When the King of England went to war in 1914, constitutional logic dictated that the King of Australia went to war as well. Although five-sixths of the population was native-born, the majority of people in Australia were descended from migrants from the United Kingdom. However ambivalent their feelings about the United Kingdom might have been, it stood at the centre of their world, whether expressed through ancestral tales, a derived language and literature, the education system, dependence on British wire services for overseas news, sporting contacts, brand names made familiar by direct British investment and the fact that three-fifths of imports were British. Australian men flocked to fight for king, country and empire. Nearly one-quarter of the men enlisting in the Australian army in the early months were British by birth, which testified to the youth, masculinity and size of the stream of immigrants during the preceding seven years. Almost 40 per cent of resident men aged between 18 and 44 enlisted for active service. Of the 330 000 who went abroad, over 60 000 died and 150 000 returned injured or ill – in total, about one-quarter of their male age cohort. Death and injury weakened the nation greatly, then and for the future (Beaumont 1995).

The economy faltered in other ways too. The war fractured the trading world. The two major trading powers, Britain and Germany, led the opposing alliances. Neutral countries could not ignore the conflict. Producers in the United States, for example, may have wanted to sell impartially to both sides, but the British Navy blockaded the North Sea approaches to Germany and the Mediterranean approaches to Germany’s allies. Eventually, the honouring of credit extended through American financiers on behalf of American farmers, manufacturers and ship-owners depended on victory by Britain and its allies. Australia, whether neutral or aligned, was similarly barred from part of its trading world. The major export commodity in particular – wool – lost much of its market when Germany and Austria-Hungary entered the war, later as Germany conquered Belgium, and over time as the textile-making region of northern France turned into the stalemated ‘Western Front’. Belgium and Germany, leaders in metallurgy, had consumed much of the zinc, copper and lead from the mines of Broken Hill, western Tasmania and Queensland.