John Hamilton Mortimer (1740-1779), Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr Daniel Solander and Dr John Hawkesworth, c. 1771, oil on canvas, nla.pic-an7351768
A Small Town at War – the Drouin Collection
Jim Fitzpatrick,
Red Cross members outside the Soldier s Memorial Hall, Drouin, Victoria, nla.pic-an24294971
In 1939 the Department of Information was established to ‘undertake the large publicity campaign necessary to support Australia’s war effort’. This campaign was centred principally on increasing and sustaining the people’s faith in the cause for which they were fighting, and sought to gain support for the government’s security and fundraising activities and distribute ‘sound’ facts on the war and its progress.
The activities of the Department were extensive and various, and when, in 1981, two packets of ‘historical’ photographs of a rural Victorian town were returned to Australia by the New York office of the Australian Information Service, a small but fascinating example of those activities came to light.