This article will examine a neglected ‘front’ in Australia's ‘History Wars’: the debate over the Australian response to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Since the 1980s, several historians have contributed to a body of literature which insists that Australia's vital interests were at stake in the confrontation between Britain and Germany in the Great War, and that Australia participated in order to protect these interests. In short, these historians are united in asserting that the Great War was ‘Australia's war’ as much as Britain's, and in condemning an alleged radical‐nationalist orthodoxy that presents Australia as a victim of the British Empire and the war as none of Australia's business. They also seek to redirect historical attention away from the themes emphasised by social and cultural historians, and towards strategy, diplomacy and high politics. Recently, several conservative newspaper columnists have also taken up their line of argument. This article seeks to explain how and why this somewhat one‐sided ‘debate’ has gathered momentum. While recognising the value of much of the new research generated by these historians, we also suggest that its terms are closely connected with efforts by the political right to defend the legitimacy of the British colonisation of Australia. At this point, the issues at stake in the historiography of Australia's response to the outbreak of the Great War intersect with some of the better‐known battles in Australia's ‘History Wars’, and notably those over the nature and extent of frontier conflict.
There is a growing body of European scholarship revising the traditionally held view that the peoples of Europe greeted the war with boundless patriotic enthusiasm. Niall Ferguson, Jean‐Jacques Becker and Jeffery Verhey in particular have argued that the “August Days” were more myth than reality. The outbreak of the war in Australia has not yet attracted similar attention. With few exceptions, Australian scholars writing about the opening days and weeks of the war have agreed that Australian popular reaction was dominated by overwhelming enthusiasm. This paper will explore the Australian historiography, since the 1930s, and assess the extent to which the “traditional” interpretation is in need of re‐investigation.
Authors’ Introduction The article is an attempt to assess a body of historical and polemical writing on Australia's entry into the First World War. It also offers, from page 70 through to page 74, an alternative to the kind of understanding of Australian participation in the war with which we take issue elsewhere in the article. The piece was inspired by our engagement with the important writing of John Moses, who was for some years a valued colleague at the University of New England; in Frank's case, as a university lecturer teaching a course on War and Society in Twentieth‐century Australia and a scholar with a long‐standing interest in Australian historiography, and in Grant's, as a doctoral candidate being supervised by Frank and researching a thesis on Australian responses to the outbreak of the war. Grant, who was in the process of completing his thesis when we published this article, has since finished and is revising his work for publication. He also produced an earlier historiographical piece arising from his doctoral work : ‘“Unbounded Enthusiasm”: Australian Historians and the Outbreak of the Great War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 3/3 (September 2007): 360–74. Like any piece of academic historical writing, our article represented an attempt to solve a ‘problem’. The ‘problem’, as we saw it, was why a group of historians and political commentators had spent so many words contesting a view which they presented as mistaken historical orthodoxy, but which we were unable to find articulated in the major writings on Australia and the Great War with which we were familiar. The writers with whom we argued suggest that, contrary to the claims of radical‐nationalist historians, the Great War was truly Australia's war, and one in which Australia's vital interests were at stake. Our purpose in writing our article was not to contest their particular claims about the national interest, but rather to interrogate aspects of their own methodology and assumptions, and to suggest an alternative. In particular, we argued that their work came out of a focus on ‘high politics’ and diplomacy, and that a closer look at the contemporary discourse suggests greater complexity and ambiguity about the significance of the war for Australians. We suggested that it was wrong to impose a single meaning on Australian participation in the war derived from an understanding of diplomatic history, and that attempts to do so needed to be understood in the context of modern Australian conservative intellectuals’ affirmative attitude towards the nation's imperial inheritance. Authors Recommend: Here, we have included readings that are not dealt with in any detail or at all in our article. These come out of the tradition of social and cultural history or ‘history from below’ that, we argue in our article, has been marginalised by the stress on high politics and diplomacy. Many of these historians are participants in those ‘liveliest conversations’ to which we refer in our concluding paragraph. E. M. Andrews, The ANZAC Illusion...
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