ANZ LitLovers LitBlog (2024)

Donna Coates’ Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions is a very, very interesting book. I reserved it at the library to coincide with ANZAC Day but I can’t resist sharing my thoughts about it now. But I have to issue a caveat: because this is a library book I have only had time to read Part 1 which is about Australian women’s war fiction of WW1. Part 2 analyses the women writers’ war fiction of WW2, and Part 3 of The Vietnam War. If I can, I will borrow the book again to read the rest of it. (At $60AUD , it’s too expensive to buy, alas.)

Update: The Kindle edition is now available at only $14.99AUD, and I’ve just bought it. But I’ll still leave it for a bit before tackling Parts 2 & 3.)

#YouHaveBeenWarned This review is longer than usual because the book is so intriguing and I want others to read it and hopefully share their thoughts too. Plus, Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend is longer than its 345 pages (print edition) suggest because it’s larger than usual (25 cm x 17.5 cm). (The Kindle edition is 567 pages.) But it’s fascinating because — as indicated by the title — Coates has a combative style and from the first, in the introduction, she sets out to be a myth-buster. It’s a myth-buster because of the feminist interest in ‘forgotten women’s writing.’ It challenges the prevailing narrative about the merits of ‘forgotten’ women writers, and through her survey demonstrates why some women’s war fiction might have been ‘forgotten’ because of its flaws. Given the penchant for authors to be mining WW1 for fiction even now, more than a century later, it’s useful IMO for readers and writers to interrogate the paradigms that have characterised existing fiction.

BTW With the exception of Brenda Walker’s The Wings of Night (2005), I haven’t read anyof the books that support these claims, (and don’t intend to).

The Introduction reveals how a Canadian came to pioneer the academic field of war literature in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Associate Professor Emerita – English at the University of Calgary, Donna Coates became interested in Australia’s attention to war history when her husband’s job brought them to Australia and they visited the Australian War Museum in Canberra. By comparison, everything from the ‘shabby’ War Museum in Ottawa to Canada’s low-key military commemorations, suggested very different attitudes to war in her homeland. A PhD was born.

Coates doesn’t beat about the bush when making a point! She can be scornful at times, and she sometimes mocks the subjects of the books she’s analysing. While she acknowledges that there are obvious similarities between our two countries, she writes…

…what does rankle with me are the numerous historians who persist in writing lengthy essays about how similar the two nations’ perspectives are on war. I tire of the academics who try to force the comparisons between Canada and Australia so that responses to World War I are almost identical, when they are emphatically not. (p. xvii)

Comparing these aspects Coates suggests that:

• Australians rushed to enlist for Britain because of popular sentiment: they felt beholden to the Mother country for The Good Life in Oz, whereas Canadians didn’t.
• The Australian reverence for and adulation of the men of Gallipoli is fueled by the education system whereas Canadians know hardly anything about their most important victory at Vimy Ridge.
• The commemoration of Anzac Day (a military defeat) is entirely unlike any Canadian equivalent. They commemorate the Armistice on November 11th — which isn’t a public holiday in most provinces.
• Australians have participated in almost every war; Canadians didn’t send troops to either Vietnam or Iraq.

Now far be it from me to quarrel with an academic like Coates, but there is another reason for Australia’s WW1 participation beside popular sentiment. I have always thought that WW1 was a tragic waste of life, but Australia’s geographical position in the region meant that she was surrounded by British, French, Dutch and German colonies — from Vietnam in the north to PNG and Indonesia on our doorstep.

Those imperial colonies did not achieve independence until after WW2. Had Germany won WW1 and taken possession of British, French and Dutch imperial assets, Australia would have been hemmed in by hostile forces, hampering trade if nothing else, at a time when her population was only about 4 million and her defence forces negligible, consisting mainly of a civilian militia and some coastal garrisons against attack from German or Japanese warships. A defeated Britain couldn’t have defended us, and an alliance with an isolationist US was decades away.

Anyway, moving on to the main theme of this book…

Women writers such as Mabel Brookes*, Gladys Hain*, Mary Grant Bruce, Ethel Turner*, Linda Webb Burge, Ray [Rebecca] Phillips, Annie Rixon and Chrystal Stirling do not go on the warpath to overcome women’s oppression, do not deploy their words as artillery to help overcome their marginalisation, but commit themselves instead to Anzac aggrandisem*nt. Moreover, these writers uphold conventional pursuits for women: rarely do they argue that women’s emancipation from marriage and motherhood is possible, or even desirable. (Ch 4, p.59)

See Also

The Spokesman-Review from Spokane, WashingtonWorld War II/AwesomeDid That Really Happen?

[LH: Don’t get the wrong impression about these women. Whatever about their war fiction, the asterisked authors at Wikipedia were activists. Gladys Hain was the fifth woman lawyer in Victoria and a journalist who campaigned on women’s rights and public housing. Mabel Brooks DBE was active throughout her life in the field of public health. Mary Grant Bruce and Ethel Turner wrote primarily for children. The other women don’t have Wikipedia pages or much of a presence at the ADB, but that might signify documentary neglect rather than insignificant lives.]

NB Not all the WW1 war fictions Coates explores were published during or shortly after WW1 to conform with (or challenge) propagandist values. The last chapter of Part 1 ends with Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005); and others were Joan Dugdale’s Struggle of Memory in 1991, Gwen Kelly’s Always Afternoon in 1981 (made into a mini series), and Mollie Skinner’s Tucker Sees India in 1937. Lesbia Harford’s The Invaluable Mystery which certainly challenges prevailing mores was written in the 1920s but published posthumously in 1987. (I’d love to find an image of the Harford and Skinner books to add to this gallery.)

Update 7/6/24 I’ve been able to borrow the Always Afternoon mini series on DVD. Let’s just say that it hasn’t aged well.

In Chapter 1 ‘The Digger on the Lofty Pedestal’, Coates asserts that whereas British, American and Canadian women writers of war fiction foreground strong women determined to make their mark in the war, the war fiction of Australian women writers doesn’t engage with societal reform or the liberation of women. Their fiction does not explore the possibility of loosening patriarchal rules or taking the opportunity to have more control over their lives. Instead, she says, they valorised the Diggers and promoted hero worship of them, fostering the idea that Australians ‘excel, even revel, in battle.’ Women’s role — as wives, mothers, sisters and sweethearts — was to support the war on the home front and to endure the losses without questioning the meaning or purpose of the war. They were to knit, to nurse the repatriated wounded, and to act as society’s ‘moral guardians’.

Australian women were, Coates says, unlike their sisters in the UK, US and Canada. This was because Australia didn’t have a munitions industry into which they could be mobilised, and there were no women’s groups advocating the feminist cause because Australian women already had the vote. English, American and Canadian women, she says, wrote fiction that featured women who were empowered by WW1 psychologically, economically and sexually, and they were determined to make their mark. For them, WW1 was an opportunity.

The war work Australian women were encouraged to do was diversionary. Their real role was to wait, their lives suspended, until the men came home. And then they were to marry, no matter how maimed a man might be. War brides, in these fictions, were enemies because of the competition for men, and misogyny was reinforced by women punishing each other for breaches of the social codes. Women themselves were agents of restriction and restraint.

Australian fiction had idealised the noble bushman, with his rugged manliness, anti-authoritarianism, initiative and irreverence and these characteristics morphed into the myth of the Anzacs on the battlefield just as bush heroes were confronted by urbanisation. The Digger was handsome, cosmopolitan, well-read, suave, charming and brave. He demanded attention in literature, and he got it.

Where did this stereotype come from? Well, Australian women novelists were mostly far from the action, not anywhere near the front. Coates says they ‘took orders’ from male perspectives on the war: C E W Bean, Banjo Paterson and C J Dennis. Women writers became ‘mouthpieces’ not ‘tellers of their own tales’. They did not take up issues of interest to women such as pacifism and temperance, nor did they write about how the war affected them. Coates says they ‘mimicked’ what men said about war.

Banjo Paterson, for example, was a correspondent who eulogised individual courage, aggressive independence, bush skills and initiative. He made no mention of larrikinism, and he downplayed death. Bean, OTOH, created the Anzac myth, ignoring the fact that many of the AIF were actually city folk and British-born [as Simpson with his donkey was]. Apparently women writers replicate (even plagiarise, sometimes) from Bean’s The Anzac Book (1916) & C J Dennis’s The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916) — deriving glowing descriptions of Australian soldiers, all taller, healthier, more manly and braver than the British Tommy.

Coates doesn’t mention the women activists in the Conscription referenda in 1916 and 1917, and why should she, when she’s analysing women’s fiction, not whether Australian women were busy activists doing useful things or not. But I don’t want to give the impression that there weren’t any. Here is The Labor Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee, and it’s a pity they didn’t have fiction written about them, but you can read a bit about them here:

And you could read a more recent novel, Wendy Scarfe’s The Day They Shot Edward (1991, new edition 2018, see my review) which is set in 1916 when the First Conscription Referendum was tearing Australia apart.) Or Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Golden Miles (1948, see my review) which features Sally’s changing views about conscription between the first (when she was pro) and the second (when she was anti.) It also has this interesting nugget about wartime censorship:

[Sally] had read a book, exposing manipulation of the war loans in the interests of financial combines, the Nation,and other illegal publications which Eily and Tom were distributing. Why were those papers and books illegal, Sally asked. She resented being told she must not read something of vital interest to her. If information was false and unreliable, it could be disproved: if not, people were entitled to it. Women like herself felt the lives of their sons and husbands were at stake: the future of their children. It was outrageous that any government should tell grown men and women they must not read criticism of the way the war was being conducted, or hear what anybody had to say about the causes of the war. (Winged Seeds, p.249)

Coates references a 1987 study by Robin Gerster which argues that Australian war fiction was propagandist in promoting the national sentiment and its ideals, and that this glorification of war was ‘out of step’ with European and American war writing. Coates, however, notes that the Gerster study involved mostly male writers and only four women writers: Mary Grant Bruce, Ethel Turner, Gladys Hain and Angela Thirkell (the only one to challenge the stereotype, but then, she was only briefly ‘Australian’). He could have added to his argument, she says, if he had included the fiction of Mabel Brookes, Linda Webb Burge, Ray (Rebecca) Phillips, Annie Rixon and Chrystal Stirling. These women writers, she says, were obsessed with the hero worship of the Anzac.They either wrote themselves into the war as male characters, or wrote romances between hero and heroine in stories where his story is more worth telling. (As you can see from my links, the last four have little or no presence on the web.)

Amongst others, Coates gives the example of Mabel Brookes’s hero in Broken Idols (1917) who brags about the ‘glorious struggle’ and how Gallipoli was the ‘first bit of history.’ In Soldiers Two by Chrystal Stirling (1918), women are excluded from a text which depicts victory as an achievement that trumps the loss of life. It claims the unique strengths of the Australian soldier who wouldn’t have realised that they were a ‘superior race’ without the war. Later, there is Annie Rixon’s The Scarlet Cape (1939) in which a bush-bred nurse critiques her profession but then when war comes that story thread ends and is subsumed by the story of the Anzac. There’s nothing about the nurse’s journey overseas, or her duties or her response to the slaughter. She’s become a minor character because the soldier is centrally important. The text ‘brags’ about the fame of the Anzacs, about their superhuman fighting in every battle despite injuries, and about how theGermans apparently fear the Diggers more than any other soldiers.

Nobody laments the loss of life.

This ‘big-noting’ (a term derived from Gerster’s study) is because writers like Mabel Brookes and Mary Grant Bruce were ‘writing back’ to Britain because the Brits looked down on them because of Australia’s origins as a penal colony. One of Brookes heroines defends Australian men by saying that, ok, they didn’t have ancestral homes or ancient names, but they were the finest men that God ever made.

In a footnote to Chapter 1, we learn thatonly two novels assert women’s right to autonomy and independence: Letters of a V.A.D (1918) by Mollie Skinner who missed ‘much of the big-noting’ because she was nursing in India, and Lesbia Harford’s The Invaluable Mystery (written in the 1920s, not published till 1987).

In Chapter 2: ‘Guns ‘n’ Roses, Mollie Skinner’s Intrepid War Fictions, we learn that the reputation of M.L. (Mollie) Skinner is associated more with her brief collaboration with a British author (who published the novel under his name), than with her career as a nurse, journalist, scriptwriter, ABC speaker, author of short stories, six novels and a book on midwifery. But Coates says she was the only one who wished to bring an end to female passivity, dependence and subordination.

In Letters to a V.A.D.(1918) published under the pseudonym R.E. Leake, Skinner breaks the silence about horrific injuries; nurses otherwise unacknowledged save lives; women characters are the intellectual equals of men; the English Tommy isn’t weak and cowardly and the Anzacs are admired for being fun-loving not because of their valour. Her character RX goes to war as an independent woman who has an identity outside sexual or maternal roles. She wants adventure and autonomy. She’s not interested in marriage.

Tucker in India(1937) depicts a man who is not an exemplary Digger. He wasn’t keen to enlist; he faints at the sight of blood; he admits to being a coward; can’t see the point of killing and laments the loss of life. His larrikinism isn’t downplayed as it is in the fiction of other women writers, and he takes advice from his sister, not his mates. He is occasionally gallant: he rescues a woman hostage and exposes gun-smuggling Germans. He questions imperialism and he embraces cultural difference, even trying to learn Urdu.

While other texts produce handsome, physically fit men who are so identical that they appear to have been fashioned on an assembly line of spewed out of a photocopying machine with perfect “Anzactitude” — they are all of herculean looks and stature — Tucker is often chided about how old he looks. (p.36)

Chapter 3: ‘(Not) Talking Back, Australian Women Novelists Lost the Great (Linguistic) War’ is about how women silenced themselves because they used men’s language and ideology to write about the war. This mimicry of men’s discourse is apparently unique to Australian women’s war fiction. But male writers were all conforming to the same script, and women at that time had no tradition of their own. Women writers didn’t have much choice, it seems, but to conform to the rules drawn up by men.

[Hmm. Not entirely IMHO. Though Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company (1945, see my review) is discussed in Part 2 — Prelude to Christopher, (1934, see my review), is an early modernist text which contrasted the collective WW1 hysteria of the masses with the supposed madness of its female main character. It doesn’t get a mention, possibly because Drusilla Modjeska in Exiles at Home (1981, see my review) claimed *sigh* that it deals with ‘women’s experience’ by focussingon maternity and the psychology of motherhood.]

Angela Thirkell, however, wrote a satire debunking the myth of the Anzac: Trooper to the Southern Cross (1934) was originally published under the pseudonym Leslie Parker. It was republished as What Happened on the Boat, and also republished under its original name by Sun Books (1966) and Virago (1985). Another reissue was reviewed at A Bookish Type. Wikipedia tells me she didn’t enjoy her time in Australia (1920-1929) which may have coloured her perspective on the Anzacs, eh? Whatever about that, for the purposes of this chapter which is about women adopting male discourses, Trooper to the Southern Cross still adopts and privileges a male point-of-view and is not true to the author’s own experiences.

Soldiers’ experiences dominate in other novels such as Kathleen Pearson’s Hugh Royston (1924, too obscure for me to find anything about it online) and Annie Rixon’s Yesterday and Today (1940, ditto). Rixon’s The Scarlet Cape (1939, ditto) and Chrystal Stirling’s Soldiers Two (1918, ditto) appear to have strong female characters but their voices vanish once war breaks out. Linda Webb Burge’s Wings Above the Storm (1921) does at least offer a mother’s conflicted perspective on her son’s enlistment but like Mary Grant Bruce’s father David Linton, she takes pride in his desire to fight.

Chapter 4: ‘Lesbia Harford’s Home Front Warrior and Women’s World War 1 Writing’ brings us to the intriguing story of Lesbia Harford’s novel written in the 1920s but unpublished till 1987. Today Harford (1891-1927) is celebrated as a queer icon, and it’s her poetry that has a presence on the web, but it’s her only novel The Invaluable Mystery that is of interest here. Unlike other hapless female characters in most women’s war fiction, Harford’s central character Sally is one who survives the privations of war on the home front without a man. Her German-born father and brother are interned as enemy aliens, and so her latent skills emerge when she has to run the family business. The text destabilises the norm because there are no Anzacs, no soldiers taking up the dominant narrative, and no references to the Diggers’ fighting prowess. The men don’t believe in the imperial cause, and they don’t enlist. The male characters come from all over the world, and they are urban: they like theatre, dances and restaurants.

Most of the characters, female and male, are cosmopolitan, cultured and erudite; they listen to classical music on the gramophone, play musical instruments, sing opera, recite Shakespeare and Banjo Paterson and debate cultural matters. They discuss the war, but focus primarily on issues of censorship and treason, and display no interest whatsoever in the Digger in the trenches. (p.58-9)

Women on their own are not lonely in Harford’s revolutionary novel. They don’t have to have a protector or a provider. They have agency.

Coates speculates on the reasons why this book was never published until its discovery decades later… it may have been Harford’s reputation for radicalism, or it may have been the subject matter.

[It’s interesting to note here that Katharine Susannah Prichard’s comments on WW1 censorship come almost incidentally in a novel that’s about something else, not war. Winged Seeds (1948) is Book 2 of a trilogy about the WA Goldfields. As far as I know, it’s KSP’s NF oeuvre that reflects her activism for peace, not her fiction.]

Chapter 5: ‘Sleeping with the Enemy, Patriot Games in Fictions by Lesbia Harford, Gwen Kelly and Joan Dugdale’ is about war fictions with an alternative narrative. These later fictions — Harford’s The Invaluable Mystery (1987); Gwen Kelly’s Always Afternoon (1981), and Joan Dugdale’s Struggle of Memory (1991) — all feature aspects of WW1 internment. Harford’s Sally finds freedom through the absence of men, and Kelly and Dugdale’s heroines find it through ‘forbidden love’ i.e. the presence of German men. Their depiction of Anzacs acknowledges fear and sorrow, drunkenness, and questioning the war. These later novels have some presence on the web: Struggle of Memory has one brief review at Goodreads, and there’s a summary of Always Afternoon at Wikipedia and a scanty review of Always Afternoon at Research UNE.

The last chapter in Part 1 is Chapter 6: ‘Demilitarising a Military Culture, Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005). (I read it in 2006, so there’s no review of it here but I wrote reams in my journal.) Reviewers, Coates says, focussed on the Jamesian style, structure and characterisation, because of the epigraph by Henry James: ‘My own taste has always been for unwritten history, and my present business is with the reverse of the picture.’But for the purposes of her research, Coates was more interested in the ‘unwritten history’ and ‘the reverse of the picture’ that suggested…

… Walker’s desire to challenge the monolithic narratives in history and fiction by both men and women writers who have, as historian Dale Blair asserts, regarded ‘the Australian soldiers who waded ashore at Gallipoli on 25 April 1915’ as the ‘apotheosis of Australia’s national identity’. (p.81).

Well, if you’ve read my reviews of James Brown’s Anzac’s Long Shadow (2014) or What’s Wrong with Anzac? (2010) by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, or Claire Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom (2018) you will know that it’s an uphill battle for legend-disputing historians wanting to subvert the tradition that it was Gallipoli that forged the nation. Walker’s novel features characters outside the Digger stereotype and it interrogates myth and reality. Coates pays attention to what’s not in the novel: the characters don’t conform to the physical stereotype; there are no references to bush traditions of fire and flood as training for war; the men don’t have natural-born fighting ability, and they’re not larrikins. Indeed, the romantic Zettler reads books and quotes poetry in the trenches. Unlike other women’s war fictions which make no reference to the harmful effects of war, Walker’s Tully remembers the bitter cold, the unbearable roar of gunfire, the typhoid in the trenches and the terrible wounds. The novel also contests the notion of an easy adaptation to civilian life.

Sometimes, Coates’ tone is a bit harsh. It seems like presentism to critique earlier generations of Australian women writers because they weren’t writing to a feminist script that didn’t exist in this country at that time. They were writing for a market — a factor that still influences what gets published today — and since Australia didn’t have a viable publishing industry until later in the century, they were subject to what British publishers thought would get through censorship and sell in two markets, Australia and Britain. OTOH this is a lively and fascinating glimpse into Australia’s literary history that I had never encountered before, and I recommend it to anyone who’s exploring war fiction or the fiction of the early 20th century in Australia.

If you’re still with me after such a very long post, I’ll finish up with a quotation that summarises why Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend is an important book:

That so many Australian women writers meticulously replicate the narratives of the dominant patriarchal discourse is singular, and for this reason, I would argue that their writing is of unique literary interest. In making this claim, I differ from Jan Bassett, who contends that “[p]oetry and verse, personal narratives, and popular novels written by Australian women about the Great War are generally of much greater historical interest than literary significance”. [86] But no other sources inform readers of the extent to which women were oppressed in Australia during the war. Historians like McKernan document that Australian women failed to hunt up paying jobs; social historians like Patsy Adam-Smith apprise the fervour with which women threw themselves into volunteer work. Only women fiction writers, especially those who efface their own stories, confirm how insignificant the dominant culture considered women to be. Only Australian women writers’ texts, which reveal women’s intense and cloying adulation of the Anzac, inform us how easy it was for the bastards to win the home-front war. (p.23)

BTW Project Muse tells me that Coates was also the primary editor of the seven-volume Women and War (History of Feminism) series published by Routledge in 2020.

Author: Donna Coates
Title: Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions
Publisher: Sydney University Press, 2023
Cover image: Poppy day (1982) by Barbara Hanrahan, cover design by Miguel Yamin
ISBN: 9781743329245, pbk., 345 pages including an index
Source: Kingston Library

Image credits:

• “The Labor Women’s Anti-Conscription Committee”, Labor Call, November 1916 (UniMelb): https://library.unimelb.edu.au/asc/collections/archives/resources/research-guides/world-war-one-collections/the-wwi-anti-conscription-votes
• Map of High Colonial Age 1870-1914, Princeton University https://commons.princeton.edu/mg/the-high-colonial-age-1870-1914/