Eureka to the Diggers

by Thomas Keneally

  In June 1916 the New South Wales state government held a referendum on hotel closing hours, and during the campaign electoral officers were given the discretionary power to confiscate and annul the votes of people of enemy origin and their sons and daughters. The German Edward Heppner threatened to resign from Culcairn Shire Council, saying that the King himself had German parentage and was not prevented from voting. There had been an hysterical story that the cast-iron verandah posts of Heppner’s house were really deployable German cannon.

  Later, when the second conscription referendum was in prospect, those born in foreign countries were barred from voting even if they had taken out British citizenship, and so were their children. Postmen were paid one and a half pence for each name they submitted that could lead to a removal from the electoral roll. People of German origin were, along with the Irish, blamed for the defeat of the first conscription referendum in 1916. A Wagga bank manager, E.A. Carruthers, accused Germans of holding secret meetings in Walla Walla, north of Albury, to keep down the recruitment rate. One Hermann Paesch chaired a public meeting in Walla Walla to protest. Amongst other things he bemoaned the sentiments of Billy Hughes, who had said that there would be no Germans in the Australian forces because they might shoot the Australians in the back.

  Members of the military Intelligence Division visited Walla Walla to make inquiries about German activity. In March 1918 four Walla Walla men—Hermann Paesch, John Wenke, Edward Heppner and Ernest Wenke—were arrested and taken by military police to Holsworthy concentration camp. No charge was brought against the men kept in Holsworthy. All the men arrested were Australian born but of German descent, and two of them were members of the Culcairn Shire Council. Heppner was an agricultural tool maker employing eleven men. He and Paesch and John Wenke had certainly been vocal in the anti-conscription movement. The secret services considered Paesch to be ‘the most disloyal and highly dangerous . . . the above is confirmed by Mr Carruthers J.P., the local bank manager’. Yet Paesch and his wife Anna had raised or donated themselves over £1200 towards the war effort. His son said that they had given him permission to join the armed forces, though his enlistment was rebuffed by the army.

  John Wenke was released from Holsworthy after the authorities discovered that his son, David, who had managed despite all to enlist, had been wounded and had recently been shipped back to Australia.

  Perhaps the most engrossing case of a naturalised child of Germans at this time was that of John Monash, originally Monasch, a civil engineer in Melbourne and leading figure in the militia. The son of Prussian Germans, he was a graduate of Scots College and eminent in his profession, having served as president of the Victorian Institute of Engineers. In 1914 he had been likely to become Chancellor of Melbourne University and to be knighted for it. His marriage to a Jewish girl named Vic—Hannah Victoria Moss—was not entirely a meeting of souls but to all appearances was a properly run alliance. Yet though he had been married by a rabbi, his colleagues knew he was utterly agnostic, and he had had a long affair with another engineer’s wife, Annie Gabriel. Thus here was a successful man who could be undermined by a number of factors, not least amongst them his Germanness and his Jewishness.

  Appointed commander of the Fourth Infantry Brigade with the rank not of brigadier general but of colonel in September 1914, he had in fact a great deal to give up by enlisting, including direct control of his engineering business. ‘I am virtual head of four large industrial companies, operating in Victoria and South Australia; also member of the University Council, and many of its committees, also Chairman and member of a number of scientific bodies.’ These considerations would have given other men every reason to remain, but he opted to go.

  By October 1914 the slanders against him began to arrive at the office of the Minister for War, G.F. Pearce. Much was made in these attacks on the ‘c’ which had been omitted from his name. General Kitchener even received such correspondence. The mutterings would not disappear entirely, but the ‘success’, the brio and endurance of his Fourth Brigade at Gallipoli, and its love for its brigade commander, would give his name such validity in Victoria that his mother’s family, the Behrends, began to call themselves the Monash-Behrends, a practice that Monash himself ultimately asked them to cease.

  RAISING THE FORCE

  The Australian government had put in place a militia and cadet training scheme from 1911. The plan was that by 1919 these men and their units would be fully trained and able to wage war. Since the inspector general of the army, Australian-born General William Bridges, felt that no viable force could yet be built out of these units, given that they were too young and that what training they had was based on home defence, he advised that an entirely new force must be created consisting of a division and the Light Horse brigade. The home defence men could apply to be part of this force if they chose. There was government pressure on him to get the force together quickly. The Canadians were declaring they had 20 000 men ready to leave for the front on a few weeks’ notice. It must be done quickly also because within five or six months the Germans would have been driven back across the Rhine, and Australia must be part of the force that did it. Some Australian officers began reading travel guides to the Rhine Valley.

  It was Bridges who devised the name Australian Imperial Force. ‘It’s not an expedition,’ he said. ‘I’d want a name that will sound well when they call it by our initials.’ (Even so, the force sent to New Guinea was expeditionary, made up of navy, naval reserve and militia.) Bridges and the staff officer Brundenell White had finished the planning for the structure of the AIF by 8 August. The recruited soldiers would be organised on a territorial basis, New South Wales to provide the first infantry brigade, Victoria the second, and the other four states the third. The Light Horse was also to be allotted by state, and individual battalions would be recruited not just from a state as a whole, but the particular region of the state. The second battalion, for example, came chiefly from the northern rivers of New South Wales or from the coal mines of the Hunter. The third battalion came from the West of New South Wales and its south coast. The seventh battalion was to a great extent from the town and district of Bendigo in Victoria.

  This large force of over 20 000 men was to be created within a month, with 12 September the proposed date of embarkation. The recruitment process Bridges and White had devised before the war went into operation. Australian soldiers who were married would be required to sign a declaration agreeing to allot not less than two-fifths of their pay to their family. Pay rates were devised—five shillings a day for an infantryman, with a one shilling retrospective payment at the end of the sevice. The term ‘six bob a day tourists’ came almost instantly into use. Lieutenants were on £1 one shilling a day, while a brigadier general received £2 five shillings. For the recruits who presented at the nation’s barracks, ‘It was a game to be played and they were players by nature,’ wrote Charles Bean. They were inheritors of ‘the fine exalted British standard’. The recruits included ‘Irishmen with a generous semi-religious hatred of the German horrors in Belgium.’ Not all of the men of best British tradition were as keen to avenge Belgium from the midst of the Australian ranks. Many British immigrants who had served in British Army regiments in the past were booking passages back to Britain to rejoin their old units.

  Nor was every voice clamant for war. In the Australian Worker a letter writer declared that while there would be the profits for capital, ‘It is we, the workers, who when mortally wounded are left to rot on the battlefield’. Patriotic funds were founded and contributed to in every municipality. But the Glebe Political Labour League held a carnival to raise money for the unemployed who had been sacked by nervous employers and hit with food prices that had risen by 20 per cent during August. Just the same, many shearers and station hands who were members of the Australian Workers’ Union were enlisting—12 000 by April 1915. A number of clergymen enlisted in the ranks. Amongst them was the Anglican past
or Digges La Touche, graduate of Trinity College, Dublin. Men took extraordinary lengths to get themselves enlisted. One New South Welshman went all the way to Adelaide to present himself for the South Australian battalion of the Light Horse.

  One natural brake on recruiting was the popular idea that the war would soon be over without the Australians getting there in time. But when the city of Liege in Belgium fell to the enemy in mid-August, it became obvious that the war might even become a matter of years rather than months, and there was a further rush to the recruiting offices. As the training began during August, many of the men could not be controlled by the normal methods used in the British Army. They laughed at regular officers whose accents of command were of the educated British variety. This was considered by Australian recruits to be a case of ‘putting on the dog’. They did not like to be told that this or that area was ‘out of bounds’. Fortunately Bridges had hardly any brigadier generals or regimental commanders who had not spent most of their life amongst the Australian populace, and so many senior officers understood how to appeal to the men in the ranks. The drab uniform the Australians were to wear, the lack of colour and decoration, was also deliberately chosen by Bridges, who had seen many a highly colourful and decorative British regiment in South Africa torn to tatters by Boer fire or typhoid fever.

  Drilling now took place on the outskirts of cities, but it was obvious that if Australia was to rush to the battlefront, the balance of the training would need to be done over there, somewhere in another hemisphere.

  GREAT AND URGENT SERVICE

  Within hours of the declaration of war, the Australian goverment received a telegram from the Secretary of State for the Colonies asking the Australians to send an expedition to destroy radio stations in New Guinea, ‘a great and urgent Imperial service’. Indeed, some of the radio messages transmitted from the German island capital of Rabaul in the New Guinean island of New Britain had already been intercepted in Australia. But the British were still nervous of Australian intentions, however, and urged that no formal proclamation of annexation should be made without communication with His Majesty’s government.

  The Australians, mindful of the formidable German East Asia squadron in the Pacific—at that stage consisting of the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Leipzig, Emden, Nürnberg and a number of light cruisers—began on 11 August 1914 to gather an expeditionary force of 1500 men, chiefly in Sydney. The Australian expedition was to be under the command of Colonel William Holmes, a citizen soldier whose normal work was as secretary of the Sydney Water and Sewerage Board and whose father had come to Australia in the 1840s as a member of the 11th Foot. Very few of the infantry enlisted by Holmes were regular soldiers, but many were members of the militia. After being cheered through the streets of Sydney, the party embarked a week later on the Berrima. Six companies of the Australian naval reserve would follow soon after.

  On the Queensland coast, the Berrima was met by the light cruiser Sydney and put in to Palm Island, a remarkably beautiful island used by the Queensland government as a detention area for misbehaving members of the Bwgcolman and Manbarra Aboriginal peoples. Here the infantry trained in tropic bush as bewildered Aborigines looked on at the first military gestures of Australia in what would become known as the Great War.

  The Australian expedition moved on to Port Moresby, where it met up with a Queensland citizen militia force waiting in its ship, the Kanowna. But Admiral Sir George Patey, the Englishman in command of the Australian navy, left them here, with instructions not to move, as he sailed off in his flagship to help the New Zealanders capture Samoa. That done, Patey returned, and the expedition left Port Moresby for Rabaul on 7 September. By now one of the German radio stations on Nauru had been destroyed by sailors from the Melbourne.

  The chief landing parties on New Britain went ashore not at Rabaul itself, but east of the town, near Herbertshöhe, and elsewhere along the coast. The first party were fired on by a German force of three officers and a number of conscripted natives, but kept on and overran the whole force, taking them prisoner. Sixty sailors came ashore from an Australian destroyer as reinforcements. To clear the way, the Australians even used a wounded and captured German sergeant to announce to his emplaced comrades that resistance was useless. The German wireless station hidden in the jungle was found and destroyed after skirmishes along thickly forested jungle tracks. The Australians were helped by the fact that a German plantation manager whose property the radio wires crossed began cutting them in a panic as the Australians drew closer.

  In September, the first Australian to die in battle in this war, which would in its extent far exceed these small colonial skirmishes, was a seaman named W. Williams, until recently an employee of the Melbourne City Council, who was wounded in the stomach by fire from the German trench line. He was retrieved by stretcher bearers, escorted to the rear by the medical officer Captain Brian Pockley and was taken aboard the Berrima. Pockley attended to Williams, and then, later in the day, returning to the front with a soldier, became aware that the fire from the Germans and their native troops was intense and so lent his Medical Corps brassard with its red cross to the soldier. Without it, he was fair game and was shot almost at once. Himself taken back to Berrima, he and Williams, the man he had treated earlier in the day, both died almost simultaneously. Three days after the deaths of Williams and Pockley, the Australian submarine AE1, commanded by Captain Thomas Besant, disappeared off Rabaul, probably trapped or holed on coral, its crew dying fearful deaths.

  After further Australian confrontations with German officers and native troops, Ernst Haber, acting governor of German New Guinea, agreed to surrender. Many of his German—as distinct from native—forces inland had been stricken by malaria and dysentery, and shells from Australian ships such as the destroyers Warrego and Encounter were now falling onto the compound at Toma, to which Haber had withdrawn. On 21 September German soldiers and 110 native troops marched in from the bush, exchanged salutes with the Australians amongst the bungalows and casuarinas, and laid down their arms. Holmes had granted to the Germans the full honours of war, that is, the right to march with the colours displayed, the drums beating, bayonets fixed and swords drawn. He felt this was a concession he had to make to achieve the capitulation. In that country, he thought (prophetically, and of a war yet to come), in this jungle, a few soldiers could hold up a considerable body of men, and he did not choose to incur the cost of that. The conditions of the surrender proposed by Colonel Holmes also required that German civilians were to take an oath of neutrality, and Dr Haber was to be sent back to Germany after undertaking to engage no further in the war. In the meantime he was to be sent to Australia.

  So control of what would prove to be a very important and strategic island in the eyes of both Australian and Japanese governments was passed to Australia with a minimum of human damage on the day the Labor government of Andrew Fisher took office. A proclamation read at the surrender told the New Guineans what the new realities were. ‘All boys belongina one place, you savvy big master he come now, he new feller master, he strong feller too much . . . No more Um Kaiser, God save Um King.’

  For Colonel Holmes, the next place to assert control was the port of Madang on the north coast of the New Guinea mainland. He left garrisons on New Britain, and a strong naval force escorted the Berrima, on which he travelled, to the new objective. He took along Lieutenant Mayer, a German officer, to interpret for him. As the Australian flotilla entered Madang, they did not know that the German raider Kormoran, whose orders were to attack Australian shipping, and the Prinz Eitel Friedrich were sheltering at Port Alexis, just twelve miles up the coast from Madang. The Kormoran would soon sail off to Yap, in the Caroline Islands in the North Pacific, to take on board the German garrison there for a reoccupation of Madang. But the German resident on Yap urged the Kormoran not to undertake the mission, since the acting governor of New Guinea and the German civilians of Madang had already surrendered. The Korm
oran would ultimately be interned at the American base in Guam.

  Indeed, at the landing of men from the naval reserve, the infantry and a medical unit, the German civilians ashore took the oath of neutrality. The storehouses of the New Guinea Company were taken over as a barracks for the troops.

  Holmes had no instruction about what to do now—he was merely the commander and therefore had no direct orders to annex New Guinea. Haber’s subtle argument against suspending all hostilities in mainland German New Guinea was that the capitulation applied only to the regions actually occupied, not to the regions which had as yet not ‘experienced a contest of arms’. Eventually Holmes overcame Haber’s point. Even so, a Lieutenant Detzner, a German officer exploring the mountainous border of British-held Papua, avoided surrender by remaining harmlessly at large in the jungle for the rest of the war.

  The capture of German New Guinea would, by the end of the war, become the operation whose implications would be most argued about at an ultimate peace conference.

  THE GAME AT SEA