Amanda Laugesen investigates the legacy of journalist and editor Phillip Harris Australian soldiers fighting in the Great War created their own distinctive culture. One of the ways in which they did this was through troop publications, which they produced during service in both the Middle East and at the Western Front. These publications helped to celebrate a distinctive ‘Aussie’ identity, through their language, their humour and their assertion of what it meant to be an Australian. It also shaped a ‘soldiers’ culture’ and community identity essential to the coherence and morale of the Australian troops.
One of the most famous of these troop publications was Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine edited by a young former journalist named Phillip Harris. Aussie had its genesis in a regimental paper called Honk!, first produced on board the troopship Ceramic in 1915. Later in the war, Harris received permission from Army Headquarters to produce a paper for a wider audience, and from the beginning of 1918, Aussie was published—10 000 copies of the first edition were produced, but it was so popular that there was a further demand for up to 60 000.
Honk! and Aussie were produced on a small printing press that Harris brought with him to France. Few editors of troop publications were so lucky: many had to handwrite or type their editions and then duplicate them. The trials of producing Aussie were still enormous: the printing press was frequently damaged, the fourth issue was bombed out of existence, and paper shortages were an ongoing challenge. The August 1918 editorial reported that the editors had to scrounge paper from wrecked French printing houses, a situation finally alleviated when the War Office donated a paper supply. Despite such difficulties, Aussie continued to be published and provided an important source of entertainment for the troops on the Western Front. By the end of the war, Aussie had a circulation of 80–100 000, and had gained a reputation as the leading Australian troop publication. In 1920, the Port Fairy Gazette praised Harris’ dedication to keeping up a high standard and noted that some British newspapers praised Aussie as ‘the most remarkable trench paper on any front during the war’.
Aussie may or may not have been the most remarkable paper produced during the Great War, but it was certainly produced under remarkable conditions, and played a central role in shaping what it meant to be an Australian soldier—to be a ‘digger’. One of the ways that it did this was through reflecting the vernacular culture of the soldiers—soldiers were the contributors to the paper, which they in turn read, thus shaping their own culture. The development of soldiers’ slang is a good example of this. Australian soldiers developed their own distinctive language, which then appeared in the pages of troop publications where it gained wider currency and authority. Slang and the culture of Aussie helped to assert an Australian national identity in relation to the British and other dominion troops and was a key development in Australian national identity. The use of new or revived words like ‘Aussie’ (in both the sense of ‘Australia’ and ‘an Australian’), ‘digger’, ‘cobber’, ‘dinkum’, and ‘furphy’ all reinforced a primary identification as ‘Australians’ for the soldiers. The use of Bulletin-style slang, such as ‘babbler’ (from ‘babbling brook, rhyming slang for ‘cook’), ‘gazob’ (a ‘fool’), ‘kidstakes’ (‘pretence’) and ‘tabbie’ (a ‘girl’) all provided a sense of continuity with Australian culture and ‘home’. Using Australian slang instead of British slang (which also proliferated during the Great War) was also integral to shaping the digger identity.
The ‘Aussie slanguage’ helped to shape a ‘digger legend’: the digger as irreverent, informal, and using humour liberally to face the horrors of war. Indeed, slang and humour play an essential role in making experiences difficult to deal with easier to comprehend and more familiar. The ‘Aussie Dictionary’ printed in the first edition of Aussie and ‘for the use of those at Home’ contains some of these slang terms, but it is in the definitions that insights into the culture of the soldier can be found. ‘Hopover’ (to go over the top of the trenches) was defined as ‘A departure from a fixed point into the Unknown’ and ‘trenches’ were defined as ‘long narrow excavations in earth or chalk, sometimes filled with mud containing soldiers, bits of soldiers, salvage and alleged shelters’. The humour here was black and ironic, as so much of the Australian humour of the trenches was. Yet it also emphasised a gulf between the culture of the Australian soldiers and the culture of home.
After the war, Phillip Harris talked about this ‘Australian language’: The language of Aussie is the Aussie’s own. It was the kind of talk the average Digger issued to his cobbers. He was continually borrowing, collecting and achieving new words and phrases. Sometimes he had them thrust upon him. Anyway, he was getting so much Diggerese into his slanguage that he was beginning to develop a distinctive tongue. In fact, it is possible that if the War had lasted as long as some of us at one time thought it would, the Aussie would have returned to his native land speaking a foreign language. This gulf between soldier and home was an ongoing ambiguity within the digger culture produced in troop publications such as Aussie. Nevertheless, such publications played important functions for the ongoing morale and coherence of the Australian Imperial Force (A.I.F.), and for keeping the soldiers fighting. Soldier culture provided a means of creating community among the soldiers. Publications like Aussie enabled them to think of themselves as part of a broader Australian community participating in and experiencing the War. Troop publications in general were also important mediums for diffusing dissent—soldiers could use the forum of the paper to express any dissent or dissatisfaction, thus preventing any greater form of rebellion. A mild contempt for authority runs through Aussie, but it is largely sublimated through humour and irony. Aussie also allowed news to be distributed, preventing any sense of isolation in the troops. News was one of the things most keenly sought after in a war where information was censored, and where newspapers might take a very long time to reach the soldiers near the front. Aussie didn’t distribute military information that would have been subject to the censors, but did allow local notices and news from among the army and from home to be circulated. The paper also provided education to some extent: it encouraged reading by its very existence, but also had pages dedicated to the study of popular Australian writers and poets, including Banjo Paterson, C.J. Dennis and Bernard O’Dowd. Aside from educating soldiers in Australian literature, it again helped reinforce a sense of national identification.
When Phillip Harris arrived back in Australia, he decided to continue publication of Aussie. He renamed it Aussie: The Cheerful Monthly (from 1920) and opened up its pages to contributors from all sections of the Australian community. Harris foresaw that the magazine would help ‘transfer that splendid spirit of comradeship, enthusiasm and patriotism which made the Aussie Army supreme and world-honoured as a fighting organization into the national life, and build a foundation for the future nation that will make it supreme and honoured among the nations of the world.’ The postwar Aussie dedicated itself to sustaining the digger culture and defending the rights of the veterans, while also embracing the re-adjustment of the returned soldiers into civilian life, resulting in a curious magazine that seems slightly disjointed. Nevertheless, Aussie continued to be published throughout the 1920s, a testament to the persistence of digger culture in Australian life. The National Library of Australia holds copies of Aussie: The Australian Soldiers’ Magazine and Aussie: The Cheerful Monthly. The papers of Phillip Harris are in the Manuscript Collection (at MS 3915 and 7367) and include copies of Honk! AMANDA LAUGESEN is the author of Convict Words: Language in Early Colonial Australia (2002) and is currently working on two war-related projects: a study of Australian wartime slang from the Boer War to Vietnam (an Australian National Dictionary Centre research project), and a study of Australian soldiers’ culture during the Great War |
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