26 September 2023

Law in War: Freedom And Restriction In Australia During The Great War

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Reviewed by Rama Gaind.

By Catherine Bond, NewSouth Books, $34.99.

War now-a-days involves a great deal of law.” This quote by Sir Robert Garran – lawyer and ‘Australia’s first public servant’ – is a precursor to the far-flung message of Law in War.

Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law, UNSW Sydney, Catherine Bond elaborates on how beliefs were shattered for Australians who believed that in times of crisis, the Federal Government would be there to support them, but not interfere with how they lived. The stories in this book highlight how “those assumptions were made in World War I and how, across the four years of that conflict, such beliefs were shattered. The shadow of Australian law during that war continues to this day”.

“I chose to examine the extent and impact of Australian law during the First World War through the eyes, voices and experiences of 13 individuals, because all too often I have found law to be divorced from people.”

Few historians have considered the impact of the law on Australians during the Great War. Bond injects life into the laws that were central to the way people were managed in Australia 1914–18.

During WWI, law was used in everyday life as a tool to discriminate, oppress, censor and deprive many Australians of property, liberty and basic human rights. A nation often amends its laws during war, not least to regulate life at home.

Engaging and revelatory, Law in War holds those who wrote the laws to account, exposing the sheer breadth and impact of this wartime legal regime, the injustices of which linger to this day. More than anything, it illuminates how ordinary people were caught up in – and sometimes destroyed by – these laws created in the name of victory.

This well-researched book exposes the dangerous consequences of legislation passed for the purpose of winning a conflict. Even the contemporary relevance of Bond’s book has been considerably heightened by COVID-19. The ongoing pandemic is having a dramatic impact on people’s lives. Here is a timely historical text in the ‘midst of this crisis: even a century later, lessons from that era are still instructive today’.

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