The Link: a weekly circular letter linking Queenslanders at home and at the front

First published in Brisbane on 20 June 1917 as a weekly until August 1918 this modest newsletter sold for 1 penny an issue or 3/3 for a half year (delivered) subscription. In keeping with its aspiration to "link Queenslanders at home and at the front", free copies were made available for sending to soldiers in overseas battle zones. The editor, John ‘Jack’ Crampton Andrews (1897-1990) enlisted in 1915 and returned home medically unfit in February 1917, the consequence of an ankle injury sustained at Marseilles, in September of the previous year. The son of an Australian Army captain and unquestionably committed to the Australian war effort, Jack Andrews may well have been seeking a means of contributing to the cause he so passionately espoused.

State Library holds just nine issues of The Link  published between 23 August 1917 and 28 August 1918 – and as far as we can determine these constitute the most “complete” set of issues held in any Australian library institution. Of unique value as a primary source work, this hitherto obscure publication offers us a revealing insight into the lives and attitudes of Queenslanders who were affected by the war experience on two fronts.

In its own unassuming way it is also a piece of our history, bearing testament to the opening up of the social and political divides which Raymond Evans writes about so compellingly in Loyalty and Disloyalty, a work which explores the home front experience in Queensland during and immediately after World War I.  A case in point is The Link’s lead story in volume 1, issue 11, provocatively titled Australia watching her Defenders who Fear to Fight in France...

I say boys, this isn’t good enough!
Men who ought to be working, fiddling and singing silly songs to the Red flag while their mates are in France, don’t join this lot.

Men who are not Australians, not Britons, not anything, leading men who have decent blood in their veins, don’t join them.

Although much of the content - homespun poetry, short humorous pieces, “fashion notes” and personal stories from the home and war fronts - is determinedly light-hearted, there is as well an underlying, serious note which reflects the attitudes and social mores of the last two years of the war. The historical interest of this publication is in the overriding themes which are about the war effort at home, the need to support Australian soldiers at the front and the reflected evidence of wartime deprivation in Queensland.

Libby Fielding, State Library of Queensland