Was It Fair To Judge The Year 1914 Essay

hen attempting to qualify any year of wartime as explicitly the worst, it would be wrong to simply look at the effects and not also the causes. Therefore, it is only fair to judge the year 1914 as the worst year of the Great War for Australia and Australians as it was the within the year 1914 that the original decision to be involved at all was made. With this pledge inexorably serving as a catalyst for the manifestations of both irresponsible government decisions and the further destruction of the front lines and the war at home. Thus, 1917 was not the worst year of the war at all to the extent that only the consequences of previously made decisions were precipitated.

With any war, the obvious cause of any carnage is the very decision to enter a conflict. Australia decided to enter the war as a show of support to what many Australian citizens still considered their “motherland”- Great Britain, on 4 August 1914. This decision was assiduously supported by both the current Prime Minister Joseph Cook and the Opposition Party Leader Andrew Fisher- both of whom were fervently committed to Britain. However, according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography Fisher “saw no advantage in the war to

This, of course, would leave many Australians at the home front suffering from intense food shortages and war profiteering- meaning “that many ordinary working people suffered a fall in their purchasing power, and their standard of living.” according to the ANZAC Day Commemoration Committee. In fact, the situation was so severe that by the year 1917, the cost of living in Australia had risen by over 30% which meant that the struggle of the estimated 20,000 people who were unemployed in Melbourne alone-was only