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FICTION It's about the women, too Thomas Keneally. The Daughters of Mars. North Sydney: Vintage, 2012. 589 pp. $33. ISBN 9781864712254
"It's all about the men!" With that dismissive remark my mother tuned out the first night's airing of Ken Burns's 2007 documentary series The War: An Intimate History of World War II. Certainly, the men in her life had played a role in that conflict. My father was stationed in England and Morocco. My uncle, my mother's brother, had been part of the Pacific theater. In fact, scenes in that first episode from the Pacific war unleashed a flow of memories about him, as she recalled his struggles there-one of his friends was shot mortally while running beside him-and afterwards. But my mother had played her part as well, as a Red Cross worker in France and Germany. She and her fellow Red Cross mates joined the American troops in liberating Dachau. A contingent of German soldiers surrendered to a group of hiking American women that included my mother. She witnessed the devastation of western Europe in 1945. War, in my mother's view, is not only a story of young men's loss of innocence or their confrontation with the horrors of combat or emotional trauma from bearing witness to the unspeakable. War is also about women.
Tom Keneally, in The Daughters of Mars, shares that belief. He takes an event that looms large in the Australian psyche, the Great War-the conflict that brought Antipodean soldiers into full view on the world stage-but shifts his focus from the slaughter at Gallipoli or other battle sites notorious for their loss of lives. We are at the same event, World War I, but we are with the women, the nurses aboard ship or in makeshift hospitals who awaited, then tended wounded and dying Australian soldiers in this war to end all wars.
Sally and Naomi Durance, a pair of sisters from the Macleay district of New South Wales, are at the...