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homefront_cover.png

Australians in World War I: Home Front cover
  • Chapter 1: Australia before the war
  • Chapter 2: The British empire and the coming of war
  • Chapter 3: Going to war (1914)
  • Chapter 4: The enemy within
  • Chapter 5: Early shocks (1914–15)
  • Chapter 6: Pain and patriotism (1915)
  • Chapter 7: The great recruiting drive (1915)
  • Chapter 8: The fault lines open (1915–16)
  • Chapter 9: The patriotic funds
  • Chapter 10: Paid war work and rifle clubs
  • Chapter 11: The decision to vote on conscription (1916)
  • Chapter 12: The first conscription vote (1916)
  • Chapter 13: The federal election and the great strike (1917)
  • Chapter 14: The second conscription vote (1917)
  • Chapter 15: Crisis (1918)
  • Chapter 16: Victory
  • Chapter 17: Australia after the war
  • Further reading
  • Image gallery

Australians in World War I series

Home Front

This commemorative publication is the fifth and final in the Australians in World War I series. It contains a brief essay on the impact of the First World War on Australian society and more than 100 full-page images. The image on the front cover is from a studio portrait of Mrs Lewis of Toowoomba with one of her six sons who served overseas. All came home again.

  • Australians in World War I: Home Front—Education Activities
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    Australians in World War I—Home Front—Educational resource

    Microsoft Office document icon doc (3.52 MB)

Chapter 4: The enemy within

German troops pushed almost to Paris but failed to take the city. Just as welcome for Australians was the growing sense that a Japanese attack was unlikely. There was probably a huge, unspoken relief that the war would be fought far from Australia.

Yet there were fears of sedition and sabotage. Hundreds of migrants from what were now enemy lands were under orders to return home and enlist, and some Australians of German origin secretly rejoiced at enemy victories. 'I must state that my very good wishes are with Germany', one woman wrote in a family letter.1 Words like those were one reason why Andrew Fisher’s Labor government, elected to office in September 1914, passed a War Precautions Act that awarded itself the power to introduce almost any regulations it judged necessary for Australia’s security.2

Within months an open, casual society became a vigilant one. Police raided mining companies to ensure minerals would not reach Germany. Military censors began opening and reading mail passing through post offices, and telling newspaper proprietors what stories they should avoid. Army officers monitored and later detained men born in enemy lands. Seven thousand were eventually interned behind barbed wire, most of them subjects of the German and Austrian emperors. They idled away the months and then the years in simple huts or cells, hoping the outside world would see them as victims and release them. The outside world held them in suspicion, and feared trouble from any 'aliens' not yet interned. Only in Broken Hill was there any violence, and it came from two men who were just as much British subjects as any other Australians. On New Year’s Day 1915 a butcher and an ice cream seller born in British India obeyed the call of Turkey’s caliph for an armed jihad by all Muslims. They fired rifle shots into a passing train, killing four people.

  • 1. Mary Mennicken Coley, The Germans in Western Australia, Edith Cowan University Department of Language Studies, Perth, 1993, p. 49.
  • 2. Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates, vol. 75, p. 371, 28 October 1914, Irvine.
‹ Chapter 3: Going to war (1914) up Chapter 5: Early shocks (1914–15) ›
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