by Marilyn Lake
The commitments were supported in all the colonial parliaments with varying degrees of dissent and popular, but by no means universal enthusiasm was expressed in the first two years of the war. As in New South Wales, in 1885, the proponents of war had a ready collection of arguments. Above all else was the affirmation of loyalty to either the Queen, or Britain or to both. It was a gesture which silenced critics and circumvented the need for further thought. The morality of the war, the rights and the wrongs of the case, being vigorously thrashed out in Britain itself, could be ignored. The less one knew about the diplomatic politics the better. A telling exchange took place in the Western Australian parliament in 1899 when the commitment was being discussed. Frederick Illingworth regretted that any discussion on the question should take place at all. JRA Connolly said that the questions about South African politics should have no effect on the local parliament, it being a matter ‘we may safely leave to the Imperial authorities at Home’. It was an observation which elicited a loud ‘Hear, Hear’ from Premier Sir John Forrest.10 The member from the goldfields FCB Vosper did not oppose the venture, but felt the House should reflect on the fact that in Western Australia people knew, ‘nothing about the justice or injustice of the war’. This observation led to the following exchange with Forrest.
The Premier: We do not want to know.
Vosper: We know nothing about the merits of the case.
The Premier: You are arguing that we do not belong to the Empire.11
Forrest was soon to become the defence minister in the first federal government.
Other senior figures in Australian politics showed a similar insouciance in relation to the politics associated with the war. The prominent lawyer-politician and first federal prime minister, Edmund Barton led the debate about involvement in South Africa in the New South Wales parliament. He argued that if the empire had decided on a course of action it was the obligation of the colonies to respect and follow. It was not necessary for them to be consulted. They could rely on the wisdom and intelligence of the British authorities particularly because they were ‘of the same blood’ and ‘belong to the same race’. It was as if Barton, like Forrest, did not want to know. As long as Australia was part of the empire,
when our empire is at war with any other power whatever, it becomes our turn to declare the motto, ‘The empire right or wrong.’ That, at any rate, is the view which I have a right to express.12
Similar statements of blind loyalty were made in the other colonial parliaments.
Dissent and disquiet
The opponents of military involvement were as much of a minority in 1899 as they had been in New South Wales fourteen years before and their arguments would have been familiar to anyone who had listened to that debate. The Labor members of the Queensland parliament were particularly hostile to the venture. Anderson Dawson denounced the ‘war craze, this thirst for blood, the jingoistic spirit’. His colleagues insisted that Queensland had no interest in the impending war, and knew almost nothing about it. Henry Turley blamed the government for ‘forcing themselves into a quarrel with which they have almost nothing to do’.13 There was a sense that the venture represented a radical change in the external relations of the colony, although this was a contested claim as shown in exchanges between JC Stewart, the member for Rockhampton North and several ministers:
Stewart: He [the premier] has altered the foreign policy of this colony.
Secretary for Railways: We have no foreign policy here.
Stewart: This colony and Australia generally has had a foreign policy. The foreign policy of this colony hitherto has been one of non- interference in matters outside the colony.
The Treasurer: You are quite wrong.
Stewart: Our foreign policy hitherto has been one of absolute non-interference in the quarrels of the Empire.14
Concerns about the precedent of engagement continued to agitate many critics of the militant turn. William Kidston asked the members of the government whether Queenslanders were to understand that this engagement marked a radical change in the colony’s foreign policy and inaugurated a new era in relations with the Imperial government and,
whether we are to understand that every time after this when Great Britain is engaged in a war anywhere throughout the whole world, that a contingent of armed men from Queensland will be sent to take part in that war; and if it does not involve that, who are to be the judges as to what are the right times to send contingents to help the Mother Country in her hour of need, and what are the wrong times?
If a future government declined to be involved would that not be, in effect, a censure of the Imperial authorities? It would subject a dissenting premier to the charge of disloyalty. To accept the present engagement, therefore, opened ‘the flood gates very wide indeed’. Kidston wondered whether the premier had considered the ‘far reaching consequences of this proposed action’.15
The commitment to South Africa met the most serious opposition in the South Australian parliament and only passed the Upper House by one vote. WA Robinson asked why the colony’s soldiers should be expected to ‘butcher those with whom they have no quarrel and whom they knew nothing about’. EL Batchelor warned about future commitments. ‘Would the colony not have to keep this game up?’ he wanted to know.16 It was a question more often asked in Adelaide in 1899 than in any other city. Thomas Price enquired:
What did this new departure which was proposed mean? It meant that we were laying down the principle that in future we were preparing to enter into England’s wars, and to assist her with troops. Having done so once, we would be expected to do so again and again. It was a dangerous precedent for United Australia to create.17
Perhaps the single most important parliamentary critic of the South African involvement was the Victorian lawyer, Henry Bourne Higgins, who opposed the measure in both the Victorian and federal parliaments. He was particularly concerned about the one-sided and distorted news received in Australia via the Imperial news services. He objected to both the war itself and to Australia’s involvement and he was particularly censorious of the large number of his parliamentary colleagues who were willing to acquiesce in Imperial policy without question, to say as Barton did, that Australia should support the empire right or wrong. Addressing his Victorian colleagues he declared:
Several honourable members have said that we should not enquire too closely into the justice of the quarrel. That is what I object to. I say that we have no right whatever to enter into any war, or to spend a penny on any war, unless we do enter into the justice of it. It seems to me to shock all conscience for us to venture to go into war with a light heart and without inquiring closely into the justice of it.18
Higgins’s scruples were not widely shared in Australia. Numerous observers noted that there was far less dissent about the war in the colonies than in Britain itself. The most prominent critic of the war was the professor of history at Sydney University, George Arnold Wood, whose views were very similar to, and were informed by, those of the English intellectual dissenters. But few other prominent people joined his lonely crusade. In a telling remark Alfred Deakin dismissed Wood’s opinions as, ‘not an Australian growth’. The English-born and educated professor had brought his ideas with him when he migrated and he would ‘take them away again’.19
The morality of intervention
The decision to go to war was much easier taken if one could leave the political, legal and moral responsibility to the British leaders. The complexity of international conflict could be reduced to a few simple prescriptions. Australia was there out of loyalty to the Queen and gratitude to the Motherland. It had gone to lend a hand. No immediate political objective could be used to assess either the morality or the utility of the engagement. There was very little suggestion in the Australian parliaments, as there certainly was in Britain, that the involvement was undertaken to improve the lot of the Africans or the Indians in the Boer Republics. There was an appealing disingenuousness in the assumed innocence of th
e engagement. And if the reason why could be left to the Imperial leaders so could the moral opprobrium of the last brutal years of the war with the burning of farms and the imprisonment of women and children in what turned out to be death camps. There was great reluctance in Australia to accept any responsibility for what were, in modern terms, war crimes. Once again that could be left to the British. Anything else would spoil the home-coming of war-torn warriors.
There was little post-war debate about the wisdom of the engagement or any assessment of what, if anything, Australia had got out of the war. What, after all, had Australia gained at the cost of six hundred dead? As on so many occasions the bravery and sacrifice of the troops took the place of hard headed assessment of what they had actually achieved for Australia. To ask hard questions about the war was to diminish the service and show disrespect for heroes. It was allowing politics to intrude onto hallowed ground which was beyond the reach of calculation. But heroism aside the war ended badly and in Britain the wartime Conservative government fell and was then defeated in an electoral landslide in 1906. In South Africa the Boers gained control of the new republic in 1910 and the three generals Louis Botha, Jan Smuts and James Hertzog led the country for thirty-eight years. Britain came out of the war isolated with much diminished prestige and little to show for the vast expenditure.
The one question which greatly disturbed the Australians was the subsequent employment of Chinese labourers in the gold mines of the Rand. This occasioned a long and angry debate in the federal parliament in 1905, with fierce condemnation of Britain’s betrayal of the white race. The small band of dissenters had reason to feel vindicated in their often lonely, sometimes beleaguered, stand. Perhaps more than anything else their fear about the inevitability of involvement in future Imperial wars was fully justified. If Australia had committed itself to a minor war against small farmer republics how could it avoid engagement in a future conflict with one or more of the great European powers?
Strategic anxieties
The Boer War had a dramatic impact on British diplomatic and strategic thinking. Her military forces had been put under great stress and alarm spread about the fitness of the nation. The European powers all had huge conscript armies. Demands for conscription in Britain grew stronger after humiliations on the veldt, but traditional resistance to a standing army prevailed. Consequently military planners looked covetously at the potential military manpower in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The colonial troops had proved their value in South Africa, dispelling high level doubt about their reliability and discipline. The British planners hoped to ease two perceived strategic problems by the use of colonial troops. In the immediate aftermath of the Boer War the fear was that Russia, pushing through Afghanistan, would threaten India. By 1906 the focus was on the threat of German hegemony on the continent. Both scenarios highlighted Britain’s lack of trained military manpower. In official circles there was no doubt that in the event of war the Australians would be there and this was the almost universal expectation in Australia itself. But promises of timely succour did not meet the needs of strategic planning. What the British wanted was a well trained expeditionary force of known size and established logistics over which they could assume command whenever they pleased. They wanted to be able to send this force anywhere that strategic logic demanded. It was an ambitious plan, but the British believed it was in the long-term interest of the Commonwealth, even if the Australians were slow to appreciate the point.
The leaders of the new federation were clear about two things when they thought about their fledgling army. They were determined to avoid all suggestion of the common European link between the officer corps and the aristocracy. They universally eschewed the idea of what they called a military caste and its association with epaulettes, spurs, sabres and social condescension. They wanted an army principally made up of part-time soldiers and came to favour the Swiss model of a trained citizenry. They did not follow through and adopt the Swiss commitment to neutrality and independence. But the logical corollary of a citizen army was that the entire focus of training and equipment was on home defence. This was continually frustrating for the British authorities and for the permanent senior military officers in Australia who were usually English and whose true allegiance was always open to question.
Yellow peril
But the Russo–Japanese war of 1905–06 had a bigger impact on Australia than the Boer War. The astonishing Japanese victory over one of the great European powers reverberated around the world. Australian leaders felt the shockwaves more than most. They became alarmed about the threat from the north. Prevailing ideas predisposed them to assuming both Japanese interest in and cupidity towards an underpopulated continent. Schooled in the ideas of Social Darwinism they assumed that nations were fated to be locked in a struggle for existence. Australians popularly assumed that race conflict loomed as a future certainty. And they thought, too, that population pressure would drive the Japanese in Australia’s direction. The White Australia Policy was both essential for the future, but also a likely cause of provocation and future tension.
The relationship between these obsessive ideas and objective reality were tenuous at best, but they were shared by many of the leading figures of Australian political and cultural life. Senator George Pearce, federal defence minister for many years between 1908 and 1921, believed that ‘earth hunger in eastern nations’ would lead them to ‘pick a quarrel with Australia for the purpose of securing these valuable and only partially populated lands’.20 The journalist and future war historian, CEW Bean, wrote an article in 1907 for the English journal the Spectator explaining Australia’s strong commitment to ‘racial exclusiveness’. He began by asserting a commonplace belief at the time: the White and Oriental races could not live together in Australia. That being so the ‘probability of an Oriental invasion, peaceful or warlike’ was enormous and justified urgent action. Believing that a ‘fierce racial war’ was inevitable, the Australians were determined to fight it at any cost, but the future stance of Britain was seen as uncertain.21 The defence minister at the time of Bean’s article, TT Ewing, was haunted by similar apocalyptic spectres, warning his parliamentary colleagues:
Every sane man in Australia knows that, if this country is to remain the home of the white man, it must be held, not by the power of Australia alone, but by the might of the white man in all parts of the world. In years to come, it will take the white man all he knows to hold New Zealand and Australia. Therefore, we must not break the link which binds us to our fellow countrymen in other parts of the world. By consideration, generosity, and a broad appreciation of our responsibilities and dangers, we must seek to knit together the white man of this and other lands in preparation for that last deadly conflict which will assuredly come upon Australia.22
Despite the power of their convictions, Australian leaders knew almost nothing about the country they assumed had designs upon their territory. The American scholar and university president, DS Jordan, visited Australia in 1907 and gave a series of illustrated lectures on Japan in which he tried to ‘dispel the dense ignorance regarding that country’. He came to appreciate how widely spread was the view that Japan was planning to annex the tropical north. ‘Gross misapprehension as to the people of Japan as a whole’ and the purposes of their government ‘prevailed everywhere and it was considered a matter of patriotism to believe them’. Jordan observed that the situation was being exploited by ‘interested militarists’ to promote compulsory training and increase defence spending.23 Australian leaders carried their ignorance with them into international forums. At the 1911 Imperial Conference in London, the prime minister, Andrew Fisher responded to the views of both British and Canadian delegations that Japan presented no threat with a truly extraordinary outburst. Speaking from what he claimed was his, ‘own experience twenty five years ago’, he declared that the Japanese were at that time ‘very glad to come down to our country, and they came in very large numbers’, and it had been necessary to solici
t the support of Britain to ‘prevent them establishing themselves seriously in the country’.24 Fisher may have had some personal experience years before, but it had little relevance to the matter in hand. He was clearly referring to Chinese not Japanese migration.
Two of Fisher’s colleagues, Senator Pearce and the external affairs minister EL Batchelor, returned from the London conference via Japan. Their visit passed unnoticed but when they returned to Australia they reported they had met with no hostility. This observation perplexed the Japanese. The English language newspaper the Japan Times wondered why they expected that there would be any.25 Japan had little interest in Australia and the official stance was that migration should only be encouraged into countries where their expatriates would not meet racial prejudice and consequent loss of face. There is no doubt the Japanese would have been willing to enter into an official understanding with Australia about migration similar to the so-called Gentlemen’s Agreements negotiated with Canada and the United States, the conditions of which set a quota on migrants which were scrupulously adhered to. The British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey reminded the Australians at the 1911 conference about the agreement with Canada and indicated that the Japanese had never raised the question of immigration with the Imperial government.