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...in the foundation years of the Commonwealth up to the First World War and beyond, were energetically pro-Empire. In short, there is reluctance to acknowledge that they existed and had played a significant role in the country's political history and cultural life. These men and women saw Australia's future bound up with the fate of the British nation of which they, understandably, considered the Dominions to be an integral part. Leonie Foster's study of the Australian Chapter of the Round Table of which Archibald Strong was a most active member did much to remedy scholarly neglect on this influential cohort of intellectuals. (2) I followed up with an article entitled, "Australia's Academic Garrison 1914-1915" in 1991, (3) in which I drew attention to the threat to Australia that leading academics perceived in the rise of Prussian-German militarism. Among the luminaries in that group of intellectuals was Archibald T. Strong, who most vigorously championed the view that if Australia and the other Dominions did not declare solidarity with the mother country and give wholehearted support to the war against Imperial Germany, and instead stood aside and allowed Britain to go under, then the liberal parliamentary Anglo-Saxon political culture that had taken firm root in Australia could not be guaranteed in a future where Prussia-Germany exerted the hegemony in Britain's place. Well informed scholars in Australia did not believe that the great distance of the Antipodes from the flash points of European rivalries would ensure the Dominions' security, especially in the age of massive naval armament. This was a factor that sceptics on the Left refused to take into account. They cultivated the fond illusion that Australia was just too far away to be of interest to policy-makers in Berlin and would therefore never be in any danger of attack or invasion. It was against this kind of ignorance that academics who formed the War Committees that were convened in each Australian university after August 1914 had to contend. Archibald Thomas Strong was arguably among the most eloquent and energetic of these men and women. This article will focus on his contribution to keeping the Australian public informed about the world situation in general and about the "Prussian Menace" in particular. Moreover, he wrote verse in order also to inspire Empire patriotism at a time of deadly peril. Strong was a literary scholar and a poet whose published work achieved respectful notice at the time.
A.T. Strong was the son of the professor of classics at the University of Melbourne, H.A. Strong, and was born there, 30 December, 1876. However, in 1883 the Strong family left for Liverpool, where father Strong had been appointed to the chair of Latin at the university college. Consequently, all of Archibald Strong's formative years were spent at school and university in England. Without doubt, at this time, Strong acquired the values of British boys of his class. He attended Sedbergh School where it is said "he went through a training Spartan even beyond the wont of English public schools [...],. (4) But the physical rigors were no less stringent than the intellectual because at this school Strong received a thorough grounding in Classical languages. And from Sedbergh he went up to the University of Liverpool, distinguishing himself in football and cricket, while editing the undergraduate magazine and graduating with first class honours in Classics, gaining a prize for Greek.
Strong clearly was fulfilling all the ambitions a scholarly father could possibly have cultivated for a studious son, and in 1896 Strong entered Magdalen College, Oxford, in order to read "Greats". Here, however, a first eluded him; not for want of diligence but through the loss of two terms due to illness. Nevertheless the sojourn at Oxford was of great benefit to Strong for among other things, he lodged for his final year there in the house of Compton Mackenzie, the later famous Scottish novelist and musicologist. The acquaintanceship with the great names of the then literary/scholarly world clearly made its impact. Moreover, Strong was becoming ever more deeply rooted in England and Europe. Indeed, after graduation he spent a semester at Marburg University where he improved his German, adding to his already acquired proficiency in French. These abilities were to have considerable influence on how he came to view the world in later years. The war would make him intensely Germanophobic on the one hand, and Francophile on the other. (5)
After his academic training it had been Strong's intention to read for the bar in London but again ill health dogged him; so much so that by 1901 he decided to leave England for his homeland in the expectation that the climate would be kinder to him. So, after arriving in Hobart in January 1902 where he spent a mere two weeks, Strong took up residence back in the city of his birth, Melbourne. Obviously, had it not been for his parlous health Strong would have made a career in the law in London, but fate decreed otherwise. As a citizen of the Empire he made his choice, and it was in the Victorian capital that he spent the next twenty years of his life, prior to his move to Adelaide to accept the Jury Chair of English Language and Literature in 1922.
Dr V.A. Edgeloe, sometime Registrar at the University of Adelaide, who had researched Strong's career with the intention, obviously, of inspiring someone to undertake a full length biography of him, wrote:
There [in Melbourne] he began immediately to take an allround interest in the conditions of life: Commonwealth politicians in respect of free trade and protectionism and of defence; taxation; industry generally, including the Factory Act, wages policies, working hours (the 48-hour, six day) week. And the effects of prescribing minimum and maximum wages; agricultural prospects; (especially the fact that the smallest party had the balance of power and thereby in large measure dominance of legislative policies in the three States New South Wales, Victoria and South Australia--in which there were three-party parliaments); the influence of the Churches; and the White Australia policies.
The image we gain of the young Strong is that of a citizen deeply concerned with the social, political and economic affairs of the country and its place within the Empire. Already in 1903 he began contributing articles on "Australia Today" to the Liverpool Daily Post on such subjects as "Imperialism and the Economy"; "Preferential Duties"; "Socialist legislation"; "The White Australia Policy"; "Kanaka Labour and the Sugar Industry", all burning issues of the day on which he reported objectively without revealing his own personal predilections. (6) Moreover, by 1908 he had begun to contribute articles of a literary...
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