'Total war' in Australia: civilian mobilisation and commitment, 1914-18

This chapter examines the processes of making total war in Australia between 1914 and 1918. Despite their distance from the main fighting fronts and a less intensive industrial mobilisation than elsewhere, Australians were deeply enmeshed in sustaining the war through their mobilisation of human and emotional resources. The first part of the chapter analyses the difficulty that Australian histories of the war have had in explaining civilian determination to prosecute the war, preferring to see greater agency in the state and its coercive powers. The second half of the chapter argues that an analysis of private sentiment in Australia during the war helps to locate Australian civilian commitment within the same processes that sustained the war at its very centre.