The end of World War I brought to Australians not tranquillity but unrest and anxiety, political, economic, cultural (a sense of being swamped by alien influences) and moral. Bolshevism threatened all, and explained to the establishment nearly every act of working-class defiance. Many Diggers could not re-enter their old jobs, since peace—as ever—brought economic slowdown. Empire still existed and was still potent as a concept, and the World War had both shaken it to its foundations yet also enlarged its possessions, especially in Africa. White Australia and its claims to an island fringe had prevailed in the Paris Peace Conference deliberations, to be affirmed at the signing of the peace treaty in the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles.

Now that peace had arrived, sport and sporting attendance had become virtues again. The streets of suburbs and country towns were full of men maimed in limb, lung or mental stability by the past, frightful war. And it seemed to elders, in Britain and Australia both, that women were escaping the management of the tribe; new mediums were blamed, but above all film, particularly American films. At the same time the eternal question, ‘What is art?’, was being debated furiously amongst those classes who could afford to discuss it. And the other issue: what was society to be? This divided citizens and drove them to extreme preparations. The indigenous peoples remained unbenefited by the recent war and still sought some status under the laws of the Commonwealth and the states. For them too, one war had closed and another begun.