Australian War Time Propaganda

War time propaganda and censorship has been widely recognised as a means of ‘managing public opinion and boosting morale’ (dl.nfsa.gov.au, n.d.). This control of information was handled by the Department of Information, which was set up at the start of WWII to control the production and censoring of information. Primarily, the government controlled information that was being presenting to the Australian public through the radio and print media, with a view to maintaining high morale and projecting a positive image of the allied action.

Not everyone has viewed this censorship as a good thing. Champness (tomchampblog.wordpress.com, n.d.) suggests that the censorship only served to ‘manipulate and hold back the truth, which the public deserved

’Successes were exaggerated while failures and troop losses were minimised or ignored (jaconline.com.au 20/04/2015). This strategy would not have been one of the Australian Government alone though. In fairness to the Australian Government at the time, this would have been a reasonable and well used war time strategy to maintain morale and influence people’s thoughts and feelings about the war. The National Film and Sound Archive have detailed how the Australian Government distorted the truth about damage and casualties and even failed to report significant loss of human loss such as when 243 Australians died in Darwin as a result of a Japanese air raid (dl.nfsa.gov.au n.d). Whilst it is understandable that the Australian Government did not want to incite panic or lessen morale, no doubt many observers, such as Champness (tomchampblog.wordpress.com, n.d.), would see this as a breach of trust and an incident that should have been

What these posters conveniently left out, however, was important information such as the harsh training, intolerable conditions and the very real threat of death or serious injury. The recruitment posters clearly provided a very one sided view of the war and were designed to manipulate young men into putting their lives on the line for their country. Whilst an element of deceit is obvious, even the recruitment of today’s armed forces still appealsto young peoples’ sense of patriotism and adventure and plays down the