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When Australians went to war with Germany in 1914 unforeseen issues of patriotism arose. One hundred years today Melbourne's Table Talk reported two of them.
"Heidelberg [in Melbourne] is a sweet-sounding name for a suburb of any city, but, alas! it is German, and so the good residents of ... the area want to whitewash the time-honoured nameplate and give the picturesque hamlet a plain Saxon title.
"Ah, well-a-day, it is not against such a place as dear old Heidelberg on the Rhine that British wrath should turn in this provincial manner. It is the Kaiser who should be blamed, and when the good, honest suburbanite turned into his garden the other morning, brushing the dews away, to see which would be the first rose of the season, behold it was a Kaiser Wilhelm! He rechristened the plants King George on the spot, conscious of a patriotic good deed well done."
Meanwhile, Table Talk congratulated Melbourne's middle-aged bankers (too old to be called up) on forming a rifle club.
"Thousands of citizens feel their helplessness in not knowing one end of a rifle from another these martial days. Every able man should be able to fire off a bullet. Lookat the Swiss. None of the mighty armies think lightly of treading across their sanctuary of neutral ground because every Switzer is a trained rifleman. Maybe the Germans will never come out to give us any practice, but we can never be sure ... When we all can shoot we shall be ready for the best or for the worst of them."