Enemy Aliens: Internment and the Homefront War in Australia, 1914–1920

Abstract

During the First World War, the German Australian community, the largest non-Anglo-Celtic group, became the target of a relentless campaign of persecution, internment and deportation that resulted in its dismemberment and the destruction of its socio-cultural infrastructure. Under the country’s belligerent Prime Minister, W.M. Hughes, the machinery of government was used to suspend basic civil rights and the rule of law, while Australian civilians were called upon to participate in the “homefront war” against an imagined internal enemy. The government’s aim was to serve the cause of Im- perial Britain and its commercial supremacy, and to secure the future of White Australia as the home of an imaginary, exclusive “British race.”