'Spending ourselves and our money': The Red Cross and the management of civilian commitment in Australia, 1914-1918

Using local branch reports of the Australian Red Cross, this article charts the shifting emotions that Australian civilians exhibited towards the First World War in the years between 1914 and 1919. As the war intensified, and its costs increased, civilians themselves consistently revised their hopes and expectations, and internalized their own place in a war that increasingly offered little sign of ending. Among these Australians the central, painful, dynamic of the war was a persistent erosion of emotional resilience at the same time that their anxiety over loved ones—and even their antipathies towards fellow citizens—demanded and reaffirmed their emotional commitment to the cause in which they were so invested.