Teaching & Learning Guide for: Whose War Was It Anyway? Some Australian Historians and the Great War

Shrine: War Memorials and the Digital Age

In 1972, Martha Vicinus edited Suffer and Be Still, a groundbreaking collection that introduced Victorian women into mainstream historical scholarship. Five years later, Vicinus brought out A Widen...

This article will examine a neglected ‘front’ in Australia's ‘History Wars’: the debate over the Australian response to the outbreak of war in Europe in 1914. Since the 1980s, several historians have contributed to a body of literature which insists that Australia's vital interests were at stake in the confrontation between Britain and Germany in the Great War, and that Australia participated in order to protect these interests. In short, these historians are united in asserting that the Great War was ‘Australia's war’ as much as Britain's, and in condemning an alleged radical‐nationalist orthodoxy that presents Australia as a victim of the British Empire and the war as none of Australia's business. They also seek to redirect historical attention away from the themes emphasised by social and cultural historians, and towards strategy, diplomacy and high politics. Recently, several conservative newspaper columnists have also taken up their line of argument. This article seeks to explain how and why this somewhat one‐sided ‘debate’ has gathered momentum. While recognising the value of much of the new research generated by these historians, we also suggest that its terms are closely connected with efforts by the political right to defend the legitimacy of the British colonisation of Australia. At this point, the issues at stake in the historiography of Australia's response to the outbreak of the Great War intersect with some of the better‐known battles in Australia's ‘History Wars’, and notably those over the nature and extent of frontier conflict.

Justin Fantauzzo. The Other Wars: The Experience and Memory of the First World War in the Middle East and Macedonia. Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 247. $99.00 (cloth). - Volume 60 Issue 1

Reviewed by: Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain Lisa M. Budreau Fighting Different Wars: Experience, Memory, and the First World War in Britain. By Janet S. K. Watson. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-521-83153-9. Illustrations. Notes. Select bibliography. Index. Pp. xiv, 333. $70.00. Another book on Britain and Great War memory? No, not quite. This revisionist work represents the latest in the Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare series under the editorial leadership of memory historian Jay Winter. In her somewhat provocative study, Janet Watson uses an exhaustive supply of published and unpublished texts (diaries, letters, poetry, public and private narratives) to challenge numerous claims concerning the war experience. Most significantly, she suggests that the disillusionment connected with the First World War was a postwar phenomenon, one gradually produced through the publication and popularity of memoirs and novels after the Armistice. "The war itself was overwhelmingly popular, and the nation came together to a remarkable degree [End Page 584] despite critical differences that reflected the nature of divisions in English society," she suggests (p. 2). This controversial stance is supported by an innovative two-part approach in which the author considers her evidence of wartime accounts as a lived experience separately in the first section, then examines retrospective accounts and postwar writings in the second half. Though primarily a study of gender and class dynamics, the analysis is comparative in several key ways. Watson looks at both women and men side by side, with special attention paid to families where both brothers and sisters were active in the war effort. Then, she examines two groups who brought different attitudes to wartime efforts: those who viewed participation as work and those who saw it as service. People brought a wide variety of attitudes to their efforts during wartime as the meaning of patriotism was constantly redefined. For example, professional soldiers and trained nurses, while patriotic, saw their efforts as work with a view toward career advancement. Munitions workers, by contrast, saw an opportunity for better wages and working conditions. For some, theirs was a job that had to be done while others believed king, honor, and glory were their supreme duty. Perceptions of class position played a crucial role in the way different types of war work were viewed, according to Watson. These views, in turn, were grounded in convictions about the preservation of social order in Britain's wartime class society. Interestingly, Watson concludes that people who had seen their wartime participation in terms of service were most likely to remember it as a story of disillusionment. Some aspects of Watson's argument are bound to provoke. She states, for example, "Without diminishing the terrors of trench bombardment or the total horrifics of mass advance into direct machine gun fire (though this was not fortunately, a frequent occurrence), we must acknowledge and give credence to other portrayals of the war experience which are not uniformly negative" (p. 50). Granted, most conventional histories begin with idealistic volunteers and end with shattered veterans and names on memorials. But, what about perspectives during the war? The author asks us to consider where the shift occurred from valuable contribution of soldiers during the war years toward the attitude of useless sacrifice? Without minimizing the considerable effort that has gone into this study, perhaps the book's greatest contribution to First World War scholarship is its ability to bring such questions of memory to the forefront of traditional military history enquiry. All credit to a work that is freshly researched and can genuinely be said to contribute so significantly to the field. Similarly, I applaud the Journal for its range and diversity by eliciting this new and distinctive historiographical genre for review. Lisa M. Budreau St. Antony’s College, Oxford University Oxford, United Kingdom Copyright © 2005 Society for Military History

<i>Imperial Apocalypse: The Great War and the Destruction of the Russian Empire</i>. By Joshua A. Sanborn. The Greater War. Edited by Robert Gerwarth.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. xii+288. $49.95.

Contested Objects breaks new ground in the interdisciplinary study of material culture. Its focus is on the rich and varied legacy of objects from the First World War as the global conflict that defined the twentieth century. From the iconic German steel helmet to practice trenches on Salisbury Plain, and from the ‘Dazzle Ship’ phenomenon through medal-wearing, diary-writing, trophy collecting, the market in war souvenirs and the evocative reworking of European objects by African soldiers, this book presents a dazzling array of hitherto unseen worlds of the Great War. The innovative and multidisciplinary approach adopted here follows the lead established by Nicholas J. Saunders’ Matters of Conflict (Routledge 2004), and extends its geographical coverage to embrace a truly international perspective. Australia, Africa, Italy, Germany, France, Belgium and Britain are all represented by a cross-disciplinary group of scholars working in archaeology, anthropology, cultural history, art history, museology, and cultural heritage. The result is a volume that resonates with richly documented and theoretically informed case studies that illustrate how the experiences of war can be embodied in and represented by an endless variety of artefacts, whose ‘social lives’ have endured for almost a century and that continue to shape our perceptions of an increasingly dangerous world.

\She is lost to time and place\

Jay Winter. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare number 1.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. x, 310. $29.95 Get access Winter Jay. Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. (Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Modern Warfare number 1.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 1995. Pp. x, 310. $29.95. Kim Munholland Kim Munholland University of Minnesota, Twin Cities Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 102, Issue 5, December 1997, Pages 1470–1471, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/102.5.1470 Published: 01 December 1997

Reviews and Short Notices

Book reviews

This article introduces the first volume of AHS Classics: Australia and the First World War. It surveys the critical scholarship on the Australian experience of war, taking its cue from Ken Inglis' seminal article, ‘The Anzac Tradition’ (1965), and tracing the development of his challenge to Australian historians over the following five decades. It argues that the adaptability of the Anzac legend, and its assimilation of varied experiences of the First World War, requires both investigation and caution in the production of new histories of events almost a century distant.

Tanya Evans has a very clear and consistent goal for this book: to persuade academic historians, especially, that family historians should be taken much more seriously, not dismissed as dilettantish hobbyists. As the director of the Centre for Applied History at Macquarie University in Australia and the leader of many workshops on how to do family history, Evans is well positioned and qualified to advocate on behalf of these industrious and enthusiastic researchers. Unfortunately, this book seems unlikely to make many converts.Evans too often belabors the obvious or writes opaquely. Take this key sentence, for example: “My continued research with family historians is committed to the belief that the historiographical projects of social and cultural history, with the history of emotions, are mutually constitutive; that learning and teaching should be collaborative; and that history researchers should aim for pedagogical and political impact” (p. 26). The book is also weakened by her portrayal of family historians as uniformly progressive and sophisticated.The book’s primary source of evidence is often at the heart of its circular, unconvincing assertions. The author sent a list of thirty-seven largely open-ended questions to family-history practitioners who responded to her invitation “to share their motivations, discoveries and the impact of these [motivations and discoveries, evidently] upon their lives” (p. 21). One of the questions asks if researching your family history has “helped you to develop your interpersonal (communication, listening and empathy) skills? If so, in what ways?” (p. 155). Evans is then able to quote from, in a chapter entitled “‘I’m much more empathetic now’: Family history, historical thinking and the construction of empathy,” several people out of the 136 who had responded that, yes, as a matter of fact, this work had made them more empathetic. When Evans is more specific about what proportion of her sample responded affirmatively to her questions, the evidence does not necessarily support her argument. For example, though less than 20 percent of those surveyed answered affirmatively to the question of whether or not feminism had “informed your work at all,” she reports this as “a significant proportion” of her (largely female) sample (p. 155, p. 63). This reader wished for a much wider range of primary sources and a much fuller and more even-handed treatment of the conservative ends, political as well as cultural, that family and local history often serves.That said, Evans certainly presents extensive quotations from the survey suggesting that family historians may indeed be much more sophisticated and progressive than is commonly assumed. As she points out, academic historians lecturing to and writing for dwindling audiences can hardly afford to ignore fellow practitioners who are so numerous and enthusiastic. This book is a flawed but timely call for mutual engagement, curiosity, and respect.

Reviews of Books

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. See, for example, citations in: Saunders (1995 Saunders, Kay. 1995. From women's history to gender relations studies in Australia: The decade reviewed. Australian Journal of Politics and History, 41: 17–32. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 22); Twomey (1997 Twomey, Christina. 1997. Without natural protectors’: Responses to wife desertion in gold-rush Victoria. Australian Historical Studies, 28(108): 22–46. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 23); Henningham (2001 Henningham, Nikki. 2001. Hats off, gentlemen, to our Australian mothers!’: Representations of white femininity in North Queensland in the early twentieth century. Australian Historical Studies, 117: 311–21. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 312); Peel (2001 Peel, Dawn. 2001. Towards a history of old age in Australia. Australian Historical Studies, 117: 257–75. [Taylor & Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], 268, 269); Garton (2002 Garton, Stephen. 2002. The scales of suffering: Love, death and Victorian masculinity. Social History, 27(1): 40–58. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 54); Gibson (2003 Gibson, D. 2003. Getting better will take some time: The effects of social policy on four generations of older women. Australian Feminist Studies, 18(41): 173–86. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 173–86); Brown (2005, 1141); Coleborne (2006, 49). The key works referred to are: Grimshaw (1980 Grimshaw , Patricia . 1980 . Women and the family in Australian history: Feminist perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978 . In Women, class and history: Feminist perspectives on Australia , edited by Elizabeth Windschuttle . Sydney : Fontana/Collins . [Google Scholar], 1983 Grimshaw , Patricia . 1983 . The Australian family: An historical interpretation . In The family in the modern world: Australian perspectives , edited by Ailsa Burns , Gillian Bottomley and Penelope Jools . Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar], 1987a Grimshaw , Patricia . 1987a . ‘Man's own country’: Women in colonial Australian history . In Australian women: New feminist perspectives , edited by Norma Grieve and Ailsa Burns . Melbourne : Oxford University Press . [Google Scholar], b Grimshaw , Patricia . 1987b . Tasman sisters: Lives of the ‘second sex’ . In Tasman relations: New Zealand and Australia, 1788–1988 , edited by Keith Sinclair . Auckland : Auckland University Press . [Google Scholar], 1991 Grimshaw , Patricia . 1991 . Was biology destiny? Historical demography and white colonial women . Lilith 7 : 71 – 85 . [Google Scholar]); Grimshaw and Willett (1981 Grimshaw, Patricia and Graham, Willett. 1981. “Women's history and family history: An exploration of colonial family structure”. In Australian women: Feminist perspectives, Edited by: Grieve, Norma and Grimshaw, Patricia. Melbourne: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]); Grimshaw and Fahey (1985 Grimshaw , Patricia , and Charles Fahey . 1985 . Families and Community in Nineteenth-century Castlemaine . In Families in Colonial Australia , edited by Patricia Grimshaw , Chris McConville and Ellen McEwen . Sydney : Allen & Unwin . [Google Scholar]); and Beer et al. (1989).