There are three principal themes in Newton’s story: what he describes as the pre-emptive and reckless nature of Australia’s offer of military and naval support; the effect of the offer on the deliberations of a British Cabinet that was divided over whether to become involved in a major Continental conflict; and the actions of the Australian Labor Party in the days before the war began. About all these issues, Newton seeks to add nuance to the historiographical orthodoxy that asserts that Australians were united on the path to war, in contrast to the vacillating British government.

Prime Minister Joseph Cook

At the urging of the Scottish governor-general, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, Prime Minister Joseph Cook met with three of his Cabinet colleagues on 3 July 1914 to consider Australia’s position in regard to the European crisis. As a result of this meeting, the government undertook to provide Great Britain with an expeditionary force of 20,000 troops and the transfer of the entire Royal Australian Navy in the event of war. The troops would be at the ‘complete disposal of the Home Government’, and all costs would be borne by Australia.

Newton’s crucial point is that Cook’s offer came forty hours before Britain resolved to go to war, at a time when the Australian government was well aware of division within the British Cabinet between interventionists and neutralists. He claims that ‘the Cook cabinet simply hurtled ahead of events’. Newton does not entertain the prospect that Australia might have stayed out of the war; it lacked both the legal power and the will to remain neutral. But he argues, in a memorable phrase, that there was a ‘deep, pathetic significance’ about Australia’s mode of entry. But can it reasonably be claimed that Australia jumped ‘rapidly and recklessly’ into the war? On another reading, Australia’s offer of an expeditionary force (which had been planned for by a Fisher Labor government a few years earlier) was a responsible statement of intent, given that Britain was in the process of weighing its options. The offer must also have been expected by Britain, given the imperial connection and the fact that New Zealand and Canada had already given commitments.

Newton goes on to claim that Australia’s ‘reckless offer’ gave grist to those in the British Liberal Cabinet who were pushing for war. He describes in gripping detail the divisions between the interventionists (the most prominent of whom were Prime Minister Asquith, Foreign Secretary Grey, and Lord of the Admiralty Churchill) and the neutralists who believed that Britain’s best interests would not be served by involvement in a general European war (four ministers resigned once it became clear that the hawks would triumph). To substantiate his assertion that the Australian offer made British involvement more likely, Newton cites the diary recollection of a Conservative member of parliament and the opinion of a British naval historian, but presents no evidence from the Cabinet documents and personal papers he studied in great detail.

Hell-Bent shows that the Australian election campaign of mid-1914 provided a critical context for Australia’s entry into the Great War. As the July crisis unfolded, both Cook’s Liberals and Fisher’s Labor Party were eager to be seen to be standing firm with Britain. Fisher famously said that Australia would support Britain ‘to our last man and our last shilling’. That statement, first made on the hustings in Colac, was a masterful piece of political rhetoric designed to counter the charge that Labor, filled as it was with Irish Catholics eager for Home Rule, was ‘tepid on the subject of the British Empire’ and reluctant to support the mother country in war.

Newton traces the vexed history of the Labor Party’s position on defence issues. In an argument that challenges the perception that pre-war Labor was a flagship of progressive politics, Newton shows how Labor politicians with loyalist inclinations, such as Fisher and W.M. Hughes, triumphed over those who had pushed for a more independent foreign policy in the years after the Boer War. Conservative Labor elements were helped in no small part by Australians’ anxiety about their geographical isolation from Britain and the threat posed by Japan. When Newton concludes that by 1914, ‘Australia had decided to stick to Britain – like a pilot fish to a shark’, he is describing the position of the Labor leadership as well as Cook’s Liberals.

When Cook announced the details of Australia’s commitment of troops and ships on 3 July, Fisher and his party were silent. In the heightened atmosphere of an election campaign, the Labor leadership effectively gave the fervent loyalists a blank cheque, for fear of being portrayed as anti-British and weak on security issues. It is tantalising to wonder what might have transpired had the nation not been in the midst of an election campaign. Would dissenting labour voices, silenced in the discipline of an election campaign, have spoken out?

Hell-Bent makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the circumstances in which Australia came to participate in the Great War. Newton does a brilliant job of exposing the political compromises and diplomatic intrigues beneath what appears to have been a bipartisan and uncomplicated decision to go to war, even if the book’s claims that Australia’s offer of military support was reckless and that it gave impetus to those in Britain who wanted war are not decisively proved. In Hell-Bent, Douglas Newton presents in an original way the allegorical story of Australia’s relationship with Great Britain. His book also functions as a cautionary tale for contemporary times about the potent and dangerous mixture of politics and war.