When Australia joined the war in August 1914, the reaction was one of excitement, especially among young men. Australian men answered the call to war with a sense of adventure, duty and enthusiasm. As Australian armed forces grew from 3,000 to 50,000, some soldiers struggled with the discipline of military life.

The word "New Right" appeared during the 1964 presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater to designate "the emergence, in response to liberalism (in the American sense of the term [i.e. social liberalism]), of an uninhibited right: ultraconservative, imbued with religious values, openly populist, anti-egalitarian,