The Rifle Club Movement and Australian Defence 1860-1941

The Rifle Club Movement and Australian Defence 1860-1941 Andrew Kilsby A thesis in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of New South Wales School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences February 2014 Abstract This thesis examines the rifle club movement and its relationship with Australian defence to 1941. It looks at the origins and evolution of the rifle clubs and associations within the context of defence developments. It analyses their leadership, structure, levels of Government and Defence support, motivations and activities, focusing on the peak bodies. The primary question addressed is: why the rifle club movement, despite its strong association with military rifle shooting, failed to realise its potential as an active military reserve, leading it to be by-passed by the military as an effective force in two world wars? In the 19th century, what became known as the rifle club movement evolved alongside defence developments in the Australian colonies. Rifle associations were formed to support the Volunteers and later Militia forces, with the first ‘national’ rifle association formed in 1888. Defence authorities came to see rifle clubs, especially the popular civilian rifle clubs, as a cheap defence asset, and demanded more control in return for ammunition grants, free rail travel and use of rifle ranges. At the same time, civilian rifle clubs grew in influence within their associations and their members resisted military control. An essential contradiction developed. The military wanted rifle clubs to conduct shooting ‘under service conditions’, which included drill; the rifle clubs preferred their traditional target shooting for money prizes. The ageing leadership of the rifle associations, although pro-military in sentiment, failed to integrate the rifle clubs into the military structure and was unable to appease either the military or the clubs. The end result was a disconnect between the needs and aims of the military and rifle club movement, and a growing mutual disdain. The outcome, when war came in 1914 and again in 1939, was that the military ignored the movement and developed new structures to meet the wartime challenges. This thesis argues that this outcome was inevitable given the failure of the rifle club movement either to break away from its military roots, or adapt to evolving military requirements in accordance with its traditional aims. Table of Contents Page Introduction 1-18 Chapter 1. Rifle shooting and the Volunteers to 1870 1-28 Chapter 2. Sowing the seeds of contradiction 1871-1887 1-33 Chapter 3. Progress and pain 1888-1896 1-32 Chapter 4. War at home and on the veldt 1897-1900 1-23 Chapter 5. The general sets his sights 1901-1904 1-18 Chapter 6. The seeds of discord 1905-1910 1-24 Chapter 7. To shoot or drill 1911-1918 1-20 Chapter 8. Two steps back, one step forward 1919-1928 1-26 Chapter 9. The Depression years 1929-1934 1-17 Chapter 10. Sidelined again 1935-1941 1-22 Conclusion, Annexes 1-24 Introduction Firearms were an integral part of Australian colonial and early Federation culture. Whether for military purposes, represented by British Imperial garrison regiments and, after 1870, by local Volunteers and then Militia, or for policing, for self-defence or game and bird sport, a great number of the adult population (and many juveniles) owned a firearm or knew someone who did. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, rifle shooting as sport was an ‘every man’s’ pastime, which most people could afford to enjoy. In many regards, however, rifle shooting became more than a sport. There was one major reason for this development and one major consequence. War scares in the 19th century, of which there were many, drove the development of a popular Volunteer military movement where musketry was a primary focus. This led to the development of rifle associations from 1860, created to promote rifle shooting among Volunteers. Rifle shooting for defence purposes evolved, albeit somewhat differently in each colony, into a powerful and militarised rifle club movement by the time of Federation, accelerated by patriotic feelings during the Boer War.1 What became known as the ‘rifle club movement’ by the time of Federation in 1901 had already been a long time in gestation.2 By 1911, rifle club members were a well-entrenched component of the defence system as ‘reservists’. By 1917, more than 100,000 Australians belonged to rifle clubs and another 25,000 more had enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Yet by 1920 the rifle club movement faced disbandment when the military chiefs rejected it as adding no military value. Despite the fact of its powerful backers at almost all levels of society, and its presence in almost every town and city in 1 By 1901, at the height of the Boer War, Victoria alone had over 20,000 riflemen under arms. J.M. Templeton, The Consolidation of the British Empire, the Growth of Citizen Soldiership and the Establishment of the Australian Commonwealth, Sands & McDougall, Melbourne, 1901, p. 53. Colonel Templeton, at this time in command of rifle clubs in Victoria, had more men under his command than the State Commandant. 2 The term was coined by Colonel Templeton around 1901 with the unprecedented success of the rifle clubs in Victoria in forming, in effect, a ‘third force’ in military affairs. In two seminal lectures delivered by leaders of the rifle club movement in 1901 and 1909 respectively, the ‘Movement’ was described as an indispensable part of the Defence establishment and as an undeniable part of Australia’s cultural heritage. J.M. Templeton, The Consolidation of the British Empire, and Campbell, J. B., The Rifle Club Movement: A Distinct Factor in the Defence Problem, Fraser & Jenkinson, Melbourne, 1909. 6 Australia, the rifle club movement failed to capitalise on its apparently natural attributes—and popularity—and faced extinction, at least as a formal part of the defence organisation. Excluded from the military establishment when it was moved administratively under the Minister for Defence, and then hit again by the effects of the Great Depression, the leadership of the rifle club movement worked assiduously to be placed under the Army once again. The movement, by and large, believed that its natural and rightful place was as part of the military reserves of Australia. In 1931 it succeeded, only to find that the gulf between the rifle shooting requirements of the Militia and that of rifle clubs had diverged for too long ever to be fully compatible again. By 1941, with the need to form a new home defence guard for Australia, politicians and the Defence establishment chose not to depend on the rifle club movement as its basis. Again, through World War Two, the rifle club movement was sidelined, as it had been in World War One. Despite the numbers of Australians engaged in defence-related rifle shooting from 1860 to 1941, and its obvious historical significance, the rifle club movement has been largely neglected by historians. The historiography of the movement is thin. Despite its well-established place in the popular culture and defence structure of Australia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, virtually nothing has been written about the rifle club movement, let alone about its complex relationship with defence.3 Short and inadequate histories of only two rifle associations have been written, and these reveal little about the relationship with defence and the frictions which often arose.4 Such individual club histories which do exist are often sparse in detail, relying heavily on rare records and fading memories. Most early rifle club and rifle association records have been neglected, lost or 3 Despite the prominent individuals associated with the rifle shooting movement - about 42 in the Australian Dictionary of Biography alone up to 1920 - no detailed memoirs were left by its leaders. 4 C.H. Cromack, The History of the National Rifle Association of New South Wales,1860-1956, Utility Press, Sydney, 1956 and A.T. Jackson, Southern Queensland Rifle Association Jubilee, 1877-1927: a brief History of the Association during the past Fifty Years, Southern Queensland Rifle Association, Brisbane, 1927. Cromack’s history, the more substantial of the two, relied heavily on the National Rifle Association (NRA) of NSW’s council meeting minutes and notes from a long-standing secretary of the Association, George Douglas. Jackson’s history is designed as a souvenir book rather than a detailed account - it completely missed, for example, the formation of the first Queensland Rifle Association in 1861. Courier, 16 May 1861, p. 2. 7 destroyed—some casually, some in accidents.5 Even the annual reports of the rifle associations, with the exception of those in New South Wales (NSW), are rare.6 Books written by individual riflemen of the period tend to focus either on the art and science of rifle shooting itself or the social aspects of the sport, and offer few insights into the politics or policies affecting rifle shooting. In the pre-Federation period, no club or association histories were written at all, and only two travel accounts exist of rifle teams from Australia competing abroad.7 Similarly, there has not been a history of rifle shooting in Australia written for the past 50 years, with the exception of technical compendiums.8 For their part, Parliamentary records are usually brief, at least until a Government-appointed Director of Rifle Associations and Clubs began to make reports to Parliament from 1913, but even these kept mainly to statistical reporting. Defence records, with the exception of Victoria where a Defence Department and Minister existed from the mid-1880s, generally do not report in detail about the rifle club movement until after Federation.

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