War and the concept of a new social order: Melbourne 1914-1915

Abstract

This dissertation is concerned with the relationship between the experience of total war and early twentieth century Australian aspirations for social renewal and change. Its focus is close rather than broad and sweeping. Specifically, it explores the hopes and illusions of prominent individuals and organisations in Melbourne as they were affected by the first two years of the Great War and as they in turn affected the way the war was experienced and understood in the community at large. The two broad themes into which the analysis and argument are divided are: concepts of political liberty and economic justice on the one hand, and concepts of social order and justice on the other. Melbourne, as both the capital of Victoria and the national capital, is particularly well suited to this close examination since the headquarters for the major employer organisations as well as much labour and pacifist activity were to be found there. The first seventeen months of the war period did not produce the violent clashes of the later years but the parameters of conflict and the terms of the discourse about war and social change were formulated during 1914 and 1915 and changed but little thereafter. The principal argument of this thesis is that the impact of total war on social ideals was destructive and that the optimism evident in many circles before the war broke out had disappeared by the end of 1915, to be replaced, in most cases, by a bleak pessimism about the nation's future. War brought about retrenchment, restrictions on civil liberty and, of course, loss of life. Where hopes were sustained, they frequently assumed a millenarian and extremist character as the political middle-ground disappeared. Where reform continued, it was of a morally coercive and regulatory kind directed towards discipline and an instrumental efficiency rather than individual freedom and expansion of opportunity. Only the most conservative members of the comnunity could draw any solace from the experience of war on the hotnefront in Melbourne and that was because their vision of the possible was a consciously limited one.