Rowan Cahill commented about the poem

'Rowan writes:

'Australian working class poet Ernest Antony (1894-1960) loathed and detested war. He regarded it as an integral part of capitalism, the essential component of Imperialism, while the creation of wars was a device employed by the ruling class to control society, contributing to keeping the working class subservient and in its place.

Antony's anti-war sentiments arguably owed a significant debt to the IWW; his published work was confined to the period between the two World Wars. However amongst the small cache of his literary papers in the Mitchell Library, Sydney, is the typescript of an unpublished anti-war poem dating from the 1940s titled Anzac 1944, addressed angrily to an anonymous collective warmongering "you".

It is rare thing to find on the Australian Left, anti-war sentiment of this kind expressed during World War 2. The poem is also notable for its early criticism of the political manipulation of the Anzac legend.'