The Great War in 'The Armidale Express'

Abstract

When we think about the First World War it is done very much with the benefit of hindsight. The war and Australia's part in it has become an iconic part of our history, hallowed by a century of myth-making. We know what we think about about the war now. We even know how attitudes to the war and its commemoration have changed over the years. In the 1960s it almost seemed as if the Anzac legend might begin to fade away through attitudes exemplified in Alan Seymour's 1958 play 'One Day in the Year'. Incidentally, Seymour ironically died earlier this year just before the Gallipoli Centenary celebrations. This article is not so much about what happened during the Great War, or even how those events have been reinterpreted. Rather, how they were perceived at the time, and how different parts of Australia received quite different versions of what was happening.How did Australians get information about the war? The main source of information was the local newspapers. This of course could be supplemented to some degree with access to newspapers from other centres, including overseas, in both cases with some considerable delay, letters from Europe from servicemen or women or relatives, and a small number of returned servicemen. All these sources would also often find there way into the local press. It is not unusual to find quotations from Canadian or British newspapers, or from personal letters, or articles by returned servicemen in the newspaper. But when we think about newspapers we must recognise that there was a world of difference between what appeared in metropolitan daily newspapers and what appeared in the country press. And it is this difference that I want to focus on. I will take as a case study a comparison of the war coverage of the 'Sydney Morning Herald' and 'The Armidale Express'.