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Research on soldier settlement has to be set within the wider history of emigration and immigration. This book examines two parallel but complementary themes: the settlement of British soldiers in the overseas or 'white' dominions, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, between 1915 and 1930. One must place soldier settlement within the larger context of imperial migration prior to 1914 in order to elicit the changes in attitude and policy which occurred after the armistice. The book discusses the changes to Anglo-dominion relations that were consequent upon the incorporation of British ex-service personnel into several overseas soldier settlement programmes, and unravels the responses of the dominion governments to such programmes. For instance, Canadians and Australians complained about the number of ex-imperials who arrived physically unfit and unable to undertake employment of any kind. The First World War made the British government to commit itself to a free passage scheme for its ex-service personnel between 1914 and 1922. The efforts of men such as L. S. Amery who attempted to establish a landed imperial yeomanry overseas is described. Anglicisation was revived in South Africa after the second Anglo-Boer War, and politicisation of the country's soldier settlement was an integral part of the larger debate on British immigration to South Africa. The Australian experience of resettling ex-servicemen on the land after World War I came at a great social and financial cost, and New Zealand's disappointing results demonstrated the nation's vulnerability to outside economic factors.
myth and the yeoman ideal but shared some of their salient features. The ‘Anzac’ legend or ‘digger’ tradition was created during the unsuccessful Gallipoli campaign. For Australians, Gallipoli signified not just the first major test of its military prowess, but more importantly a coming of age. Australians believed that their country had indeed achieved nationhood. 7 The
the Gallipoli massacre in particular became transformed into a story – the Anzac legend – that symbolises what are purported to be key Australian national values: courage, valour and heroic suffering, where war becomes the proving ground of national character and death in war the ultimate patriotic sacrifice. 15 The pervasiveness of the Anzac legend is immediately evident not only in Australia’s national holiday (Anzac Day) but in the numerous war memorials and monuments found in state capitals and small country towns alike
converted: those who made up the conservative, Anglocentric White Australia of the Old Bully; who voted for Menzies over Ben Chifley's Labor Party in 1949 (see Figure 14.4 ); and who saw in Australia's involvement in Korea a continuation of the Anzac Legend founded in the two world wars ( Figure 14.5 ). Figure 14.4 Ted Scorfield, ‘Going my way – on a full petrol-tank?’, The Bulletin , 30 November 1949, p. 5
Growing up in Australia I could not avoid the Anzac legend and the Australian pride in the contribution of their ancestors to both World Wars. These contributions, especially at Gallipoli, play an important role in Australian national identity in new and evolving ways. 1 As an Australian of Cypriot heritage the place of the Great War in the Australian national script
Pakeha imagination: ‘The children played old-world soldiers at Waterloo, not Rangiriri, and new-world soldiers at the Wagon Box, not Ngatapa’. 86 By the time The New Zealand Wars was published, the ANZAC legend had also already shown itself to be far more adaptable to the myth of war experience, not to mention less controversial. 87 The New Zealand Wars had even arguably been surpassed in
