Army History, Issue 85, Fall 2012 - US Army Center Of Military History

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Jean Bou is a historian at the Australian War Memorial and a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. He is cowriting a forthcoming volume of the Official History of Australian Peacekeeping, Humanitarian and Post–Cold War Operations. He has a Ph.D. in history from the University of New South Wales (at the Australian Defence Force Academy) and is the author or coeditor of several books on Australian military history including Light Horse (New York, 2010), Australia’s Palestine Campaign (Canberra, 2010), Australian Peacekeeping (New York, 2009), and The Oxford Companion to Australian Military History, Second Edition (Oxford, 2008). As an Army Reserve officer he is a member of the Australian Army History Unit. Trooper John Dalby, New South Wales, c. 1900 Australian War Memorial
I n September 1909 a group of Australian Army officers filled a room at the United Service Institution of New South Wales to hear Maj. W. F. Everett, a permanent officer then appointed the brigademajor of the 2d Light Horse Brigade, deliver a lecture entitled, “The future use of cavalry, and our light horse.” Having recently attended the 1909 autumn maneuvers of both the British and French armies, as well as visiting the battlefields of the Russo-Japanese War, Everett had returned to argue in his lecture that the regiments and brigades of the Australian Light Horse, being neither proper full cavalry nor the more limited mounted infantry, needed to be organized and trained “on definite lines.” 1 There was nothing extraordinary about Everett’s lecture, nor the discussion that resulted from it. They were but a contemporary example of the professional discussions about military developments that then occurred at officer gatherings and in service journals, much as they still do today. At this lecture, however, the officers, in discussing what form Australia’s mounted troops should take, were not simply debating matters of organization or armament, but trying to grapple with some fundamental matters about the military system of which they were part. These matters stemmed in large part from an ambitious desire to create a modern, efficient, and effective military force from an organization where almost all officers and soldiers were part-time and the resources of all kinds were far from plentiful. One of the officers present at Everett’s lecture, Col. George Lee, by then a senior permanent officer and respected veteran of the Boer War, noted: It is absolutely impossible to train our mounted troops up to the standard of Imperial cavalry. . . . We can put into the field first-class irregular light horse. . . . I have no hesitation in saying that with the material we have in Australia an exceedingly useful force can be made available. 2 In broad terms this is what Australia had supplied to fight in the Boer War of 1899–1902, which, if sometimes imperfect, had been adequate—but what about the next war? As Major Everett pointed out in his lecture, “we will not have the Boers to fight again, and much higher training will be required against European troops.” 3 And so it would prove to be. AMBITION ADVERSITY Developing an Australian Military Force, 1901–1914 by Jean bou AND The Commonwealth Military Forces, as Australia’s Army was then known, was created between the Boer War and the First World War, and then, just a few years before the Great War, almost completely recreated. In both cases the schemes implemented reflected the fundamental ambition to create something effective and efficient, but each time the efforts would be severely troubled by the problems that beset them. The Commonwealth Military Forces came into being just a few months after Federation when, on 1 March 1901, the now state governments passed the control of the various colonial forces they had maintained to the new federal government and the Department of Defence, established in Melbourne. In most of the colonies, efforts to maintain some form of local defense force had begun with a degree of seriousness in the 1850s, but generally speaking it had only been since the mid-1880s that the larger colonies had become prosperous and developed enough to maintain them on an ongoing basis, a resolve that had been severely tested during the economic depression of the 1890s. The forces that the Commonwealth inherited were all recognizable as examples of British-pattern nineteenth 29
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Army History, Issue 85, Fall 2012 - US Army Center Of Military History

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