Recalling Resistance: remembering the First World War in Canada and Australia

This paper examines the nationalist myth-making that emerged during WWI in Australia and Canada, arguing that similar patterns can be detected in popular efforts to make meaning if the conflict. It will then investigate the bases and nature if dissent, especially as they coalesced around the issue if conscription in the two dominions. Key to this analysis is an examination if the nature if the emerging form, style and meaning made if democracy and cultural identity in both societies. I argue that genuine anti-war movements emerged in response to the war, with their own conceptions if national virtue, but that these movements, like the ideals that inspired them, already had long traditions to draw upon. Those currents if belief and experience sustained them both during and after the conflict. While war resistance has been a topic if some interest to historians, these experiences, and the traditions if dissent that questioned war in the New World democracies, are barely remembered and receive no public commemoration, let alone celebration, in contemporary Canadian and Australian societies increasingly concerned with venerating all-things- war. Yet genuine alternatives for remembering the war exist today, nurtured as they have been by those dedicated to them for a century.