Devastation
for their bravery and swift thinking in devastating German air raids on casualty clearing stations — in the case of Melbourne’s Alicia, covering patients’ heads with enamel wash basins and bedpans, knowing they are practically useless as helmets but might at least give a sense of security to the bed-bound men.
Their stories stand out in wartime commemorations, but what about the men and women at home, on the front line of a society riven by division?
The conscription debate had already torn through Australia the previous year, with communities divided against one another — often along loose religious lines; Catholics opposed and Protestants for enforced service — and a referendum at year’s end narrow win for the antis that saw the Labor Party split in two.
Prime Minister Billy Hughes’ second doomed push to introduce conscription, in 1917, turns those open wounds septic — and the rancour bleeds into other social issues, in a country now weary of war, where every family is in some way suffering deeply.
“Communities, families were torn apart,” says Stanley, research professor at UNSW Canberra and former Australian War Memorial principal historian. “Propaganda was appallingly divisive, not just from the factions but even coming from the prime minister.”
The conscription battle leaves communities divided for years to come.
“You could walk down a street and people would not talk to you, because they would know how you were voting,” Stanley says. “After the war, in the Great Depression, men were laid off because they had voted ‘no’. And for decades people in suburbs and country towns knew who had voted which way.”
“Great Strike” that spreads across the country midyear raises similar levels of vitriol with similar accusations: strikers are traitors to the cause, those who continue work are scabs. In the midst of it all, there is hunger from a mouse plague that ruins crops; and bread riots in Melbourne where hundreds of women storm parliament chanting for “food and fair play”.
Among those arrested is Adela Pankhurst, daughter of famous British suffragette Emmeline.
Women are some of the first to fill gaps left by strikers and soldiers overseas; especially those whose menfolk are fighting.
On November 11, 1917, with the second conscription referendum a month away, positivity is hard to find. It will be another bitter year — and 8000 more Australian deaths — before the Armistice comes; and with it Remembrance.