand's When We Go to War and Field Punishment No. 1. Due to their capacity to attract mass audiences, television and film are useful mediums for elucidating major cultural trends, including the changing nature of war commemoration and its relationship to ideals of nationhood. In particular, the article argues that the coexistence of myth-challenging representations in Australia with productions that reinforce the traditional Anzac legend reflects a longstanding tension between supporters of the state-sanctioned nationalist trope and its critics in artistic and academic communities; alternatively, the less controversial nature of the Anzac legend in New Zealand helps account for the more prosaic tone of some of its Anzac-themed television. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the participation of French-born soldiers in the AIF – Australia's volunteer army during the First World War. While the AIF counted men from many different ethnic and cultural backgrounds, the experiences of the French-born Diggers is yet to be fully explored. This article analyses the detailed profiles of these men contained in their military files and demonstrates how they are emblematic of the diverse nature of the French community in Australia. French-born residents of Australia were in a unique position, as they were also liable for French military service. This article explores the motivations and implications of their choices. It also draws on French archival sources to provide a transnational perspective, framing the soldiers' experiences within the broader context of the conflicting demands of the French and Australian governments, and how French identity was expressed from both above and below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on letters published weekly in 'Uncle Sam's Corner', in Rockhampton's Morning Bulletin and Central Queensland Herald between 1915 and 1918 to explore the role of journalists in disseminating popular narratives during the First World War. Through the children's own words their understanding of unfolding events is exposed as is the role of journalist 'Uncle Sam' in shaping children's wartime responses. Using his adjoining children's corner and the responses given to the children's letters, Uncle Sam inculcates the values of duty, service and sacrifice; the qualities demanded of the Empire's civilians in wartime to aid military success. An examination of a specific children's column reveals how media can overtly manipulate public perceptions to shape dominant societal narratives and highlights how children unwittingly participate in wartime propaganda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The First World War as a form of total warfare required belligerent governments to take centralized control of society in order to better prosecute their respective war efforts. In Australia, this was enforced through the War Precautions Act, an item of legislation which greatly expanded executive power and restricted civil liberties. Among the various regulations emplaced on society came restrictions on entertainments, including sport. This paper focuses on the curtailment of sport on the Australian home front, principally horse-racing, as an example of government authoritarianism in wartime and the turmoil it fuelled. These regulations illuminate the government's willingness to control even the trivial elements of Australian life, as well as its deteriorating relationship with factions of the Australian populace. Unlike other studies, however, this paper uncovers a broad level of discontent among racing institutions at either end of the social spectrum. Though the middle classes are said to have supported the government in its strict execution of the war effort, socially prestigious clubs expressed resentment toward the repressive methods of government that matched working class discontent. Such evidence brings into question the clear dividing lines used to explain social conflict on the home front during the war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of children's war play in Australia during and after the First World War remains largely unexplored. Recognising the importance of play in understanding the lives and experiences of children, this article examines memoirs, oral histories, photographs, newspapers and children's letters published in the provincial press to explore how young people used their play to promote, participate, preserve and even subvert national war culture. Although children were physically, economically and culturally mobilised for the war – the scale of child-orchestrated knitting and fundraising and the swelling of anti-German sentiment suggest as much – many accounts reveal that aspects of wartime mobilisation were not easily dismantled in the interwar period. In a process that was more akin to a renovation than a reversal of wartime mobilisation, changes to children's war play traditions were not necessarily reversed, but renegotiated and preserved within a longer tradition of pre- and post-war games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the homecomings of Australian servicemen and women. Homecoming was not a singular or linear event that came to close the First World War chapter in Australia's history; homecoming was a lengthy, costly and demanding process both for those who returned and for those who had stayed. Our aim is to reposition Australia's passage out of war as a critical period in shaping twentieth-century Australia rather than merely the afterword to 1914–18. The phases of Australia's demobilisation varied and modulated as between the military process of repatriation, the medical and welfare-orientated agencies of the state, and the persistence of the culture of the war in important elements of Australian life. The transition out of war demanded new mobilisations, rededicated efforts to deal with the immediate burdens of the conflict, and a concerted effort to make sense of the war that extended well beyond the lives of those most intimately involved. The scale of that work was significant, and few anticipated how much longer than the conflict itself it would continue. Australia's 'exiting' from the First World War has been a century-long process, one that is perhaps, on a cultural level, unfinished. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During and after the First World War, returned soldiers from the Western Australian suburb of Subiaco were called upon to speak about their experiences at a range of public events. Few of these speeches were given without a purpose, or by individuals who did not have particular status as an officer or a medal recipient. The reporting of such events was also selective, with newspapers limited in what they could publish due to censorship concerns. Nonetheless, the accounts of speeches given by men associated with a single community demonstrate the value accorded to first-hand stories of war, and reveal how the soldiers themselves fought to retain some control over their personal narratives. This article examines the speeches of several returned soldiers, and considers the home front context in which their battlefield recollections were received. Examining such speeches in the present day permits a more complicated understanding of how one local Australian community and the individuals within it attempted to reconcile their place in global events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the process by which Australian military prisoners of war were recovered from enemy captivity and returned to Australia after the First World War. Release from captivity was a pivotal moment for prisoners of war; letters and memoirs suggest that prisoners fixated on the prospect of their release from the moment of capture. The somewhat haphazard planning and execution of the recovery of Australian prisoners of war after the cessation of hostilities, however, suggested that Australian military and civilian authorities were less preoccupied with liberating their men from captivity. Despite general concern for prisoners of war, the demobilisation of combatants took precedence over the recovery of prisoners, and recovery operations aimed to amalgamate prisoners of war quickly with their combatant counterparts after their release from captivity. At this point, prisoners of war were considered indistinct from their combatant counterparts. The process of recovery, demobilisation and return to Australia offered little space for returning prisoners of war to make sense of their time as captives, and public narratives about war service did not easily accommodate wartime captivity. Captivity ultimately added an additional layer of complexity to the difficult task of reintegrating into civil society after the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Just over 4000 Australian servicemen were taken prisoner by Ottoman and German forces during the First World War. Their distinctive stories are rarely considered in Australian histories and memories of the war: captivity affected only a minority of Australian servicemen and, for a long time, surrender or capture was seen as a failure of the contemporary prescription for Australian martial masculinity. This article explores some of the challenges the prisoners of war (POWs) faced both during and after the war, and how they responded to these challenges. Learning or refining skills and trades in prison camps helped overcome boredom but also may have enabled POWs to prepare for post-war life, while articulating particular ideas of capture and imprisonment in the post-war period to explain the physical and psychological legacies of captivity could lead to successful claims for 'Repat' assistance. Exploring ways in which Australian prisoners of the Germans and Ottomans made sense of their experiences of capture and captivity offers important nuance to this little-known aspect of Australian First World War history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon interviews recorded in Australia four decades ago, this article considers the challenges of using archived oral history and how these interviews contribute to a history of fatherhood between the wars, traversing three temporal moments: research in the 2010s; interviews in the late 1970s and early 1980s; and events in the 1920s and 1930s, when narrators were children and young parents. The interviews show how and why most interwar Australian families aspired to the ideal of a division of family roles along gender lines, with fathers primarily breadwinners and mothers responsible for the home and childcare. They also reveal how different catastrophes - the aftermath of the First World War, the Depression and the loss of a parent through death or desertion - played havoc with that family ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian scholars are now familiar with the tropes of the Anzac legend. This narrative describes the realisation of an Australian masculine identity, whose characteristics were forged on the Australian frontier and validated through the ordeal of battle. Though many writers contributed to this narrative, C.E.W. Bean, the official historian of the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, is most closely associated with the popularisation of this myth, which fused frontier and martial masculinity into a national archetype. This article will examine the role of the slouch hat as a material and visual device that helped communicate the Anzac legend. While most of the scholarship that examines the construction of this narrative focuses on its articulation in prose, this narrative was also popularised through other media. Artists drew symbols of the frontier into their paintings while museum directors arranged their artefacts to support this narrative. This article will argue that the slouch hat provided an essential visual device to connect the narratives of frontier and martial masculinity through the image of the Australian soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

When the Australian War Memorial, the Anzac legend’s primary physical incarnation, displayed its collections between 1922 and 1935 in Melbourne and Sydney, these initial exhibitions emphasised traditional values associated with combat. Nowadays, such romantic notions of war have become increasingly marginalised in public discourse. Comparing the interwar and present-day displays of third Ypres, this article argues that, in order to remain relevant, the Memorial has not remained strictly bound to the vision of its founders in its refurbished First World War galleries. Rather, it has developed an exhibition that clearly reflects the Australian popular memory of the war today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates how Australian men and their families negotiated the competing demands of military duty and domestic male responsibility during the First World War. This was a matter of real consequence in a nation that did not impose conscription for overseas military service: men were obliged to weigh the duty they might feel to their nation and empire against that which they owed to their families. As many as one in two military-aged men responded to calls to enlist; just as many declined to do so. Wartime and post-war efforts to build hierarchies of citizenship with returned servicemen at their apex have, however, obscured the realities faced by those thousands of Australians who did not enlist. This article argues that despite the potent language of martial citizenship, space existed within families and communities to assert the legitimacy of men remaining at home as breadwinners, fathers, sons and carers. The presence and responsibilities of the breadwinning male were integral to family economies that would not be conceded readily to the war. Those confronted by this choice were not rejecting one form of manhood in favour of another. Rather, their experiences show that the definitions and obligations of manhood remained delicately and painfully indexed to material realities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the demobilization of Australian veterans after the First World War, placing this process in the broader transnational context of Britain’s settler society dominions more generally. It explores the public challenges posed by demobilization in Australia, and by way of comparison, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, and how each of these dominions negotiated reintegration of veterans through the deployment of cultural and political strategies grounded in emergent nationalist discourses. Nationalism became a means of both acknowledging the contribution of veterans in making the nation and tying veterans back into the civil society. While nationalism was the ideological glue that held settler societies together in the immediate postwar years, preventing social and political disintegration, in Australia these nationalist discourses took on a peculiar character, at once proclaiming the virtues of veterans as founders of the nation while adopting a heightened sense of the importance of ties to the Empire. What emerged was a hybrid discourse that interwove nationalism and Empire loyalism, conceptualized here as Empire nationalism. This unusual Australian political discourse was forged by the experience of the Great War and demobilization, grounded in an effort to make soldier citizenship the core foundation for a new nationalism. In Australia Empire nationalism became a framework that both sanctioned particular forms of veteran violence and accommodated that violence into an affirmation of nationalist values, placing the Anzac legend at the centre of the national ethos, one that looked both inward to Australia and backward to Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article gives an overview of the British Empire’s participation in the First World War. The roles of Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand and South Africa are well documented but there was also a significant contribution from and impact on the smaller and more peripheral territories. These are well covered in Sir Charles Lucas’s multi-volume seriesThe Empire at War. Although very much of its time, written for and by an imperial elite and now neglected, it remains an invaluable record. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article investigates discrepancies between narratives of national independence in public discourses surrounding the First World War and narratives of loyalty in school textbooks in Queensland, Australia. Five textbooks commonly used in schools from 1916 to 1936 are analyzed in order to ascertain how the First World War was represented to pupils via the history curriculum. This article argues that, although public discourses were in a state of flux, and often viewed Australia as a country that was becoming increasingly independent of its colonial ruler Great Britain, textbooks that maintained a static view continued to look to Great Britain as a context in which to teach national history to school pupils. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the London-based international news agency, Reuters, in transmitting propaganda-inspired news to Australia during the First World War as well as the take-up of such news by the Australian press. It explores how the propaganda function was understood within Reuters and how this function changed during the course of the war. It focuses on Reuters' establishment, in March 1917, of a special British Empire 'supplementary news service designed to unite the Empire behind the war effort. The paper explains Reuters' success in Australia which arose, in large part, from its partnership with the United Cable Service, an Australian agency managed by Keith Murdoch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience on the Somme in 1916, and the unprecedented losses suffered in the attempt to break through the German defences, forced the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) to re-evaluate its attack doctrine. James Edmonds, the official historian of the British army in the Great War has stated, 'It is not too much to claim that the foundations of the final victory on the Western Front were laid by the Somme offensive of 1916'.1 Gary Sheffield reaffirmed this view more recently: 'The battle of the Somme was not a victory in itself, but without it the entente would not have emerged victorious in 1918'.2 Historical assessments of the Somme campaign are divided regarding the success and/or failure of the battle, but it is clear that the experience spurred efforts to correct the problems encountered in 1916. Infantry tactics, weapons, training, artillery, machine guns, command and control, communications, and support services were all adapted based on the lessons learned at the Somme.3 Only seven months after the catastrophic losses suffered on 1 July, the BEF embarked on it next major offensive at Arras. This article will examine the fighting on one day of the Arras offensive to analyse the evolution of the British Empire method of attack. On 3 May 1917 Haig ordered an attack by First, Third, and Fifth Armies astride the Scarpe River. At 0345 hours fourteen British, Canadian, and Australian divisions launched an assault against German positions in the Drocourt-Quéant Switch and Hindenburg Line. By the end of the day all British divisions has been repulsed while the Australians maintained a toehold in the German line. Only the Canadians were able to capture and hold their objective. This article will argue that command and the application of doctrine made the difference between success and failure on that day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gallipoli Campaign holds pride of place in Australian history as the purported birthplace of the Australian national identity and of the ‘Anzac Legend’. Australian historians – amateur, professional and academic alike – dedicate more time to researching and writing themes surrounding the Gallipoli Campaign than they do to any other topic in Australian history; it is a remarkable trend given the ultimate failure of the campaign and the loss of some 8000 Australian lives, in addition to the lives of over 120,000 combatants from other nations. Yet for all this attention, and for all that we claim to know about the conduct of the campaign, there are still some clear gaps in the historical literature. One vast gap, and the one that this paper seeks to address in part, surrounds an understanding of the labour undertaken by combatants of both sides throughout the campaign. By focusing primarily upon the personal accounts of the rank-and-file of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) in combination with the detailed Official History, this article will draw out the key features of the labour undertaken by Australian soldiers during the campaign and present a model for further historical inquiries of working cultures in the environment of work. It provides an intentionally limited scope in recognition of both the diversity of work undertaken by soldiers and of the need for further studies to draw this work out in greater detail. As a case study, this article focuses primarily upon the labour undertaken by the men of the AIF in digging the trenches (and associated activities such as tunnels, dugouts, saps and so forth) in the area surrounding Anzac Cove during the Gallipoli Campaign. Among other benefits, this approach demonstrates the primacy of manual labour in the daily lives of the rank-and-file soldier throughout the Gallipoli Campaign and emphasizes the importance of understanding this labour as part of our understanding of military service in general during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

With Horse and Morse in Mesopotamia: The Story of Anzacs in Asia (Burke 1927) memorializes the service of various units in that theatre during World War I. It is uncharacteristic of the standard unit history genre in that it adopts the format of so-called soldiers' books. These, key examples of which are The Anzac Book (Bean 1916) and Australia in Palestine (Gullett and Barrett 1919), consist chiefly of contributions from service personnel themselves, and thus are informed to varying degrees by the pre-war populist imperialism espoused in boys' weekly papers and adventure novels by Henty and others. In its self-proclaimed role as 'memory book' of the Mesopotamian veterans' 'great adventure', With Horse and Morse is characterized by the same mix of residual imperial and emergent nationalist discourses to which its predecessor works had subscribed. However, that emergent nationalism in turn has its roots in an earlier discourse of comradeship long upheld in popular boys' papers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article proceeds through a case study of commemorative rhetoric in a British settler state, Australia, and in a provincial capital, Brisbane, whose dominant commemorative group, the Anzac Day Commemoration Committee (ADCC), had claims to have invented the national memorial rituals for the principal day of remembrance. It briefly surveys the broader Australian commemorative background, then explores the control of Anzac Day in Brisbane, focusing on accommodations and alliances between political, civil and religious leaders and the principal returned soldiers' organization, the Returned Sailors' and Soldiers' Imperial League of Australia (RSSILA) on the ADCC, in Anzac Day activities, and in Anzac Day rhetoric. The article suggests that the theme of 'triumphalism' has been underplayed in analysis of interwar commemorative rhetoric in Australia, and that cooperation, accommodation and alliance were more typical of interwar commemoration than contest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the disorders of the mind at the turn of the twentieth century offered useful knowledge about the psyche and the First World War (FWW) provided an avalanche of case studies. Prior to the war the mentally ill were treated with disdain and the social distrust of individuals who did not present as ‘normal’ was high. The level of diagnostic expertise of psychiatric illness by doctors and nurses was low and as a consequence medicine and nursing was ill-equipped to deal with the phenomenon initially referred to as ‘shell shock’. However, the soldiers of the FWW who endured the varied and seemingly unrelated symptoms of shell-shock were respected men – occasional heroes – who were reduced to the status of ‘mentals’. There is evidence that civilian trained health professionals altered their views about mental illness during the FWW but initially, the military imperatives inherent in a global conflict perpetuated the notion that mental illness was linked with defective morality. This paper provides an historical account of changes in attitude toward the mentally ill as a consequence of the FWW. The interregnum (1918–39) was a period of advancement in the field of mental health within the civilian sector. However, the imperatives of war negated these developments and there is evidence that the management of soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders in the Second World War did not benefit from the lessons learnt in the FWW. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social commemoration of warfare is one fraught with potential contradictions. In Australia, the foundation of nation is often regarded as having derived from the World War I experience, in which Australians fought independently of the British for the first time since Australian Federation in 1901. The Anzac myth, as it has become known, draws on the Gallipoli experience and the distinctiveness of the 'Diggers' (Australian soldiers) who were widely perceived as independent and rugged, as suited their home experience. But this myth, one still perpetuated annually on Anzac Day, is one that was not shared by all the community from its very inception. Australia at the end of the Great War saw the erection of monuments to the dead and victorious throughout the land, but the biography of a single monument, erected in the staunchly unionist mining town of Broken Hill, illustrates the different understandings of such war memorials and how the social commemoration of war, even in such a supposedly unified nation as Australia, can divide a community and demonstrate a continuation of pre-war struggles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information related to the online memorials which focus on the First World War complement. It mentions that declaration of a commitment to remember memorialize the First World War. It also mentions that Australian historian, Ken Inglis has estimated that every second Australian family was in mourning after the Great War.