A house divided: Queensland in November 1918 [Blog post]

A house divided: Queensland in November 1918 [Blog post]

On the night of 11 November 1918 Philip Gibbs, the most famous British War correspondent of the First World War, sat down at his typewriter to compose his final dispatch. Although he had spent almost four years on the Western Front, he was an avowed romantic, one whose colourful prose was more popular with Queensland newspaper editors than Charles Bean, whose mania for detail led English correspondent Ellis Ashmead Bartlett to suspect that he actually counted the bullets. Gibbs was deeply moved by ‘the beautiful silence of the nights of peace … as though God gave a benediction to the wounded soul of the world’.1 Almost a world away in the Australian state of Queensland, there was anything but silence, as thousands of people took to the streets to celebrate. The cost of this long awaited victory had been exorbitant. Half of eligible Australian males had enlisted, and of that number 60,000 were killed and 145,000 wounded. For Queensland, the impact of 6,850 dead and 15,950 wounded was catastrophic. The war had indeed wounded Queensland’s soul, but peace would not bring with it the benediction that Gibbs saw so clearly from his hotel room in Mons, where for the British the war both began and ended.

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