A legend with class

Featured in

  • Published 20150505
  • ISBN: 9781922182807
  • Extent: 264 pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

FOR THE AUSTRALIAN labour movement, Anzac has been more like a first cousin than a close sibling. There is no missing the family connection: the first Australian Imperial Force (AIF) was an overwhelmingly working-class army, with an ethos instantly recognisable as such.[i] Its members valued social egalitarianism while accepting the substance of inequality – just like most of the Australian working class in civilian life, who well understood the difference between a boss and a worker. It nurtured a powerful sense of entitlement – reflecting the idea of a living wage, which had begun to make its mark by the time war broke out, as Justice Higgins’ Harvester Judgement of 1907 found wider acceptance. And, just as in civilian life, members of the AIF were sometimes prepared to withdraw their labour when they believed their rights were being disregarded, or their dignity insulted.[ii]

Like the working class of Australia’s cities and towns, the AIF contained its fair share of crooks, crims and ne’er-do-wells, but alongside them were the steady and the respectable – men who saw the demands that war made on them as a test of their moral character.[iii]

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

Island stories

Memoir SANDY AND BERYL Stone had ‘a really lovely night’s entertainment’ one Tuesday in Melbourne in the late 1950s – according to Barry Humphries’s brilliant ‘Sandy...

More from this edition

Ray Parkin

Picture Gallery[Best_Wordpress_Gallery id="15" gal_title="Enduring Legacies – Ray Parkin"]All images reproduced with the kind permission of the Parkin family.

What was lost

EssayDURING THE CENTENARY commemorations of the Great War, it will no doubt be frequently asserted that the conflict ‘made’ Australia (in a positive sense)...

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.