The military has occupied a marginal position in Australian
society for most of the nation’s history, but war and the fact of military
service have been key determinants in the shaping of the national character and
ethos. At the level of national policy, the search for security through
alliance with `great and powerful friends’ has typified Australian defence and
foreign relations since the late nineteenth century. Australians have often
defined themselves in terms of their military past, although until very
recently they have studiously avoided any consideration of the violent
dispossession of the aboriginal people in this process.
The British army and the Royal Navy left an indelible stamp
on the early Australian colonies, but this had little to do with the discharge
of their most obvious military functions. The garrison of New South Wales was
provided initially by several companies of the Royal Marines, who were
succeeded in 1791 by the New South Wales Corps, a regiment recruited
specifically for service in the colony. Following its involvement in the
bloodless deposition of Governor William Bligh in January 1808 it was recalled
to Britain and disbanded finally in 1818, and from 1809 the military force in
the Australian colonies was provided by regiments of the British army, usually
four in number at any one time. These provided guards for the convict labourers
who made up the bulk of the settlement’s early population, maintained internal
law and order against the aboriginal population and escaped convicts, and
provided a security guarantee against an external threat which, while
frequently apprehended, never materialized. With the decline in transportation
after 1840 the internal security function declined, and this together with the
absence of a clearly identifiable external enemy led to a gradual rundown in
the British garrison, although the last regiment was not withdrawn until 1870
in line with the recommendations of the Mills Committee of 1862.
The most important contribution of the British military was
in `nation-building’; most of the original transport and communications
infrastructure of the colonies was created by officers of the Royal Engineers,
who also supervised the early Mints, while the structure of executive
government and administration was supplied by officers of the army and navy.
The regiments and the ships of the Australia Station (created in 1859) played a
dominant role in the social life of the colonies as well.
The achievement of self-governing status in the 1850s and
1860s, and especially the departure of the last garrison units, forced colonial
governments back on their own resources for the provision of their own defence.
The colonial military forces were never very effective militarily; they
fulfilled an important social function for the middle classes but were subject
equally to marked fluctuation in strength and the provision of equipment,
especially during the major depression of the 1890s. On two occasions colonial
forces played on a wider stage: in 1885 when New South Wales despatched a
contingent of 770 men to the Sudan to avenge Gordon, and during the Boer War (1899-1902)
when 16,175 men served in five colonial contingents and, following Federation
in 1901, in three Commonwealth ones.
The period between the federation of the colonies in 1901
and the outbreak of war in 1914 was marked by considerable military activity,
although initially the Commonwealth parliament was hostile to military
spending. This changed with the Japanese victory against the Russians in 1905,
coupled with dissatisfaction with existing arrangements for naval defence which
entailed reliance on, but no control over, ships of the Royal Navy subsidized
by the Commonwealth. Agitation for a greater say in the dispositions of naval
defence led to the formation of an Australian naval squadron in 1914, while a
system of universal military training was introduced in 1909 to provide a
sizeable field force for the home defence of the Commonwealth. In both areas
Australia adopted distinctly different solutions to its defence problems from
either Britain or the other self-governing dominions.
The Boer War notwithstanding, participation in the Great War
of 1914-18 was regarded widely as the nation’s `coming of age’, and involvement
in that war influenced Australian society for decades. Approximately half the
eligible white males drawn from a total population of five million enlisted;
331,000 of these served overseas, of whom 60,000 were killed and a further
166,000 were wounded. It was a devastating introduction to modern industrial
warfare, made worse by the deep divisions occasioned by the domestic disputes over
conscription for overseas service.
The seizure of German colonial territories in the South
Pacific in the war’s opening months and the destruction of German
commerce-raiders fully justified Australia’s pre-war insistence on an
Australian fleet, but the first major military commitment was to the defence of
the Suez Canal and the opening of a front against Turkey in the Dardanelles. An
unmitigated disaster at almost every level, Gallipoli is the foundation stone
of the Australian military myth and provided the raw material of the
self-regarding Anzac legend, which has dominated the Australian national image
ever since. It was also a small epic of courage, endurance and sacrifice which
demonstrated both that the Australians had the makings of very fine soldiers –
something which various British observers had remarked on during the Boer War –
and that they still had a long way to go. Of the 50,000 men who served on the
peninsula over 26,000 became casualties, more than 8,000 of them killed, in
just seven months.
The Australian Imperial Force was greatly enlarged and
reorganized in January 1916; five infantry divisions departed for service on
the Western Front while two mounted divisions remained in the eastern
Mediterranean as part of the main strike force in the campaigns in Sinai and
Palestine. In France the Australians fought on the Somme, losing 28,000 men in
July-August 1916, and at Bullecourt, Messines and Passchendaele, where they
suffered another 58,000 casualties in the course of 1917. Formed into an Australian
Corps at the end of that year, and from May 1918 commanded by an Australian
militia officer, General Sir John Monash, the Australian divisions became one
of the spearhead formations of the British 4th Army, heavily involved in the
great advances of July-October 1918 which resulted in the final defeat of the
German army, and during which they suffered a further 21,000 killed and
wounded. The heavy losses in France led directly to agitation for the
introduction of conscription in line with Britain and the other dominions.
Dominated by the prime minster, William Morris Hughes, the domestic debate
degenerated into a loyalty test into which various irrelevant considerations of
religion and class were introduced by both sides, influenced by events in Ireland
in 1916 and Russia in 1917. The electorate twice rejected the proposal, in
October 1916 and December 1917, and by 1918 the home front was bitterly
divided; recruitment in the last year failed significantly to keep pace with
wastage, and many units in France operated at half strength or less.
The interwar years were marked by the same financial
stringencies and political blindness experienced throughout the western
democracies, in Australia’s case influenced strongly by over-reliance on the
Singapore strategy. The outbreak of war in 1939 saw Australia commit
inadequately equipped forces to the Mediterranean once again, while the entry
of the Japanese into the war in December 1941 revealed the bankruptcy of
interwar strategy. Australian infantry divisions were involved heavily in the
early defeats of the Italians in 1941 and in the see-sawing offensives against
the Germans in North Africa, as well as comprising the main forces committed to
the disasters in Greece and Crete. A division was lost at the fall of Singapore
in February 1942, at which point the Australian government insisted on its
right to withdraw its forces from Europe for the defence of its own territory.
Under the command of General Douglas MacArthur in the American-created
South-West Pacific Area, Australian formations defeated the Japanese in a
succession of gruelling campaigns in Papua-New Guinea in 1942-3 until, eclipsed
by the enormous build-up of US forces and denied a role in the reconquest of
the Philippines, they were deflected into marginal campaigns away from the main
axis of the Allies’ northwards advance.
Australia fielded about 800,000 uniformed personnel during
the war, and made as great an effort on the home front. As well as supplying
its own needs it provisioned the US forces in the South-west Pacific theatre
and continued to supply foodstuffs to Britain. War-related industries received
a considerable boost, and large numbers of women entered nontraditional
employment categories for the first time. So great was the strain on the domestic
economy that the government began selective demobilization of the forces at the
end of 1943 in order to meet the demands for labour. From February 1943 a
limited form of conscription for overseas service applied; conscripted
militiamen were required to serve only in Australia’s immediate environs, and
the successful passage of the legislation was the result of considerable
persuasion within the Labor Party by the Labor prime minister, John Curtin.
Dictated by the seriousness of Australia’s strategic situation, it remains the
only occasion on which the issue has not deeply polarized the wider community.
Postwar defence policy was characterized by three
tendencies: forward defence and the concomitant involvement in a continuous
series of conflicts throughout the 1950s and 1960s; the dominance of the
regular services, especially the army, as the principal source of advice to
government; and the centralization of defence administration. At the same time,
Australian reliance on a major ally switched, gradually, from the United
Kingdom to the United States. In the period immediately after the war Australia
in fact re-emphasized the traditional links with Britain; through the 1950s
Australian policy tried to balance British and American links and, although the
major realignment of the armed forces along American lines began with equipment
acquisition programmes announced in 1957, this policy continued until the final
announcement of British withdrawal from southeast Asia in the late 1960s.
Involvement in the occupation of Japan (1946-51), the Korean
War (1950-3), the Malayan Emergency (1950-60), Konfrontasi with Indonesia (1964-6)
and the Vietnam War (1962-72) saw the services involved in operations more or
less continuously for a quarter of a century. With the significant exception of
Vietnam, these wars were fought entirely by regular service personnel;
casualties were low and the operations generally successful, and involvement in
these campaigns aroused little comment and almost no opposition at home. Although
initially ignored by most, Vietnam became the most divisive war in half a
century, especially after the first national servicemen were despatched in
mid-1966. As in 1916-17 the issue for most was the use of conscripts overseas,
although for the radical Left this soon led to a critique of the conduct of the
war, the fact of Australian involvement, the US alliance, and the nature of
society generally. The operations conducted by the 1st Australian Task Force
were highly successful on the whole, and the casualty rates low: 501 killed,
only 1 per cent of the total number involved, and around 3,000 wounded. These
factors made little difference to the growing unease felt by middle Australia
over government policy, nor to the mostly young demonstrators who took to the
streets in 1970-1 in their tens of thousands. The Australian contribution was
scaled down in 1969, and withdrawn in late 1971. Whether Vietnam was the key
issue in unseating the government in the elections in December 1972 must be
doubted, however.
Since 1975, and more particularly since 1983, Australia’s
defence posture has undergone some fundamental changes. While the alliance with
the United States remains close, epitomized by the prompt despatch of a small
naval task force to the Persian Gulf in late 1990, a series of reports has
stressed the need for greater selfreliance in the task of defending Australian
territory and interests. A large-scale equipment acquisition and replacement
programme, commenced in the 1980s, will run through to the end of the century,
and this has placed strain on the defence budget, but in other areas,
especially the proclaimed intention to pass many functions back to the reserve
forces, government policy seems intent on reversing many of the developments of
the postwar era.
FURTHER READING
Jeffrey Grey, A Military History of Australia (Melbourne,
1990); Australia: two centuries of war and peace, eds Michael McKernan and
Margaret Browne (Canberra, 1988); Revue Internationale d’Histoire Militaire,
lxxii, edition Australienne, eds Peter Dennis and Jeffrey Grey (Canberra,
1990); Peter Pierce, Jeffrey Grey and Jeff Doyle, Vietnam Days: Australia and
the impact of Vietnam (Ringwood, Victoria, 1991).
