The five Australian infantry divisions had suffered terribly during the battles of 1917, and in early 1918 they were finally rotated out of the front lines of Flanders Fields in order to rest and reorganise. In September–October 1917, during the battles of Passchendaele and the bloodbath at Bullecourt, the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) alone had suffered over 55,000 casualties. They were now 10 kilometres south of Passchendaele taking up camp in the relatively ‘quiet sector’ around Messines.

Along with the New Zealanders, the Australians had taken Messines from the Germans in June 1917. It was of vital strategic significance, as the ridge overlooked any German advance towards the critical railway hub of Hazebrouck about 25 kilometres behind the Australian lines. This railway hub was just as critical to the British as the southern rail centre at Amiens. Both towns represented logistical choke points for the British, with over half of all British supplies needing to travel through them. If either fell to the Germans, the British would have to break away from the French, forcing them back towards the English Channel, separating the armies and thereby losing the Allies the war.1

It was not until 4 October 1917 that both I ANZAC (1st, 2nd and 4th Australian infantry divisions) and II ANZAC (3rd and 5th Australian and New Zealand divisions) fought together, when they attacked Broodseinde Ridge in Ypres as part of the bloody and futile battle for Passchendaele. Only now was the repeated request by the Australian prime minister, Billy Hughes, to the British government and the Imperial War Cabinet that the Australian divisions form a single Australian corps finally endorsed by British field marshal Sir Douglas Haig, who commanded all British forces on the Western Front.2

It was agreed that the British lieutenant general William Birdwood for now would command the Australian Corps, and that all senior positions – including corps commanders – would soon be transferred to Australian senior officers. As the men of these depleted battalions and brigades took up their bivouac positions around Messines, they were informed that they were now part of the newly established Australian Army Corps. This was met with a universal chorus of cheers from the diggers, as after three years of fighting the AIF would be united and under Australian command.3 As stated by Australian official war correspondent Charles Bean, the decision, which came as a ‘complete surprise to the divisions emerging from Third Ypres [Passchendaele], was everywhere hailed with delight’.4

However, the fact remained that the recruitment rate back home had dwindled, and reinforcements for the shattered Australian battalions were hard to come by. Indeed, recruitment had dropped to an average of just 2500 per month, nowhere near the 7000 needed to replace the casualties. Added to this, most ‘reinforcements’ were men returning to the line after having ‘recovered’ from wounds and illness. The figures for the first six months of 1918 did not look promising: of the 66,871 ‘reinforcements’ to the Australian divisions, 46,161 (70 per cent) were returning casualties. The AIF was feeding on itself. Given the casualties associated with the fighting in 1917, every Australian reinforcement in England, including those from the embryonic 6th Australian Infantry Division, were fed into the five Australian divisions fighting in France and Belgium. Billy Hughes had twice initiated conscription campaigns in Australia with the aim to rebuild the Australian forces fighting in France, Belgium and Palestine.5

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Australians during the first conscription referendum in late 1916 were evenly divided between those supporting conscription and those against it. Under the federal constitution, the Commonwealth Defence Act (1911) allowed for conscription of citizens for home defence only. Hughes thought he could get around this by enacting aspects of the all-empowering War Precautions Act (1914), which allowed for the Commonwealth government to censor the media, fix prices, levy an income tax, intern enemy aliens, break up strikes and imprison those involved in anti-conscription activities. Hughes’s Labor government colleagues baulked at the idea and refused to support him. They insisted on adherence to the constitution, which stated that nothing contrary to its provision could be achieved without consent of the majority of the people via a referendum.6

The convoluted question put to the people was: ‘Are you in favour of the Government having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military services, for the term of this War, outside the Commonwealth, as it now has in regard to military services within the Commonwealth?’7

The first referendum, held in October 1916, narrowly failed, with the ‘No’ vote winning by a margin of 72,476, or 52 per cent of the vote. Immediately following it, volunteer numbers dramatically fell across Australia and would never again reach even the lowest levels gained prior to the vote. It also had serious political consequences, breaking up the then-ruling Australian Labor Party (ALP).8

Just two weeks after losing the referendum, the Labor Party caucus expressed no confidence in Hughes. Before they could vote him out of office, however, he left the meeting with 25 supporters and the next day formed a new government with the conservative opposition, creating a new political identity called the Nationalist Party. Hughes, who had done so much to help create the ALP, was now considered a Judas who had betrayed his party and his class. Even so, the Nationalist Party was voted into office in early May 1917, showing that overall the Australian public supported the war, if not conscription.9

Despite this support, the government was seen by many as having broken trust with the majority of the electorate by trying to force the conscription issue. Associated with this fault line were issues of class and sectarianism, which the government, by invoking a conscription referendum, had now put front and centre. The working class – containing a large Irish Catholic constituency – tended to be less enthusiastic about the war as, unlike the middle class, they were more directly affected by the wartime wages freeze, restrictions on industrial action, and rising prices. Members of the trade unions saw a capitalist conspiracy associated with ‘war aims’ and wartime industrial production and profiteering. This resulted in the general strike of August 1917, involving over 95,000 workers. Over a three-month period, it was estimated that around four million working days were lost. The focus of the strike was in New South Wales and Victoria. The state governments, supported by the federal government, employed scab labour, or what they euphemistically called ‘strikebreaking volunteers’ to break the back of the workers and unions. The strikers were eventually forced back to work, but they would never forget or forgive.10

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All through this period and after, the middle-class loyalist women of the ‘white feather brigade’ were in full swing, ‘encouraging’ at every recruit’ league was formed in mid-1917 by a Miss Temperley, with a pledge by its members to ‘do my utmost to enlist one man by appealing through my Womanhood to his Manhood’.11 Temperley urged her female supporters to ‘fix upon one man, even if he were the poor, unfortunate but eligible tradesman who knocked at the backdoor each day’ and pursue him until he enlisted.12 If that failed there was always ostracism, with single women expected not to socialise with eligible men. One store in Sydney sacked those it considered to be ‘shirkers’.13 Recruiting appeals were stepped up, as were unexpected speeches invoking men to sign up:

In the interval at a dance a wounded soldier would stand up and ask for mates; on a surfing beach the sun-bakers would hear the voice of the recruiter; at the moving pictures and the theatres the tale of the disappearing legions was told. In the centre of the cities outside the post office or town halls or other gathering places, a daily meeting gave opportunities for all who knew how and what to speak on the great topic. It might be a returned VC, a crippled officer, a wounded man from the military hospital [obviously not one who was horribly disfigured], the Premier of State, the Lord Mayor, the chairman of the local recruiting committee or the Director-General, a chaplain, a layman, a woman. Sometimes it was one of that day’s recruits.14

Those against conscription, however, argued that Australia had already done more than its fair share: Canada, with a population of around seven million, had enlisted 308,000 men, while Australia, with a population of just five million, had already sent 270,000 – on a proportional basis Australia would have been doing well to supply 230,000.15 By war’s end Australia would have committed over 400,000 to the conflict and suffered about 60,000 killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner; these figures do not include the psychological scarring with which many survivors returned home.16

Not all who opposed conscription were against the war – they just did not agree that men should be forced to enlist. Others were patriotic and proud that the AIF consisted solely of volunteers and wanted it to remain that way, rather than have it ‘sullied’ with the inclusion of unsuited and unwilling conscripts who would make bad soldiers and negatively impact on the force’s splendid fighting reputation.17

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A year after the first failed conscription referendum, Hughes argued that the military situation in Europe had deteriorated further. The Western Front was in late 1917 still bogged down in stalemate; Italy was reeling from one military disaster after another and might soon capitulate; and Russia was in the throes of revolution and had withdrawn from the war. At the time it was assessed that around 140,000 healthy and fit single men of military age had failed to enlist, as had 280,000 married men of similar age. Hughes wanted as many of these men as possible in uniform and ‘over there’.18

While Hughes had the numbers in both houses of parliament to pass a conscription bill, he decided in early November 1917 to risk a second referendum. He believed that drafting the bill and getting it passed through parliament would take far too long, and that this time he could win the people over with a speedy campaign. He was buoyed by the increased majority he had obtained in the recent federal election, which had brought the Nationalist Party into government, and undoubtedly also by the recent defeat of the trade unions in the general strike. He believed that the Australian people were listening to him and that he could carry the ‘Yes’ vote.19 However, his actions had seriously split the labour movement, and many who might have previously supported him had turned away from him and his conservative government.20

The question to be put to the people this time was simple but intentionally emotive: ‘Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Australian Imperial Force overseas?’21

While the newly installed Archbishop of Melbourne, Dr Daniel Mannix, had been vocal in the debates of 1916, he now became the voice and representative for the ‘No’ vote, especially for the Irish Catholic working class.22 Mannix and others were outraged that ‘Mr Hughes and his party had framed a question from which the word conscription was wholly eliminated’.23 Mannix was not against volunteer recruitment, but he and many others were against forcing men to go to war. He accused Hughes directly of contributing to the falling rate of volunteers, arguing forcefully that ‘recruiting was going very well in Australia until Mr Hughes returned [from Britain just after that nation had invoked conscription] full of vanity, and started the first conscription campaign. That was the first blow to voluntary recruiting, and it was a blow from which it had never recovered.’24

If the ‘Yes’ vote was carried, a ballot would be drawn of all fit males aged from 20 to 44 who had no dependent children. Those families who already had men serving would be largely exempt, as would those men who were working in certain industries that contributed directly to the war effort or in ‘chosen’ professions. The numbers to be conscripted each month by ballot would depend on how many additional men were needed, after volunteers, to make up the required 7000 men per month.25

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The political divide was embodied by the short and wiry Hughes, who, when his blood was up, was like a growling street dog ready to pounce. He was a fighter to his core and relished parliamentary ‘combat’. One of his staunch enemies was former prime minister Alfred Deakin, who described him as resembling an ‘ill-bred urchin one sees dragged from a tart shop kicking and screaming as he goes’.26 Also against Hughes was his nemesis, the more restrained but forthright Queensland Labor premier, Thomas Ryan. Ryan had refused to use scab labour during the general strike and, while he supported volunteer enlistment, was opposed to conscription. He would not be bullied by Hughes and what he saw as a flagrant grab for power by the Commonwealth government – above all, Ryan was a strong advocate for states’ rights.27

Hughes went so far as to try to stop an offending speech by Ryan being published in the press, so Ryan, using parliamentary privilege, read the speech in parliament, which meant that it was guaranteed to be published in Hansard. This infuriated Hughes, who ordered police to confiscate copies of the parliamentary papers, with some sources stating that the prime minister himself led the police raid on the government printing office. In turn, Ryan had 50,000 copies of his speech printed in the Queensland state government gazette, with state police guarding the printer’s building. Things were quickly getting out of control when Hughes uncharacteristically backed down and allowed the speech to be published. This drew far more attention to it then would have been the case if he had let the newspapers publish it originally. As stated, perhaps emotively, by Ryan’s assistant minister for justice and minister without portfolio, if Hughes had persisted it would have been a ‘declaration of civil war’.28

But Hughes did not stop there: he used the speech to charge Ryan with a breach of the War Precautions Act, stating that it contained misleading information. The case failed when it was demonstrated that Ryan had used the government’s own statistics and information to prosecute his case. Hughes now looked to many as being mean and desperate, further isolating many of his potential constituents.29

The prime minister was also not immune from public rage. While in Queensland he was hit by an egg while addressing a ‘Yes’ vote meeting. He rushed into the crowd, demanding the arrest of the culprit, and a Queensland Police senior sergeant with the unmistakably Irish name of Kenny, when approached by the prime minister, informed Hughes that he only served Queensland authority. An enraged PM reboarded his train and quickly used the incident to further usurp power to the Commonwealth, authorising the establishment of a Commonwealth police force that later gave rise to the Australian Federal Police.30

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It was not only along political lines that the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ votes were being prosecuted. The Protestant and Catholic sectarian divide in Australia at the time was very real, and for many loyalists, the most feared menace was represented by the Irish political independence movement of Sinn Fein. The Easter uprising in Dublin of 1916 had confirmed to many that Sinn Fein was undoubtedly involved in sinister plots against their cause. The great loyalist bogeyman came to be embodied in the form of Archbishop Mannix.31 A supporter of Sinn Fein and a great orator, he drew huge crowds in advocating the ‘No’ vote. His popularity culminated in one meeting that drew around 100,000 people. Mannix struck a chord with the contradiction that Britain was supposedly fighting a war to protect and liberate the small nations of the world but had refused Home Rule for Ireland. This was repeated at many meetings and widely published, including in the Argus newspaper, which was usually hostile to Mannix and the ‘No’ vote:

Young men and old men have been asked to rush to Europe to avenge the wrong of Belgium and of other small nations but he [Mannix] would say that there was another small nation that had wrongs more ancient than those of Belgium. There was another nation whose scars were deeper than Belgium’s scars. There was another nation that they feared might still remain in slavery and servitude when [a] Peace Conference had righted the wrongs of Belgium.32

Mannix was fighting against not just conscription, but also what he saw as the ongoing injustice to the Irish working-class minority against the Protestant majority. Many of those who came to hear him speak were the same men who had been crushed by the government in the general strike just months earlier. While the Catholic hierarchy had been divided on the 1916 referendum, Mannix singlehandedly managed to unite the church leadership in advocating the ‘No’ vote. He didn’t need to convince his ‘flock’ of his position – he was preaching to the converted. Very soon Mannix became the ‘devil incarnate’ to those demanding the ‘Yes’ vote, with some arguing that he was intent on placing Australia under the ‘rule of Rome’.33

On the opposite side of the religious fence, leading the ‘Yes’ vote, was the charismatic pastor of Collins Street Baptist Church, the Reverend Thomas Ruth. He also brought out large passionate crowds, arguing the case for the loyalists and stating publicly at one point that Mannix was ‘engaged in this country in a sordid, ecclesiastical traffic, destructive of manhood, destructive of patriotism, destructive of Christianity, and as a man, as an Englishman, as a Christian, I fling back into his teeth the offensive slander he has hurled against my country and the Empire that gives him protection’.34 The sectarian divide and the competition for the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ votes seemed to hinge on these two ‘combatants’, each embodying his respective cause to his parishioners and to many who had previously been sitting on the sidelines.

The political and sectarian divide also crossed paths, with Hughes and Mannix trading verbal abuse. Indeed, Hughes helped to elevate Mannix as the arch villain of the ‘Yes’ vote, turning his personal attacks on him, the unions and other ‘social-riff-raff, and therefore Mannix became an outstanding figure not only because of his own exertions but also because the press and the Prime Minister and others chose him as the focus for their attacks’.35 However, the archbishop was more than happy to take on the role.

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For many in the broader community, reason and logic went out the window during the second referendum, with those in the opposition camps frequently demonised, sometimes resulting in violence.36 All too frequently the debate degenerated into the use of overripe eggs and unripe fruit. Returned soldiers broke up ‘No’ meetings, and unionists did the same at meetings arguing the ‘Yes’ case. It wasn’t always so black and white, with some returned men forming a Returned Soldiers’ No-Conscription League of Australia, which held its own meetings. At one, a Gallipoli veteran who had lost a leg during the campaign got up to speak but was yelled down, with someone in the crowd shouting: ‘What a poor specimen you are!’37

The ugly divisiveness got to the point that something previously incomprehensible began to occur: women confronted each other physically and violently over a political issue. While the suffragette movement had been alive and well in Australia, it had mostly involved women against the male establishment – now it was women against women.38

The Australian Worker, prosecuting the ‘No’ vote, published an article called ‘The lottery of death’, which described how ‘the game of chance [was] viler than any played in . . . Monte Carlo . . . Lives are to be drawn for on Tattersall principles; souls are to be made the subjects of a hideous sweep. The equivalent of eligible males are to be tossed into a hat or something; then someone – Death, who knows? – plunges in a hand, and all who are drawn are doomed to be the victim of bloody war . . . if Australia accepts the scheme of military compulsion formulated by the Prime Minister . . . it will . . . reduce its citizens to the level of cannibals drawing lots for an obscene feast’.39

The ‘No’ vote was perhaps best exemplified by an anti-war pamphlet called The Bucket, which was printed and distributed in large numbers and described the conditions of a medical clearing station just behind the lines of the Western Front:

The bucket outside contains hands and feet, pieces of jaw, and the rest. Have you seen a butcher after the day’s killing? Well, that’s how the surgeon appears. Their aprons are saturated with gore. In fact at the back the dead are lying. The first has no face, the next has bled to death. The corpses are pulled about as the slaughterman pulls his dead sheep. Intestines and pieces of lung are in the bucket outside the tent, so that the surgeon may get good practice.40

Many whose sons, brothers and fathers were fighting and dying on the Western Front would have read this pamphlet, with its long, grisly recounting of what was happening all too frequently in France, Belgium and beyond.

The ‘Yes’ vote camp countered with its own propaganda from those who claimed to know the true situation at home and abroad: ‘Our men who have fought at Gallipoli, France and in Palestine, know the desperate straits of their comrades. They know what it is to look with anxious eyes for the reinforcements which mean so much to them. With full knowledge of the position at the front and in Australia, the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League in Melbourne and Sydney have given their undivided support to the efforts of the government to gain reinforcements.’41

Others were quick to point out that almost all Allied countries had adopted conscription, including the United States, which had done so immediately upon declaring war against Germany and its allies. Canada, New Zealand, Great Britain and others had also instituted conscription, so why was Australia failing to support the Empire and the Allies’ cause? Australia needed to show it was right behind the mother country. The ‘No’ vote turned this concept on its head, with Henry Boote, editor of the Australian Worker, arguing that ‘Australia “in the midst of universal madness” had preserved its sanity’.42 Indeed, other Commonwealth countries, including South Africa, India and Ireland, did not invoke conscription – Australia was not alone.

Loyalists saw conspiracies everywhere. Germany and its allies, now including the revolutionists in Russia, were surely involved in nefarious activities to sabotage the Allies’ cause, including in far-away Australia. Treachery was under every doormat. Anti-German feelings and persecution reached new levels during the second conscription campaign, with the Anti-German League even successfully lobbying the government to order that not only should naturalised citizens of German heritage not be allowed to vote in the referendum, but neither should their children. Indeed, the Commonwealth statistician declared to Hughes at the time: ‘Whether naturalized or not, the average German is so strongly pro-German that he cannot (and in many cases his children cannot) give a patriotic (Australian) vote on “Conscription” or any other “defence question”.’43 In the end, only those German families who had a family member serving with the AIF were allowed to vote. By the time the war was over, almost 7000 people of German, Austro-Hungarian or Turkish background were detained in internment camps within Australia, while just over 4600 were on parole and under police supervision.44

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The referendum held on 20 December 1917 resulted in the ‘No’ vote gaining 54 per cent at 1,181,747 and the ‘Yes’ vote 1,015,159. The margin between the ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ votes more than doubled that of the referendum the year before. Not surprisingly, Queensland saw the greatest increase. However, those fighting and dying on the other side of the world, the members of the AIF, voted ‘Yes’ by a slim margin (52.5 per cent). Breaking down the figures even further, the ‘Yes’ vote for those Australians serving overseas succeeded with a margin of just 715 votes. It appears that the people at the sharp end had voted overwhelmingly against conscription, while those voting ‘Yes’ were largely those in training camps in Britain and elsewhere.45

Lance Corporal Len Harvey of the 43rd Battalion, a 19-year-old clerk from Moonta Mines in South Australia, received a letter from his pro-conscription father asking why the troops were against conscription. Harvey was recovering from wounds suffered on the Western Front. ‘Dad,’ he replied, ‘I would like to give you a satisfactory answer to your question re. the reason for so many soldiers voting No, but I’m afraid I can’t. A large number, when questioned, said it was immaterial to them which side won, and it wasn’t for them to vote yes to bring another man into the war. Others reckoned they were out to crush militarism and that by voting yes they would be helping to bring militarism to Australia.’46

However, 33-year-old Australian Army nursing sister Mabel Tilton from Melbourne, who had recently lost her fiancé in the war, recalled being disgusted with the conscription vote. While convalescing from illness in southern France she wrote home:

These [many debates] naturally influenced our vote in the first instance [first conscription referendum], but they had no effect the second time, for we had seen men, wounded four and five times, return to the line again, until finally, in many cases, they died serving their country. During 1917, when every man was so badly needed, boys left our wards before they were fit to return to the line. Gunner A.S. ——, shot through the jaw, was sent back to France before he could properly masticate his food. Yet he never uttered a word of complaint at the decision.47

In contrast, Captain William Braithwaite of the 22nd Battalion, a 23-year-old tanner from Preston in Victoria, certainly knew why he would vote ‘No’, writing to his parents before the second referendum: ‘Do not vote for conscription on any account. Australia has sent enough to the war and if we did empty the remaining men out, it would only cripple her and not make a slightest difference to the result of the war.’48 Tragically, Captain William Braithwaite would be killed on 3 October 1918 in the battalion’s last battle of the war at Beaurevoir, leading his men in an attack against an entrenched German machine-gun position.

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With conscription again voted down, any talk of it being invoked as part of Australia’s war effort was finally crushed. Hughes, in a mean spirit, later said it was ‘war-weariness of a people who have escaped all the consequences of this awful war!’49 He should have tried telling that to the large number of Australian children, wives, parents and siblings who were daily receiving news that their fathers, husbands, sons or brothers had been killed or were missing in action or badly wounded. By the time hostilities ceased in November 1918, Hughes himself understood. When British prime minister Lloyd George sent a communiqué asking whether Australia would ‘furnish troops for another campaign against Turkey, the reply of Mr Hughes was brief and to the point. He, too, had learnt the value of an unqualified “No” and that one word was his answer.’50