In 1914 Britain—or really its capital, London—was the centre of one of the great global empires that had parcelled up most of the planet between them. The British empire included a quarter of the world and its people, from the Indian Punjab to the Canadian prairie. Unlike Ireland, Australia was a self-governing federation within it. Legally, Australians were British subjects, and they were citizens of the empire economically and emotionally as well. Nearly half of Australia’s exports went to Britain—more than its imports came from there—and British investment largely funded economic and civic development. There was a sentimental veneration for the king, for famous generals like Kitchener, for the British army, and for the Royal Navy, which had abandoned its base at Sydney only a year before World War I began.

The Royal Navy’s departure had been a little unsettling. Its ships were concentrating off Europe as the British empire prepared for a possible war with a rival empire, that of Germany. Strange as it now sounds, Australia shared a border with Germany in 1914—the nation now called Papua New Guinea was then German territory in the north and Australian in the south. But Australians were concerned less by the remote chance of a German attack on Australia than by a more likely German invasion of Britain and, thereby, the decapitation of their empire. They were also concerned that Japan, despite being Britain’s ally at the time, might use a wartime crisis to attack Australia. So, a few years before World War I, Australians began to build their own little navy to defend their own coast or Britain’s as required. They made it compulsory for young men to join the militia, a part-time force confined to defending local soil. Their generals made plans, if war came, to enlist volunteers and send them to fight where they were needed. But if the men of Australia roused themselves for war before it began, the women did not. A few might serve as nurses, but otherwise war was seen as man’s work.

Australians were not naive about the coming conflict. School teachers and popular authors told them about the British empire’s titanic struggle against France a century earlier. Some Australians had themselves seen something of army life and the cruelty of combat when fighting in British territories in Asia and Africa. But outside the town camps and rural missions to which Australia’s Aboriginal people had long been banished, there was no personal memory of devastation and defeat. War was something that damaged other people, far away in time or place. No one was ready for the political and economic demands of a global, industrial conflict, one fought by mass armies and mighty navies, where men would be killed by poison gas and children starved by blockade, where the enemy never came close to Australia but nonetheless threatened the heart of the empire. No one expected that while their volunteers went to Gallipoli and then to France, their families would also be called on to wage war on the home front.