1939

• 3 September: War was declared on Germany by the Australian Prime Minister Robert Gordon Menzies.
• Forty-four hour working week became standard throughout Australia.
• Press censorship was adopted.
• Bushfires in Victoria killed seventy-one people.
• Conscription for home service was established.
• The first meeting between physicists and the Menzies Government was held.
• CSIR/O began secret radar research at the University of Sydney.
• Short-wave radio service Australia Calling (later renamed Radio Australia) began broadcasts from Sydney in English, Spanish, French and Dutch.

1940

• Over 2,000 German 'aliens' arrived from the United Kingdom on the ship Dunera.
• Communist and Fascist parties were banned.
• Australian servicemen and women saw action in North Africa and the Middle East.
• Volunteer Defence Corps were established.
• Bass Strait was closed to shipping following the sinking of a British ship (the result of enemy mines).
• Petrol rationing began.
• The Optical Munitions Panel was established in July.
• The first optical glass was produced in Australia in December.

1941

• Robert Gordon Menzies resigned as Prime Minister of Australia.
• The Australian Labor Party took office, led by John Curtin.
• Australian defence forces were engaged in action around the Mediterranean (primarily in North Africa, Greece, Syria and Crete).
• Sydney opthalmologist Norman Gregg discovered the connection between birth defects and the Rubella virus in pregnancy.
• Child endowment was introduced by Commonwealth Government.
• Australia declared war on Japan on 8 December.
• HMAS Sydney was sunk by the German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran off the Western Australian coast. All hands were lost (645 men).
• Australian balladist 'Banjo' Patterson died. His writings include The Man from Snowy River and Waltzing Matilda.
• The film Forty Thousand Horsemen was produced on sand dunes at Coogee (in Sydney, New South Wales) by Australian actor, writer and director Charles Chauvel.
• 7 December 1941: Japan launched her Pacific campaign by attacking Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, USA.

1942

• John James McNeill returned to the Munitions Supply Laboratories after a fruitful period of study in England.
• Over 15,000 Australian soldiers were imprisoned by Japanese following the fall of Singapore on 15 February.
• 243 people died when Darwin was bombed by the Japanese on 19 February.
• The Battle of El Alamein, North Africa.
• The Battle of the Coral Sea.
• The Battle of the Kokoda Trail, New Guinea.
• Broome and Wyndham, in northern Western Australia, were bombed by the Japanese.
• Three midget Japanese submarines entered Sydney Harbour.
• Allied headquarters were established in Australia under the leadership of General Douglas MacArthur of the USA.
• State income tax was abolished when the Commonwealth Government took over the administration of income tax.
• The Communist Party in Australia was legalised.
• Clothes, tea and sugar rationing began.
• Daylight saving was first introduced.

1943

• Conscription was introduced for overseas military service.
• Darwin encountered its last bombing raids (conducted by the Japanese).
• Japanese bombing occurred off the coast of Exmouth, Western Australia.
• Cooking appliances and butter rationing began.
• Australia became the first country in the world to make penicillin available to civilians: see Howard Walter Florey.
• Pay-As-You-Earn (PAYE) income tax was introduced by the Commonwealth Government.
• Letters were sent on microfilm from Australia to the United Kingdom.
• The first Australian women were elected to Federal Parliament.
• William Dobell was controversially awarded the Archibald Prize, for his painting Joshua Smith.

1944

• Meat rationing began.
• Japanese prisoners-of-war escaped from their internee camp at Cowra, New South Wales: 234 prisoners and 4 guards were killed.
• The Liberal Party was formed by Robert Gordon Menzies out of the remnants of the former United Australia Party.
• Australia and New Zealand signed the ANZAC pact.
• Commonwealth unemployment and sickness benefits were first introduced.
• Bushfires in Victoria killed fifty-one people.
• T.H. Laby resigned as Chairman of the Optical Munitions Panel.

1945

• John Curtin died while Prime Minister of Australia. Ben Chifley took his place as Prime Minister.
• The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on 6 August, and another on Nagasaki on 9 August.
• 15 August: The Second World War ended in the Pacific region with the surrender of Japan. (The war in Europe had ended previously, when Germany surrendered on 7 May.)
• Australia became a member of the United Nations.
• Howard Walter Florey became the first Australian to win the Nobel Prize (for his work on penicillin).
• Two million sheep died in a wide-spread drought.
• The National Film Board was established.
• Alcoholics Anonymous was established in Australia.
• The first Sydney-Hobart yacht race was held.
• The Optical Munitions Panel held their final meeting.

1946

• A massive migration program (to Australia) for people from Britain and Europe began.
• Trans-Australian Airways (TAA) was established.
• Australia and Britain entered a joint venture for the testing of weapons with the establishment of the Woomera rocket range in South Australia.
• N.J.O. Makin becomes the first president of the United Nations Security Council.
• The Australian National University was established.
• The Sydney Symphony Orchestra was established as a full-time body.
• Professor T.H. Laby died.

Source: The Concise Australian Reference Book, Golden Press in association with Daniel O'Keefe Publishing, Drummoyne, NSW, 1986.

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