On Sunday 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, arrived with his wife in Sarajevo for an official visit. At the time, Sarajevo was in the imperial province of Bosnia-Herzegovina. As the royal party travelled in an open motor vehicle along the official route, it was fired upon by a 19-year-old student, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian nationalist. Princip only managed to fire two shots before he was arrested, but these two shots managed to kill the Archduke and Archduchess. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand is generally taken as the starting point for the descent into what became known as the Great War or World War I.
At first, the assassination—no matter how shocking—was seen by the outside world as an event isolated from its deep concerns. The consequences of the assassination were expected to be contained within Eastern Europe. The response from King George V of Great Britain was perhaps typical: he wrote in his diary ‘It will be a terrible shock to the Emperor and is most regrettable and sad. We dined alone. Marked my new stamp catalogue. Bed at 11.30’. But the planet by 1914 was a world of alliances between empires and nations and the networks of colonies of European countries meant events in Europe had worldwide ramifications. Equally significant, the means existed not only to bind but amplify all these factors: such as the steamship for trade and travel and the ocean telegraph cables for immediate communication.
As we know, the waves generated by the events at Sarajevo that Sunday did not just spread and dissipate within Eastern Europe. The waves from Sarajevo spread, were refracted by other events, and effectively dislodged or caused events which generated new waves. These new waves were far more damaging in their consequences for the world.
By the time the Great War was over, the waves had claimed around nine million military casualties and perhaps an equal number of civilian casualties through displacement, starvation and disease; the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires were no more; and the Russian Empire was in the process of transforming into the Soviet Union. The refracted waves included the British Empire reaching its zenith in its geographic area; the German collapse creating the stage for the journey into World War II; and other events such as the first step in the creation of the State of Israel. For Australia, the war