The Story of Conscription in Australia.

Bookseller Notes

Inscribed by the author on the flyleaf: 'To Tom Barker, "the heart and brains of the I.W.W. in the Commonwealth" [see text, p. 228], in appreciation of his great part in the defeat of conscription in Australia in 1916-1917. Sincerely, Leslie C. Jauncey'. Barker is thanked in the Preface and mentioned numerous times in the text. Jauncey does not exaggerate the standing of Barker, a Cumbrian-born New Zealand trade unionist, within the International Workers of the World organisation - whose activities, some of which directly under Barker's influence, 'must be listed as one of the factors in the defeat of conscription in Australia' (p. 228). Barker was editor of the I.W.W. paper Direct Action from 1914, and twice arrested for distributing anti-conscription posters; following his latter prison-term, he was deported to Chile in 1918. By the time this book was published, he was in London, where he joined the Labour Party and continued his political activities.Jauncey was an Australian economist, whose education included an MA and PhD at Harvard University. His narrative of the Conscription issue in Australia begins in the mid nineteenth-century, but is primarily concerned with the crisis-point of the Great War, when successive referenda determined that the will of the people was against Conscription - in line with Jauncey's own convictions, as expressed in his inscription to Barker. Jauncey is said, in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, to have 'dabbled mildly in radical politics', something that the recipient participated in rather more concertedly - but his own opinions are clear, he closes in reference to how 'little faith should be placed in the overwhelming majority of leaders as bulwarks against militarism' (p. 353), and written at a time when the issue was once more on the agenda with the 'peace vote in England [...] a ray of hope in a European sky overcast with the threatening clouds of war and oppression'.