AUSTRALIA AND THE “MOTHERLAND”

Great Britain has achieved much over the last 232 years, but one of its finest achievements has been the creation of modern Australia. Although initially established as a penal colony, Australia brought generations of migrants from the United Kingdom (including Ireland) and built a society which in many ways replicated the traditions and values of Britain.

Early Australian settlers did not see themselves as Australians in the way Australians do today, but as Britons living in Australia. It was not surprising, then, that when Great Britain went to war in South Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, Australian regiments rallied to the cause. New Zealanders similarly served in the Boer War. When the First World War broke out, Australia was there from the outset. Just before the war, the then Australian opposition leader and future prime minister, Andrew Fisher, said that his country would defend Britain to “the last man and the last shilling”. And so it did. More than 60,000 Australians were killed in the First World War, largely on the Western Front; some 8,800 were killed at Gallipoli. A further 156,000 were wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. As a proportion of the population, Australia had the second highest casualty rate of all Allied countries, although it had not introduced conscription.

It was a similar picture for New Zealand, which was also involved from the outset of the First World War. Out of a population of just over one million, more than 100,000 New Zealanders served as troops and nurses, suffering a 58 per cent casualty rate (16,697 dead), the highest of the war, and another thousand would die of their wounds after the conflict had ended.

On the day Britain declared war on Germany in September 1939, the then Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, said that “as a consequence Australia is now at war”. And the then New Zealand prime minister, Michael Joseph Savage, similarly declared, “It is with gratitude in the past, and with confidence in the future, that we range ourselves without fear beside Britain, where she goes, we go! Where she stands, we stand!”