"The ordinary discharge of my duty": Field Marshal Sir John Monash and the Ozanne controversy.

The ferocity with which the conscription debates in 1916-17 were fought is a well-documented part of Australian history, and ninety years later, it would appear difficult to contribute anything new to our understanding of the time. (1) However, close examination of the archival record remains fertile ground, especially when some established accounts of the behaviour of leading figures in those political battles take certain events as given or unproblematic. For example, major biographers of John Monash, Australia's leading soldier of the First World War, treat his involvement in a controversy surrounding the war service of a Labor member of parliament, Alfred Ozanne, in a benign and sympathetic manner. (2) In fact the evidence shows that Monash was not a political innocent but a willing participant in a highly successful smear campaign against Ozanne orchestrated by Nationalist Prime Minister Billy Hughes and his political agent cum journalist in England, Keith Murdoch.

The Backdrop: Hughes' Campaign for Conscription

The conscription furore may be well-known, but some brief background is necessary to properly contextualise the Ozanne episode, the decisive moments of which were played out in March, 1917. By that time, Australia had been at war for two and a half years. The cost was prodigious, and to the modern mind, incomprehensible. We live in an age in which the death or even the wounding of a single soldier attracts saturation media coverage. In the First World War, sixty thousand Australians died. In the bloodiest actions, whole units of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) were wiped out, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Those who survived were often hideously maimed, or crippled by poison gas. Men who escaped physical injury were liable to permanent trauma. (3)

Tragedy on this scale naturally had convulsive social and political consequences. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) took Federal office just after the outbreak of the war, led by Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. Labor supported the war, but divisions in its ranks emerged as the conflict dragged on at such massive cost. The "win the war" elements of the Cabinet were galvanised by Attorney-General Billy Hughes. A British immigrant, a former union organiser and sometime shopkeeper, Hughes had campaigned within the ALP for a robust defence program before the war. A fierce imperialist, he had--at the point of a gun--reorganised the Australian mining industry in 1914-15 to drive out German investment in the base metals industry at Broken Hill. (4)

Hughes' support for the war was partly informed by his conception of Australia as a "white" outpost in Asia: in the hour of the Empire's need, Australia had to pull her weight so that Britain would in turn come to Australia's aid if and when the "yellow hordes" of Asia descended on her. (5) Needing to build this debt of blood, it became apparent that Australia's system of voluntary enlistment would not sustain a sufficiently vigorous war effort. Hughes, who replaced Fisher as Labor Prime Minister in October 1915, turned to conscription as the answer to the recruiting shortfall. On his urging, Labor put conscription to a referendum in October 1916. It failed, due to the opposition of civil libertarians and women, and because of dissent within Labor ranks, from trade unionists concerned that military conscription would lead to industrial compulsion, and from Irish Catholics concerned with the bloody way in which the British suppressed Sinn Fein's Easter, 1916 rebellion in Dublin.

Hughes went to extraordinary and arguably improper lengths in the course of his campaign for a "yes" vote in this first conscription referendum. His agent in London was Keith Murdoch, a journalist whose credits included bringing to political attention the inefficiencies of British commanders at Gallipoli, but who was otherwise committed to a larger Australian war effort, albeit under national command. Working through Murdoch, Hughes sought to garner the soldiers' vote in France as a means of establishing his own authority as a war leader. He received a message of support from the head of the British Army, General Robertson, and another from the commander of the British forces in France, General Haig. General Birdwood, the British-born leader of the AIF, also directed a thinly veiled pro-conscription message to his troops, and although he declined to allow his officers to address the men in these terms, he did put the ballot back by three days to allow Murdoch and other civilians to speak to the rank and file. (6)

With this weight of effort behind the "yes" vote, the defeat of the October 1916 referendum left the Australian militarists momentarily crestfallen, not least because the rank and file of the AIF declined to vote with any enthusiasm for conscription. Murdoch wrote immediately after the ballot to Hughes, in terms that said much about the nature of their relationship: "You will have to admit that I carried out all your instructions and more without delay and failed only what was impossible--the securing of resolutions from the men." Murdoch itemised the reasons why the men of the AIF declined to do as the conservatives and the Generals preferred. Apart from not wanting to serve alongside conscripts on whom they might not be able to rely in action, and a fear that Australia would be left de-populated in the face of Asian expansion, Murdoch privately recorded that the AIF soldiers held another common sentiment, to the effect that no one should share their agony: