Abstract
The men of the AIF identified Europe as their primary destination. The pyramids of Cairo and the streets of London had simply been a sideshow to what many saw as the ‘real war’ in France and Belgium. Those who had enlisted to do a job were prepared to arrive where the ‘real work’ was being done. On the final boat to France and on the trains up to the front lines those fresh recruits who had not experienced combat on Gallipoli, known at the time as the ‘new chums’, anxiously waited for their big chance to see some action and prove themselves as soldiers worthy of the AIF. But for all their excitement and anticipation, the ‘real thing’ came as a terrible shock to these men. The new recruits soon realised upon passing the mass graves of the war dead that this was no adventure. If the harsh reality of their situation was not grasped during their military training, then it was certainly realised upon their first experience in the trenches.1 In addition, Australian soldiers came to realise within several weeks of their arrival in France that their daily duties revolved not around fighting, as they had expected, but around work, particularly manual labour.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Welborn argues that beliefs of war changed the instant men hit the beach at Gallipoli and saw the dead and dying Australians. Similar sights in France and Belgium had like effects on the beliefs of new recruits. See S. Welborn, Bush Heroes: a People, a Place, a Legend (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2002), p. 89.
C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume IV: The Australian Imperial Force in France, 11th Edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), p. 21.
J. G. Fuller, Troop Morale and Popular Culture in the British and Dominion Armies 1914–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 6.
D. Winter, Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War (Camberwell: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 81.
C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918 Volume V: The Australian Imperial Force in France, During the Main German Offensive, 1918 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 8th Edition, 1941), p. 126.
Gammage, The Broken Years, p. 176. Pozières was allocated to the Australians as Haig had wanted ‘to make sure that the Australians had only been given a simple task’, as it was their first time in a big offensive. Douglas Haig diary entry dated 22/7/16 in R. Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig: 1914–1919: Being Selections from the Private Diary and Correspondence of Field-Marshal the Earl Haig of Bemersyde (London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1952), p. 155.
See M. Crotty, Making The Australian Male: Middle-class Masculinity 18701920 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), p. 25. For a recent similar analysis of the situation in New Zealand, where soldiers were held up as the archetypal man during the First World War, see S. Loveridge, ‘“Soldiers and Shirkers”: Modernity and New Zealand Masculinity during the Great War’, New Zealand Journal of History, 46 (1), April 2013, pp. 59–79; for a British comparison see M. Albrinck, ‘Humanitarians and He-Men: Recruitment Posters and the Masculine Ideal’, in P. James (ed.), Picture This: World War I Posters and Visual Culture (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), pp. 312–339.
J. Tosh, ‘What Should Historians do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain’, History Workshop, 38, 1994, p. 184.
J. Damousi and M. Lake (eds), Gender and War: Australians at War in the Twentieth Century (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5.
R. W. Connell, Masculinities (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1995), p. 36.
R. Deem, Work, Unemployment, and Leisure (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 15.
P. Stanley, Bad Characters: Sex, Crime, Mutiny, Murder and the Australian Imperial Force (Sydney: Pier 9, 2010), pp. 66–69.
There were exceptions, particularly in the latter months of 1918 when the German army was on the verge of collapse. See, for example, N. Wise, ‘“In Military Parlance I Suppose We Were Mutineers”: Industrial Relations in the Australian Imperial Force during World War I’, Labour History, 101, November 2011, pp. 167–171.
E. P. Thompson, ‘Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture’, Journal of Social History, 2(4), 1974, p. 401. For further examples of such theatre in the pre-war working class culture in Australia, see B. Scates, ‘A Struggle for Survival: Unemployment and the Unemployed Agitation in late Nineteenth Century Melbourne, Australian Historical Studies, 94, May 1990, p. 57.
B. Scott, ‘Traditional Ballad Verse in Australia’, Folklore, 111 (2), October 2000, pp. 309–310.
Scott, ‘Traditional Ballad Verse in Australia’, p. 310, and R. Ward, The Australian Legend (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 22–28.
T. Merlyn, ‘Wobbly Words: The Industrial Workers of the World and Their Use of Ballads and Verse as Radical Adult Education’, Communities of Learning, Communities of Practice, The 43rd Annual National Conference of Adult Learning Australia, 27–30 November 2003, University of Technology, Sydney.
C. E. W. Bean, The Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, Volume VI: The Australian Imperial Force in France, During the Allied Offensive, 1918, 1st Edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1942), pp. 939–40.
G. Wahlert, The Other Enemy: Australian Soldiers and the Military Police (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 25.
For example, Charles Gruner argues that the shared laughter that results from humour bonds people together; C. R. Gruner, The Game of Humour: A Comprehensive Theory of Why We Laugh (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2000), p. 75.
Lefcourt argues that the results from the successful use of humour encourage and empower the ‘joker’; H. M. Lefcourt, Humour: The Psychology of Living Buoyantly (New York and London: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001), p. 7.
The assertion of a masculine identity through the use of humour in the workplace is further explored in D. L. Collinson, ‘“Engineering Humour”: Masculinity, Joking and Conflict in Shop-floor Relations’, Organization Studies, 9(2), 1988, pp. 181–199.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Nathan Wise
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wise, N. (2014). The Nature of Work — The Western Front. In: Anzac Labour. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363985_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137363985_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47318-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-36398-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)