Cirrus@Austlit

During World War I, the radical left wing Melbourne newspaper the Labor Call was one of the few Australian newspapers which openly opposed the war and condemned Australian participation in it. Despite the rigours of wartime censorship, during the course of the war, the Labor Call still managed to publish a number of poems which expressed strong anti-war sentiments.

During World War I, very few Australian writers questioned the morality of the war or sought to examine the broader political and social dynamics which made the war possible. Victorian Labor figure and poet J.K. McDougall was an exception.

Throughout the war years, McDougall’s anti-war poems appeared at intervals in the radical left wing Melbourne newspaper the Labor Call. Given the dictates of wartime censorship, McDougall was rarely able to speak out against the war itself. However, he was able to publish poems which condemned war in general – which in effect amounted to a condemnation of World War I by inference. The fact that McDougall’s anti-war poems were published at all is in itself quite remarkable, although at least one of his poems is known to have been altered at the insistence of the censor.

As might be expected, McDougall's anti-war stance sparked a good deal of animosity. During the 1915 and 1917 federal election campaigns, McDougall's political opponents maintained that he was unfit for election to public office. During both the 1915 and 1917 election campaigns, in order to discredit him, McDougall's opponents circulated an extract from his Boer War era poem, 'The White Man's Burden', which they claimed insulted Diggers. In 1919, a group of recently returned ex-servicemen were so outraged by 'The White Man's Burden', that they drove up to McDougall's home at Maroona, in Western Victoria, and abducted and then tarred and feathered him.