Kate Ariotti

Australians and the First World War

The First World War set in train the development of ideas and traditions that had profound implications for nations and for national identity. Whilst the British Empire grew in size at war’s end, revolution and war beset the United Kingdom, the very heart of that empire, resulting in the establishment of what ultimately became the Republic of Ireland. This was a violent rejection of Britishness. Elsewhere within the empire, a shared British identity was simultaneously reaffirmed and undermined by the war. One of the ways in which this manifested itself was through commemoration. This chapter uses the early years of the commemoration of the Gallipoli campaign as a means to observe both continuities within Britishness and the seeds of its decline.

“I’m awfully fed up with being a prisoner”* Australian POWs of the Turks and the Strain of Surrender

ABSTRACT Nearly 200 Australians were captured and held as prisoners of war (POWs) by Ottoman Turkish forces during the First World War. They have largely been overlooked in Australian history and memory of the conflict with the result that little is known of their time in captivity or of its wider ramifications. In examining the emotional impact of their capture and imprisonment, this article offers intimate insights into how these Australian POWs felt about their captivity, from the moment of surrender until long after the war had ended. The humiliation of capture and confinement at the hands of a culturally, religiously and linguistically different enemy and the restrictions imposed by wartime imprisonment exacerbated the prisoners’ private feelings of shame and failure, feelings that were publicly reinforced in the aftermath of the war as the two dominant narratives of the conflict—the heroic Anzac fighter and the Turks as the honourable enemy—excluded or, at best, marginalised their experiences. Such analysis tells us much about the psychological dimension of wartime captivity, and adds to our understanding of the legacy of this POW experience.

The role of sport for Australian POWs of the Turks during the First World War

Nearly 200 Australians were taken prisoner by the Turks during World War I, some 76 of them during the Gallipoli campaign and the remainder over the succeeding three years during the ongoing campaigns against the Ottoman Empire. Approximately a quarter of them died in captivity. In contrast to the experiences of Australians taken prisoner by the Japanese during the Pacific War, Australian history and collective memory, and Australian commemorative activities, have almost totally overlooked the Australian prisoners of the Turks. This article redresses the balance somewhat by looking at an important aspect of the prisoners’ lives; the games they played while in captivity. The article suggests that sports and games were an important part of their methods for coping with the captivity experience, although there were some significant differences in the role sport played for captives of the Turks as compared to the role it played for those taken prisoner by the Japanese in the next World War.

At the Crossroads of Empire, Culture, and War

The Great War and the British Empire: Culture and Society is the second edited collection published from the proceedings of the 2014 international conference ‘The British Empire and the Great War’ held at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. In their first book, conference convenors and editors Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava explored the Australian relationship with the British Empire through the lens of the First World War, curating an interesting selection of essays that examined (among other issues) the effects of the war on Australians at home and the tensions between history, memory and mythology in Australia during the war and more recently. In this second publication they have focused on the nexus between cultural production and the war and have brought into the framework other colonial and dominion perspectives, from Ireland to India and Canada to Cyprus. The result is a wide-ranging collection that tackles musical and artistic representations of the First World War, questions of national and imperial identity, and the politics of remembering and forgetting across the British Empire. After a foreword from renowned British art historian and critic Richard Cork, the collection begins with a comprehensive introduction by the editors. This is followed by John MacKenzie’s thought-provoking take on the ‘First World War as beginning of the end of empire’ idea. Far from following a downwards trajectory in the years following the war, MacKenzie argues, the British Empire entered a new dawn after 1918; though power became more decentralised and shifted away from London, this was not the catalyst for what other historians have claimed was the ‘inevitable’ decline of the empire. Part Two focuses on imperial identities and responses to the war. Richard Scully examines cartoonists’ portrayals of Kaiser Wilhelm II in Britain and the dominions (among other territories), and convincingly argues for a more thorough understanding of the importance of comic art as a historical source; Emma Hanna explores the behavioural and educational effects of music for British Empire troops; Gregory Hynes assesses the relationship between local New Zealand and broader British identities in New Zealand’s war propaganda; Jan Asmussen discusses the little-known impacts of war on the isolated island of Heligoland, a former British colony ceded to the Germans in 1890, and how its inhabitants found themselves caught up in the conflict between the two imperial powers; and Matthew Kennedy argues that the success of the British proposal for the post-war ‘Singapore Strategy’ rested as much on the powerful influence and authority of the empire’s victorious First World War heroes as on clear defence strategy.

International Encounters in Captivity: The Cross-Cultural Experiences of Australian POWs in the Ottoman Empire

This chapter explores the cross-cultural encounters and experiences of Australian prisoners of war in the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. Transportation away from the battlefield, the ad hoc nature of the Ottoman prison camp system and the multinational population in the camps meant the Australians came into extended close contact with their captors, with fellow POWs of varied backgrounds, and with Ottoman civilians during their imprisonment. The chapter argues that the Australians interacted with those they encountered in captivity according to their pre-war conceptions of different racial and cultural groups. In doing so, the chapter offers insights into Australian attitudes towards ‘others’ before and during the war, and contributes to an understanding of captivity as representative of the global nature of the First World War.

Histories of humanitarianism

The centenary of the First World War has so far focused on the fervent commemoration of significant battles fought in Europe and the Ottoman Empire. But, as Melanie Oppenheimer and Margaret Tennant...