Universities and Conscription: The 'Yes' campaigns and the University of Melbourne

‘No event in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia’, Leslie Jauncey writes in The Story of Conscription, his classic study of the conscription referendums, ‘created more feeling and interest in the community than the two referenda in 1916 and 1917’. Jauncey considered the importance of his work as ‘compiling an accurate history of the development of the anticonscription movement in Australia’.1 In the century that has passed since the 1916 referendum, there has been no equivalent work on the pro-conscription campaign, nor has quite the same enthusiastic conviction been expressed over this period about the need to document the movement for the Yes vote. While there have been many individual studies undertaken – largely through biographies of key figures such as such as Billy Hughes2 – or organisations like the Australian Women’s National League, National Council of Women (NCW), the Protestant Churches, and the Imperial Round Table3 – we await a systematic and detailed study of those who supported conscription, and of why and how they did so.4 The Yes vote is invariably discussed in terms of why it lost, rather as a set of arguments or as a movement in its own right.5 As a result, the Yes case has been far less analysed and examined in the histories of the conscription campaigns than the No campaign.