The War at Home: Volume IV

The War at Home interprets the experience of the Australian people during the Great War in Australia itself, in the politics of war, its economic and social effects, and in the experience of war; what is conventionally called 'social history'. It seeks to show that the war affected many aspects of Australians' lives-and that people's experience of 1914-18 included more than just the war. It also addresses the impact of the war on Australia's culture and artistic responses to the war. This volume draws on the uneven but still substantial body of scholarship that has grown up in the decades since Ernest Scott's official history appeared in 1936, which in turn has largely been founded on an array of sources mainly made available since then.

The Bibliographic Essay discusses the secondary literature on which it is based. It also reflects the experience of the years since then. The events of our past change how we understand more distant history. It is impossible now to think of the internment of German Australians without also reflecting on the experiences of those detained in immigration detention camps, to think of the 'battle of Broken Hill' without also thinking of the 'war on terror' pursued from 2001, or to look at Norman Lindsay's posters without recalling the insidious influence of propaganda in the century since.Before understanding the way the Great War affected Australians, we need to acknowledge the texture of life in 1914.

Australia before the Great War was, as Michelle Hetherington writes in a survey of the last full year of peace, 'a world of glorious possibilities', in which as a social laboratory of progressive social, industrial and economic legislation it was 'eager to learn, to develop, to dream'. The war would damage that dream, arguably fatally The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War Series:Volume 1: Australia and the War in the Air - Available Volume 2: The War with the Ottoman Empire - Available Volume 3: The War with Germany - AvailableVolume 5: The Australian Imperial Force - April 2016

About the Author

John Connor is a Senior Lecturer in History at UNSW Canberra. He is the author or editor of several books on the First World War and Australian Military History.

Peter Stanley is one of Australia's most active military-social historians. He has published 25 books, mainly in the field of Australian military history, but also in medical history, British India, British military history and bushfires.

He is currently a Research Professor in the Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.

Peter Yule is a Research Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely on Australian economic, business and military history, with his books including biographies of Sir Ian Potter and W.L. Baillieu, and histories of the Collins Class submarine project and Australian National Airways.