The Queensland Civil War (That Never Happened)

Pineapples, beaches, the G20, large scale radical political movements: Queensland has a reputation as a relaxed tourist destination, but it also has a long history of radicalism. This is one of these stories.

King, A cartoon history of Australia, 1983.

"If the army is used against the Queensland Police, it will be considered a declaration of civil war."

John Fihelly was a cabinet minister in the Queensland government in 1917. In late November of 1917, he, along with the Premier and other cabinet ministers, in deadly seriousness, planned for the outbreak of civil war in Brisbane.

They organised for two thousand Special Constables to be sworn in, to reinforce the existing 400-500 police officers if it came to conflict with the 600 soldiers stationed in Queensland.

With these plans in place, outside the Government Printing Office, at 2am on the 28th of November, 1917, Brisbane almost went to war with Canberra.

This extraordinary state of affairs had been brewing for years. In the middle of World War I, Brisbane had been having a vicious and divisive war on the home front. Over two referendums on conscription, conflicts over class, race and ideology played out. In the end, conscription lost, and Queensland ended up with the label the 'most disloyal state in Australia' (Evans, 59).

This is the story of how Queensland earned that name.

The Bitter Fight, Harris, 1970.

One of the many anti-conscription leaflets distributed through the campaign.

The war within and without

Billy Hughes (pictured in the first cartoon) was the Labor Prime minister, the 'Little Digger' who proved to be an admired wartime leader, a position to which he was well suited. As a long term advocate of conscription, he spearheaded the scheme to have all boys undertake military training from 1909, and on a trip to London he had been convinced by the British Imperial War cabinet that Australia must compel these conscripts to serve overseas. His problem was that the Labor party had a strongly anti-conscription majority.

Unable to wrangle the votes in his party caucus, specifically in the Senate, Hughes was forced to a compromise position — he put the issue to a public vote, a plebiscite on whether or not Australians would be compelled to serve overseas, and started hustling votes for the "Yes" campaign.

This was Hughes' masterstroke, gaining a mandate for a policy he supported, putting the industrial labour movement in its place, and showing those he felt were disloyal in the caucus that his way was the way to success. If it had worked, it would have been a triumph. But all that he succeeded in was to take the conflict from the caucus rooms and conferences of the Labor party to the streets and the ballot box.

By campaigning for 'yes', he set himself against the political machine of the Labor Party, the Irish immigrant population who were less than enthusiastic about going to war for the British Empire, various pacifist radicals, religious groups and socialists; and in Queensland, he set himself against Premier Thomas Jordan Ryan – the leader of the most successful Labor branch in Australia; Brisbane Trades Hall, Irish and German immigrants, and radicals like feminist Margaret Thorp. For this, Hughes was cast out of the Labor Party, and took many of its parliamentarians when he left.

This was a deeply felt personal and political divide. E.J. Holloway, a Labor member of the first parliament told the story of the funeral of Senator Andrew McKissock in Victoria in 1919. Standing fifty feet away from the crowd of hundreds of Labor mourners was William Spence, a loyalist to Hughes who still felt the distance of the conscription conflict years later.

Workers of Australia, divided

The Worker, 15/9/1915

The largest and most organised element of resistance to conscription in Queensland was the organised working class. In March of 1915, the Queensland Labor-in-Politics convention lead by the largest union, the Australian Workers Union, adopted a position against conscription. As the largest union, by a long way, the AWU had a significant influence over how Labor acted in government. The political wing and the industrial wing were so closely tied that if there were electorates that did not have a Labor Party branch, the AWU branch would perform the campaigning duties for the Party in those areas.

This cooperation meant that Queensland was alone, out of all the states of Australia, in having an anti-conscriptionist Premier and government. It was also the only Labor party that maintained a united front in its parliamentary caucus and cabinet, and apart from the resignation of one minister, TJ Ryan was able to maintain peace and stability in the Queensland Labor Party.

As well as organisation, the labor movement had a network of newspapers and publications that were as widely read as the commercial press. However, the heart of the argument of the mainstream labour movement against conscription was not one that was anti-war, or even anti-imperialist. There were two main arguments against; firstly, that the best outcome for the war effort was willing volunteers, and that it was politically and morally wrong to compel men to fight, and secondly, a much darker and less noble racial fear of foreign, ‘coloured’ workers.

The propaganda of the anti-conscriptionists showed this tension between appeals to the best and worst in the characters of Australians. On October 26, 1916, the front page of The Worker, the last edition of Brisbane’s Labor Party tabloid published before the vote proclaimed proudly on its front page that “Australia will be there” (The Worker, Oct 26, 1916). It asked that anyone who was a democrat refuse conscription as the extreme of removing a person’s autonomy; scolded any Labor person or unionist that they could never reward a traitor like Hughes with their trust, cajoled the socialists to refuse to follow the whims of capitalists, and asked true Australians to remember their nation was but a ‘white drop in a coloured ocean.’

“A man cannot hate to order” (The Worker, 1916)

The appeal to the better nature of working class Australians was a genuine one. A letter to the Worker read:

"Tolerance, love of freedom, the right of every man to think for himself, to speak the thought within him whether hedged by friend or, foe these are the things that have made England great. Are we to part with them for the sake of adding a few hundred unwilling, and therefore utterly useless, conscripts to our army of four million men?"

Anti-conscriptionists published many articles leading up to the vote regarding conscription, chief among their concerns the inequity in what was being asked from different classes. A major rhetorical theme was the voluntary nature of the contribution of wealth to the war effort, without an attempt at conscription. As well as this, the poor pay of soldiers fighting at risk of loss of life and limb showed that voluntary recruitment had not failed. They argued that a volunteer at the front was worth a lot more than reluctant conscripts, who would also not be able to help the war effort at home. This voluntarism was genuinely felt and demonstrated by the 30,000 members of the AWU who joined the Australian Imperial Force.

The fear of 'economic conscription' was also a motivator for the labour movement – not only were there attempts to enforce conscription by law, but conscriptionists advocated measures such as dismissing all working men of fighting age so as to force them into armed service. This was what was referred to as 'economic conscription'. There was also serious discussion, after the 1916 referendum was lost, to dismiss unmarried public servants under 25 to force their service.

These economic concerns galvanised the union movement, and tied in with the ongoing concerns of a small, white, colonist nation in Asia – the anti-conscriptionists used concerns about 'coloured' labour taking jobs from white Australians, when they were conscripted overseas.

The Worker, 28/9/1918

While the pro-conscriptionists whipped up anti-German sentiment, the anti-conscriptionists went to the older well of anti-white racism. The Capricornian reported on meetings in Townsville with pro-conscriptionists which were interrupted by men yelling that ‘niggers’ were to be used to replace white workers heading to the front. The ethnic tensions that had existed already as part of the white working class’s anxiety over maintaining their pay and conditions was exacerbated by the experience of war, and the inflammatory propaganda fed into that.

A specific instance in the campaign was the arrival of a boat carrying 98 Maltese migrants in late September of 1916. Just like racism, worrying about boat arrivals has a long history in Australia. The Worker depicted the Maltese as negroid and animalistic, and there were prophecies of thousands more to come. In Far North Queensland cane fields, there were concerns about Greeks and Italians replacing ‘Britishers’ called up in the draft. In Brisbane, echoing the Townsville incident, when Hughes came to speak to a public rally, a spokesperson for the union-lead Anti-Conscription Campaign Committee got up on a makeshift platform and called for ‘Three cheers for White Australia and No Conscription.’ He was attacked by several dozen uniformed army men, crying ‘keep your eyes on Germany,’ but in the eyes of working men in Queensland it was clear the first on the list of concerns was cheap, coloured labor replacing them.

The Worker, 26/10/1916

The concerns over race affected the vote against conscription in more ways than this. For the substantial German population in southern Queensland, the anti-German rhetoric had a significant effect. It solidified them as voters against conscription, along with discussion around the internment of Germans and the limiting of their rights to buy and sell property, as a part of a moral panic that Germans were hoarding gold. The provisions of the referendum meant that in areas of high concentration of people of German origin, like in southern Queensland, were counted separately. Southern Queensland registered an overwhelming ‘no’ vote.

Germans were the second largest minority in Queensland, but by far the largest was the Irish population. In the 1911 Census, over a quarter of Queensland’s immigrant population were born in Ireland. In 1916, a group of Irish nationalists, lead by school teacher and language activist Patrick Pearse, lead the Easter Uprising, to a bloody and crushing defeat by the British establishment. Archbishop James Duhig, at a meeting of the Queensland Hibernian Society expressed condemnation of the British repression, which he was sure would create a new generation of Irish martyrs. This was part of a broader alienation of Irish Australians from the imperial cause, and conscription. Importantly, as well as the shock and horror of Irish Australians, the reaction in Australia to the Easter Uprising could be seen in establishment papers like the Argus that applauded the reprisals against the Irish people, and it became a common thing to refer to Irish Catholics as Sinn Feiners. This exclusion from the mainstream solidified Irish opposition to conscription.

There’s not a lot of evidence that all Irish people were ardent nationalists, but there is substantial evidence that the population had a general Anglophobia, and were informed and engaged with events in Ireland via columns like the ‘Irish Times’ in the Catholic Advocate published by the Queensland Hibernian Society.

'Irish affairs' column header, in the Catholic Advocate, 1916.

There were dedicated anti-conscription Irish advocates, such as the Austral-Irish National Association that issued one of the most hard-line anti-conscription groups, who said they’d rather ‘lay down their own lives than be compelled to assist England in any way’.

The leaders of Irish Australians such as Archbishop Mannix, who on a visit to Brisbane stated his opposition to conscription on the basis that the war was ‘another trade war’ showed the association of religion with national identity, but while conscriptionists feared the great papist minority, the way Irish Queenslanders acted in these referenda seemed to be more determined by political concerns of class and nation, rather than confession.

John Arthur Fihelly, State Library Queensland. / Via upload.wikimedia.org

One example of this is the combination of class and national interests in TJ Ryan’s cabinet - John Fihelly. Irish born, he was smart and articulate, though intemperate. In early September of 1916, a meeting of the Queensland Irish Association was held to raise funds for refugees of the aftermath of the Easter Rebellion in Dublin. At this meeting, Fihelly denounced British authorities in Ireland; linked opposition to conscription to ‘the mail fisted policy of Prussianism operating in Ireland’.

Fihelly was very clear he did not align himself with Sinn Fein, and fellow cabinet minister and Irish-born Catholic William Lennon. Their speeches expressed no disloyalty to Britain or the Crown, and were only briefly reported in the Catholic Advocate in September. Conscriptionists in the southern state took this as an opportunity to try to wedge the labour movement — this was the instance of greatest division. John Adamson, minister for railways and a lay Protestant preacher who had been a passionate advocate of service as vice-president of the recruiting body the United Services League. TJ Ryan and the union movement stood behind what was a moderate, Irish home-rule position, and Adamson resigned the cabinet. Conscriptionist newspapers and the British loyalist attempt to exploit racial fears about Irish subversives proved ineffective in changing the vote.

Ross magazine, 18 November 1916

However, the confessional divide was not just Catholics anti-conscriptionists and Protestant conscriptionists. Small religious groups such as the Society of Friends, Quakers, and the Modernist Association of Queensland, an ecumenical religious group described fondly by its president as a ‘bunch of cranks’. Cranky or not, pacifist Christian groups played a fairly significant role in the Queensland campaign, with their brand of left-wing Christian thought very influential throughout Queensland. Chief among these activists in Queensland was Margaret Thorp. A life long Quaker, and organiser with the Women’s Peace Army, Thorp was an important but often disregarded figure. In the conscription referendum, women were spoken to a lot, and about, but there is less focus on the agency of those women.

Margaret Thorp, HIllary Summy 2006.

Through 1916, Margaret Thorp travelled to mining towns like Gympie and Mt Morgan, advocating the progressive Quaker line that social reorganisation must take place to make peace permanent, and society socialist. Working with Emma Miller, long time AWU activist, radical women advocated against war and militarism.

The Worker, 28/10/1916

The vote on the 28th of October 1916 resulted in a ‘no’ vote, but this proved a mid point rather than a conclusion to the conflict over conscription. The next stage of the conflict proved bloodier and more polarising, and Queensland saw a lot of conflict.

The Worker, 8/11/1916

Hughes left the Labor Party federal caucus in November 1916, forming a Nationalist party with his dissident members of parliament and the opposition Liberals. This new party won the 1917 Federal election convincingly, and emboldened, Hughes pledged a second referendum in December of 1917.

Ray Evans, Loyalty and Disloyalty. 2006

The second campaign was even bitterer than the initial campaign. The social divisions revealed by the 1916 campaign hadn’t healed, and the ongoing devastation of the war added an edge of desperation to both sides. There was more violence, more conflict, and tensions were high. The propaganda of the conscriptionists started painting antis with the same ugliness they attributed to the Germans. This was also the campaign that pitted Queensland against the commonwealth most sharply, and Hughes versus Ryan.

Returned soldiers and loyalist organisations began to react violently to anti-war or anti-conscription demonstrations and meetings. New recruits and veterans trained in the use of force were increasingly willing to use force against ‘shirkers,’ and organised loyalist attacks against anti-conscription meetings. Earlier clashes had lead to the formation of the Labour Volunteer Army, to physically protect anti-conscriptionists from loyalist violence.

School of Arts, undated. The venue of the meeting where Margaret Thorp was attacked / Via thefotofanatic.com

Though, it was not just conscriptionist men who began to use violence. At the of School of Arts in Brisbane, at a meeting of conscriptionist women, Margaret Thorp attempted to speak to a motion encouraging the casting aside of the 1916 referendum and the institution of conscription by regulation. The Daily Standard tells that ‘the gathering dissolved into a seething mass of women… she was rolled on the floor, kicked, punched and scratched.’ The polarization of conscriptionist and anti-conscriptionist was extreme.

In meetings in Warwick and Toowoomba, when Hughes visited to speak for conscription on the 28th and 29th of November, fireworks and eggs were hurled from an open air anti-conscription meeting at conscriptionists leaving an address by Hughes, hitting several uniformed men, and an egg knocking of Hughes’s hat.

Throwing things was pretty common during rallies of the time, but Hughes’ reaction was not — he is reported to have reached into his jacket for the revolver he carried, yelling at police that they were to arrest the man responsible. As it was a large crowd, the Queensland Police were unable to find the man responsible. Hughes did not accept this. He threatened the police officer who had restrained him from shooting into the crowd, and through the conscriptionist press, he told a story of Queensland police acting for TJ Ryan and his disloyal, Sinn Feiner government.

And this brings us back to the night in November where the Queensland Police almost fought the army. This conflict was the crest of the wave of irrationality and division that had swept across Queensland, that the publication of HANSARD 37, the official recording of Queensland Parliament, was almost the trigger for civil war. Like Hughes’s reaction to the egg in Warwick, the anti-conscriptionist’s furtive plans for civil war were overwrought, irrational. T.J Ryan had delivered a speech against conscription, which had been suppressed by Hughes’ increasingly reactive government and censors, in the hope that the tradition of parliamentary privilege would allow these ideas to be shared. Hughes ordered his the suppression of HANSARD, under the War Precautions Act, and the seizure of the 50,000 copies printed to send around Queensland.

Evans and Ferrier, Radical Brisbane, 2004.

The police were ordered to protect the Government Printery, and the army to enter and seize HANSARD. The only thing that prevented armed conflict, it seems, is the actions of A.J. Cummings, the printer himself. A loyalist, he opened a side door to let in the army. But with the years of bitterness, it wouldn't have taken Cummings acting as a loyal State employee to tip Brisbane into open conflict with Canberra. T.J. Ryan declined to pursue the conflict, and didn’t repeat the comments.

The Worker, 27/12/1917

The 1917 referendum returned ‘no’ as well, with the margin in Queensland increased by 22,000. The conflict had concluded, while the World War wound down, with an armistice with Russia and the entry of the US into the war. Having lost twice, the conscriptionists were forced to accept the outcome of the referenda, at least on conscription.

Like every story in history, there’s no real end. There is change though, and politics of the conscription campaign were a transformation.

The Returned Service Leagues and loyalists were politicized, and radically reactionary. Conscriptionists and antis were primed for racist sentiments, and the Irish had tightly allied with the labour movement. There hadn’t been a civil war, but the conflict that almost lead to one wasn’t resolved.

After the referendum, a group of loyalists in Toowoomba gathered in consolation, returned soldiers, local worthies and patriots, shocked by a state they no longer recognized. They dedicated themselves to being vigilant against future disloyalty. For lack of a better place to end, I’ll leave the final word to Job Stone, because indeed, Queensland had demonstrated how it was the ‘most disloyal state in Australia.’