This paper will focus on the intriguing association between two doctors in South Australia during the Great War. As 'outsiders' in an increasingly insecure Anglo-dominant wartime society, both Artie Hanrahan, an Irishman living north of Adelaide, and Marcel von Lukowicz, a German-born city specialist, attracted charges of disloyalty plus official surveillance. Their families had to negotiate many difficulties during the years of war. Both doctors left the state soon after the war and returned to their homelands. Artie and Marcel left important contemporary evidence of the war's personal and professional impact: some family letters, surveillance files and newspaper traces. Recent connection with the descendants of both men - in Australia and in Poland - has  revealed more about their families' wartime and post-war histories - micro-histories which need to be viewed within the global timeframe of the war and its  aftermath, as well as the imperial issues.