By Max Solling, Bulletin 3/2025, May
Over 150 people attended this year’s Anzac Day Service, held as usual at the War Memorial Shrine in Foley Park, Glebe. The service was led by Father James Baxter, parish priest at St James Forest Lodge and St Bede Pyrmont and Rob McLean piped The Lament. Wreaths were laid by young players from the Glebe Hockey Club and by Duncan Leys, Glebe Society president. Max Solling gave the address.
This morning I would like to share thoughts on Australia’s involvement in WWII and how this war reshaped the lives of Australians and Glebe residents.
Australia and WWII
Australia’s strategic dependence on Britain drew it into WWII – as it had in WWI. Britain’s capacity to defend its empire, however, had been diminished by the inter-war political and financial instability that had taken root in Europe.
Australia had run down its defence capacity between the wars, believing it could rely on the (British) Royal Navy and its major naval base in Singapore to protect its interests in the region – the ‘Singapore strategy’.
The unanticipated attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour on 7 December 1941 destined the Strategy for failure. The Royal Navy’s largest and most important warships, the Prince of Wales and Repulse, were sunk by Japanese aircraft on 10 December 1941, a few days after Pearl Harbour. Without these capital ships and with the Air Force largely tied up in Europe, the defence of Singapore crumbled, and British-led forces there, under General Percival, surrendered on 15 February 1942. When Singapore fell, 16,000 Australian infantry joined 69,000 British, Indian and Singaporean soldiers as prisoners of war.
Britain’s failure to defend Singapore, a humiliating defeat, was regarded by Australia’s Prime Minister John Curtin as an ‘inexcusable betrayal’. He insisted that Australian troops return to defend Australia. His concerns were well-founded: on 19 February 1942, Japanese aeroplanes bombed Darwin inflicting 243 deaths and sinking eight ships in the harbour, and with the landing of the Japanese in New Guinea in early 1942, the war was on Australia’s doorstep. In desperate fighting in the jungles and malarial swamplands of New Guinea, Australian forces re-took Kokoda in November 1942, costing 10,000 Japanese, 625 Australian and about 150 Papuan lives. The Damien Parer photograph of the wounded soldier supported by a mate on his return from Kokoda is very poignant.
Australians’ war experience
Over 800,000 Australian men and women served in uniform during WWII in a population of little over seven million, of whom 560,000 served overseas. From Glebe, 2,347 men and 79 women enlisted; most joined the AIF (81.5%).
Australian service men and women experienced a war outside the realm of expectation, particularly those who were captured. Prisoners of war on the Burma-Thai railway were treated appallingly, while women army nurses suffered equal brutality. A ship evacuating army nurses from Singapore was sunk in 1942. Of the 53 who made it to land, 21 were executed and eight more died in captivity. War in the skies was lethal; 10,000 Australian aircrew lost their lives in WWII, most in Europe.
The return of the soldiers, sailors, airmen, nurses and members of the women’s services at the end of the Second World War was not nearly as protracted as it was from the First. Most service men and women who were engaged in the European, Mediterranean and North African theatres of war returned to Australia in 1943 to strengthen the fight against Japan. Nearly 200,000 in the services had returned to civilian life by early 1944, although 3,000 airmen continued to fight in Europe. Japan signed the Surrender on 2 September 1945, ending the war.
The costs of war
Despite the high participation rate, Australian WWII casualties were considerably lower than in those of WWI; just under 39,000 Australians were killed. The number of soldiers taken into captivity, however, was eight times higher than in WWI; 8,200 were held as prisoners-of-war in Germany and of 22,000 captured by the Japanese only 13,872 lived to return to Australia. It appears that about eighty Glebe-Forest Lodge men and women never returned.
How the Australian community remembered their WWII dead differed from their response during and after WWI. A Gallup poll in 1944 posed the question, what kind of memorial the people favoured. 90% voted for useful memorials – halls, parks, hospitals.
And when asked whether there be any new memorials, 58% opted instead to add the names to the old memorials.
Australia (and Glebe) during and after WWII
Australia had been hit hard by the world-wide Depression of the 1930s, but during the Second World War, Australia’s economy and society was mobilised to an unprecedented degree.
Over a third of the male workforce was unemployed in 1932; not only were wages reduced, the Depression exacerbated great inequalities in incomes and wealth. Tariffs and arbitration and a parsimonious social security system between 1890 and the 1940s could not insulate Australia’s commodity-based economy from the powerful shocks that an unstable international economic order meted out.
House construction had come to a standstill during the Depression, and in the period leading up to WWII, there was a shortfall of 350,000 houses. Most households in Sydney, and half those in Melbourne were made up of tenants, the most vulnerable renting terrace houses in the inner suburbs that had fallen into disrepair and lacked the most basic facilities. Tenancy of private houses was the predominant condition. 70-80% of Glebe households were renters raising large families on single incomes. The birth rate was low, and population growth stalled.
Between the wars, people steadily shifted from rural regions to inner suburban Sydney in search of employment in the city’s expanding urban industry and commerce. By 1945, Glebe (including Forest Lodge) was a heavily industrialised place, with 164 factories.
Post-war reconstruction
The ordeal of World War II created new expectations and was a catalyst for structural change. The new social compact brought substantial reconstruction policies that put Australia on the road to a more prosperous post-war society. John Curtin told parliament in 1942 that “There will have to be a fairer distribution of wealth”. That year, the Commonwealth Post-War Reconstruction Department was formed; it was presented with a unique opportunity to demonstrate the importance of policy, planning, politics and popular resolve.
The architects of reconstruction prepared ambitious plans for health, transport, rural reconstruction, industrial development, migration and public works. Planning also in this enlightened time emphasised the importance of local communities in nation building and expanding support for families through local facilities such as libraries, health centres and recreational centres.
Australia became a more socially mobile society in the three decades from the 1950s. The material living conditions of ordinary Australians improved. Families could acquire a home of their own, a Holden car, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. A universal 40-hour working week came in 1947, and four weeks’ annual leave in 1974. The homogeneous culture of the Anglo-Celtic era began to fade as ethnic diversity broadened, and Australia became less isolated, physically and intellectually.
Yet inequality remains. While post-war reconstruction in Australia improved the lot of many, not all have benefitted. Andrew Leigh’s updated study of inequality in Australia reveals today’s inequality is double that of 1980. The number of Australian billionaires is revealing, having grown from two in 1987 to 150 in 2024. Internationally, huge disparities remain in access to basic services and in life expectancy, issues that continue to preoccupy the United Nations.
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