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So strong are the stories of the Gallipoli campaign in Australian folklore that high school
students are often surprised and at first disbelieving when told that Australia did not win the
front at Gallipoli—but that the Turkish army defending their country did—and that
Australian troops retreated after months of battle defeats and significant loss of life. Like
most textbooks from this and other eras, the focus of Australia’s involvement in WWI is on
Gallipoli, rather than the battles of France which as a prolonged campaign saw many more
Australian soldiers die and sustain horrific injuries; yet Gallipoli remains as the most highprofile
front of the war. The connections to Great Britain are significant and important,
especially considering that this was the first international conflict Australia had participated
in since unifying as a nation in 1901.
7.18.2 Discourses of military allegiance.
Phrases that indicate Australia’s allegiance to Great Britain in the first global conflict since
Federation include: “Once Britain was at war, Australia was automatically involved...”; “...no
indication that Australians objected to this state of affairs”; and “widespread enthusiasm
demonstrated that the decision of the mother country was ‘popular in Australia’” (Cowie,
1980, p. 201). The selection of words such as automatically and mother country are used to
convey to students the depth of allegiance to Great Britain, particularly the phrase mother
country. However, unlike discourses present in textbooks in the first quarter of the 20 th
century, Crossroads: Asia and Australia in world affairs does not propose that Australians
still feel a connection to Great Britain as the mother country, and instead positions this
allegiance to a distance past, evident through the use of past tense to describe the allegiance
(see Source 7.88).
Source 7.88. “Involvement in World War I” extract from Crossroads: Asia and
Australia in world affairs (Cowie, 1980, p. 201).
Discourses of allegiance are also included in Spanning time (Power et al., 1985). In
particular, a focus on Fisher’s speech communicates this allegiance (see Source 7.89).
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