by Martin Crotty
© all rights reserved
By the time of the outbreak of World War I, the ideal of manliness operative in the broad range of activities designed for socialising young Australian males was considerably different from that which had dominated half a century beforehand. In the 1870s the threats of masculine barbarism on the frontier, the ‘savage’ native race, the feared decline from the tenets of old world civilisation, and the Arnoldian ethos of godliness and good learning that had so heavily influenced many of Australia’s early educators, combined to give rise to a formulation of manliness that emphasised morality, religiosity and intellectual development. Boys were encouraged to take on attributes that were commonly identified with an idealised femininity, and in so doing escape the brutishness, immoral muscularity, irreligion and barbarism associated with masculinity in its unregenerate state.
A number of social and cultural trends saw this formulation of manliness give way to an increasingly anti-feminine, secular, muscular and athletic alternative. One major trend was the decline in the cultural authority of religion and a parallel rise in the authority of secular notions of appropriate behaviour, often based around the perceived needs of the empire and the nation. The godly boy was replaced by the chivalrous boy who would live his life according to the demands of the society of which he was part, reflecting what Stuart Macintyre has called ‘the transition from a society unified by faith to one joined in citizenship’.1
Social Darwinism also emerged with strength in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Biological thought became increasingly powerful, and the idea that the first requirement to be a good human being was to be a good animal found an increasingly receptive audience. The Australian fear of racial decline in the colonies, the general fear throughout the western world about the deleterious effects of modern civilisation, and the importation of the enthusiasm for athleticism, which by the 1870s and 1880s was rampant in the English public schools, all joined to emphasise muscles and brawn over brains and piety. By the 1880s and 1890s the religious and intellectual boy was looking increasingly out of place. His vigorous and athletic colleague, on the other hand, offered reassuring evidence that a number of contemporary fears could be overcome.
The fit and athletic boy also appeared more suitable for fighting in defence of his nation, an increasingly important consideration in the early years of the twentieth century when Australia looked nervously towards her northern neighbours, particularly Japan, who appeared to threaten white Australia’s unsure grip upon a large and tempting continent. Nor did the British Empire seem entirely safe, as evidenced by the difficulty it had in overcoming the Boers. Growing continental, unrest resulting partly from the armed build-up of Germany, and threats to British industrial and commercial dominance also appeared to threaten Britain’s security. If Australia and the British Empire were to survive they would have to be fought for, and the rising generation would be the ones to do it. Glorification of the soldier and increased efforts at training the young to be militarily capable were the result. If he was out of place on the sports ground, the intellectual and religious boy would be even more out of place on the battle field, while his athletic successor would only be of value if his physical fitness and bravery were properly used, trained and directed towards a willingness to fight and die for the cause of country and empire. In middle-class schooling, in juvenile literature, and in youth groups, military man supplanted athletic man.
The ideal of a physically fit young man prepared to lay down his life for a good cause appealed as particularly noble to contemporaries, and is a construct that has been, and continues to be, immortalised in Australia by the Anzac legend. But the militarist and nationalist ideals of manliness, as constructed in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australia, had much to condemn, as well as commend them. They were, for example, extremely tightly-constructed ideals which became less and less tolerant and pluralist. Hegemonic masculinities do not deny or suppress all debate. It is, in fact, from debate and difference that they emerge. But the degree of power that hegemonic masculinities exert over those masculinities they subordinate varies, and in the early years of the twentieth century the voices of dissent were all but completely silenced.
Almost all elite secondary schools, for example, adhered to essentially the same educational vision. Even Scotch College which had, under Alexander Morrison, been reluctant to embrace athleticism, prefects and other trappings of the English public school system, did so rapidly after his death in 1904 and the subsequent appointment of W. S. Littlejohn.2Such a conversion appears to have been well received, and may have been one of the major reasons for a rapid increase in enrolments, from 272 in 1904 to 489 in 1908.3 By the time World War I broke out the school was at the forefront of schoolboy militarism. The prefects successfully proposed that the school motto of Deo et Litteris be expanded to includePatriae, and 600 Scotch boys sang at a rally in support of Hughes’ attempts to introduce conscription.4
The uniformity of educational ideals resulted partly from the decreasing distinctions between religious denominations. R. B. Walker has suggested that in South Australia Methodists were often ‘an undistinctive part of a Nonconformist Protestant influence’.5 The same would appear to be true throughout Australia, and true equally of other denominations, whether Nonconformist or not. The mingling of religious denominations appears to have weakened many of the definite distinctions of the old world. Rates of marriage between persons of different denominations suggest a gradual breakdown in the importance of denominational affiliation, while most churches also became less doctrinally strict in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.6 This blurring of creeds affected the denominational schools, so that by the early twentieth century there was little to distinguish the Anglican school from the Methodist or Presbyterian one.
Even Xavier College, where sport had been boy-led until about 1900, lost much of its distinctive Irish Catholic identity after 1906 as it ’embraced the English, Protestant and secular Public School spirit with enthusiasm’. Prefects, captains, duxes, honour boards and an increasing interest in sport made Xavier little different in many respects from Wesley College and Geelong Grammar.7. St Joseph’s College in Sydney, also initially reluctant to adopt the creeds of athleticism and militarism, eventually did so in the early years of the twentieth century.8 Less exclusive corporate schools, such as Trinity Grammar School in Melbourne, also enthusiastically adopted the ethos of their older counterparts. Established in 1903, Trinity adopted Viriliter Agite, or ‘Act Manfully’ as its school motto, and proceeded to establish asthletic sports, prefect systems, school songs and cadets in an effort to mimic its more distinguished forebears.9 By the early twentieth century subscription to the athletic and militarist ideology of manliness was ‘tediously uniform’ throughout Australia.10
When state secondary schooling was finally established in Australia in the early twentieth century, it was the public schools which provided the models for the curriculum, school organisation and methods, and for practices such as prefects, school badges, school songs, and sports.11 The first headmaster of Ballarat Grammar after it opened in 1911, for example, was P. A. Robin. He had taught at Melbourne Grammar since 1895, and in his first annual report as headmaster of Ballarat Grammar he stated that ‘from the outset an endeavour has been made to establish the school on the lines of the great Public Schools of Australia’.12 Schools such as Melbourne High, University High, and Geelong High developed traditions, rituals and old boy networks that gave them the appearance of the public schools.13
The pattern was set by Melbourne High School, opened in 1905 and known as the Melbourne Continuation School until 1912. Its headmaster was Joseph Hocking, determined to match the public schools in examination performance and character formation. He used rituals and school songs of a public school nature, a prefect system and sport in the inculcation of character. Sport in particular, he believed, was one of the most effective means of building ‘school spirit’ and of training character, and he stated that ‘in no part of our school course does a pupil receive such a sound preparation for the battle of life as on the sports ground’. Similarly, the University High School, opened in 1910, was heavily influenced by Wesley College. Adamson was a member of its council and its first two headmasters were Wesley College old boys. In true Wesley style, the pupils of the University High School would gather every morning to sing songs heavily influenced by the Wesley College Song Book and to listen to addresses. Prefects, form captains, a school badge and motto, cadet camps, and inter-house sports were all instituted within the first decade or so of its existence.14 Many other state schools similarly employed gymnastics and calisthenics to develop physical fitness and martial discipline.15 In conjunction with school medical inspections, such activities were designed to regulate potentially unruly bodies, thus aiding in educational achievement, national efficiency and military performance while guarding against ill-discipline and vice.16
There were some exceptions. Quaker schools such as The Friends’ School in Hobart, because of the pacifist nature of Quaker ideals, did not share in the growing enthusiasm for militarism.17 But schools perceived as not adhering to the dominant militarist and athletic ideology of the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries were the object of suspicion, or were gradually brought into line. Even Xavier, because of its Irish Catholic background, was suspected of disloyalty despite the Rector and the Old Xaverians’ Association immediately declaring their support for the war effort.18
Moreover, within such schools there was little opportunity for dissent. To be an intellectual meant to be a ‘swot’, to avoid manly games made one effeminate, and even refusing to attend a Saturday cricket match at Wesley was considered ‘notoriously evil’.19 Adamson’s lauding of the successful sportsman and those who served in World War I was matched only by the viciousness and surliness of his assaults upon ‘slackers’, those who he felt were not pulling their weight on the games field or on the battle field in the time of imperial crisis .20 Nor were the boys, following the example of their teachers, much more tolerant. A herd mentality often dominated the dormitories at Geelong Grammar, making life difficult for weak, sensitive or intellectual boys. At Wesley College initiation rituals such as running the gauntlet, tossing in blankets, blindfold boxing, body painting and performing a war dance introduced boys to the boarding culture and instructed them in group values.21
John Gillis has argued that British boys of the first decades of the twentieth century were the objects of a smothering adult culture exerted over them as a response to the anxieties of their elders. The same is true in Australia. Educational pressures to conform were reinforced by prescriptive juvenile literature and youth groups. The state became increasingly involved in regulating childhood through, for example, law courts which functioned to extend the control of the state over children by defining as ‘deviant’ behaviour which had previously been tolerated.22 Medical practitioners and social reformers also had their say in constructing ever more narrow and didactic definitions of manliness.23
Boys were not, it needs to be remembered, entirely powerless. They could, and did, fight back by vandalising school property or refusing to conform to rules, or more simply by declining to read the edifying literature presented to them, turning down the opportunity to join Scout groups or rescue movements, or enjoying the benefits of such associations while rejecting their ideological messages. But in the early years of the twentieth century such signs of resistance were increasingly scarce. Adult culture appears to have successfully suffocated most resistant ‘boy culture’, and young Australian males were increasingly drawn into supporting the needs of nation and empire, as defined by an older middle-class generation.24
That their support was uncritical was all the more tragic for the faults of Australia nationalism and British imperialism. Together they had helped to decimate and exclude the indigenous people of Australia, and they were soon to play their part in sending tens of thousands of young, almost exclusively white, Australian males to their own doom. Humphrey McQueen and others have argued that Australian nationalism was extremely racist and militarist, and suffered from a siege mentality because of the perceived threat to white Australia’s hold on the continent, particularly from Japan.25 The demands of Australian nationalism, along with the culture of the bush legend, played a major role in shaping Australian masculinity, and infected it with the same xenophobic and destructive qualities. Aborigines, homosexuals, Chinese immigrants, intellectuals and women were excluded by the increasingly rigid racist, misogynist and anti-intellectual hegemonic constructions.
Although created through discourse, ideologies of manliness had very real effects in the social world. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White have highlighted the importance of the creation of ‘others’ in the maintenance of social collectivity by arguing that the ‘exclusion necessary to the formation of social identity at one level is simultaneously a production at the level of the Imaginary, and a production, what is more, of a complex hybrid fantasy emerging out of the very attempt to demarcate boundaries, to unite and purify the social collectivity’.26 It is important to note that the formulation of a tightly prescribed imaginary ideal acted as a very real exclusion upon those who did not meet its specifications, and created a tough set of demands even for those it included. Through social practice the imaginary constructs, ideals and exclusions of formulations of manliness acted upon people’s lived experience, often with tragic consequences, and no more clearly than in the years surrounding World War I.
Militarist and nationalist constructions of manliness reached their logical culmination in the idolisation of the Anzac soldier and in the glorification of the war experience. Although the sight of young men inculcated to believe in the qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice appealed to contemporaries, and although this vision still dominates popular memory of the Anzac experience, it needs to be remembered that it resulted in often futile slaughter on the slopes of Gallipoli and in the mud of the Western Front. Approximately 330 000 Australian men enlisted for service overseas; 60 000 of them never returned, and another 150 000 were wounded.
Back in Australia, paranoia reached new heights, and Australians of German extraction were ‘beaten up, spat on, dismissed from jobs, expelled from clubs and associations, abused for attendance at church, and refused service at stores and theatres’. They and their children were discriminated against in education, law and in the work place in a shameful exhibition of wartime hatred.27 Persecution extended to the school-yard. One man interviewed by Jacqueline Kent recalled his school fellows beating up a boy of German descent, and humiliating the 13-year-old victim by forcing him to walk around the school singing ‘Rule Britannia’.28
The widespread enthusiasm which greeted the outbreak of World War I, particularly strong among middle-class males, marked the high point of a masculinised and militarised Australian manliness.29 But it also marked its destruction as the grim and lengthy casualty lists took their toll, and as enthusiastic weeks stretched into weary years. Perhaps the best illustration of the failure of the militarist ideals of manliness promoted to middle-class children in the early twentieth century is provided by Brian Lewis, a student at Wesley College whose elder brother was killed in France. Lewis recalls the breakdown of the glorification of soldiering by the later years of World War I:
We had been told that our troops were stainless knights, that they were happy boy scouts holidaying in France, that they were nonchalant clowns tumbling in the mud of no-man’s land; we were beginning to think of them as hopeless men moving to their deaths because they could see no escape. The ‘sweet red wine of youth’ had become blackened blood. We had been given a picture of the ‘fallen’ as lying clean and serene before being committed to the gentle earth so that flowers could bloom above them. We were beginning to know that they would be lucky to be pushed into a hole and not left as rotting hunks in the mud.30
By the end of the war ‘1914 was a long time ago and we had quite forgotten’. The cynicism towards militarist causes and the rejection of nationalist fervour carried over into an attitude of increased cynicism towards those who had purveyed such ideals. Lewis states that by war’s end Adamson’s teachings were no longer accepted. ‘The pathos of his war now looked ridiculous and artificial’, Lewis recalls, while Adamson himself ‘now seemed to be an isolated figure posturing and gesticulating remote from us’. For Lewis’ generation dying for one’s country had been set ‘as our highest goal’, but after the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front it increasingly appeared as ‘something which might be avoided, if luck ran your way’.31 Nor did problems end with the conclusion of the war, for as Stephen Garton has noted, many men appear to have found it difficult to settle back into peacetime society as they found domestic life tame and unmanly after the dangers and excitement of the trenches.32
Just as militarist and nationalist codes of manliness contributed so much to the enthusiastic march to war in 1914, so too did the spectacle of shattered veterans returning home, and the absences of those who did not return at all, contribute to the weakening and unravelling of these codes. Marilyn Lake has argued that one of the greatest political struggles in Australian history occurred at the end of the nineteenth century when men and women fought for control of the national culture. Women attempted to restrain the anti-domestic masculinity of the Bulletin school, absences from home, drunkenness, violence and smoking.33 But the role of women’s groups in reconstructing masculinity can easily be exaggerated, and perhaps has been by Lake. If women had some success in restraining such non-respectable masculinist culture, they had less in restraining masculinist middle-class ideals, and often served to further them.
Lake also suggests that by the 1920s Australian culture had become much more feminised, that anti-domestic masculinism had been largely defeated.34 This assertion appears to have more applicability to postwar middle-class codes of manliness, for despite the Anzac legend, and despite considerable evidence indicating a continued enthusiasm for athleticism, the extremely narrow masculinist codes of manliness appear to have eased. That they did, however, seems to have been due more to the carnage at Gallipoli and on the Somme than to feminist social activism. Headmasters such as James Darling of Geelong Grammar School sought to wind back some of the excesses associated with schoolboy athleticism, school periodicals reveal an increased interest in academic and cultural pursuits, military codes of manliness never again had the same appeal of the pre-war years, and youth groups such as the Boy Scouts appear to have been increasingly determined to dissociate themselves from jingoistic nationalism.35 Ideals formulated in the schools and on the parade grounds were destroyed in the mud and the trenches, so early-twentieth century manliness seems to have fallen victim to its own faults rather than to feminist attack.
The redefinition of middle-class manliness followed from the growing realisation that different aspects of manliness had darker sides. Many of the component elements of the militarist, nationalist and athletic creed of manliness that dominated in the early twentieth century had enormous appeal for contemporaries. Obedience, discipline, loyalty, devotion, physical strength, readiness to fight for a cause and adventurousness appeared suitable qualities for overcoming the threats of physical degeneracy, military invasion and anti-social behaviour. They appeared to be the key to making and keeping Australia in a secular and threatening age. And they still have considerable appeal to many today. But such apparently positive qualities can easily become negative ones. Unquestioning obedience of orders encourages despotism. A desire for health can easily become an obsession with the physical at the expense of the intellectual and spiritual. There is a fine line between courage and foolhardiness. Ultra-nationalism has been one of the greatest plagues of the twentieth century, and adventurousness can easily develop into recklessness.36 As Wray Vamplew has pointed out, young British officers ‘led their men over the top as though it was a charge of rugby forwards, but instead of hard-tackling full-backs they ran into machine-gun fire’.37 The tragedy of the early twentieth century is that qualities such as obedience, discipline and loyalty were harnessed to jingoistic, racist and misogynist ideologies, and that the hegemony was so forceful it was all but impervious to those voices which dared to question it. Fit, strong, loyal and obedient men may have appeared as the solution to the ‘boy problem’ and perceived threats to the Australian nation. But the adulation of these qualities was so fierce and so strong that the possible contributions to Australian life of women, non-Caucasian males, homosexuals, intellectuals and the religiously devoted were ignored or undervalued, while the heroes themselves all too frequently met their ends as victims of their own lionisation.
These issues remain. Masculinity is still treated as something essential by authors such as Steve Biddulph, by the men’s movement, by popular commentators, and in the broad Australian culture. Men have particular needs, it is alleged–men are different. And some would have us believe that the average, normal male is being persecuted by education systems and Family Courts which have taken away their scope for expression in the former case, and their children in the latter.38 Men are being treated unfairly, and although the pendulum may have needed to swing to some extent, it has now gone too far. ‘Discourses of men’s rights’, in the words of Sarah Maddison, ‘are increasingly flowing into the social and symbolic worlds, and finding voice in the media and amongst social commentators as part of the ongoing backlash against feminism’.39
The positioning of ‘men’ as a victim category obscures the undeniable reality that we live in a society in which men still occupy the dominant positions. The gender wars might be taking new forms, but there can be no doubt that male hegemony remains the reality in most circumstances. Men still dominate Australian politics, occupy the vast majority of high-ranking corporate positions, earn more per capita, significantly outnumber women in the professions and are generally ‘holding most of the cards’.40
But the positioning of ‘men’ as a victim category also ignores power relations among males in the form of the hegemony that certain forms of masculinity continue to exercise over others. The dominance of the white, heterosexual, middle-class athletic males who serve their country may not be, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, what it was at the start of the twentieth. But the hegemonic power of the idealised manly figure of the early 1900s cast a long shadow forwards over the twentieth century, and strong resonances remain. The macho bravado of the television ‘Footy Show’ sneers at anything that even hints at effeminacy, and emphasises brawn and bravery over intelligence and sensitivity.
Athletes still demand great prestige in elite secondary schools, much more so than those who distinguish themselves in matters academic or cultural. Anzac Day is an increasingly important part of the collective Australian memory as World War I veterans fade in the flesh. Australia’s role in East Timor and the reaction to the death of troops in the Blackhawk helicopter disaster in 1996 illustrate just how willing we still are to laud military heroes. It is as if we are seeking to replace the fading generations who fought in the earlier world wars, while at the same time according them an ever greater place in Australian collective memory through, for example, the entombment of the Unknown Soldier in 1992 and the 2000 unveiling of a new statue of a digger on one side of Sydney’s Anzac Bridge, renamed after initially being called the Glebe Island Bridge.
Discrimination on the grounds of race and sexual orientation remain bugbears in Australian society. Both are now illegal, but evidence that they survive as cultural and institutional practices is bountiful. The reluctance of John Howard to accept the darker sides of Australian history while he celebrates Anzac testifies to the hegemony of Anglo-Saxon historical experience. In the national culture, and in day-to-day life, white Anglo-Saxon males enjoy a privileged position at the expense of their non-Anglo-Saxon counterparts. And amongst Anglo-Saxons, heterosexual men are somehow more ‘real’ as men than homosexual men, and have the right to assert it. David Marr’s withering analysis of the attitudes of the appeal court judges who determined the outcome of Malcolm Green’s trial for the 1993 murder of a real estate agent who allegedly made sexual advances towards Green provides a case in point. Marr concludes that the case ‘establishes in Australian law the proposition that violence will be looked on a little more kindly by the courts if it’s provoked by one man making a pass at another’.41 The ‘homosexual advance defence’ appears to have gained legal credence in Australia in a way that no ‘heterosexual advance defence’ possibly could.42
Masculinity has been reformed in the twentieth century. The most violent, anti-intellectual, and virulently racist and sexist elements of what used to be the ‘centre’ are now firmly confined to the margins. But their residue means that we still have some way to go in questioning and interrogating masculinity, in ensuring that the qualities we deem desirable are not exploited or utilised for, or motivated by, racist, sexist, or homophobic ends and underpinnings. The task of the historian is not so much to rectify but to illuminate, to provide the lessons, examples, antecedents and understandings that might permit us to work backwards and forwards, entering the follies and glories of our history in the hope of minimising the former and maximising the latter in the future.43 One of my tasks in this book has been to look backwards, to try to understand the people of the past on their own terms just a little more thoroughly by identifying the gender ideologies they variously formulated, rejected, accepted, remodelled, resisted or were subject to. I hope others will find that aspect of our past useful in making the future.
Martin Crotty is a lecturer in history at the University of Newcastle. This extract is from his first book, Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity, 1870-1920, Melbourne University Press, 2001. Martin’s research interests include the Australian homefront in World War One, the history of masculinity, and sports history.
NOTES
1 Macintyre, A Colonial Liberalism, p. 154.
2 D. T. Merrett, ‘”The School at War”: Scotch College and the Great War’ in Murray-Smith (ed.), Melbourne Studies in Education, 1982, p. 220.
3 Sherington, Petersen and Brice, Learning to Lead, pp. 27-8. See also the Scotch Collegian from 1904 to 1908 which documents the adoption of athleticism and the rise in enrolments.
4 Brice, Which Patriotism?, pp. 8-9.
5 Walker, ‘Methodism in the “Paradise of Dissent”, 1837-1900’,pp. 331-47.
6 Jackson, Churches and People in Australia and New Zealand, pp. 33-5, 84-5, 125-6.
7 Dening, Xavier, pp. 4, 97. See, for example, the sentiments in Xavier’s school songs written early in the twentieth century: Xavier College, School Songs of Xavier, Xavier College, Melbourne, c. 1919.
8 Naughtin, A Century of Striving, pp. 296, 141.
9 McCalman, Journeyings, p. 17.
10 David W. Brown, ‘The Legacy of British Victorian Social Thought: Some Prominent Views on Sport, Physical Exercise and Society in Colonial Australia’ in Vamplew (ed.), Sport and Colonialism in 19th Century Australasia, p. 26.
11 R. J. W. Selleck, B. K. Hyams and E. M. Campbell, ‘The Directors–Frank Tate, W. T. McCoy and S. H. Smith’ in Turney (ed.), Pioneers of Australian Education, pp. 23-4; Turney, ‘The Advent and Adaptation of the Arnold Public School Tradition in New South Wales’, p. 38.
12 Quoted in Sherington, Petersen and Brice, Learning to Lead, p. 61.
13 Bessant, Schooling in the Colony and State of Victoria, pp. 73-4.
14 Ibid., pp. 74-8.
15 Kociumbas, Australian Childhood, pp. 160-1. See also David Kirk and Karen Twigg, ‘The Militarization of School Physical Training in Australia: The Rise and Demise of the Junior Cadet Training Scheme, 1911-31’, pp. 391-414.
16 See Kirk, Schooling Bodies, pp. 3, 58, 59, 140.
17 See Annells, The Friends’ School, Hobart, passim.
18 Dening, Xavier, pp. 105-6.
19 Lewis, Our War, p. 188.
20 McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War, p. 101.
21 Bate, Light Blue Down Under, p. 146; WC Chronicle, May 1917, p. 37.
22 Gillis, Youth and History, pp. 141-2, 173-8.
23 See Kociumbas, Australian Childhood, passim.
24 For a fascinating individual example of a boy subscribing to ideologies of adventure, albeit in earlier years, see Melissa Harper, ‘A Boy’s Own Adventure: George Morrison on Foot Across Australia’ in Biber, Sear and Trudinger (eds), Playing the Man, pp. 110-22.
25 McQueen, A New Britannia, p. 18; Alomes, A Nation at Last?, pp. 30-5, 49. See also Alomes and Jones, Australian Nationalism, pp. 125-39.
26 Stallybrass and White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, p. 193.
27 Gammage, The Broken Years, pp. 5-6, 283. See also Lack, A History of Footscray, pp. 212-13.
28 Kent, In the Half-Light, pp. 61-2.
29 Joan Beaumont, ‘Australia’s War’ in Beaumont (ed.) Australia’s War 1914-1918, pp. 2-7. Beaumont suggests that the working classes were less enthusiastic because of less devotion to the empire, while there was also opposition from some women’s groups, elements of the Irish population in Australia, and some minority religious groups. See also Andrews, The Anzac Illusion, pp. 40-5.
30 Lewis, Our War, p. 280.
31 Ibid., pp. 281, 321.
32 Garton, ‘War and Masculinity in Twentieth Century Australia’ in Moore and Saunders (eds), Australian Masculinities, pp. 92-4.
33 Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability’, pp. 117, 119-21, 125-7. See also Peggy Pascoe who similarly argues, in relation to the American West, that relations of social control were not only class-based, and can often be best understood as a conflict between men and women. Pascoe, Relations of Rescue, p. xvi.
34 Lake, ‘The Politics of Respectability’, pp. 130-1.
35 On scouting organisations’ attitudes to the war, see chapter 7. On James Darling’s attempts to control schoolboy athleticism, see Peter Gronn, ‘”Will Anything Ever Be Done?”: Geelong Grammar School and the Associated Public Schools Head of the River in the 1930s’, pp. 242-61.
36 See Vamplew, Pay Up and Play the Game, p. 8.
37 Ibid., p. 8.
38 See Winchester, ‘Lone Fathers and the Scales of Justice: Renegotiating Masculinity After Divorce’, pp. 81-98.
39 Maddison, ‘Private Men, Public Anger: The Men’s Rights Movement in Australia’, p. 39.
40 Ibid., p. 39.
41 Marr, The High Price of Heaven, p. 53.
42 Ibid., p. 58.
43 Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, p. 280.