ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

If you read my previous review of Donna Coates’ Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend, Australian Women’s War Fictions you will know that I had only read Part 1, about women’s war fiction about WW1, and found it very interesting indeed.  Coates’ thesis is, from the blurb at AmazonAU:

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre of war literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remains the privileged (and only canonised) war story.

In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartime experiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerous voices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australian national literatures, with women’s war writing foregrounded, to break the hold of a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored, women’s tradition.

So, to Part 2 of Shooting with Blanks at the Anzac Legend.

The focus in Part 2 is not so much on women writers adopting the valorisation of the Anzacs, but on whether women wrote about women’s experience of WW2.

Chapter 7 ‘Damn(ed) Yankees, The Pacific’s Not Pacific Anymore’ covers fiction about American servicemen in Australia.  The novels discussed explore the tension between the contribution of the Americans and the interpersonal conflicts that arose when they were stationed in Australia, though Coates begins by noting that until recently, historians and literary critics had paid little attention to the one million American servicemen in Australia from 1941-1945.  This research includes…

…accounts of the tensions over fighting prowess, money and women, which heated up shortly after the Americans arrived, but their efforts to determine the impact the Americans had on Australian culture and way of life proved remarkably elusive. (p.186)

Coates analyses two novels that traverse this terrain.  One, I’d never heard of : Henrietta Drake-Brockman’s The Fatal Days (1947) and the other that I’d read in the years before blogging: Come in Spinner (1951) by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James.

Because Drake-Brockman’s and Cusack/James’ novels take place during different periods – The Fatal Days covers 20 February to 6 March, 1942; Come in Spinner eight days in October 1944 – they offer a fascinating overview of the American presence in Australia. The Fatal Days opens at a time when Australians are feeling especially vulnerable: the newspapers have begun to list Australian casualties in the Mediterranean; Singapore has fallen; the Japanese have bombed Darwin, raided Port Moresby and captured Rabaul. Suddenly, the Australians comprehend that their show of British loyalty – they have shipped both their arms and their armies to the other side of the equator – has rendered them defenceless in the face of enemy attack. Realising that they can no longer count upon Britain (now fully occupied fighting for her own survival) to protect them, they are enormously relieved when the Americans agree to come to their aid. (pp. 188-189).

Overall, The Fatal Days reads more like a series of essays championing the events and players at the Eureka Stockade and Anzac Cove than it does a work of fiction. Most frustrating is that Drake-Brockman’s female characters crow about identity-forming events that absent(ed) women, glory in a political adventure: disseminating values she did not help formulate, Drake-Brockman facilitates her own marginalisation as a woman writer. She also reinforces traditional perceptions that women’s experiences are unworthy material for a national literature and hence bolsters the power of the patriarchal culture that denounces women as “Other.”
(p. 192).

Come In Spinner comes in for some harsh criticism as well:

Cusack/James were ultimately cowards in their own war effort for, like the dutiful women myrmidons in World War I who relegated their female characters to the bush, they, too, were taking their orders from the masculine bush myth-makers such as Henry Lawson, C.E.W. Bean, and C.J. Dennis. (p. 201).

Oh.  So, these women writers have failed the Sisterhood too…

Chapter 8 ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ offered some interesting observations about the symbolism of flowers used by Dymphna Cusack and Florence James in Come in Spinner to validate bush values but also to critique wartime institutions. [LH: Predating some of the 1970s hostility to the RSL and its political activities], Come In Spinner expresses a returned serviceman’s anger at the sight of poppies because he thinks that the RSL encourages a boozy complacency that precludes interrogation of war profiteering.

Come in Spinner also shows that were clear class differences in the affordability of flowers, and some of the working-class women often wore flowers that were bruised or damaged.  These flowers symbolise that the women were ‘damaged goods’, because they were forced into prostitution by poor wages in the city, reinforcing the vulnerability of women in wartime.

In referring to the sailor’s brutal de-flowering of a naïve sixteen-year-old, Cusack/James highlight one of the recurring criticisms of the Americans in Sydney – their desire for very young women.

Cusack/James are also critical of the double standards that prevail in wartime: when the authorities raid the house of ill repute where Monnie is held captive, they arrest her on the charge of promiscuity, but allow the licentious soldier to go unpunished.

Moreover, they stress that the conscription process was inequitable: although the policy insisted that women who were not gainfully employed were to be recruited into essential employment, in practice, as Anne Summers points out, “the single girls most likely to be conscripted were those poor or working-class girls who did not have fathers with the connections to get them an exemption. For the daughters of such influential men, the war years consisted of a whirl of parties with officers, then perhaps a few hours a week helping out at the Red Cross”.  Accordingly, in the novel, the Manpower completely overlooks upper-class women’s frivolity, never once admonishing them for failing to pull their weight. (pp. 211-212).

But once again Coates is disappointed by the way the novel privileges bush life, marriage and children as desirable.  These elements had to be updated for contemporary audiences when Come in Spinner was made into an ABC mini series in the 1980s, while still perpetuating the women’s need for help and guidance.

OTOH Coates, though she thinks that the mini-series did it better, agrees with literary critic Ina Bertrand’s view that “the novel depicts explicitly not only the financial and moral dilemmas of working people during wartime, but also the corruption rife in Sydney at the time, pointing out how the wealthy manage to maintain their lifestyle with few sacrifices while the majority of the community carry sometimes intolerable burdens”.  (p.226)

Chapter 9: ‘Country Matters in The Little (Southern Steel) Company’ begins by addressing the question of appropriation in Eleanor Dark’s The Little Company (1945, see my review) and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947, see my review), going on to suggest that Dymphna Cusack’s Southern Steel (1953, on my TBR) has too many similarities to be entirely coincidental.

Admittedly, given the texts’ shared historical time frames, some comparisons might be obvious. Dark’s novel takes place between 1941 and 1942, Cusack’s solely in 1942, with the bombing of Darwin figuring prominently in each. Both texts also document, to a greater or lesser extent, the “Yank invasion” of Australia and the advent of wartime measures such as blackouts, brown-outs, food shortages and rationing. The texts also depict women knitting khaki socks, serving enlisted men at canteens, and making their entry into war work – the munitions industry in Southern Steel and the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) in The Little Company. Characters in both texts also express surprise that Australia – especially Newcastle, with its massive steelworks on the coast producing munitions – should suddenly have become so vulnerable, so threatened by an enemy that had, until 1942, seemed so remote. Nevertheless, both novels attest to the kind of complacency that prevailed among Australians, including members of the military… (pp. 230-231).

However, I found it hard to follow Coates’ train of thought in this chapter.  I am puzzled that there is no analysis of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow because it is a work of women’s war fiction, actually written during WW2. And in its own way, it’s a repudiation of the mythic Anzac hero, because amongst other things it’s a critique of militarism.

Anyway…

Acknowledging that the other two novels are concerned with class, the text then goes off at a tangent to explore Cusack’s autobiography and the frustrations of the English-orientated curriculum and the lack of interest in Australian fiction at universities.   The analysis of Southern Steel suggests that in much of the novel, the war is only a backdrop.   Dark’s novel is analysed in terms of its exploration of Australian identity, for which WW2 was a catalyst, and (disagreeing with Drusilla Modjeska’s introduction), Coates finds it unsatisfactory too because Dark…

… had insisted publicly that we have “to find ways for women to participate in making decisions about the community and the nation, not just the family and the house” (233), yet she offered no policies or platforms or ideas of how to achieve this goal in her novel. (pp. 247-248).

The chapter concludes with a little rant about the rise and fall of OzLit in universities.

Chapter 10: ‘Reality Bites The Impact of World War II on the Australian Home Front in Maria Gardner’s Blood Stained Wattle (1992) and Robin Sheiner’s Smile, the War Is Over, (1983)’  gets back on track.  These two sound interesting and I bought the former in a Kindle edition and the latter from AbeBooks. Gardner used her father’s diary to retell the sorry story of the bombing of Darwin in fictional form.  (See Peter Grose’s 2009 NF account, An Awkward Truth.)  Coates notes that Gardner initially idealises the American servicemen on their way to help in the aftermath but then depicts the problems that arose from the GIs monopolising taxis, booze and women.  Shiner’s novel depicts women participating in the workforce but being excluded from management roles and being badly paid.  (No surprises there). Estelle Pinney’s 1995 novel Time Out for Living apparently depicts the same inequities in a novel which Goodreads tells me is about an uncertain and exciting world full of sailors and soldiers, brawls and seduction, dancing and romance.  

Chapter 11: Loving Thine Enemies: Representations of Italian Prisoners of War in Contemporary Australian Women’s World War II Fictions’ focusses on the unjust and unjustifiable treatment of Italians and Italian Australians.  (I discovered that there’s a great deal of moral indignation about war time internment when I recently read Time Stood Still (1931), by Paul Cohen-Portheim. But all belligerent nations did it: the Allies (including in Coates’ homeland Canada) and the Axis (including in Japan and Germany.) My own mother was interned in Belgium.)

Coates begins by asserting that there has been little scholarship about the experiences of POWs because the preoccupation with military history excludes those who did not fight, i.e. POWs, and civilians who are mostly women and children. She cites historian Christine Twomey on the need to listen to the voices of civilians ‘if only to remind ourselves that the reach of war extends far beyond the military and their families alone’.  From this she segues to women novelists who have also been “doing their bit” to augment the diversities of prisoner-of-war stories, including those concerning the Japanese imprisoned on the Australian home front whose experiences have been almost completely overlooked. (p.336)

Coates discusses novels featuring local internees and how their women fared without them:

• A Stranger in My Street by Deborah Burrows (2012, see Marg’s review at The Intrepid Reader)
• Pukunja by Vilma Watkins (1999)

and also novels featuring POWs captured mostly in the Middle East and India and brought to Australia:

• The Italian Romance by Joanne Carroll (2005, read before starting this blog).
• The Paperbark Shoe by Goldie Goldbloom (2009, see my review)
• The Bread with Seven Crusts by Susan Temby (2002, read before starting this blog)
• The Farmer’s Wife by Dale Turner (2011)

While the analysis of the novels brings to light the idealisation of Italian men (who are all nice guys, contrasted occasionally with the Yanks who wear out their welcome) Coates concludes that…

Taken together, these novels point out the differences between historical and political accounts of the effects of war on internees and prisoners of war but add another invaluable perspective – that World War II benefited women in many tangible ways. Several escape a patriarchal culture by marrying Italian men who value their intelligence and skills and talents or, as Temby’s Eddy puts it, see them as equals to men. Moreover, by their various roles in the running of the country during the war, many find that “anything a man can do, a woman can do too, and often better.”
(p. 329).

Chapter 12: ‘Lies, Secrets and Silences, Japanese Prisoners-of-War in World War II Australian Women’s Fiction’ Coates discusses four novels, three of which I’ve read.  Interestingly all three of those are about Japanese POWs or internees in Australia, while the fourth is a fictionalised account of the life of Vivien Bullwinkle, captured by the Japanese in Indonesia:

• My Beautiful Enemy (2013) by Cory Taylor, see my review
• After Darkness (2014) by Christine Piper, see my review
• Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2017) by Anita Heiss, see my review
• Borrowed Eyes (2002) by Saskia Beudel (see excerpts from reviews at Beudel’s website)

Chapter 13: ‘No Hell Like Peacetime’, Going (Down) Under in the Land of the Fair Go

This chapter brings attention to a topic mostly overlooked in fiction: British and Japanese war brides married to Australian servicemen.

Thus, this chapter strives to counteract the omission of women’s voices by drawing upon two contemporary Australian novels that challenge the narrowly-defined national past by exposing the inadequacies of the core myths of Australian society (such as the “fair go”) and continuing to reveal the biases and gaps in the records of those who have been systematically silenced. (p. 393).

The books discussed are:

• Gilgamesh by Joan London (2001) which tells the story of an English woman who marries an Australian soldier at the end of World War I.  (I read it before I started this blog, but see Jennifer’s review at Tasmanian Bibliophile at Large.)
• Borrowed Landscape by Helen Heritage (2010) which is about one of the 650 Japanese women who married an Australian serviceman during the post- World War II occupation of Japan.

(BTW because Coates limits her discussion to women coming to Australia as brides of Australian servicemen — she doesn’t include the English bride Stella in Gail Jones’ 2007 Sorry, because though the wife comes to Australia, the husband is an English migrant which makes him not Australian; nor Simone Lazaroo’s 2000 The Australian Fiancé, which takes place at the end of World War II, because the fiancé has not fought in any war, nor does his unnamed Singaporean fiancée become his bride. [LH: So Eleanor Limprecht’s The Passengers (2018) isn’t discussed either because it’s about an Australian woman’s experience as a war bride in the US. See my review.)

The novels chosen for analysis focus on the impact on the women who bore the brunt of government failure to support returned soldiers — in WW1 with the disastrous soldier settlement scheme in Gilgamesh and in WW2 with unfair eligibility rules that denied pensions to war-damaged veterans in Borrowed Landscape.  Veterans were not given a ‘fair go’ in Gilgamesh and the English war bride suffers greatly from isolation, poverty and disconnection from everything she knows.  In Borrowed Landscape an adolescent narrator relates her Australian father’s struggles with war-related trauma.  It also depicts her relationship with the war bride Hanuka, providing a window on the silence of Japanese war brides about their struggle to adapt in an Australian society that expected them to assimilate.

In this chapter Coates also quotes historian Suzanne Davies, who argues that “the carefully cultivated mythology of the Anzac hero, like all militaristic mythologies, depends for its survival and strength on a selective and exclusionary construction of the past”. (pp. 396). She concludes that…

…the Anzac legend has not been a subject women writers have wished to tackle, although this oversight is being challenged by some whose work appears in this larger study. Brenda Walker’s 2005 World War I historical novel The Wing of Night, for example, undercuts the heroic Anzac tradition and calls attention to the much-overlooked dark sides of war, (see my thoughts about Part I, near the end) and both Mandy Sayer’s 2011 Love in the Years of Lunacy and Sara Knox’s 2007 The Orphan Gunner (see Ch 14 below) depict women stepping from the margins to the military – occasionally even into Anzacs’ roles as soldiers and pilots during World War II – and proving that, as I’ve suggested elsewhere in this volume, anything a man can do, a woman can do better, sometimes even effortlessly so. (pp. 396-397).

Chapter 14: ‘The New “Anzacs Two” Make Their Debut in Contemporary Australian Women’s Fictions

Three fearless authors, says Coates…

… began to imaginatively reconstruct the events of World War II from a temporal distance and bring to light important concerns about the cultural, racist, sexist and colonial biases their predecessors’ fictions had overlooked. In these women-centred narratives, writers seek to interrogate and challenge the  blinkered national past and to venture beyond its boundaries, to expose the inadequacies of the core myths of Australian society and to devise an entirely new set of stories that have been omitted from “master narratives” such as the Anzac legend. Their novels indicate that daring, intrepid women were every bit as capable as men of contributing to the war effort in that each novel features women who do not shy away from danger, but in Anzac terms, exercise “ready initiative” by saving numerous lives and hence becoming “sheroes,” or the new “Anzacs Two.” (p. 418).

• The Voyagers, a Love Story by Mardi McConnochie (2011, see Lily’s review at Goodreads)
• Love in the Years of Lunacy by Mandy Sayer (2o11, see Michael’s scathing review at Goodreads)
• The Orphan Gunner by Sara Knox (2008, see the enticing Goodreads review by Elizabeth Knox and Jo Case’s review at Readings.  )

Of these three, the one that tempts me is The Orphan Gunner.  (It’s available from Giramondo.)  The other two, *yawn*, well you can tell from the cover designs, eh?

Citing Kate Darian-Smith’s and Marilyn Lake’s research, Coates tells us that the first two novels conform to “a dominating narrative of heterosexual romance”, and “it was men [i.e. foreign soldiers] who “provided both the catalyst and the rationale for dramatic action” [i.e. female rights to sexual pleasure] in a climate of moral madness where norms of passivity and dependence were disrupted by the wartime environment.  The female central characters also conform to notions of Australian egalitarianism because they both fall in love and lust with musicians despite differences in class.  These men are rural, poverty-stricken, uneducated Americans without families. Marina’s brief moment of bliss in The Voyagers results in a pregnancy that compromises the offer she had to study at a prestigious music school in London. The plot and its Hollywood Happy Ending sounds implausible and melodramatic to me…

Love in the Years of Lunacy which inverts the good girl → bad girl trope to bad girl → good girl, explores inter-racial love, thus exposing tensions between nation states but also revealing tensions and contradictions within nations when Pearl discovers how badly African-American soldiers are treated by the US military.  Reading the ins and outs of this one made me thankful never to have read it.  Because I had impulsively just ordered the Knox novel, I was a bit alarmed to read that The Orphan Gunners has things in common with the risible Love in the Years of Lunacy — but the cross-dressing and impersonation of men in order to become pilots and ‘do their bit’ in The Orphan Gunner isn’t inherently implausible.  As we know from novels based on a true story like Half Wild (2017) by Pip Smith (see my review).

It seems most unfortunate that…

…Knox’s superbly researched and well-written novel has been almost entirely ignored: I am aware of only a few reviews, none of which address Knox’s challenge to the Anzac legend. Even though [the academic Julie] Wheelwright observes that stories like these of gender inequality illustrate that “with courage and imagination, women have always found ways of overcoming the most seemingly impossible restrictions”, these novels have clearly not had much impact in Australia. (p. 449).

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This brings me to the end of Part 2, with Part 3 about fiction of the Vietnam War still to read.

Firstly, it must be said that while the novels selected for Part 2 were obviously relevant to Coates’ research, some of them are what gives historical fiction a bad name because they are blatantly historically inaccurate.  From one published by UQP that describes a book as set in ‘war-torn Australia’ to another that references ‘the bombing of Sydney’ one has to wonder what nonsense readers are learning from these poorly researched books.  While the blurb for Coates’ book exhorts us to undertake a re-reading of Australian national literatures, I’d recommend being selective.

TBH I began to feel that the thesis had run out of steam.  Where Part I made the case that women authors of WW1 fiction being silenced by the expectation that they would conform to the idealised depiction of the Anzacs, Part II isn’t wholly convincing that the focus on Anzacs in combat hampered acknowledgement that women on the home front are victims of war too.  IMHO It might simply be that women writers, far from being silent, were loud and clear that there were more interesting issues to write about.

But that might just be the intrusion of my own opinions.  I came of age in the 1970s when all my friends were anti-war because of Vietnam, and so I noticed that the books that Coates selected for analysis fell into two time periods:

• written during or shortly after WW2 (i.e. published 1945-1953)
• written during or in the wake of conservative Prime Minister John Howard’s era (1996-2007) of resurgent Anzac valorisation (i.e. 1999-2017, with outliers from 1983, 1992 and 1995).

The gap is obvious.  Where are the women’s war fictions from the 1960s and 1970s?  Maybe Part 3 about the Vietnam War fills this gap, we shall see. But when it comes to war fiction about WW2, well, if the lists at Wikipedia are any guide, a few men were ignoring the zeitgeist and writing war fictions, but women were setting their own agenda and writing about other issues of interest during this progressive period in Australia.

Overall, however, I found Shooting Blanks to be fascinating reading. By honing in on a particular issue in this survey of women’s writing from a century or so, Coates has delivered a comprehensive analysis of developments in a significant aspect of women’s fiction.  In the absence of an up-to-date ‘companion’ to Australian literature*, Coates’ book is really valuable, and I have some interesting new additions to my library thanks to Part 2!

I’m think of making have made a Page for Australian War Fiction, so over to you, dear reader… are there novels not mentioned here that I  should include?  Please add a link to reviews if you have them.

*The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel (2023) doesn’t have a chapter on women’s writing at all, see my discontented review.

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
ASIN:  B0CM4QYCQL, Kindle edition, 567 pages,  including an index (345 in the paperback edition)
Source: Personal library, purchased for the Kindle from You Know Who.