'What do you think of this Card?' Postcards To and From Australia During The First World War1

By 1914, when the Great European War broke out, picture postcards were at the crest of a popular wave which continued throughout the war. They had only been on the market since the Paris Exhibition of 1889 and the divided-back card, providing space for the address and a message, was even more recent, having been legalised in 1902.2 Not only did the picture postcard allow the sending of a short message - sometimes intimate, often reticent and understated, occasionally inarticulate and almost illegible - but its design and the intention behind its purchase and posting carried signs of other messages for private and/or public decoding and consumption.