Glorious Deeds of Australasians in the Great War

by E. C. Buley

"Upon the force devolves the honour and responsibility of representing Australia and of performing Australia's share in the great Imperial effort in the interests of justice, honour and international integrity. The ultimate issue of that undertaking can never be in doubt, but its attainment demands a steadfast display of the British qualities of resolution and courage, which are yours by right of heredity. The people of Australia look to you to prove in battle that you are capable of upholding the traditions of the British arms. I have no fear that you will worthily represent the Commonwealth's military forces. Your presence among the Imperial forces has, however, a wider significance, as representing the solidarity of the Empire and the Imperial spirit of loyalty to the King."

And now the men of Australasia are embarked on their mighty adventure. Six months later they were to thrill the Empire with a feat of arms as brave and brilliant as anything contained even in the annals of this, the greatest war of all times. So much they hardly dared to hope then, but they strove by every means in their power to keep themselves fit for the ordeal to come, when they would be matched against the trained soldiers of the greatest and proudest military Power history has ever known.

Troops leaving Brisbane.

A glance around those forty troopships would reveal an interesting object lesson in the production of new types of the great Anglo-Saxon race. These are all picked men, whose parentage consisted of the same kind of Britons, drawn from the four root stocks of the islands of Great Britain. But the wide range of climate permitted between the tropical plains of North Queensland and the rugged fastnesses of the mountains of the New Zealand Southland has already produced types so divergent that it is hard to believe that they sprang from the same stock.

Compare McKenzie of Townsville, Queensland, with McKenzie of Dunedin, New Zealand, and the difference is apparent. They may be cousins: such things occurred in that wonderful army of Australasia; but the Northerner is dark, slight, lean and wiry. The lines are bitten in his browned face by exposure to many a glaring day in the merciless direct rays of a tropical sun. His broad shoulders and narrow hips make him an ideal athlete, but he is loosely built. He walks with a swing; his movements look slower than they really are; the sun has given him something of a languor that is not all graceful. But the fire of a high courage burns in his dark eyes, and the sea breezes have already brought a touch of colour to the pallor of his cheek. He is in superb physical health, for all that he is so sallow and hard bitten.

McKenzie of Otago weighs two stone more, though he has no whit of advantage in height. He carries no spare flesh, but is a big-boned, thick-set fellow, brought up on mutton and oatmeal. His cheeks are rosy and tanned with the salt wind that never ceases to blow over the wholesome island where he grows rich harvests of grain and tends his plentiful flocks. He is a stiff, great fellow, as hard as nails, and as healthy as a big bullock. His keen blue eyes look out from under a smooth brow unfurrowed by any care. He comes from a land where there is no want; his million or more of fellow New Zealanders have not yet built a big city or created a huge fortune. Easy prosperity, an abundance of physical well-being, and a continual strife for high moral excellence are the characteristics of his country, where the death-rate is the lowest in the world and the sale of intoxicants is subject to closer restriction in peace time than anywhere else in the Empire.

Between these two extremes are all sorts of modifications; the Tasmanian, who grows apples on the sunny borders of the beautiful Huon river and enjoys a country that resembles in many of its features the rustic beauty of the best parts of Southern England. He is a big, stocky fellow, this Tasmanian, with something of the rustic simplicity of an English yeoman. But he is not by any means as simple as he appears. Now look at Tommy Cornstalk from New South Wales, tall and lanky, slow of speech and swift as a miracle in action. Hear his queer slang as he talks of his "cobbers" or mates; and shrewdly reckons his chances of seeing Australia again within a reasonable number of years. The Victorian from the rich Western plains is a stouter man, who has an intimate acquaintance with that exasperating animal the cow. Butter has been to him a means of realizing prosperity; from his early youth he has milked so many cows every morn and evening. And when he wishes to express his opinion of the Germans he calls them cows. It is his last term of abuse.

The West Australians, for some reason not yet apparent, are, as a class, the heaviest and stoutest of Australians. They number many a jack-of-all-trades in their ranks, for they have learned to turn their hands to many things. They are bronzed by a climate where the sun seldom fails to shine brilliantly; healthy, shrewd, sane and full of reckless courage. The South Australians approximate more nearly to the Cornstalk type, and from them are drawn some of the finest riders in the ranks of Australia's celebrated Light Horse.

The speech of these Australasians varies remarkably. The short-clipped speech of the men from the coastal cities contrasts strangely with the monotonous drawl of the bushmen. In the New Zealanders the old accents survive strangely; many of them talking Scotch as broad as the men of a Highland regiment. Others speak English of a remarkable purity of accent, though strangely tinged with the slang of the shearing shed, the stable and the bush track.