Читать книгу Australian History For Dummies - Alex McDermott - Страница 21

When World War I started, few Australians doubted that Australia would be in the war and on the side of Britain. But the war dragged on and on, with horrific casualty lists and a constantly rising number of deaths. Labor was in government, and had promised to fight ‘to the last man and the last shilling’ — before it became apparent that it actually might come to that. Unionists, who made up the bulk of Labor’s support, started to mutter loudly that fighting foreign wars on behalf of foreign capitalists wasn’t such a bright idea. Then, to make things worse, Ireland staged a rebellion in 1916.

One of the biggest challenges in the Australian colonies had always been that its three main ethnic groups — English, Scottish and Irish, who had very long traditions of hating each other’s guts — were forced to live cheek by jowl with each other, something they had very little experience with elsewhere. But this integration had been the young nation’s greatest achievement.

But Ireland, and Britain’s rule of it, had always been a touchy subject in Australia. Now, in the middle of world war, a rebellion broke out in Ireland and in Australia, support for Britain (read England) in the world war ceased to be unquestioned for many.

In the turmoil, the Labor Party split and lost government and spent most of the next 20 years as a political irrelevance, their one triumph the successful campaign against compulsory military service overseas. The ex–Labor prime minister, Billy Hughes, got huge support from the public for doing everything to win the war, and the Liberals, which he now led, claimed centrestage as the ‘natural’ choice for patriotic Australians.

Australia ended the war a far more divided and fractured place than it had been when the war began. The animosity felt between Irish Catholic Australians and the Anglo-Protestant majority would eat away at Australian unity for some 40 years. (See Chapter 13 for more on Australia’s role during World War I and the tensions that emerged at home.)