Join us in person or online for a seminar with PhD candidate Alex Barilaro.
A Political Battlefield – The Attempted Coup of Monash and Birdwood in 1918
1918 was a triumphant year for an Australian military force whose victorious performance validated Gallipoli. But that story was not alone one of military might and supreme Western Front prowess. It was a political battlefield, with gossip and politicking taking the place of shells and bullets. In February 1918, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom tried to usurp the head of the British Army, and the Prime Minister of Australia saw fit to repeat his allies’ enterprise in June, as he tried to prevent the ascension of one John Monash and, crucially, completely remove the figure of his predecessor, William Birdwood. Drawing on archival material from both British and Australian sources, and conducting the interrogation of events through the eyes of the Prime Minister and his attack dog, a journalist by the name of Keith Murdoch, rather than through the much-traversed letters of Monash and singular focus of Birdwood, this paper seeks to explore how the Australian military became a battlefield for incipient Australian nationalism. It also seeks to explore exactly why Hughes felt personally motivated to involve himself in the running of a war, and exactly how much power Keith Murdoch held not only within Australia, but within the greater prism of the British Empire’s First World War campaign. The involvement of Australia’s historian Charles Bean in the attempted overthrow of Monash’s leadership provides a problem for the purity of an Anzac story which emerged from his writing in the following years. This research, extracted as a chapter in a PhD thesis dealing with the politicised A.I.F. during the First World War, demonstrates how fraught and contingent the entire A.I.F. became in 1918, as Australians not only became cognisant of their own potential on the battlefield, but as a nation within the British world.
29 April 2026, 11am AEST
Burwood: C2.05.01
Waurn Ponds: IC1.108
Zoom: Click here.
Alessandro (Alex) Barilaro is a third-year PhD candidate at Deakin, specialising in the First World War and the human dynamics of radical change, having completed his Bachelor of Honours (First Class) at Deakin. He completed the Australian War Memorial’s Summer Scholarship in 2025 and won the C.E.W. Bean prize for military history for his Honours thesis in the same year. He is interested in the study of revolutions, change, and human dynamics during cataclysmic events.
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