Labour and Anzac: An Introduction

* This article was peer reviewed by two anonymous referees. The editors would like to thank Professor Peter Stanley, now at the Australian Defence Force Academy, University of New South Wales, and formerly head of the Centre for Historical Research, National Museum of Australia, for his support and advice on this project. This article is part of an Australian Research Council funded project examining war and memory, LP110100264, Anzac Day at Home and Abroad: A Centenary History of Australia’s National Day. The authors thank the other Chief Investigators, Keir Reeves, Tim Soutphommasane, Martin Crotty, Peter Stanley and Graham Seal, and the Partner Organisations associated with the project: the Department of Veterans’ A 缀airs, the Shrine of Remembrance, Legacy, the National Archives of Australia, the National Museum of Australia, King’s College London, Çanakkale Onsekiz Mart University and Historial de la Grande Guerre. We also knowledge the assistance of project managers, Gareth Knapman and Damien Williams, and International Advisers, Jay Winter and Annette Becker. historians on so many aspects of war and society in Australia. Would the home front receive su 耀cient attention? How, if at all, would the centenary treat the bitterly divisive debates over conscription, the internment of Germans and German-Australians, the imprisonment of political dissenters and the 1917 strike? Would the experiences of the working class, women and Indigenous people be visible? Or would they be overshadowed by a celebration of the eternal, universal national values supposedly epitomised by Anzac? Would the su ?erings of returned men and their families be recognised? Would there be su 耀cient attention to the costs of war? Would there be any recognition that Anzac Day itself has long been an occasion for debate, dissent and disagreement? Above all, would the centenary of Anzac degenerate into a festival of jingoism? This special issue brings together work being undertaken in Australia and overseas by historians working on various aspects of the relationship between the Anzac Legend, the labour movement and the working class. The editors – all labour historians – belong to a large team investigating the international history of Anzac Day, a project funded by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant. While the articles collected here often illuminate the history of Anzac Day, they are concerned more broadly with the working-class and labour movement history of Anzac and war. Together, they constitute one answer to the question as to what labour history and labour historians have to contribute to an understanding of the history of Anzac. We believe that the result complicates arguments about the past that tend towards polarisation between critics and defenders of the Anzac Legend. If the resurgence of Anzac commemoration in recent years has marginalised alternative themes, achievements and memories in Australian history, one reason for this phenomenon might be that historians have paid too little attention to the long history of contention over the meaning of Anzac and its relationship to working-class and labour movement history. Anzac has been a site for intense political debate and social division, as well as a focus of widely shared values. Its meanings have altered much over time and little attention has been paid to how those meanings di 缀er among di 缀erent communities. Labour historians, we believe, can contribute to recovering a sense of this unsettling history. The collection begins with Douglas Newton’s account of the Labor reaction to the outbreak of war. By placing this response in the context of pre-war Labor defence policy, as well as Australian and British politics in mid-1914, Newton reveals how the anti-militarist and internationalist strands within labour movement ideology were muted in the context of the crisis of July 1914. The following contribution,