'Rats', 'Scabs', 'Soolers' and 'Sinn Feiners': A Re-Assessment of the Role of the Labour Movement in the Conscription Crisis in Western Australia, 1916-17

Abstract

to conscription in a different way from that of the remainder of Australia and that 'the Labour Movement's attitude provides the key to this further example of Western Australian differences'.1 A number of scholars have accepted Robertson's thesis and perpetuated it, both in published and unpublished work. A. R. Pearson, for example, virtually paraphrasing Robertson, has stated that the 'Yes' majority in both conscription plebiscites was influenced by the unity of the industrial and political wings of the labour movement, faith in the federal government, and a common reluctance on the part of conscriptionists and anti-conscriptionists to destroy the Labor Party, or to condemn those with opposing viewpoints.2 Other scholars are more tentative in explaining the apparent zeal of Westralians to commit some of their number to battlefields on the opposite side of the world. David Black, for example, remarks in his 1981 study that 'the underlying explanation for this level of support, unparalleled elsewhere in Australia, must remain in the realms of conjecture'. Black's treatment of the conscription crisis is brief and tentative. He admits that it is a 'bald summary [which] . . . does less than justice to the uniqueness of the reactions of West Australians'. But in drawing extensively on primary sources such as the ALP papers in the Battye Library he has brought some fresh perspectives to a very neglected subject.3 This paper re-examines and challenges the assertions, made principally by Robertson and Pearson and to a lesser extent by Black, that the reactions of the Western Australian labour movement were markedly different from those in the Eastern States, and that a key element in the overwhelming majority of 'Yes' votes was the so-called 'moderateness' of Labor.