This chapter focuses on Europe’s response to the ongoing wartime crisis by exploring media driven humanitarian campaigns. New media fundraising utilized documentary film, memoir, print media and celebrity endorsements to represent this aid as transformative and successfully bolstered interest in the plight of refugees. As a consequence, refugees became a new kind of moral weapon used to bolster support for continued Allied presence in the Ottoman Empire.

Chapter 1 explores the campaigns of Cecilia John, Meredith Atkinson and the Save the Children Fund, which in Australia was formed in 1919. John established an Australian branch after attending the Women’s International Peace Congress in Zurich in 1919 with feminist Vida Goldstein, where she witnessed the horror of images of starving children in Europe, which left an indelible impact on her. A biographical study of John provides a framework through which to bring together disparate parts of her life that have been studied in isolation. Previously, her national and international efforts have been discussed separately. Integrating these studies has revealed, I argue, not a continuum of political ideals but contradictions. During the First World War, John critiqued the British Empire for draining the blood of Australia’s men on the battlefields of Europe, but after the war, she eulogised the Empire for rescuing starving and destitute children through Save the Children. She appears not to bring these politics into Save the Children, however, focusing instead on the desperate plight of starving children in an apolitical framework. The emotive, apolitical appeal of rescuing starving children seemingly sat without the complications of her earlier proclamations. Privileging sentimentality in the cause of destitute children, void of political or critical analysis, was a challenge the journalist and educator Meredith Atkinson encountered too, as he attempted to promote the cause of Russian children caught in the civil war.

Save the Children was revived during the war and became a major organisation in dispersing funds to local children after the war, as discussed in Chapter 8. This signified a major shift in the role of the Fund in Australia, with localised branches working for the first time within Australia and in the Asian region. These activities directly impacted on Indigenous and migrant children, framed around the assimilation policies. The White Australia policy bound these endeavours. In Chapter 8 I consider two broad arguments. The first is that while the Save the Children branch developed a new localised identity, a form of imperial humanitarianism remained. My claim is that it did so through assimilation policies – which promoted an Australian way of life based on a White Britishness – that underpinned humanitarian work with Aboriginal children and war migrants. While this might not be surprising, it did make the Fund unique in post-war Australia. It was the only organisation that linked international humanitarianism to humanitarianism in Australia through its focus on Indigenous children and newly arrived war-refugee children. Arguably, these connections were possible only through a focus on children and the insistence that children were innocent, vulnerable victims across the globe. Second, this chapter continues the thread of examining the biography of lesser-known activists such as nurse Florence Grylls, which allows us to consider humanitarianism in action through attention to these campaigners.

Chapter 1 constitutes the dramatis personae. It introduces the main protagonists of the story, a heterogenous group of international associations (the predecessors of today’s NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (the League of Nations), philanthropic organizations that have delivered humanitarian aid in the Near East since 1918.