More than a year before the killing stopped, the factory girls of Ballarat ventured into a winter mist to plant trees, hundreds of them, willing each of them to grow in memory of a boy who had marched away.
All of Australia, it seemed, was in a desperate hunt for relief from the malevolent fog of grief seeping into the nation’s spirit.
The quest continued long after World War I ended, when the lasting costs – human, societal, spiritual and economic – were totted up, column by dire column.
In mid-1917, however, as those young women in Ballarat planted their yearning avenue, the fields of France and Belgium and the men who stumbled across them were still being ripped to shreds.
The devastation was vastly worse than the previously unthinkable toll exacted on the hills of Gallipoli two years before. Meanwhile, horsemen and their mounts were mingling blood with dust across the Sinai and Palestine. Australian nurses toiled to save young men everywhere, or at least grant them some final comfort.
But Australia, 20,000 kilometres away, was physically untouched. Instead, it was being broken from the inside.
The war and its aftermath, as a generation of damaged men tried to fit back in to a nation that had been living on its nerves and arguing bitterly over conscription (narrowly rejected in two separate plebiscites, leaving Australia an all-volunteer force), left track marks on the Australian psyche and on its streets that can still be discerned today.
What had begun in 1914 with high-spirited patriotism and the promise of foreign adventure had become a nightmare.
And though national leaders would boast, with considerable evidence, that Australia had won international respect and renown through its exploits on the battlefield, Australia at home turned inward and suspicious of the new and threatening world beyond its shores.
It would cling for another half century to the mirage that it could buy with blood the status of an old-world bastion, a White Australia separate from its region, Asia.
As the war raged on in distant Europe, no matter how many politicians, preachers, civic leaders and military recruiters used terms such as “glorious deeds” and “heroic sacrifice”, families throughout the suburbs and across the lonely rural blocks – while expressing immense pride in the soldiering and nursing undertaken by their men and women – had learned the bitter truth.
Tens of thousands of their men were dying, and many tens of thousands more were being ravaged in body and mind.
Those families would learn something more profound for a people who, along with New Zealanders, lived vastly further away from the battlefields of Turkey, Europe and Palestine than any other of the nations that had been sucked into the maw of the Great War.
The bodies of soldiers who were killed or who died overseas would never be brought home. Worse, of the 60,000 who died by the time of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, a staggering 23,000 were listed simply as “missing”. They would forever be ghosts, with no known graves, their families’ torment never ending.
For years, military headquarters received anguished letters from mothers who refused to believe their sons could simply have vanished.
“The implications of mourning without a body are profound,” wrote Deakin University historian Bart Ziino in his 2014 book A Distant Grief, whose study showed that the great physical distance separating Australian families and their lost men and nurses served to exacerbate their pain further.
The young women working the sewing machines and the cutting tables and the packing rooms at E. Lucas and Co, Ballarat’s famous fashion and textile business, could barely abide the melancholic and growing absence of their district’s men.
The Lucas Girls, 500 of them, planted the first 1000 trees on June 3, 1917. Farmers brought palings to keep the rabbits at bay.
None of the young women could know that as their trees went into the ground, the world was about to grow darker.
Within a week, thousands of Australian men were gassed and shelled at Messines in Belgium as they prepared to detonate 19 massive mines dug deep into the earth beneath German lines. The events would fade from public memory until they were revived for the 2010 film Beneath Hill 60.
Over the following months, thousands more Australians would suffer and die in a string of battles in the mud outside the ruined city of Ypres that would haunt families for decades.
In a single day – October 4, 1917 – at least 33 men from the Ballarat district alone died fighting for Belgium’s Broodseinde Ridge during the battle of Passchendaele. They were among 6500 Australians who died or were wounded that day.
The row of trees planted by the Lucas Girls over the next two years, and renewed since – 3771 of them, each with the name of a soldier, airman, sailor or nurse attached – today stretches 22 kilometres, making it the longest avenue of honour in Australia and, most likely, the world.
Of the names attached to the trees, 550 are of those who never came home: more than one dead Australian for every one of the Lucas Girls.
Scores of other towns, villages and cities across the nation, from Queensland to Western Australia, soon planted their own avenues, and built stone memorials, too.
There came to be 547 avenues of honour scattered across Australia, about half of which were in Victoria.
There are vastly more memorials – obelisks, cairns, cenotaphs, statues of soldiers, flagmasts and halls – in the main streets of just about every city, town, village and blink-or-you’ll-miss-it rural settlement in the nation.
The symbolism of trees – growing, breathing things, thrusting towards the future and invested with hope – is instantly understood.
But the stone memorials meant something more.
The memorials became proxies for distant lonely tombstones that most mourning Australian families would never see.
A century later, they remain the focus of Anzac Day and Remembrance Day services, most of them more carefully tended than real cemeteries.
Just one soldier’s body would be brought home to Australia during the war: Major-General William Throsby Bridges, commander of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF), who died after being shot by a sniper in Monash Valley, Gallipoli.
His remains were interred on Mount Pleasant above Canberra’s Royal Military College, Duntroon, where Bridges had once been commandant.
His horse, Sandy, was the only war horse of the 136,000 taken overseas to be brought home, too. The big charger lived out his days at the Central Remount Depot at Maribyrnong, west of Melbourne.
It wasn’t until 1993, 75 years after the war finished, that another body came from the battlefields. The remains of an unknown soldier were dug from the Adelaide Cemetery near Villers-Bretonneux in France and placed in the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
“He is all of them. And he is one of us,” said prime minister Paul Keating, declaring that the unknown soldier represented all the 102,000 Australians who had died at war in the 20th century.
Grief, however, left the war’s deepest imprint on the Australian psyche.
To understand the depth of it, and how its effects would resonate through generations, we need only know this: more Australians died in that one conflict than in all the other wars fought by Australians put together, not including the earlier frontier wars between Europeans and Indigenous Australians.
Australia’s proportion of casualties in relation to its participation in the war was among the highest of all nations. That word, casualty, waved around by generals to count those no longer of fighting use, covers all manner of calamity: the dead, the wounded and those taken prisoner.
In 1915, Australia had just 4.9 million people.
About 2.6 million of them were men (because of male-dominated immigration, there were around 162,000 more men than women in Australia at the outbreak of war. By the end of 1918, after the foreign slaughter, there were around 84,000 more women than men).
A total of 416,809 men enlisted – almost 40 per cent of the entire male population aged between 18 and 44.
Around 330,000 sailed for overseas service, plus close to 3000 nurses.
Imagine, then, what it meant when 61,514 of them died (the total of deaths by the time the AIF was formally disbanded).
If such a cataclysm were to befall Australia today, with a population of 25 million, the equivalent death toll would be about 316,000.
There were another 155,133 Australian men wounded, including those gassed and crippled by “shell shock”. At least another 15,000 suffered other very serious illnesses.
Today, that would convert to almost 867,500 wounded and sick.
The dead, the maimed and the infirm, then, if you were to imagine them in today’s population, would be almost 1.2 million: nearly one in 20 of all Australians.
There were so few men left or not ruined for life that many young women would never marry, becoming known as the decades rolled on, cruelly, as “maiden aunts”.
These are the statistics broadly accepted for almost a century. But according to Melbourne University historical researcher David C. Noonan, they are significantly underestimated.
Noonan found in 2014 that Australia’s war historians, led by C.E.W. Bean, omitted to count hospitalisations for several forms of injury – and any at all for illness – and understated admissions for shell shock by as much as 50,000. Shell shock, which today would fall within the category of post-traumatic stress disorder, was a term misunderstood, argued over, put down to malingering or constitutional weakness and diagnosed either as a “wound” or an “illness”.
Noonan estimated the total hospital admissions for wounds, injury and illness suffered by the men of the AIF exceeded 750,000, meaning that vast numbers of men had each been admitted to hospital numerous times.
He further found that more than half the Australian survivors of the war were discharged medically unfit, and that at least one in five of them was suffering shell shock.
In the years immediately after the war, about 8000 ex-soldiers died and at least 550 men committed suicide (the suicide statistics were never properly recorded). Even one of the most revered fighting commanders of the war, Major General Harold “Pompey” Elliott, ended up killing himself in 1931.
One hundred years later, after Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign conflicts, mental illness, PTSD and suicide continue to bedevil ex-service personnel. Last year, the National Mental Health Commission found that the suicide rate among those who had left the Australian Defence Force was still about 13 per cent higher than for the general population, and was particularly high among men aged younger than 30.
Today, perhaps granting some form of retrospective closure to families who never had the chance to mourn properly, crowds of Australians surge across the world to stand bewildered before endless rows of meticulously tended graves at Gallipoli and across the Western Front.
But how many of those travellers know the wartime origins of Australia’s national airline as they fly?
The airline with the kangaroo on the tail was created from flying skills learned in dangerous skies above the Western Front by two of its founders: Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness.
Fysh, having served in the Australian Light Horse in the Battle of Gallipoli and the Palestine Campaign before joining the Australian Flying Corps, became an observer and gunner to air ace McGinness and won a Distinguished Flying Cross.
Two years after the war, recognising the worth of planes in Australia’s peaceful vastness, Fysh and McGinness, together with Fergus McMaster, a businessman who had served as a gunner and dispatch rider in France, established the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services. Today, we simply call it Qantas.
Even deeper into the Australian myth of distance conquered, the idea for today’s “Flying Doctor” came in 1917 from a doomed young pilot with the Australian Flying Corps.
When he was 23, Clifford Peel, of Inverleigh, Victoria, wrote to the Rev John Flynn, who ran the famed Inland Mission across outback Australia. Peel, previously a medical student, proposed that aeroplanes, instead of waging war, could help people who lived across central Australia.
Peel was shot down over the Western Front in France the following year, one of 178 Australian airmen to die in the war. But his dream of saving lives rather than destroying them became the blueprint for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.
And the Lucas Girls? They weren’t done with their amazing tree planting. In September 1918, with the war beginning to turn, they decided their grand avenue needed a grand entrance. They challenged the workers of Melbourne’s military uniform manufacturer, the Khaki Clothing Factory, to a game of football.
The match – the first women’s Australian Rules game in Victoria, won by the Lucas Girls – attracted a crowd of 7000 and raised £330. The money went towards building a monumental victory arch that still stands at the entrance to Ballarat’s great avenue of elms and oaks.
And yet, what was it all for?
The historian Peter Cochrane recently reminded us in his book Best We Forget that prime minister Billy Hughes spelled it out explicitly. “I bid you go and fight for White Australia in France,” he told Australians in 1916.
It underlined a complicated truth: one of Australia’s central reasons for entering World War I was not as simple as standing with the “mother country”. It was to seal in blood a relationship to ensure Britain would protect White Australia against the feared future expansionist ambitions of Japan, even though Japan was an ally in World War I.
White Australia remained an article of domestic faith and international condemnation until the policy was dismantled in the 1960s and replaced with multiculturalism in 1972.
Yet, a century on, echoes remain. Australians and their parliamentarians in 2018 are restive about immigration, express anxiety about the expansionist ambitions of Asians to our north – it’s China now – and recently, senators even tied themselves in knots over the question of whether it was “OK to be white”.
White Australia began dealing with those it deemed “undesirable” or a threat at home during the Great War by detaining and deporting thousands of mainly German-Australians, including naturalised Australians.
More than 7000 were detained in what were called “concentration camps”, and more than 5000 were deported. Scores of German-sounding towns were renamed — 69 of them in South Australia alone under an Act of Parliament known as the Nomenclature Committee’s Report On Enemy Place Names.
A century later, Australia still detains and deports those it doesn’t want on its shores.
And today’s Australia – which long ago switched its hopes of protection to the United States, marching and sailing off to American-led wars from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan – remains a constitutional monarchy, its head of state the Queen.
Old ties, sealed in blood, die hard.
The seaborne convoys of troops returning to Australia at the end of the First World War might have hoped to be greeted by cheering crowds and ticker tape.
The peace turned out not to be as simple as that.
A new mass killing was under way.
The end-of-war Spanish influenza pandemic would kill at least 50 million people worldwide (some estimates are double that), vastly more than the 10 million military combatants and six million civilians who had died in the war itself.
Panic and fear of infection caused some welcome-home parades to be cancelled. Concerts and even sporting events were banned, and the border between Victoria and NSW was sealed.
Returning soldiers were forced into quarantine before they could be reunited with their families and sweethearts.
Troops mutinied on February 10, 1919, after being isolated in a snake-infested camp at Sydney’s North Head Quarantine Station. Almost 1000 furious soldiers stormed out. After a face-off with officers, they eventually agreed to be billeted at the Sydney Cricket Ground before being released.
Australia, however, was relatively well-prepared for the pandemic.
With drug supplies from war-stretched Britain unavailable, the Australian government had established the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) in 1916 to produce vaccines.
Fearing mass infection from returning soldiers, CSL produced 3 million doses of flu vaccine by March 1919. Its efficacy was disputed, but Australia’s distance from Europe and its sea border helped.
Nevertheless, 12,000 Australians died of the flu.
Seventy five years later, the Keating government privatised CSL. Three years ago, the world got to see how the Australian psyche still valued its isolation when the then-agriculture minister, Barnaby Joyce, threatened to shoot actor Johnny Depp’s dogs because they hadn’t endured quarantine.
By 1919, returning troops, who would be mythologised for the following century in popular literature, song and official histories as having won lasting glory, had long been seen as “difficult”.
With throngs of wounded and sick soldiers flooding home ever since the early days of Gallipoli in 1915 – initially welcomed as returning heroes – authorities and newspaper editorialists soon grew intolerant of large groups of unemployed and “idle” young veterans gathering in the streets and indulging in drunken fighting.
Partly as a response, 6 o’clock closing was imposed in 1916 on pubs in NSW, Victoria, South Australia, and Tasmania. Queensland held off until ex-soldiers were blamed for street riots in 1923. The infamous “six o’clock swill” would continue until 1955 in NSW and as late as 1967 in the other states.
While many thousands of returned soldiers melted back into everyday life and quietly started new families and rebuilding the nation, others found themselves shiftless, out of work and often angry and misunderstood.
The nation’s most popular poet of the war years, C.J. Dennis, caught the troubled mood of the times by introducing a returned soldier he called Digger Smith, who knew the war had left him less than whole and psychologically disturbed in a way that would have him diagnosed as suffering PTSD today.
“I’m only ’alf a man,” ’e said. “I’ve seen so much uv death,” said ’e, “Me mind is in a whirl. I’ve ’ad so many thoughts uv late.”
Some returned men took out their fury on those considered to be anti-war pacifists.
John Keith McDougall, a Labor politician, farmer and poet, was tarred and feathered and dumped in the main street of Ararat in country Victoria after the Nationalist Party used in 1919 parts of his anti-war poem The White Man’s Burden, written in 1900, as evidence of Labor’s “contempt for the digger”. The six ex-soldiers responsible for the assault were each fined just £5 by a sympathetic magistrate.
One of the government’s attempts to alleviate unemployment – by giving veterans preference for government jobs – caused further divisions: unionists, who had found themselves assailed by government-approved strikebreakers during mass industrial upheavals in 1917, felt even further left out.
And yet, one of the biggest single “make work” programs for returned men would give Australia its most beautiful lasting memorial to lost Diggers, and the world’s biggest war monument.
The Great Ocean Road, along Victoria’s southern coast, took 17 years to build. About 2500 Great War veterans and 600 civilians lived in tents, faced fierce weather and used explosives to blast away cliff faces.
The spectacular 242-kilometre ribbon of roadway from Torquay to Allansford, near Warrnambool, attracted a million tourists last year.
The same number visit the Australian War Memorial annually, a place conceived in the imagination of First World War historian Charles Bean while tramping the blood-soaked Pozieres battlefield in Northern France in 1916.
Dramatically less successful were the numerous Soldier Settlement Schemes.
The idea was to populate the land by granting ex-soldiers, sailors and airmen the right to buy or lease farms at attractive rates. To many, it fitted the myth of the strong, can-do outdoors Australian, even if the great majority came from cities.
In reality, most of the blocks were far too small, or on unsuitable land, or were settled by families with no previous farming knowledge. Physical and mental wounds from the war also held back many soldier settlers, and grinding poverty proved to be the story for too many.
By the mid-1930s, more than half the nation’s 23,000 soldier settlement farms had been abandoned, handed over or sold to neighbours.
Indigenous Australians didn’t get the chance to try farming the land that had been stolen from them in the “frontier wars” of the 19th century.
More than 1000 Aboriginal and Torres Islanders served in Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine and on the Western Front, despite military recruiting instructions stating in 1916 that “Aboriginals, half-castes, or men with Asiatic blood are not to be enlisted. This applies to all coloured men.”
By 1917, those who could persuade a medical officer they had one European parent were permitted. Many of these men were treated for the first time as equals. They were paid six shillings a day, like all their fellow soldiers (Australians were the best paid in the war) and an unrecorded number died and were wounded as equals.
But those who came home were subjected to the same discrimination they had always suffered. They were excluded from the soldier settlement scheme.
One hundred years later, the humiliation still rankles. Some Indigenous families are still seeking compensation for the opportunities denied them under the farming scheme.
Meanwhile, the war had transformed the lives of Australian women.
With so many men in the most vigorous period of their lives away fighting, Australia had become a nation largely dependent on women, old men and children.
Thousands of women, previously strangers to workplaces beyond the home and excluded from the military (even though they had won the vote in federal elections in 1902), found new purpose.
Young women entered a workforce previously all but barred to them, filling vacancies left by men in offices and factories, though at around half the pay of men.
When the men came home, many women refused to give up their jobs. Employers were often happy to keep them at low pay rates, though the women usually lost their jobs when they married.
Nevertheless, those young post-war women were social pioneers. By the 1920s, they had lifted the hems of their skirts, scandalously taken up smoking and listening to jazz, and were flaunting an independence previously denied. A new word was coined for these early adherents to something approaching liberation: flappers.
A century later, Australian women make up about 47 per cent of the workforce but are still being paid on average 14.6 per cent less than men, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency.
Many women in cities, country towns and on farms had also spent the war volunteering with the Red Cross, the Australian Comforts Fund and other groups, producing mountains of knitted, sewn and baked goods and sending them to the troops and prisoners of war.
The Red Cross also helped families search for the fate of distant members by forming a Wounded and Missing Persons Information Bureau in each state.
The Comforts Fund even arranged tea stations (which served 12 million cups of tea and coffee) and soup kitchens for the soldiers in France.
From these roots sprang what is now Australia’s biggest women’s organisation, the Country Women's Association, founded in NSW in 1922.
Almost 3000 women also served as Australian nurses overseas. About 2100 of them belonged to the Australian Army Nursing Service and others were with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, the Red Cross, and privately sponsored organisations.
They worked, often under great stress and in appalling conditions, in hospitals, on hospital ships and trains and in casualty clearing stations behind the front lines. They served from Britain to France and Belgium, the Mediterranean, the Middle East and India. And 25 of them died in service.
With the war done, those men the nurses had saved were handed over in Australia to a new Repatriation Department.
The report of the Repatriation Commission for 1920-21 gives an indication of the immensity of the war’s damage: three years after the Armistice, the department was administering 222,537 war pensions, costing just under £7 million for the year. It notes that 2025 war pensioners had died in the 12 months.
The report lists hostels for alcoholics, artificial limb factories (1044 artificial legs manufactured that year), convalescent farms, sanatoriums for “consumptives”, repatriation hospitals, “mental hospitals” and Anzac hostels for the totally and permanently incapacitated.
Also reported: 11,791 children who were left fatherless or with a permanently incapacitated father.
Australia, in short, was a nation in trauma. And it wouldn’t let up.
War pensioners topped 283,322 in 1932. By 1938, the year before the Second War broke out, there were 77,000 incapacitated soldiers and 180,000 dependants still on pensions from the First.
War pensions until 1938 cost Australia almost £148 million ($13 billion today) and medical care £8.57 million ($750 million). There were 1600 men still in homes for the permanently incapacitated in 1938, and about 23,000 outpatients in repatriation hospitals.
The war had given birth to Australia’s first welfare system. Uncounted numbers more, unseen, with no benefits, were cared for by their families or lived in desperation.
It wasn’t until 1964 when a significant Australian novel would be set in the household of a family defined by the violence of a Great War-damaged father and a distant mother who had spent the war as a nurse overseas.
My Brother Jack, a semi-autobiographical book by journalist and war correspondent George Johnston, reeks of the bleak detritus of that war passing through his childhood home: a man with a face that was no longer like a face at all, burnt by mustard gas, sobbing quietly in the night; the hallway a clutter of walking sticks and sets of crutches, at least one invalid wheelchair and “artificial limbs propped in the corners”.
“Jack and I must have spent a good part of our boyhood in the fixed belief that grown-up men who were complete were pretty rare things – complete, that is, in that they had their sight or their hearing or all their limbs,” Johnston wrote. The book remains a classic, almost too honest to bear in its casual telling of suburban life after the war.
If the heartbreak wasn’t enough havoc for such a small population, the financial cost proved crippling, long-term.
The war’s direct cost to Australia’s federal government to mid-1920 was £377 million (about $26 billion today), according to historian Dr Peter Yule in the International Encyclopaedia of the First World War.
It was a huge weight on an unsophisticated economy. Entire Commonwealth revenue for the year the war began had been £21.7 million (about $2.2 billion in today’s money).
Few question the existence of income taxes today.
But the system was introduced by the Commonwealth in 1915 as a “temporary” measure to help finance the war. Before that, the states raised their own taxes. When the war finished, the Commonwealth, unsurprisingly, retained its hold on levying income tax.
Income taxes, however, couldn’t raise anywhere near enough. The government essentially paid for the war, plus war pensions, the repatriation effort and the Soldier Settlers Schemes, by taking loans from Britain and “printing money”.
When the Great Depression hit in 1929, the precarious nature of the economy was exposed: agricultural trade fell (at a time when Australia still rode on the sheep’s back) and industrial capital from Britain dried up. Unemployment soared to 29 per cent by 1932, among the highest in the world.
More, however: the lost economic and creative production of almost 62,000 war dead and 170,000 wounded and ill ex-servicemen and women over the decades after the war remains incalculable.
And so – even when no one alive today fought in that war, and when decades of mass immigration means many Australians have no obvious connection to the Australia of 1914-1918 – we still fall silent at 11am every November 11, the hour of the 1918 Armistice.
It recalls victory and peace.
Most of all, it is a remembrance of survival and the slow recovery from a national grief that once seemed all but insurmountable.
Photo research Andrew Brooks Video Kelly Bergsma Design Mark Stehle Editing Felicity Lewis