Labor's Volunteer Army: The Fight Against the 1916 Conscription Referendum in Broken Hill

Virtually every community in Australia was profoundly affected by the Great War, but the response across the nation to the horrific events in Europe was not a uniform one. Hundreds of thousands of men would, and did, enlist in the military forces, but more than two-thirds of the 'eligibles' did not. Reactions to the call for patriotism - and so to enlistment - varied from state to state and from town to town, and these responses, in their turn, changed as the war 'progressed'. One discrete place to experience unusual and intense responses to the war was Broken Hill.For the inhabitants of Broken Hill, the Great War was a period of terrible economic and political upheaval. At this time, personal circumstances in the mining city were extreme and often fraught. The rates of illness and death from industrial accidents and diseases in the mines was a pressing and unresolved concern, and the industrial relations in the great Barrier mining camp were especially bitter. This was industry very much in the raw. Men laboured underground and were paid by the ton at rates negotiated directly with the company's representatives. Almost all the miners were members of what may have been the most militant union in the country, the Barrier branch of the Amalgamated Miners Association (AMA), and the union there was dominated by radicals drawn to Broken Hill by its keen industrialist reputation.