In mid-December 1903, Hutton wrote to Lord Northcote, soon to be appointed Australia's third Governor-General, to introduce himself. He claimed that his success as GOC thus far in forging an Australian federal army and the radical restructuring it entailed had been ‘very remarkable’. Few could have anticipated so little friction, Hutton continued, in effecting 'so many and such vital changes’. It was a similar message to many others Hutton had been sending home to friends and patrons back in Britain, yet it smacked more of wishful thinking than reality. The truth was that from mid-1903 Hutton faced a slowly rising tide of resistance and antagonism towards his sweeping reform plans and, in some quarters, against his person. It began to feel no doubt like a version of Canada all over again. Many of the drivers were in fact similar, especially those connected with Hutton's methods and personality. Others were quite different. The net result, however, was hauntingly familiar.

To begin, in the wake of the war in South Africa, the colonies watched with interest continuing turmoil at the War Office, especially the submission of the Elgin Report, weeks before Brodrick left office on 6 October 1903. His successor, Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster, took the Elgin recommendations regarding War Office reform and established the Esher (War Office Reconstitution) Committee to oversee them. Hutton, like other senior British officers in the colonies, was increasingly identified with what was seen from afar as rank War Office incompetence, which itself was understood to have contributed to difficulties in South Africa. At same time the Norfolk Commission, appointed in spring 1903 to investigate British auxiliary forces, was brutal in its criticisms. Questions began to be asked in Australia. Was it not the same ‘British’ system, for example, that Hutton was trying to impose? The fact that the GOC was already advocating many of the commission's recommendations was less important than perceptions.