THE AUSTRALIAN NATIONALIST SENTIMENT conveyed by celebrated bush balladeer A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson's 1915 poem ‘We're All Australians Now’ represents a development which is widely recognised to have been common to the experience of the British dominions during and after the First World War. In these countries, the war came to be regarded as a milestone on the journey from colonial status to independent nationhood. Their war efforts may have been articulated in terms of the loyal defence of the British Empire and of the values ascribed to it, but the share taken by the dominions in mobilisation, sacrifice and ultimate victory was understood, as Paterson asserted of his own country, to make Australians feel more Australian in consequence. ‘We're All Australians Now’ was written at home in the summer of 1915 during a brief hiatus in Paterson's war service, which would shortly take him to Egypt as an officer of the Remount Service of the Australian Imperial Force. He was Australian born, the son of a Scotsman who had emigrated to New South Wales in the early 1850s but, with more socially elevated English and Irish forbears on his mother's side, he never traded on the Scottish end of his ancestry. He identified more readily with the country of his birth, which he had seen federated as a nation in 1901, and his literary work, especially ‘The Man from Snowy River’ and ‘Waltzing Matilda’, was already influential in formulating the romantic figure of the bushman as a leading character in the foundation myth of Australian identity. By the end of the First World War, the classic image of the Australian soldier, the strapping, scruffy, unflappable veteran of Gallipoli, Pozières and Romani, had been melded with Paterson's bushman, principally through the influence of war correspondent, official historian and propagandist C. E. W. Bean, to ingrain the archetype of the ideal Australian in popular consciousness.

If, by 1918, to be an Australian soldier was to be a true Australian, much the same might be said for the war's impact on national consciousness in New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and, though with a different long-term outcome, in Newfoundland.