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 with 135,000 troops brought home from Britain in 147 voyages, and 16,773 troops from the Middle East in 56 voyages, mostly on a first come, first go basis.
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.
It would take until 22 September 1919 for the last transport to reach Australia.
With a long wait to get home, some troops took the opportunity to travel around France and Britain, while 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 after the success of Canadian initiatives offering vocational training to service personnel.
More than 1,100 Australians served with the Australian Graves Detachment, which was formed in March 1919. 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.
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, and of munition workers who had come to the UK to work during the war.
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, and it became a global pandemic in 1919–1920.
Australian authorities quickly brought in extensive quarantine procedures in October 1918, which caused some frustrations for returning troops keen to get home to their families.
By March 1919, 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.
Return to civilian life
Australian losses during the First World War were devastating. From a population of less than five million people, more than 416,000 Australians enlisted, more than 60,000 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.
Some wounds left returned men debilitated, or totally incapacitated for life. Some men like Albert Ward would spend the next 43 years confined to a bed on coach wheels at an Anzac hostel for returned veterans.
The impact on the Australian people was immense, and some returned service personnel struggled to settle back in to civilian life, in a land which had not seen firsthand the horrors of war. There was also frustration from some who had served, and antagonism against those who had stayed home and were known to many by the derogatory term ‘shirkers’.
The war had changed many families, the divorce rate rose, doubling between 1913 and 1921, while many young women would never find a partner after the loss of so many young men.
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 40,000 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. Only a very small percentage of settlement blocks were allocated to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen.
But a constant reminder of the service and sacrifice of the First World War are the more than 2,000 war memorials which can be found all over Australia, inscribed with the names of the men and women from each community who served or were killed.