Catherine Bond, Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War, New South, 2020
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Dr Catie Gilchrist reviews 'Law in War':
A nation often amends its laws during war, not least to regulate everyday life at home. During the Great War, new ‘emergency’ laws were enacted for ensuring the ‘public safety and defence’ of the Commonwealth. They were also deemed essential for military victory. A few individuals, notably law enforcers and prominent manufacturers benefitted from these new laws. Yet they were also used to discriminate, censor and deprive many Australians of their livelihoods, liberty and basic human rights. All ‘aliens’ and anyone suspected of being disloyal, unpatriotic or sympathetic to the enemy became ensnared in the law’s unforgiving maw. In turn, the new laws created acute tensions within local communities themselves. According to Bond 'allegedly disloyal utterances made against the war or the government, an unusual sounding surname, or the use of ‘Anzac’ in some way all led to members of the public to put pen to paper and denounce individuals who they may have known for years.’
In recent years, historians have documented the social and economic problems of the home front; the bitter and divisive struggles which erupted over the conscription plebiscites, the Great Strike of 1917, and the sometimes violent protests and riots over food shortages and rising prices. Yet few historians have considered the direct impact of the law on Australians during the First World War. In this original new book, Catherine Bond shows how the law became central to the way people were managed and how people scrutinised their own neighbours and communities from 1914 to the end of the war and beyond.
Perhaps the most significant of these new laws was the unholy trinity of the War Precautions Act, the Trading with the Enemy Act and the Unlawful Associations Act. These prohibitive laws allowed the Government to introduce hundreds of new rules and regulations to control many facets of daily life. Everything from conducting overseas business, to what could be photographed or published in newspapers, all came under the new jurisdiction. As did freedom of speech, the censorship of mail, the right to gather and protest, and anything else the authorities considered ‘a grave menace to society’. Everyday behaviour was thus extensively regulated and policed. Punishments for breaching the war regulations were harsh with terms of up to six months imprisonment and/or large prohibitive fines.
As the war progressed, more serious restrictions were introduced. The membership of certain ‘unlawful associations’, believed to be in conflict with the Australian war effort, was prohibited. As a result, many left wing and socialist activists were jailed simply for having a political opinion that the Government refused to tolerate. Tom Barker was one of Sydney’s leading IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) members. He was also a strike agitator, freedom of speech advocator, and a brilliant cartoonist and journalist. Barker was forcibly deported to Chile in July 1918 after numerous stints inside for breaching the War Precautions Act and the Unlawful Associations Act.
Others were discriminated against because of their nationality. All ‘aliens’ and non-British subjects were ordered to register at their local police station. Related to this, specific rules were also enacted around the indefinite detention of individuals who were residents but who had been born in countries that Australia was now at war with. And over the course of the war, the indeterminate incarceration of any individual the authorities merely ‘had reason to believe’ had ‘hostile origin or associations’, whether born in Australia, Britain or otherwise, also became permissible. Yet aspects of this capricious law have never gone away. One hundred years later, these extraordinary and arbitrary powers of ongoing detention by the government, remain a reality for many seeking refuge in Australia today.
Yet these individual experiences were often indicative of thousands more like them and the author skilfully uses them as an intimate snap shot into the much wider picture. Along the way we meet German born Franz Wallach who in 1892 emigrated to Australia, was naturalised as a British subject in 1898, and became a successful managing director of the Australian Metal Company in Melbourne. Yet the government suspected Wallach to be a ‘disaffected or disloyal’ citizen because he was a ‘naturalised subject of enemy origin.’ In the middle of 1915 he was interned as a prisoner of war and remained so until April 1919 - almost six months after the Armistice. Approximately 7000 other men, women and children were likewise detained in Australian concentration camps during the war. Many remained traumatised by their experiences long after their liberation, and thousands were forcibly deported after the war. As a consequence, many Australian born spouses and children were forced to make the heartbreaking decision; to stay in the country of their birth and heritage – or to follow their deported loved one back to an unknown foreign country?
The book also introduces the reader to British-born feminists and social reformers Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines. These two outspoken women, who had both emigrated to Australia before the war, played a continual game of ‘cat and mouse’ with the authorities in Melbourne. During the war years, they tirelessly campaigned for peace, price controls and freedom of speech, causing great consternation in government circles. Yet rather than deport them back to Britain, the authorities were more concerned that the women were ‘trying to provoke them to obtain added notoriety.’ And a harsh punishment might ‘cause some sentimental sympathy on account’ of their sex. William Hughes, the architect behind many of the wartime regulations himself admitted that ‘I hate punishing women’.
Despite this, both women were prosecuted and imprisoned on a number of occasions for their public speeches for peace and calls for fair food prices. Such actions, under the new restrictions, were easily catagorised as conduct that was ‘unpatriotic’ or ‘prejudicial to recruiting.’ Yet the economic realities of the home front for many women left behind to struggle to feed a family and cope with the insecurities of war were bleak. And it meant that despite the harshness of the emergency wartime regulations, their only recourse was out on the streets demanding more from the Australian government. A government which had promised their men so much and yet left many women and children with so little. It certainly belies the stereotype of dutiful women staying at home knitting socks for the troops and selling patriotic badges for the war effort; because the reality for many women was really rather different.
The law also humiliated Indigenous, Chinese and others of ‘non-European’ descent by denying them the ability to enlist. George Kong Meng was born in Australia and on the outbreak of war, he was determined to serve his country. Meng’s father Lowe Kong Meng was of Chinese heritage, although, as he had been born in Penang, he was a British subject. George’s mother Mary Ann was Tasmanian born, yet George was rejected from the AIF because according to the provisions of the 1910 Defence Act he was ‘not substantially of European origin or descent.’ The ambiguity of this definition was astonishing - but it was grounds for the rejection of hundreds of men by their appearance alone. The recruitment decision often came down to an individual medical officer inspecting a potential recruit. In Meng’s case, the fact that his older brother Herbert Kong Meng had been accepted by the AIF must have been especially galling.
Many Indigenous Australians seeking to enlist faced similar discrimination. Harry Grant attempted to enlist on three separate occasions. ‘Bad teeth’ was the reason for his first rejection, ‘not substantial European origin’ lay behind the second and ‘permanently unfit’ due to ‘bad teeth’ justified the negation of his final attempt. Grant, by his efforts, clearly had the tenacious resolution required to serve in combat, but his service, as an Aboriginal man, was not desired. Despite this, an estimated 1000 Indigenous men did indeed serve during the First World War. Douglas Grant, (no relation to Harry) who featured in the Anzac Memorial’s recent 1919 exhibition and whose story is included in this book, was one of them. Often then, recruitment was a lottery, subject to the pragmatism, personal opinions or prejudices of the recruiters and medical officers and hence interminably arbitrary to say the least.
Laws and regulations enacted under ‘emergency’ conditions such as war, fleeing persecution (in the case of refugee’s) or, in the very contemporary context, a global pandemic, remind us that in times of crisis, governments will go far and wide in passing laws in the so-called interests of national defence and public health and safety. Often these laws are made by the government in the name of the people - but they do not always reflect the desires and beliefs of the people. And their breadth and impact can be both enormous and devastating. Law in War is a judicious reminder of this. It is also a timely call to arms for social vigilance over the repeal of everyday rights and freedoms in times of upheaval.
Drawing on extensive archival materials held by the National Archives of Australia, the Australian War Memorial, the National Library of Australia and other state libraries, Law in War is a deeply engaging and meticulously researched book. It will appeal to all readers interested in the Great War and how the war years played out at home in Australia. Index lovers and fans of in-depth footnotes will rejoice at the inclusion of both, although the absence of a separate bibliography is a rather curious omission. In the final analysis, Law in War illuminates how ordinary people were caught up in and sometimes destroyed by laws created in the name of safety, defence and victory. And, as with all good history, the parallels with today are both timely, and at times, strangely familiar.
Dr Catie Gilchrist is a published historian and the Anzac Memorial's Exhibitions and Research Officer.
About the Author of 'Law In War'
Catherine Bond is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney. Trained in intellectual property law, and with a PhD thesis on the history of Australian copyright law, in 2016 she published her first book Anzac: The Landing, The Legend, The Law. As part of that work Catherine became interested in the little-considered topic of how law affected the Australian community during the First World War leading to this, her second book.
Law in War: Freedom and Restriction in Australia during the Great War, New South, 2020
246 page paperback
ISBN 9781742236483
$34.95 (+postage)