Please Note: These sources can only be used in a response to the 2025 Simpson Prize Question about the First World War (WW1)

 

Source 1 A

An Australian recruitment poster issued by the Win the War League. C. 1915 (AWM ARTV00141)

 

Source 1 B

Verses from ‘The Call’, a poem published in The Argus newspaper (Melbourne), 8 August 1914

Coo-ee! It’s the mother country calling;

Coo-ee! Her sons shall make reply;

The children of the free,

From sea to surging sea,

Have heard the call, they’ll stand or fall, prepared to do or die.

 

Forget our tale of party strife, forget our varied creeds,

Perhaps we’ve wrangled over words, we stand as one in deeds;

Divided in her time of peace – when first the bugles blare

Her enemies have yet to learn the Empire stands foursquare!

 

Source 1 C

Newspaper report of a speech given by Prime Minister Joseph Cook at Horsham on 1 August 1914. From The Sydney Morning Herald, 1 August 1914.

MELBOURNE, Friday. In the course of a speech at Horsham tonight the Prime Minister (Mr. Cook) referred to the European crisis. He said, “I hope that reason will get the better of these passionate feelings that have been aroused, and that there may be peace …

whatever happens Australia is a part of the Empire right to the full. Remember that when the Empire is at war so is Australia at war. That being so, you will see how grave is the situation. I want to make it quite clear that all our resources in Australia are in the Empire, and for the Empire, and for the preservation and the security of the Empire.” (Loud cheers.).

 

Source 1 D

Extract from a newspaper report on a recruitment rally, The Brisbane Courier, 6 May 1916

RECRUITING CAMPAIGN.

A STIRRING CALL

LAST NIGHT’S RECRUITING RALLY

It was inspiring to see the great gathering, which included many ladies, who remained, notwithstanding the heavy rain The weather interfered somewhat with the arrangement of the procession, which proceeded from the Valley, through the City, to Albert Square. It included wounded soldiers in motor cars … There were also two motor lorry loads and eight motor car loads of children from New Farm school…There was a great demonstration as the cars containing the wounded soldiers who had just arrived by train passed through the square.

In opening the meeting Colonel the Hon. A. J. Thynne remarked on the large number of fit young men visible about Brisbane and urged them to awaken to their duty. He did not believe, though, that any true Queensland boy would continue to hold back once he really knew how much his services were wanted. (Hear, hear.)

 

Source 1 E

Extract from John Maynard’s ‘The First World War’, published in Beaumont & Cadzow (eds) Serving Our Country: Indigenous Australians, War, Defence and Citizenship, 2018 

Were these Indigenous soldiers fighting for ‘their country’, for Australia or for the British Empire? We cannot know the answer to this question with any certainty, since few of those who served left any record of their motivation for so doing. As previously discussed, the records of Aboriginal men who joined up suggest that they were previously employed in other occupations. This challenges the idea that the prospect of a wage was the major motivation behind their volunteering. Aboriginal men did not go to war simply because they lacked options or choice. Some probably signed up for the same reasons as non-Indigenous men: for travel and adventure; because their mates or brothers had signed up; because they believed in the war effort; or because they were subjected to aggressive recruitment campaigns. However, Aboriginal people during the early twentieth century were also developing a sense of a pan-national Aboriginal identity loosely tied to the rise of a wider Australian national identity. This would come very much to the fore during the l920s when organised Aboriginal political protest began to emerge. However, like many white Australians, Aboriginal men may have positioned their sense of identity within a wider ‘British’ loyalty. James Arden and Richard King on their arrival at the Ballarat military training camp, stated that they were:

[A] nxious to get to the front as soon as possible in order· to fight for the Empire ... the natives at the Condah station felt that they were real Britishers, having been born under the Australian flag, and were willing to fight to a man if they were accepted by the military authorities.

 

Source 1 F

Robert Edmund Antill, Extract from Letter, 1914 – 1917, private record (AWM 1DRL/0047)

You may think it funny of me turning up such a great job but it was like this: Philpott had only about 3 days work left for us and things are so bad out here for there is a drought on. We haven’t had any rain for months so I thought I would join the army. Well I joined and here I am. Whoever thought that when I left home that I was leaving for a soldier but still there a such a lot of things happening in this world it’s no use being surprised, is it…

 

Source 1 G

Extract of letter by Lance Corporal F.C. Mulvey, 2nd Light Horse, AIF, 23 August 1914, private record (AWM 2DRL/0233)

I know no more than that I have sworn “to obey the King’s commands and fight his enemies wherever I am required”. I sincerely trust that you will look at my move in the right light, as you do most things, and recognise that out of a family of three sons, one can be spared for the defence of Australia and Australia’s fate is going to be decided on the continent and not out here. Of course we may never see the front; there are rumours and conjectures that we are bound for India or some such place to take the place of the regular troops there. I know that I have taken a serious step but this war is a serious matter and I feel convinced in my own mind that being suited in physique and occupation and being prompted by a sense of duty and spirit of adventure I can hardly do anything else but volunteer.

 

Please Remember: These WW1 sources can only be used in an entry about World War One.

Please Note: These sources can only be used in a response to the 2025 Simpson Prize Question about the Second World War

 

Source 2 A

Extract from Prime Minister John Curtin’s ‘The Task Ahead’, The Herald (Melbourne), 27 December 1941

The Australian Government, therefore, regards the Pacific struggle as primarily one in which the United States and Australia must have the fullest say in the direction of the democracies’ fighting plan.

Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

We know the problems that the United Kingdom faces. We know the constant threat of invasion. We know the dangers of dispersal of strength, but we know too, that Australia can go and Britain can still hold on. ...

Summed up, Australian external policy will be shaped toward obtaining Russian aid, and working out, with the United States, as the major factor, a plan of Pacific strategy, along with British, Chinese and Dutch forces.

 

Source 2 B

Extract from a source published in ‘Indigenous Service’, Shrine of Remembrance, Melbourne, 2013

 

Jennet Cole-Adams, and Judy Gauld. 2013. Indigenous Service : Investigating the Wartime Experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People from the First World War to the Present : A Resource for Secondary Schools. Canberra: Dept. of Veterans’ Affairs. p. 12

 

Source 2 C

Australian government poster, 1942

 

Source 2 D

Extract from Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ radio address to the Australian people, 3 September 1939

Fellow Australians,

Fellow Australians, it is my melancholy duty to inform you officially that in consequence of a persistence by Germany in her invasion of Poland, Great Britain has declared war upon her and that, as a result, Australia is also at war. No harder task can fall to the lot of a democratic leader than to make such an announcement. Great Britain and France, with the cooperation of the British Dominions, have struggled to avoid this tragedy. They have, as I firmly believe, been patient. They have kept the door of negotiation open. They have given no cause for aggression. But in the result, their efforts have failed and we are therefore, as a great family of nations, involved in a struggle which we must at all costs win and which we believe in our hearts we will win.

There was never any doubt as to where Great Britain stood ... There can be no doubt that where Great Britain stands, there stands the people of the entire British world.

 

Source 2 E

Extract from Joan Beaumont and Tristan Moss, ‘Australian Military Forces in the Second World War’, published in Beaumont & Cadzow (eds) Serving Our Country: Indigenous Australians, War, Defence and Citizenship, 2018 

… it can be deduced from oral histories and family memories that Indigenous soldiers, like other Australians, chose to serve for a mix of reasons. Some saw military service as a way of escaping the economic and social constraints of their lives. Leonard Waters, who became the only known Australian Aboriginal fighter pilot of the Second World War, claimed that: ‘When war broke out in '39 ... I would have liked to have gone into aircrew straight away. I was obsessed with it ... you know, it was the pioneering days of the air ...  I was always interested in motors too.’

Athol Fred Lester, so his son John recalled in 2015, joined the Army because that was the only job he could get at that time. Not only were Indigenous men the victims of systemic disadvantage, but unemployment remained high in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Other Indigenous volunteers recalled the influence of being part of a family or community with a tradition of military service. Reg Saunders, for example, was ‘very conscious of the service of Aboriginal men during the First World War’. He later recalled:

My Dad was a soldier, and all my uncles and various cousins were soldiers, including my grandfather ... There was three of us. Mum and Dad and my brother ... We discussed the war; we took it quite seriously and because I was the eldest we decided that I was the one that was going to enter the war ... I never fought for anybody but Australia ... my loyalty was purely Australian. It was a sense of duty to the country.

John Lovett, too, came from a family with a proud history of military service, though in 2015 he also recalled that his father may have gone to war ‘so he could feed his family’. Yet others seem to have volunteered due to a mix of peer pressure and patriotism. Charles Mene from Thursday Island enlisted on 15 December 1939 because ‘some of the boys I know, they enlisted, and I thought, well, I might as well be in it too ... And I also wanted to fight for the country’.

When northern Australia was under direct attack, fear of the Japanese may have provided an additional incentive to volunteer. Rosie Ware, when recalling in 2014 the service of her father, Elia Ware, a Torres Strait Islander, claimed that ‘without them ... Japan would have invaded Australia’. Or, as Aden Eades put it in 2015, ‘Dad went willingly because he wanted to serve his country’. Claude McDermott too would later say to his son, James, ‘I needed to fight for my family, for my community and for Australia’. Yet Alec Kruger, who enlisted after Pearl Harbor, said:

We knew that the army was taking a lot of people and paying good money. We would be fighting for our country. People who had left to join the services were looked up to in Alice Springs.

Even full descent Aboriginal people were getting paid real money and being employed to do army jobs ... I was ripe for a bit of real money and ruination.

Finally, military service was seen by some Aboriginal activists as providing an opportunity to press their claims for political rights. Michael Sawtell of the Committee for Aboriginal Citizenship wrote to Prime Minister Menzies on 20 September 1939:

Our committee does not wish in any way to hamper you & we are not hostile to the compulsory training, but as we are at war to uphold democracy, we do consider that democracy should begin at home in Australia.

 

Source 2 F

Extract From Thomas Keneally’s Australians: Flappers to Vietnam, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2014, pp. 140 – 141

       Some young Australians, after a restless Sunday night, rushed straight off to the main barracks in their cities to enlist. Charles Janeway, a schoolboy in Mount Gambier in South Australia, said that his father had nightmares that night and was up walking the house, and that the next morning there was a gathering at their farm of his uncle, a cousin and two or three World War I ex-servicemen. ‘And oh! What they wouldn’t have done to those Germans!’

Merv Lilley, a rural labourer and bush poet, said that ‘thousands and thou­sands of characters on the dole and the breadline knew they’d get a job in the army . . . when you joined the army you met them all, and they were all in there for the three square meals . . . and five bob a day—big money’. A letter to the Sydney Morning Herald read: ‘Today I am unemployed, and when the war broke out, like many another man in a similar position, I hoped that a chance of enlistment would arise and take me off food relief, and give me a chance to become a useful citizen again.’ The Age soon reported that on coming into the Army Pay Office for his first week’s pay as a recruit in what would become the 2nd Australian Imperial Force, one man took the envelope and made a Nazi salute while shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’ Asked by the officer what he was doing, he said, ‘This is the first blinkin’ pay I’ve had in two blinkin’ years.’ It was a gift arising from Hitler’s aggression against Poland. Niall Brennan claimed (with obvious exaggeration) that 95 per cent of the first AIF volunteers were unemployed. Certainly Patsy Adam-Smith, a future author who as a child lived in Warragul, Victoria, remembered that the boys of the town, includ­ing her future brother-in-law, were jumping on the trains, hiding themselves under the tarpaulins covering grain, to get to Melbourne to enlist and put an end to unemployment. But, she noticed, there was also a peculiar excitement in their eyes.

Handsome Russell Braddon, who was then at university in Sydney and who would ultimately write a famous memoir of his years as a prisoner of the Japanese, enlisted within days and for the traditional reasons. ‘I joined the Army because the King was in danger and the Empire was in danger and the Nazis were unspeakably wicked and I wanted to go and kill Germans—it’s as simple as that. Very schoolboyish.’ He was a tough young man and was sure that he could defend himself if his homosexuality ever became a subject of derision. A young man named Alan Lowe wrote, ‘My mother had gone through the First World War with two young children while my father was away for four years, and he’d been hospitalised and wounded and she had a vivid memory of this . . . and she wasn’t happy at all about me going in.’ But even with their fathers to warn them off, men still enlisted. The horrors of 1914–18 could not be conveyed verbally. Young men were doomed to want to taste of those bloody springs for themselves.

 

Source 2 G

Cartoon published in The Bulletin (Sydney), 2 October 1940

‘In you go, lads, and give them everything you’ve got!’

 

 

Please Remember: These WWII sources can only be used in an entry about World War Two