In April 1942 John Curtin made one of his many broadcasts to the people of Britain, a call of solidarity from the leader of a loyal dominion to the war-weary population of the ‘mother-country’. In this ‘comradely message of united endeavour’ from the Australian labour movement to its British counterpart, he drew on the imagery of Britannic nationalism, invoking a shared language and lineage, history and heritage. The workers of Australia were as one with their ideological soul mates in the United Kingdom, and the ‘British land’ of Australia remained the beacon for a ‘better and freer’ Britain. The broader message was simple and irrefutable: when the war challenged Australia to define itself in a world of nations, Curtin replied at once, defining Australians as a British people and the nation as a proud and integral part of a united Empire. A fortnight later, he remarked in another broadcast that ‘We are practical Empire patriots, and practical democrats’. By laying the stress on the ‘practical’ he was giving voice to a language of Britishness that Labor could make its own, one which underlined the benefits to Australia and avoided the flowery imperial oratory for which he had no patience. He even lauded the fact that Australia had been ‘the first Empire people to send their men away from their shores to fight for the Empire’, words unthinkable for a Labor leader to have even contemplated uttering in the 1930s. Over the course of his wartime prime ministership, as he wrestled with the demands of office, John Curtin sought to give an even more definitive form to this idea of practical imperial fraternity.