After the war

Repatriation and war losses

After the Armistice of 11 November 1918, the Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes insisted Australian troops be repatriated (returned home) as quickly as possible. 

This logistical challenge was enormous. Some 67,000 Australians were on the Western Front in France and Belgium when the armistice occurred. A further 17,000 personnel were in the Middle East, when the war ended. About 63,000 Australian military personnel, and 300 Australian munitions workers, located in the United Kingdom also had to be repatriated.  Overseeing this complex task was Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, who was appointed Director-General of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) Department of Demobilisation and Repatriation on 21 November 1918.Repatriation began in late 1918. The journey home to Australia took approximate two months. The last transport ship, HMT Port Sydney, arrived at Fremantle on 22 September 1919. 

While waiting to be repatriated, some troops travelled around France and Britain. A few hundred Australian servicemen went on to serve in Russia as part of a volunteer British force fighting Bolshevik forces. Some Light Horse units also helped with suppressing an Egyptian nationalist revolt in early 1919. 

Many took part in the AIF Education Scheme, which was developed by Monash after the success of Canadian initiatives offering vocational training to service personnel. 

More than 1,100 Australians served with the Australian Graves Detachment. The detachment was formed in March 1919 to exhume and re-bury Australian war-dead. Men in the unit worked in northern France where the AIF fought many of its battles. Some members of the detachment were veterans of the fighting on the Western Front who volunteered for the job. Most were men who had enlisted too late in the war to see fighting and had reached France after the Armistice.

Between April and August 1919, the Australian Graves Detachment exhumed and re-buried the remains of almost 5,500 dead. This distressing work included identifying bodies where possible and reburying them in centralised war cemeteries. Men who were missing and presumed dead were listed on memorials across wartime battlefields. 

After months or years away from home, thousands of Australian troops had met and married women from the countries they served in. The Australian Government brought around 20,000 women and children to Australia, including the wives and fiancées of Australian troops. Some Australian munition workers who had come to the UK to work during the war had also married while abroad.

Spanish Flu

While the origins of the 1918 influenza epidemic are still unclear, the virus thrived in the crowded conditions of the Western Front and large military camps in Europe and elsewhere in the world. The Spanish Flu quickly became a global pandemic as service personnel were repatriated after the war.

Australian authorities brought in extensive quarantine procedures in late 1918 after outbreaks in New Zealand and South Africa. This caused additional bureaucratic difficulties for returning troops keen to get home to their families. 

In early January 1919, the first case of the Spanish Flu was documented. By March, Australian soldiers were being inoculated against influenza before their repatriation. 

These combined efforts helped Australia to record one of the lowest death rates of any country during the pandemic. 
By the time the pandemic arrived in the country it was in its ‘third wave’, which proved to be significantly less severe than the preceding wave.

This pandemic killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people globally: as many as five times the number of people killed during the First World War. About 15,000 Australians died as a result of the pandemic.

Return to civilian life

Australian losses during the First World War were devastating. By 1918, Australia’s population was less than five million people. Out of the approximate 416,000 Australians who enlisted. More than 60,000 personnel were killed and 156,000 wounded, gassed or taken prisoner. Just under 40 per cent of Australian men aged 18 to 44 had enlisted, and 330,000 had seen active service overseas.  

The impact on the Australian people was immense, and some returned service personnel struggled to settle back into civilian life. The impact of the service, the loss of lives and the sacrifices made by service personnel last long after their return to Australia. Some also faced demonstrated antagonism, referred to in the derogatory term ‘shirker’ - by those who had stayed home.

The war had changed many families, the divorce rate rose, doubling between 1913 and 1921.Women who had been widowed or were married to incapacitated men became the primary breadwinners of the household, staying in or entering the workforce, while often also caring for wounded family members.

A strong emphasis was placed on giving returned personnel the skills to support themselves. This included through the Soldier-Settlement Scheme, which offered small parcels of land as farms for returned personnel. Around 23,300 returned men took up the scheme, however, many of these farms were too small to be viable. Some soldier settlers were not skilled in agriculture and proved unable to make a success of their holdings.  

A reminder of the service and sacrifice of the First World War are memorials across Australia which list the names of men and women of each community who served of were killed. As of 2026, there are approximately 45,000 memorials, including gardens, plaques and honour boards, across Australia commemorating the First World War.

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