Military recruitment in Queensland in World War I
[1] The recruitment of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) during the First World War has been called "the greatest effort that Australia ever made as a nation".
[5] Though artificially high fitness standards were set by army doctors at the outset, more than 52,000 men had enlisted by the end of 1914.
A Queensland grazier rode nearly 500 miles to the closest railhead to offer himself to the Australian Light Horse in Adelaide.
[4][7] After a lull in the early months of 1915, national excitement around the Gallipoli landing in April, indignation and horror around the sinking of the Lusitania in May 1915, and an imperial call for reinforcements – in the form of a letter from the King George V to state premiers – kept the recruiting officials busy.
The Queensland Recruiting Committee – which included members of parliament, clergymen and local government officials – was formed in June 1915, and, unlike their counterparts in other states, was initially an independent and privately funded body of citizen volunteers.
[12] However, the ongoing publication of casualty lists meant that the naïve enthusiasm for war evident in 1914 was increasingly replaced by a sense of hardened resolution and grimmer purpose.
Recruiting organisers increasingly believed that the voluntary system had reached its limit and invested in the success of compulsory conscription which had been publicly advocated by the Universal Service League and others since September 1915.
The government under William Morris Hughes offered a plebiscite on the issue of conscription – campaigning for which proved highly socially and politically divisive.
[4][14] In the wake of a determined German military thrust on the Western front in March 1918 and increased anxieties about the outcome of the struggle, a national recruiting conference of all state and federal political parties was convened by the Governor-General and held in Melbourne in April 1918.
The purpose of the conference was to reenergise the recruitment drive and help heal the social divisions around the war.
It proved a forlorn attempt at national cohesion around voluntarism as Labor delegates increasingly aired publicly their growing anti-war sentiment and Prime Minister Hughes' polemical and high-handed style did little to appease them.
[2]: 192 The experience of war in general, and tensions around recruitment and conscription in particular, had shattered the nation's innocence and sense of unanimity.
