"I love God and my country. I honour the flag, I will serve the Queen, and cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law." It was called Assembly, this ritual, and the Victorian Education Gazette and Teachers' Aid had set down the quaint procedure for it in 1901. The chanted declaration, of course, made liars of us all. We cheerfully disobeyed parents and teachers, and in a few years, some of the assembly were disobeying laws too. Who knew, as bush kids in a primary school, just what "honouring the flag" was supposed to mean, let alone "serving the Queen", particularly when it was chanted so often it may as well have been a prayer in Latin? We did, of course, love God and country, because that's what everyone did, didn't they, and no one wanted to be struck down by lightning. Anyway, it was little more than another regular puzzle, a sort of tolerated background noise, like the sound of cicadas in the summer. Pretty soon we'd be freed for important things like kick-to-kick with a footy or, in the cricketing months, tippy-de-run.

It was, of course, an attempt by authorities to instil a national belief in a simple set of shared principals. Nationalism by hypnosis. It had worked in the early part of the 20th century, hadn't it, and all those tens of thousands of boys and the nurses who would try to keep some of them alive had marched to ships to sail away to honour the flag and serve the King, and they'd done it a second time 21 years after the end of that first adventure and the dead and the wounded had been counted. As we were reminded this week that it was precisely 100 years since Australian troops took part in their first battle of World War I – the Battle of Bita Paka on the island of New Britain, New Guinea, a largely forgotten engagement, its details still cloudy – it seemed worth revisiting just how wonderfully naive was the nation about marching blindly beneath the flag. "Not an officer or man of the whole battalion knew for what part of the world he was bound," wrote Signaller Lyle Comyn Reeves in what was almost certainly the first book published by a serving soldier about Australians in World War I, describing the departure of the first Australian Naval and Military Expedition from Sydney on August 19, 1914. As the excited young troops passed through the streets for the docks, one company took along a galah as a mascot; another a kitten sporting a blue ribbon and bell. The soldiers were showered with gifts – here a large pineapple, there a pair of socks and coloured handkerchiefs, and all around boxes of cakes.

Passengers on passing ferries cheered, ferry boat captains let loose with their steam whistles and a boat loaded with members of the militia circled the troopship, a band on its deck playing what were described as "popular airs". And so began Australia's part in what would become the most ghastly war in the history of the world, and 100 years ago this week, the first of the nation's soldiers died in a place called Bita Paka, seven months before Gallipoli. It didn't work so well for my generation. The urge to honour the Queen and love God and country wasn't strong enough to persuade enough of us to march to ships bound for Vietnam. Frustrated authorities decided that compulsion was the answer, a beefed up version of forcing kids to recite the Patriotic Declaration, and introduced conscription. All these years later, Prime Minister Tony Abbott, frustrated that not everyone shares his vision, has tried what once worked before it failed, and has added a tin ear to the equation. He wants everyone to sign up to something called Team Australia, and a few weeks ago declared that only one flag should fly above us, the Australian flag. Could a revived Patriotic Declaration be far away? Unvarnished nationalism, having scripted horror too often, is too easy, too simple. But it's going around. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten, arguing for Australia to build its own submarines, dog-whistled only this week about Japanese subs destroying Australian shipping in the last war. Well, who remembers that the Japanese were our allies in the First World War and escorted our armada to Egypt in preparation for Gallipoli? Now we are off to war again.

This time, we might hope, it is in the cause of humanity, to prevent genocide beneath the shared flag of a belief in civilised conduct. The simple chant of God, country and a national flag are no longer enough.