World War I

The Great War (First World War, 1914-1918) opened up divisions. Pyrmont – home to a polyglot population of sailors and stevedores - was especially affected by the internment of German and Austrian citizens and often their Australian- born children. 35,000 people in Australia had been born in those countries. Nobody knew how many of them or their children felt divided loyalties. 4,500 were interned, including naturalised Australians and Australian-born.

Right from the start, there was some opposition to the war: 12 unionists from the Industrial Workers of the World were jailed in 1916, on charges of sedition and sabotage. (One was Donald Grant, a future councillor and senator.) The hardships imposed on working men and women – rising costs of living and declining wages – intensified class conflicts more broadly. These tensions erupted in the Great Strike of 1917, which directly involved waterside workers. The suppression of the strike did nothing to endear unionists to government policies. Prime Minister Billy Hughes had to abandon his Pyrmont constituency – and split the Labor Party – when he tried to bring in conscription.

The Protestant churches broadly supported the war. So, at first, did the Catholic Church, on patriotic principle, but also as leverage for Home Rule in Ireland, and to gain state funding for local Catholic schools. That commitment evaporated after the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, and the savage repression that followed.

When Hughes campaigned for conscription in two referenda in 1917, the opposition was both sectarian and class-based. By 1918 Pyrmont was more divided than it had ever been.

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