Labour and Anzac: An Introduction

Abstract

For the Adelaide Advertiser, the workers had solved the problem of how to reconcile “the holiday spirit” with “dire national stress ... by eliminating from their demonstration any element of self.”3 The anti-labour Register, unable even on such a grand occasion to refrain from a series of cheap shots, backhandedly praised labour’s “splendid sacrifice” when it had forgotten “all about itself, all about its politics, and its industrialism, all about its eight hours a day or less, all about its advocacies of impossible ideals which, in recent years, have been trying to dominate the aims of a sane democracy, forgot about everything that was not just patriotic.”4 Although the occasion was designed to raise money for wounded men, with wounded soldiers participating in the procession, carried in the cars of Automobile Association members, it