1939 - a later generation may be at a loss understand why

Chapter 3 - The Volunteers
Oct 1939 Official Barriers 55
One man 2 who had driven from west of the Darling River in New South Wales to enlist at the nearest recruiting office later wrote his recollections of the day.

Coonamble (he wrote) had not been thrown off its balance by the war, or by the fact that men were arriving to enlist there.

2 L.M. Long (of Goodooga, NSW) later Capt 2/3 Bn.

Chapter 3 - The Volunteers

A hundred years from today, when Australia has produced a strongly- flowing native culture, and absorption in the affairs of east Asia and the Pacific have made Europe seem more remote, a later generation may be at a loss to understand why Australians (and New Zealanders) volunteered so readily for service half a world away. Nine out of ten of the recruits had been born in Australia of Australian parents, were intensely proud of their national independence and would have fought for it against all comers.

Chapter 3 - The Volunteers

The men who joined the army were the type who stood up in trams and gave their seats to women. There are people who are constitutionally unable to resist when a call is made, or when they feel they are under some obligation. I doubt whether many of them could tell why they enlisted. The real cause was something deeper than they could fathom. We could not see ourselves as fitting the glowing words of Masefield about the Anzacs at Gallipoli, and, although we were born with a tradition to carry on, and were proud of it, we were only too ready to admit that we were a ragtime army--though woe betide the militia or the civilian who suggested that. There was, I believe, a large body of men--perhaps the majority--who were adventurers at heart but common citizens by force of circumstance--how many of us are not--who saw in this call a glorious combination--the life of an adventurer with the duties of a citizen.

"Almost all contemporary left-wing writers of this generation and the last attacked the idea of nationalism," wrote Rebecca West, after the war.5
5 In "The Meaning of Treason", Harper's Magazine, Oct 1947. .