By the beginning of the First World War, Australians were increasingly identifying as somewhat different to their predominantly British ancestors. Poets, artists, and literary figures in particular were keen to emphasize those differences and stress that the Australian character was different to the British character. Indeed, C.E.W. Bean asserted in the opening pages of his Official History that ‘Australians came to exhibit a peculiar independence of character. Their fathers, usually men of an assertive and forcible disposition, had cut loose from tradition and authority when they left the British Isles’. Whereas independent and democratic American values of the 1860s were rooted in the republican tradition, similar Australian values were rooted in the assertion of that unique Australian character. By the 1910s, the Australian working classes had incorporated values of independence, irreverence, and egalitarianism into their class identity; and those values formed the basis for their assumptions within the civilian moral economy.

While Australians increasingly asserted their identity as a different people, links between Australia and Britain remained strong. When war broke out in 1914 many young Australian men and women felt a sense of duty to the British Empire, to their king, and to their country, and they voluntarily enlisted in the military in their hundreds of thousands. Indeed, throughout the war, some 417,000 men and women enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (aif). In Ernest Scott's analysis of the occupational backgrounds of members of the aif he noted that 112,452 men were previously tradesmen, 99,252 were labourers, 57,430 came from ‘country callings’, 6,562 were from seafaring occupations, and an additional 14,122 were from miscellaneous occupations. Tradesmen, labourers, and men from country callings alone formed 81.36 per cent of those who embarked; and those typically workingclass men would also form the bulk of the rank and file.

As with the 2nd Maine, the rank structure of the Australian military quickly came to reflect the class structure of civil society. Middle-class men became officers while working-class men made up the rank and file. The same pattern of relationships that those men had experienced in civil society was experienced within the military.