‘Are you in favour of the proposal of the Commonwealth Government for reinforcing the Commonwealth Forces overseas?’

– 1917 plebiscite question

By late 1917, the military position on the Western Front was nothing short of dire – in September and October Passchendaele had cost about 38,000 casualties, including 12,000 dead or missing, and Britain’s chief allies Italy and Russia had been defeated or had withdrawn altogether. Once again the British government pressured Australia for more men, and once again Billy Hughes’ Nationalist government agreed.

On 7 November it announced that a second conscription plebiscite would be held on 20 December. Men aged between twenty and forty-four who were single, divorced or widowed without dependants would be called up if the number of enlisted men per month dropped below 7000. Hughes, whose government had a comfortable majority, presumably decided on another plebiscite instead of putting legislation through parliament because men could be sent to the front more quickly. Besides, Great Britain and the USA had introduced forms of conscription, as had New Zealand, Canada and Newfoundland.

This second anti-conscription campaign in Victoria was even more bitterly fought than the first. The plebiscite was announced while some workers were still on strike, and the casualty lists were showing no signs of decreasing. And this time the anti-conscription campaign in Victoria had a new rallying point. Daniel Mannix, archbishop of Melbourne, was an outspoken and consistent opponent of conscription, and his stand against it attracted the support of many working-class Catholics. Naturally the Women’s Peace Army and the Women’s Political Association, both led by Vida and Cecilia John, joined with other anti-conscription groups. Their work seemed even more urgent because Victoria as a whole had voted in favour of conscription the previous year.

This time Vida travelled outside her home state, to Sydney and Tasmania. She found supporters and opponents alike were noisy and argumentative: in Tasmania one man shouted, ‘How many sons do you have at the front?’ and at an open-air meeting in Hobart her audience clashed with the pro-conscription group On Active Service. The Hobart Mercury duly described Vida as ‘a mixture of Karl Marx and Lenin’, and yet again published the slur that her German name suggested she favoured the enemy.¹

The printed propaganda war was just as intense as it had been the previous year. As before, the anti-conscription campaigns appealed mainly to women while the pro-conscriptionists targeted Australian men, with the plea not to let their mates down. (‘Scum of the earth! Your mates have Turned You DOWN. This was the placard hoisted over the German trenches facing the Australians after the last Referendum. Don’t let the Hun repeat the Lie. Vote YES.’) The ‘Blood Vote’ poster appeared again: according to one source, a million copies had been printed. As a result, pro-conscription forces were even more strongly on the attack. ‘Conscription is the fairest and justest way of apportioning services between our own and other mothers’ sons,’ argued one pamphlet. ‘It will not be mothers who defeat it.’

WPA communications were censored, and so was Vida’s mail. At least once this had comic results. She had written to her friend Edith Abbott about WPA work in her birthplace, Portland, in a state of despair at the slowness of its pace ‘because the war atmosphere is so thick’. She added, ‘Were I a loyalist and wanted to punish the Kaiser . . . I would advise that he should endeavour to do a fortnight in Portland.’ The censor who intercepted this was highly indignant about the insult to this peerless town: ‘This letter tells the whole story of a loyal District, with keen war workers, obviously standing for the Empire, who are to be disturbed, misguided and probably led astray by the disgruntled Pacifists.’²

There were the predictable episodes of violence. Five days before the vote in Melbourne, a large peace rally took place, centred as usual on the Yarra Bank. According to The Argus, women started singing ‘revolutionary songs’ and shouting defiance: ‘With hoarse threats of vengeance the “antis” dashed upon the returned men, whom they outnumbered by ten to one, and a furious battle ensued, from which several men emerged with bruised and bleeding faces.’ Viragoes all, apparently: no mention was made of the soldiers’ aggression. Some soldiers tried to grab the WPA flag from John, who calmly turned a fire hose on them.³

On 29 November at the railway station in Warwick, Queensland, where Hughes was speaking, one Patrick Brosnan hurled an egg at him, knocking off his hat. Enraged, Hughes reached into his coat for a revolver, which fortunately was not there. He demanded that a local police officer arrest Brosnan, but the policeman told the PM, ‘You have no jurisdiction here.’ This incident is widely credited, if that is the correct word, with the formation of the Commonwealth Police.

This time, Victorians as a whole voted ‘no’ to conscription, in line with much of the rest of the population. The final figures were 1,015,189 in favour and 1,181,747 against. The case for conscription had been lost for the second time, and by a greater margin than in the previous year. Hughes had declared that if he was defeated he would resign, and after several prompts he finally did, on 10 January 1918. The governor-general was unable to find another political party able to command a majority in parliament, however, and so Hughes and the Nationalists were recommissioned.

Vida’s sense of vindication about the conscription result was increased by some modest WPA successes: its annual report mentions increased numbers of women police in Victoria, and some tweaking of unjust laws concerning women who died intestate. In March 1918 she was also pleased to join a committee organised by the Australian Socialist Party, the WPA and the Victorian Socialist Party to celebrate the first anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Like many other left-leaning people of the time and later, Vida considered the revolution to be just what the world needed, the first time in history that the pre-eminence of the masses, the people, had been so effectively asserted.

Cecilia John was also working for the education of the people. In April 1918 she launched the People’s Conservatorium with her colleague Annie Macky. According to the Australian Worker, ‘The aim is to give a broad education on artistic lines, and to make the people realise that art is a part of life and not merely a pastime.’ The conservatorium would provide lessons in violin, piano, singing and cello, and would also ‘hold up before the students the high ideals of unionism and point out that an educated revolutionary movement will be a far greater force for good than an uneducated [one].’⁴ The conservatorium did not last long, but it was one of John’s first steps in what became an enduring career as a music and movement educator, and an Australian pioneer of Dalcroze eurhythmics.⁵

The Woman Voter, so staunch a supporter of the anti-conscription movement, almost succumbed to the financial trouble that had always dogged it. In the middle of the year Vida reduced it to a fortnightly paper, and in August its price was doubled to twopence. Like its predecessor the Sphere it limped on for some time; it finally closed down at the end of 1919.

The relentless slaughter over four years of war was making many in Britain and Europe concerned about the fate of the population afterwards. Clearly women would heavily outnumber men in almost all the combatant nations, and what would happen to the population if there were not enough men to father children? This anxiety did not spare Australians: in a total population of fewer than five million, 416,809 men had enlisted and about 62,000 had been killed, with 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner – and those figures did not include men who came back from the war damaged in other ways.

In August 1918 the WPA held a conference on ‘Scientific Motherhood’ to discuss setting up a Eugenics Institute. Staffed by medical personnel, it would supervise the artificial insemination of women who, married or unmarried, were doomed to be childless because of the war. The idea had gained currency because of a pamphlet published by Australian eugenics advocate and sex educator Marion Piddington, who argued in favour of ‘the amelioration of individual and national destiny . . . such as will accord with the principles of modern eugenics’.⁶

Vida was not entirely in favour of this, believing that ‘only hearts and minds united to spiritual ends . . . could justify and sanctify the creation of another human being’ and that, on a practical level, men would abrogate their responsibilities as husbands and fathers; she had certainly seen that happen often enough. Another WPA member, Kate Flynn, objected to the scheme because it implied that all women wanted to be, or should be, mothers. ‘That motherhood is necessary to the fulfilment of our destiny I deny absolutely . . . Motherhood is an experience . . . a great and holy experience it should be, but only an experience.’⁷ Nothing came of the Eugenics Institute plan.

The war ended with the Armistice on 11 November 1918. Shortly afterwards, Vida and the WPA joined the Socialist Party, the Trades Hall Council and the Labor Party in signing a petition calling for the repeal of the hated War Precautions Act. The many restrictions in force over the previous four years had been irritating and expensive, to say the least. There were demonstrations, known as the Red Flag riots, against the Act in Brisbane in 1918 and 1919, but it was not repealed until late in 1920, demonstrating how much quicker and more willing Australian governments were to impose restrictions on their citizens than to lift them.