Very patriotic Australians were intent on shaming all Germans. Newspapers carried reports of inflammatory speeches condemning what was called ‘the enemy within’. There were reports of name calling and pub fights.

Nowhere more so than in the Border district, where whole communities were branded disloyal, even by the Prime Minister, Billy Hughes.

In this month, marking the centenary of a referendum on conscription in December 1917, it is appropriate to pause to remember the hurt and humiliation endured by the German and German-Australian residents of this district.

The district just north of Albury was the biggest German settlement in NSW. German settlers had established there an extensive network of Lutheran churches and attached schools, where they retained the German religion and language.

In spite of their loud and repeated protestations of loyalty to Australia and the empire, Germans and German-Australian dual nationals were suspect. Patriots said Germans were too pro-German to be loyal.

They called for German schools to be shut and Lutheran pastors to be compelled to preach in English not German. They demanded that employers refuse Germans jobs. They made official complaints about the loyalty of people they did not like.

Accusations of disloyalty became most frenetic during and especially after the referenda on conscription in October 1916 and December 1917.

At the polling places, electoral officials could set aside the votes of people born in an enemy county, irrespective of citizenship. And they could set aside the votes of their children. Postmen were paid for the names they supplied of people who might be disqualified from voting.

When both referenda failed, recruitment propaganda became even more forceful. Denunciations of ‘the enemy within’ were even more vigorous.

At the end of 1917, the bank manager at Walla Walla declared the village was ‘an Australian Berlin, a hotbed of disloyalty’. Military secret service agents were sent to spy on the Germans in the Riverina.

They found many in the Walla Walla district still spoke German and displayed pictures of Germany and the German royal family.

Four community members of the Culcairn Shire Council – Harry Paech, John Wenke, Ernest Wenke and Edward Heppner – were arrested. No charges were laid against any of the four and, consequently, there was no opportunity to refute them. But they were interned at Holsworthy Concentration Camp near Liverpool.

They and their families had to bear the ignominy of imprisonment, apparently on suspicion of harming the war effort, by perhaps dissuading recruits.

At worse, they had spoken against conscription. And they had vigorously opposed electoral regulations, which cast them and their children out of the community.

Admittedly, nobody was reported as having died from being insulted, offended or vilified, disenfranchised or interned. They were simply humiliated into being ‘other’.

The Great War proved divisive. The referenda unleashed or renewed xenophobic and sectarian divides that continued through to and beyond the next war.