'The Bolshevik element must be stamped out' : returned soldiers and Queensland politics, 1918-1925
Date
1988
Authors
Popple, Jeff
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Abstract
The First World War was not a unifying experience for
Australian society. The demands and traumas produced by the
war played on and exacerbated long existing tensions and
divisions in Australian society. The descent from a facade of
near unanimity of purpose at the beginning of the war to the
open and bitter racial, religious and class confrontations at
its end is now well documented. Marilyn Lake and Raymond
Evans have provided accounts of the impact of the war upon the
homefront in Tasmania and Queensland between 1914 and 1918,
while L.L. Robson in his excellent study has charted the
decline of unity by focussing on responses to one issue,
enlistment.(2) Other historians have also provided sweeping
accounts or narrow specialist studies which chronicle the
degree of disunity and social conflict during the war
years.(3) Heated industrial disputes, falling wages and rising prices and two emotive conscription referenda all
helped to aggravate and extend the societal divisions caused
by religious suspicions, racial persecution and class conflict
over the inequality of wartime sacrifices. These divisions
were deepened by two overseas events; Britain’s brutal
suppression of the Irish Easter rebellion, and the Bolshevik
revolution in Russia. As a result of the trauma of war
Australian society in 1918 was a cauldron of turmoil into
which one more divisive ingredient was yet to be added, the
returned soldier.
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