An American architect, Walter Burley Griffin (in collaboration with his wife Marion Mahoney), wins an international competition to design the new national capital, Canberra. While Griffin and his winning design generate prolonged and bitter controversies, the Griffin Plan provides an enduring legacy for the development of Canberra.

As a result of effective lobbying by women, the Maternity Allowance Act 1912 (Cth) is introduced by Labor Prime Minister Andrew Fisher. It provides for payment of £5 to all white mothers, including unmarried mothers, on the birth of a child. The provision for unmarried mothers causes outrage amongst church groups. The Act excludes mothers of ‘Asiatic’, Indigenous, Papuan or Pacific Islander origin in line with the White Australia Policy. Indigenous women become eligible for the allowance in 1942, except those living a ‘nomadic or primitive’ life.

At the 1913 election, Joseph Cook’s Commonwealth Liberal Party wins a one-seat majority and Cook replaces Fisher as Prime Minister. World War I breaks out in Europe during Cook’s term in office, and he commits Australian forces to fight for the British Empire. For more information, visit the Australian Prime Ministers Centre.

Britain, France and Russia (the Triple Entente) fight against Germany, Turkey and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The United States enters in 1917 on the side of Britain. On 26 April 1915 Italy comes into the war on the side of the Triple Entente. Japan is also allied with the Triple Entente, securing sea lanes in the Pacific and Indian oceans against the Kaiser's navy. World War I ends with an armistice on 11 November 1918. In 1919, Austria and Germany become republics. The Treaty of Versailles imposes reparations to be paid to the Allies, limits the German armed forces and prohibits their development, and enforces territorial losses against Germany. The Treaty also establishes new international bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization.

In Australia’s first double dissolution election, Andrew Fisher and the re-christened Australian Labor Party are returned to power, ousting the Cook government. Fisher is Prime Minister during the now-legendary Anzac landing at Gallipoli. For more information, visit the Australian Prime Ministers Centre.

On 25 April 1915 members of the Australian Imperial Force land at Gallipoli, together with troops from New Zealand, Britain and France. The landing signals the start of one of Australia’s most commemorated military campaigns, ends with the evacuation of the remaining troops after eight months of battle. Following Gallipoli, Australian servicemen fight with Allied forces in campaigns on the Western Front and in the Middle East.

Vida Goldstein and Cecilia Annie John form the Australian Women’s Peace Army in Melbourne to protest against the First World War.

Prime Minister Andrew Fisher resigns, due largely to his failing health. His deputy, Billy Hughes, replaces him. During Hughes’ term in office, Australia holds two separate referendums on the introduction of conscription, both of which are rejected. Hughes splits from the Australian Labor Party and establishes his own Nationalist Party in 1917. He represents Australia at the 1919 Versailles Peace Conference and establishes the Commonwealth Police Force. For more information, visit the Australian Prime Ministers Centre.

As a wartime measure, the government of Billy Hughes introduces Regulation 28A, which gives it the power to force newspaper editors to submit articles to the censor for clearance before publication.

At the end of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, the Australian Imperial Force begins to move to France. All five divisions see much action on the Western Front and, as the enormity of Australian casualties become known in Australia, the number of men volunteering for service falls steadily. The federal government comes under sustained pressure from Britain to ensure that its divisions are not depleted. In 1916 it is argued that Australia needs to provide reinforcements of 5500 men per month to maintain its forces overseas at operational level. Prime Minister Hughes decides to ask the people in a referendum if they would agree to a proposal requiring men undergoing compulsory training to serve overseas. The referendum, held on 28 October 1916, is defeated with 1,087,557 in favour and 1,160,033 against.

The government introduces compulsory registration of ‘aliens’ during in World War I with the War Precautions (Alien Registration) Regulations 1916, forcing ‘aliens’ to register with customs officials or the local police. The government subsequently introduces an internment policy, requiring those born in countries at war with Australia and classed as ‘enemy aliens’ to be relocated to camps. This is expanded to include people from enemy nations who are naturalised British subjects, Australian-born descendants of migrants from enemy nations and others who are thought to pose a threat to Australia’s security. Australia interns almost 7000 people during World War I, of whom about 4500 are enemy aliens and British nationals of German ancestry already resident in Australia.

As the Australian public learns of the enormity of Australian casualties on the Western Front, the number of men volunteering for service falls and Prime Minister W M Hughes puts the question of military conscription to the public. Australians are divided over the issue of compulsory conscription for overseas service, with conservative political parties, the media and most church leaders supporting conscription, while trade unions and many women’s groups oppose it. The referendum of 28 October asks ‘Are you in favour of the Government having, in this grave emergency, the same compulsory powers over citizens in regard to requiring their military service, for the term of this War, outside the Commonwealth, as it now has in regard to military service within the Commonwealth?’. The referendum is defeated with 1,087,557 in favour and 1,160,033 against. A second referendum in 1917 also fails and the issue divides the nation politically, socially and along religious lines.

Billy Hughes and fellow members of the Labor Party who supported conscription are expelled from the Labor Party caucus. Hughes forms a new party, the National Labor Party, which a short time later, merges with the opposition Liberals to form the new Nationalist Party. This new party subsequently wins a majority of seats in its own right at the 1917 election and Hughes continues as Prime Minister.

The Russian Revolution in February overthrows Tsar Nicholas II and establishes a provisional government and a Soviet at Petrograd, representing workers and soldiers, where most of the action had taken place. The revolutionary government chose to remain in the war. A second revolution in October brings Lenin and the Bolsheviks (communists) to power, overturns the interim provisional government and establishes the Soviet Union. The revolutionary government withdraws from the war.

The largest industrial dispute ever experienced in Australia begins at the Eveleigh Railway Workshops in Sydney when managers introduce a new system of recording how long it takes workers to do different jobs. It involves timing tasks with a stop watch, and the workers strike fearing that the new system will turn them into slaves of the clock. Initially 5,780 worker strike, but the industrial action spreads to other unions and industrial centres in NSW, and is supported by workers in Victoria and Queensland. Despite large protest marches demanding government intervention in the crisis, the Eveleigh railway workers end their strike and return to work under the new card system. This is later abolished in 1932 by Premier Jack Lang. Amongst the strikers are J B Chifley, a train driver who becomes Prime Minister in 1945, Eddie Ward, elected to federal parliament in the early 1930s, and J J Cahill who becomes a Minister in the NSW Labor Government in the 1940s and Premier in the 1950s.

Prime Minister Billy Hughes establishes Australia’s first Commonwealth Police Force comprising, at its peak, 50 plain-clothed police based mainly in Queensland. Hughes takes action following increasing tension over a range of issues, including conscription, with the anti-conscription Queensland Premier. Hughes is reputedly enraged by the lack of response by the Queensland police when he is hit by an egg during a public rally over conscription. The new force has full police powers for federal offences, but its main task is to report on subversive activities of those opposed to the war and the Commonwealth government. It is disbanded in 1919 when the threat of subversion is deemed to be not as serious as first thought.

The Aboriginal Ordinance No 9 of 1918 (Cth) is the first Commonwealth law for the governance of Indigenous people. It applies to Indigenous people in the Northern Territory, which was separated from South Australia in 1911 and transferred to Commonwealth control. Prior to this, South Australia had made no legislative provisions for Indigenous people in the Northern Territory until 1910, in preparation for separation. The new Ordinance imposes restrictions on drinking alcohol, possessing guns, having relationships with non-Indigenous people or mining Aboriginal reserve land, and remains in force until 1957.

The armistice to end World War I is signed on 11 November, and the Treaty of Versailles is concluded in June 1919. The Treaty of Versailles creates the Covenant of the League of Nations, and is signed by Prime Minister William Hughes and Minister for the Navy, Joseph Cook. This is the first political treaty signed by Australian officials, and the first negotiated with direct participation by Australian Government delegates after Hughes insisted on Australia’s right to attend the Peace Conference in its own right rather than be represented by Britain. He also persuades leaders from New Zealand, South Africa, Canada and the United Kingdom to oppose Japan's bid for a racial equality clause to be inserted in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

As World War I draws to an end, seamen striking for better wages and conditions interrupt Australia’s fuel and coal supplies and, in December, several hundred Australian Workers Union members protest in Darwin’s Liberty Square to demand the Northern Territory Administrator be removed for maladministration. This incident is known as the Darwin Rebellion.

James Joyce's book Ulysses reflects changing trends in censorship. It is banned in 1919, unbanned in 1937 and re-banned in 1941. Despite protests in parliament in 1967, the Minister for Customs refuses to over-rule the Censorship Board's ban on the film Ulysses, which the it rules as obscene and indecent.

Departing from the first past the post voting system, the federal parliament introduces a preferential voting system in the 1919 general election following the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918. Sometimes described as the alternate vote, preferential voting is a uniquely Australian system of voting. Based on the principle that the winner should have more than 50 per cent support, it allows voters to number the candidates in order of preference. This system is used in the House of Representatives and the lower house of every Australian state parliament, except the ACT and Tasmania, which use the Hare Clark system of voting.

Australia is among 32 signatories of the Treaty of Versailles, and a founding member of the League of Nations established by the Treaty. The League is officially inaugurated on 10 January 1920, when the Treaty of Versailles comes into force.

The League of Nations is the world's first attempt to form a genuinely international cooperative organisation. Sixty-two countries are at some point members. An important objective of the League is to ensure that there would not be another world war, and to offer collective security to any member-state attacked. By the late 1930s the League becomes ineffectual.

In a landmark case, the High Court’s ruling on the Engineers’ Case gives the federal government the power to determine the pay and conditions of people employed in the engineering industry across Australia, and determined that the Commonwealth’s Conciliation and Arbitration Court decisions are binding on state governments.

In a landmark decision that sees a shift in federal power towards the Commonwealth, the High Court rules that the Commonwealth can use its powers under Section 51(xxxv) of the Constitution to authorise an industrial award for engineers employed by the state public service. The case overturns an earlier interpretation that neither the Commonwealth nor state governments can interfere in each others’ powers, and implies that it is possible for the Commonwealth to use the full scope of any of its powers under Section 51 to make laws to bind states.

A group of socialists inspired by the 1917 Russian Revolution establishes the Communist Party of Australia. The Party exerts some influence over the trade union movement in New South Wales in the mid-1920s, and achieves its greatest political strength in the 1940s, even facing an attempted ban on its activities by the Menzies government in 1951. The Party is influential in some areas of Australian political and cultural life, but never poses a serious challenge to the main political parties. Former members of the Communist Party of Australia establish the Socialist Party of Australia in 1971, and the name is changed to the Communist Party of Australia at its 8th National Congress in October 1996. Its stated aim is the socialist reconstruction of Australian society.

The British Dominions Women Citizens’ Union joins with women’s societies in Australia to form the Australian Federation of Women’s Societies for Equal Citizenship (later the Australian Federation of Women Voters). Founded by Bessie Rischbieth, it aims to achieve ‘equality of opportunity, status, responsibility and reward between men and women’. From 1922, each Australian delegation to the League of Nations General Assembly includes women as a result of the Federation’s lobbying. The Federation affiliates with the British Commonwealth League and the International Alliance of Women, and survives until at least 1974.

Edith Cowan is elected to the Western Australian state parliament, becoming Australia’s first female parliamentarian.

The socialisation objective — the principle of increased government ownership of industry, production, distribution and exchange — is accepted by the Australian Labor Party federal conference in Brisbane. The Party’s first pledge established in 1905 had emphasised that it would maintain the racial purity of the nation and the commitment to the White Australia Policy. The new objective, introduced by James Scullin in 1921, focuses on the socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, and becomes the Labor Party’s central policy platform. All members are required to pledge to actively support it to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features.

The Country Party is first formed in Western Australia in 1913, having emerged from various farmer and settler leagues. It becomes a national political party in 1920, largely sponsored by state farm organisations fighting for a better deal for the ‘man on the land’. The Party is represented in federal parliament from 1922. Its leader, Earle Page, becomes Treasurer and Deputy Prime Minister in the first federal coalition government in 1923, establishing a tradition when the coalition is in government. The Country Party changes its name to the National Country Party of Australia in 1975, then to the National Party of Australia in 1982 as part of a strategy to extend its national representation to urban electorates. Three of the Party’s leaders — Earle Page, Arthur Fadden and John McEwen — briefly serve as Prime Minister on occasions when the leadership of the major coalition party is in transition.