Despite the nearly half a billion dollars devoted to the Anzac centennial, Australians recall very little about the home front during the first world war – and what they do remember is generally wrong.

The notion that the Gallipoli campaign brought the nation together is one of the most commonly repeated platitudes of the whole Anzac ritual. In reality the war led to almost unparalleled social polarisation – the two conscription plebiscites, the split in the Labor party, the banning of the Industrial Workers of the World, the NSW General Strike, to name a few.

In 1914, with the great conflict in Europe only just underway, something that we’d now call a “culture war” broke out at the University of Melbourne.

It emerged against the backdrop of a great outbreak of pro-Empire sentiment in Australia. The Bulletin, for instance, celebrated the outbreak of hostilities in verse:

With Britain’s other gallant sons

We’re going hand in hand,

Our War-cry “Good old Britain boys”,

Our own dear motherland.

But the great majority of editors, journalists, clergymen, politicians and other opinion leaders weren’t going anywhere. How, then, could stay-at-home patriots demonstrate their loyalty to “good old Britain”?

Symbolic blows against representations of Prussianism became immediately important. As the historian Ian Turner writes,

Automobile advertisements advised the public to “Buy English, French and American goods”; the distributors of the Metz 22 (a suspiciously German name) announced that their car was “Built in America”. Advertisements for the Berlin Piano Company disappeared; a digger extolled John Brinsmead’s pianos – “John Bull and Young Australia both agree.”

Similarly, the Townsville suburb of German Gardens duly renamed itself Belgium Gardens, while Weinberg Road in Melbourne’s Hawthorn became the more dinkum Wattle Road. Concerned citizens contacted the military authorities to report all manner of skullduggery, including German agents fishing for the telegraph cable at Westernport and building flying machines in Clifton Hill.

But few men were as keen to fight the Hun at home than Alexander Leeper, the Warden of Trinity College and a member of the University Council.

Skeletally thin (his students dubbed him “Bones”) and highly strung, Leeper was an Irish Protestant, fanatically hostile to anything that smacked of disloyalty. “He had little interest in Australian politics,” writes JR Poynter in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, “his outlook remaining Imperial and his accent Irish. Australian nationalism, even in forms as trivial as the kangaroo stamp, repelled him.”

Leeper agreed with the Bulletin and most other respectable Australians: the war was a battle for Empire. That was why he launched a campaign against the only two employees of the university with Germanic backgrounds.

The first was Eduard Scharf, a talented pianist. Though born in Germany, he’d lived in Australia for 17 years and was married to an Australian woman. He’d been employed at the Conservatorium since 1913.

Leeper’s second target was Walter von Dechend, a lecturer in German. Like Scharf, von Dechend had been in the country for many years; he, too, was married to an Australian.

For Leeper, they were both suspect. He relayed to the University Council an allegation from a student that von Dechend “had exulted in his class” upon learning of British warships being sunk in the North Sea.

Von Dechend denied the allegation – and then provided a declaration of support signed by all his students, including by the woman whose testimony Leeper had cited.

Somehow, though, the Council’s deliberations reached parliament, where angry MPs demanded that the premier ensure that “unnaturalised Germans be not allowed to draw salaries from institutions receiving financial support from the State.”

But Leeper was not done. Surreptitiously, he visited Victoria Barracks to report von Dechend to the Australian Intelligence Corps. In his history of Melbourne University, Richard Selleck explains that Leeper told the AIC that von Dechend was a former captain in the German army who maintained a mysterious box at the Melbourne Safe Deposit and developed suspicious photographs in a room on Collins Street.

Leeper’s friend George Knibbs chimed in with a note to the corps calling von Dechend and “the other Germans at the university” a menace. Knibbs added that he’d heard accounts of von Dechend’s wife expressing anti-English sentiments.

It was all fantasy, of course.

Nonetheless, a few days later, the homes of Scharf and von Dechend were raided. The Intelligence Corp also visited the university, demanding its register and noting down all students with German sounding names – though it explained that its actions were “not intended in any way to create consternation or alarm”.

By mid-1915, the anti-German sentiment had reached fever pitch. After the sinking of the Lusitania in early May, the Sunday Times editorialist declared:

We … are permitting Germans to go free, unmolested, and protected by the law of the land. Every German in our midst is a potential well poisoner, a slayer of women and little children, and yet we give them their freedom. [How] much longer are we going to tolerate anything but energetic treatment of the Germans among us? … This is not a time for moderation. This is not a time for platitudes, for hair-splitting, for the niceties of international table manners. It is a time when every hand must be raised against the enemy that desires our ruin. The Germans are beasts. Only as beasts can they be made to understand. Use the whip, and for every blow dealt to a defenceless British subject in the Kultured land of Germany, let us strike a hundred blows here.

That month, Leeper again raised Scharf and von Dechend at the University Council. The two men, he said, had taken “not steps to repudiate the infamous acts of the Germans” and their continuing employment had created an impression that the university was “not as scrupulously careful of the interests of Empire as it should be”.

In following meetings, he hammered home the attack. In reply to those who said that Scharf and von Dechend had done nothing wrong, Leeper explained that Germans who committed no indiscretion were the most dangerous at all, precisely because nothing could be proved against them.

Von Dechend’s students published an open letter in the Melbourne University Magazine in support of their teacher; another academic declared that there was “not a scrap of evidence to show that Mr Scharf had done anything or said anything against the Empire”.

It didn’t matter. At the end of the year, Scharf and von Dechend both lost their jobs.

Nor was that the end of their travails. Von Dechend remained an object of suspicion for intelligence agents for the rest of the war, and was never reemployed at the university. Scharf, whose wife and son had been trapped in Germany by the outbreak of hostilities, was required to report to police once a week. In July 1918, he was detained as a prisoner of war. A fortnight later, he was transferred to the concentration camp in Liverpool. He remained there until 1919 – and then he was deported to Germany.

Amid all the great upheavals of the time, Alexander Leeper’s nasty campaign at the University of Melbourne seems fairly minor. But it’s a story worth retelling, if only because of its immediate familiarity. A hysterical attack on academics accused of insufficient patriotism, fuelled by inflammatory journalism and attention seeking backbenchers? An insistence that those perceived as possessing divided loyalties repudiate their cultural background? Intelligence agencies profiling students with foreign names?

We know something about all of that.

Yes, it’s important to remember the carnage of the Great War’s battles. But the trenches of France and the cliffs of the Dardanelles feel like they belong to a very different epoch to our own – and because of that, they’re a safe topic.

By contrast, discussions of what the war meant here in Australia become immediately more uncomfortable, simply because they inspire awkward parallels with our own era. This Anzac Day, spare a thought for Eduard Scharf and Walter von Dechend – and ask yourself how many Alexander Leepers are still with us today.