The fight for the vote: ‘An Undeniable Voice’ by Tania Blanchard
I have always felt a certain pride that Australia was one of the first countries (after New Zealand) to allow (white) women to vote. And puzzled by the slowness of Britain to do the same. Was it because of centuries of entrenched attitudes in Old Europe – attitudes towards women and men, and their relative roles in social, economic and political spheres? After all, many of those attitudes were transplanted to the Antipodes, along with convicts, rabbits and a cornucopia of noxious weeds. So why did Britain lag so far behind us before bestowing on half its population the basic democratic right to vote for their representation in government?
An Undeniable Voice traces the long-drawn-out fight for women’s suffrage in Britain. It’s a follow-on from an earlier novel by Tania Blanchard, A Woman of Courage, which I have not read – and I found that it reads perfectly well as a stand-alone.
It is 1907, and we meet Hannah Rainforth, an active member of her small northern colliery community in England. She and her husband run the pub she inherited from her parents, which she has turned into a kind of community hub, a meeting place for people to come together for various groups and projects, and support when times are hard.
But when her husband dies suddenly, Hannah is left with three children to support, and comes face to face with the inequalities experienced by women in all spheres of life: in marital laws, property, finance and employment. She knows that nothing will change unless all citizens are entitled to vote for those who make the laws that affect them.
Hannah has to make some hard decisions when she loses the right to continue as publican: moving to London, she returns to her teaching career but must leave her two sons to do so. Working to regain her old life and reunite her family, she also throws herself into the suffrage movement.
The narrative gives a comprehensive and compelling account of the activities of those working for women’s suffrage: from polite petitions to smashing windows, from peaceful marches and deputations to imprionment and hunger strikes. The brutal treatment of women on the streets and in prisons at the hands of police, government spies and prison guards is hard to read at times. What were these men so afraid of? Obviously the thought of losing their tight grip on the reins of power drove their violent and at times, bizarre responses.
Some readers may be surprised at the historical facts highlighted in this novel: that even for men, ‘suffrage’ was not then universal. There were property qualifications that attended the right to vote. In other words, men had to own a certain value of property before could register to vote. How much harder was it for women, then, when there were barriers for women owning property or taking out a loan in their own right?
The struggle for women’s suffrage took much, much longer than it should have in Britain. It was not until the ravages of WWI so thoroughly shook the nation that it was impossible for things to return to the old ways, that true progress began to happen.
In those long years, Hannah and her compatriots risked and suffered a great deal.
We all owe these women, and the men who supported them, a great deal.
An Undeniable Voice is published by HarperCollins in October 2024.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a review copy.Historical richness: ‘Threadbare’ by Jane Loeb Rubin
I reviewed US author Jane Loeb Rubin’s debut novel In the Hands of Women last year. Her second novel has been released recently and is actually a prequel to the first, as it tells the story of the experiences of refugees and immigrants in New York in the late 1800’s.
Once again there is a treasure trove of historical riches in this book. The main character is Tillie, a girl whose aspirations to attend high school are cut short by the tragic death of her mother from breast cancer. Tillie is left in charge of helping her father run their farm in Harlem, on what was then the northern outskirts of the city. She also keeps house and looks after her younger siblings, including Hannah, who is the main character featured in In the Hands of Women. In this new novel we get a fuller understanding of the tough circumstances in which Hannah’s life began, and the sacrifices made by her older sister.
Tillie marries at sixteen and fortunately – for it’s a match arranged in part by the local Rabbi – it is a mostly happy one. However her new husband brings her to live in the tenements of New York’s lower east side, notorious for their terrible squalor and poverty. The plan is to stay here only temporarily until they can save enough to move to a better area.
Tillie’s refuge is the local Jewish centre with its lending library, where she begins teaching English to the many people from Europe crowding into the city.
She helps her husband with his business selling buttons to the burgeoning clothing trade in the city, and becomes fascinated by fashions and the beautiful clothing she sees, but can never afford. During this time the family experience the trauma of the infectious diseases that run rampant through the poorly ventilated apartment buildings, and the death of an infant.
As an aside, I looked on Google maps to get an idea of the areas being described in the book. I was pleased to note that in the district where Tillie and Abe first live, there is now a museum dedicated to telling the stories of the many immigrant communities who lived here from the nineteenth century. The link to the Tenement Museum is here, if you are interested. If I ever get to New York City, it will be on my ‘to do’ list for sure.
As Abe’s business grows they move to a newer apartment and things begin to look up for the family. With her best friend Sadie, Tillie starts a business, making kits for poorer women to be able to sew their own clothes, using patterns rather like the ones my own mother used to buy, to sew for herself and her family.
I always love learning the ‘back story’ of a place, a company or industry, and Threadbare provides so much of the history of ‘Gilded Age’ New York – which was anything but gilded for its poorer citizens, especially women. Contraceptive devices and abortions were illegal then and made life so much harder for poor women and their families – something that Tillie herself experiences. There is also the scourge of diseases such as tuberculosis and women’s cancers, at a time when germ theory was a relatively new idea and surgical and other medical treatments still far from those we would recognise today.
Especially vivid in Threadbare is the way in which women in business were ignored, patronised, or ridiculed. Tillie’s husband must accompany her to meetings with potential business partners even though the ideas being pitched were hers and Sadie’s.
As in the best historical fiction, Threadbare offers opportunities to learn about the past while enjoying an engrossing story about believable and sympathetic characters. The ups and downs of Tillie’s life had me cheering her on, metaphorically speaking, and hoping that the many obstacles lined up against her could disappear. They don’t, of course, but in the process of her dealing with them we see what determination and courage look like.
As always with such stories, I drew particular pleasure from the fact that Tillie is inspired by the author’s real-life great-grandmother, Mathilde, who had arrived with her family from Germany in the 1860s. I can’t think of a better way to honour an ancestor than by writing a book inspired by their life!
Threadbare is published in 2024 by Level Best Books.
Why I am a feminist: ‘Normal Women’ by Philippa Gregory
Where to begin with this huge, sweeping non-fiction book? Perhaps with the title. In an interview I heard with the author (best known for her historical fiction featuring British royalty like the Plantagenet and Tudor women) she said that she wanted to write about the full gamut of women across 900 years of British history – from royal and aristocratic to peasant women. Because, at the times in which they lived, these were ‘normal’ women, doing what queens, noblewomen, tradeswomen and artisans and peasant farming women did.
I found that a compelling argument; more so since reading this grand work of research and narrative.
Why am I interested in the history of British women?
Apart from the fact that I inherited my fascination with history from my mother; as an Australian woman whose ancestors were almost all from England, Ireland or Scotland, the history of Britain and its women is also my history.
Also, my interest in family history is particularly focused on the women in my family tree, the people about whom it is most difficult to find information and records that extend beyond birth and baptism, marriage and babies, death and burial. I want to know what kind of lives they lived, what their likely interests or preoccupations might have been, what big and small events shaped them.
Ms Gregory sums up her motivation for writing the book as follows:
What we read as a history of our nation is a history of men, as viewed by men, as recorded by men.
Normal Women pp1-2
Is 93.1 per cent of history literally ‘His Story’ because women don’t do anything? Are women so busy with their Biology that they have no time for History, like strict timetable choices – you can’t do both?…
Women are there, making fortunes and losing them, breaking the law and enforcing it, defending their castles in siege and setting off on crusade; but they’re often not recorded, or mentioned only in passing by historians, as they were just normal women living normal lives, not worthy of comment.The book begins with the Norman invasion in 1066 and ends at the modern era, in the 1990’s. In between it examines the lives of women over a range of topic areas, including: religion, violence, marriage, women loving women, women and the vote, prostitution, health, education, work, enslaved women and slave owners, single women, ideas about the ‘nature of women’, rape, sport, wealth and poverty, protest…It’s a huge expanse of information drawn from a wide range of sources.
In the process the real reason for the beginnings of the gender pay gap is revealed; also how the patriarchal systems of law and inheritance were imported and formalised by the Norman invaders; how accusations of rape were dealt with in the legal system and how this barely changed over centuries; when businesswomen and tradeswomen gained admission to important guilds and how they were later excluded; how a queen became the first woman to publish a book in English in her own name; how women worked together and also against each other; a sombre roll call of women martyrs who died for their religious beliefs during the early modern period and another of women murdered by husband, boyfriend or family member in 2019.
The author’s skill is evident in the way she has presented a mind-boggling array of historical facts and themes in a compelling narrative, with snippets of the names and stories of women across different circumstances that help to bring them to life for the reader.
And there are some Oh My God moments. Here are some that stayed with me:
- Sixteen year old Emma de Gauder holding out against William I (aka the Conqueror) at a Norwich castle for three months and later going on the First Crusade with her husband.
- Roman Catholic churches in the eight century hosting same-sex marriages (women marrying women) which were entered in the parish records in the usual way.
- The old Anglo-Saxon word for ‘wife’ meant peace-weavers and ‘spinster’ originally meant the actual occupation (a woman who spun yarn.)
- The 1624 Infanticide Act meant that women who could not prove that a baby had been stillborn would hang. There was no assumption of innocence and no accusation levelled at the father of the baby.
- The sentence of death by burning at the stake was still being applied for crimes such as the murder of a husband in the 1700’s. It mattered not how violent, cruel or abusive the husband was. Husband-killing was seen as ‘petty treason’.
- Forceps for difficulties in childbirth were invented in the 1700’s but kept a secret for three generations in order to increase the profits of the medical family concerned.
- Housewives living in poverty were blamed for poor sanitation and high rates of disease and child mortality.
- Syphilis was thought to occur spontaneously in the bodies of promiscuous women (read: prostitutes) and passed on to men.
- Rape in marriage was thought to be impossible as their wedding vows meant that women gave consent to sexual acts from that time on.
- The widespread belief (even into the early twentieth century) that women would become infertile if they were more highly educated: to quote from the book, a statement by a neurologist – If the feminine abilities were developed to the same degree as those of the make, her material organs would suffer, and we should have before us a repulsive and useless hybrid. (p460)
- Male students at Oxford University were so appalled at the proposal that female graduates should be awarded their degrees on completion of their course of study – in 1948 – that they attacked the college residence of women students.
- and so on and so on…
I dare any woman to read this book and not be thankful for feminism and the changes it has helped to bring about. But – it also highlights the fact that there is a long, long way to go before we can truly say we have achieved genuine equality for women of all classes, races, religious beliefs and family situations.
Normal Women is published by HarperCollins in November 2023.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy.A book with heart: ‘In the Hands of Women’ by Jane Loeb Rubin
This novel opens in Baltimore, USA, in 1900. Hannah Isaacson is one of a small group of women admitted to Johns Hopkins Medical School, in the face of doubt and opposition from the men who dominate and control everything about healthcare and medical education, including for women. She is determined to achieve her goal of working as a qualified doctor in obstetrics.
To do so, she has to study and work hard and find a way around the demands and questionable practices from some doctors who don’t put the interests of patients first.
She becomes increasingly concerned about the rising number of women she has to deal with who are the victims of botched abortions. The stark reality of women’s lives at this time led some to choose this way of dealing with an unwanted pregnancy: middle-class and ‘society’ women to avoid shame for themselves and their families; poor women because they cannot afford another mouth to feed.
Contraceptive devices were illegal under Federal US laws at the time – women left with very few choices regarding family planning and their own health needs.
Hannah wants to work to change all this.
After she is qualified, she moves back to her home town of New York City to work in a major Jewish hospital there, and meets other women with similar aims, including the real-life Margaret Sanger, a pioneer in areas of women’s birth control and suffrage.
When Hannah tries to save the life of a woman dying after a botched abortion, she is arrested and incarcerated at the notorious Blackwell’s Workhouse, where she is horrified at appalling neglect and abuse of inmates. Her experiences here add to her determination to address the devastating effects of poverty on women, especially among the communities of immigrants pouring into New York from Europe and Ireland.
When she is finally released, she has to claw back her reputation and career, and while doing so, develops a plan to create women’s health services in the poorest parts of the city.
This is a carefully researched novel, with a mix of real-life and imagined characters. I love that part of the inspiration for one of its central women, was the author’s great-grandmother. And I enjoyed learning about the beginnings of modern hospital care and obstetric services in an important US centre and its immigrant populations, especially Jewish people from Europe escaping anti-semitism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Hannah is a believable character. She is determined, but not without anxieties and insecurities. Her experiences with men add complications and leave her questioning her own instincts. Many readers will relate to that side of Hannah. However, despite all the challenges confronting her, she does not lose sight of her goals to better the lives of others. She is smart, sensitive and empathic. Her dealings with the men in charge of institutional funds and regulations allow her to develop some wily negotiation skills!
I enjoyed In the Hands of Women: an engrossing novel with themes and characters I could care about. There is a prequel on the way by Jane Loeb Rubin which I look forward to reading on its release.
In the Hands of Women was published by Level Best Books in May 2023.
My thanks to the publishers and NetGalley for a review copy.Regency adventures: ‘The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered ladies’ by Alison Goodman
‘Welcome to the secret life of the Colebrook twins: unnoticed old maids to most, but unseen champions to those in need – society be damned.’
The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered LadiesFans of Georgette Heyer’s Regency novels and the TV hits Bridgerton and Queen Charlotte will welcome this romp-with-a-twist through Georgian society.
Far from simpering ‘young gels’, the Colebrooks (Augusta and Julia) are spinsters of what was then regarded as advanced age – late thirties and early forties. Rather late to still be unmarried.
Augusta (‘Gus’) decides to take matters into her own hands when she learns that her good friend’s goddaughter is being cruelly mistreated and kept a virtual prisoner by an abusive husband. She hatches a plan to rescue young Caroline and Julia becomes her sidekick – somewhat reluctantly and certainly with misgivings, but wholeheartedly once they both realise the seriousness of Caroline’s situation.
The mission presents many dangers, especially once their carriage is held up by a highwayman on the way to their destination, and Gus accidentally shoots the man on horseback, who has demanded their money and jewellery.
Once she realises he is someone they knew from years before – Lord Bevan who was exiled to Australia after being accused of murder – the sisters’ plans begin to unravel in a hilarious way. Despite the setbacks, they succeed in rescuing Caroline and this whets Gus’s appetite for more adventures – much to her sister’s dismay.
Gus and Julia are very different women, bound by deep love for the other, and they bring a different skill set to each of their subsequent missions to help badly used women. Lord Bevan plays a role and of course there is a blossoming romance (it would hardly be a Regency novel without it, right?)
The fun of the novel is coupled with some devastating scenarios that beset many women during this time. The graceful gowns, satin slippers and elegant manners of polite society were accompanied by laws and attitudes that seriously disadvantaged women, sometimes to the point of threatening their lives.
I loved seeing Gus and Julia sally forth on their pursuit of justice for other women. They are heroines we can admire and enjoy – while men provide assistance, the brains of the outfit definitely resides in female heads!
There is apparently a sequel on the way and I look forward to more fun with the ill-mannered ladies.
The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies was published by HarperCollins in June 2023.
Why I am thankful for feminism: ‘Restless Dolly Maunder’ by Kate Grenville
Kate Grenville’s latest offering is a novel woven from family stories of her grandmother, who was born into rural poverty towards the end of the nineteenth century.
Readers of The Secret River will recognise Dolly as the granddaughter of Sarah Wiseman, the daughter of that earlier book’s fictionalised protagonist based on Solomon Wiseman. Solomon, the author’s ancestor, was an emancipated convict who settled in the upper reaches of the Hawkesbury River in a spot later named for him – Wiseman’s Ferry.
The novel describes in painful detail the restrictions on women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially (but not exclusively) for poor women.
The small worlds they inhabited, the never-ending chores it was assumed they’d be responsible for simply because they were born female; the limited options for their futures – marriage, or spinsterhood while working as a nurse or teacher.
Girls were of no account, you learned that early on. Good enough to make the bread and milk the cow, and later on you’d look after the children. But no woman was ever going to be part of the real business of the world.
Restless Dolly Maunder eBook location 14 of 293Dolly is born wanting more, wanting movement in her life when the world tells her she must be still, be satisfied with her lot. Whip smart yet denied an education past 14 years, and lucky to get that, being young enough to benefit from new government laws that required all children under 14 to regularly attend school.
As always with this author, the prose is uncannily evocative: Grenville has the ability to climb right inside her characters’ heads and make the reader feel they are there as well. Simple language but always the exact right word chosen for the right moment in the story.
Dolly is a prickly character, not particularly likeable at any point in the story. But the author’s skill is to make us care about her anyway. There is an especially poignant moment in her author’s note, describing a childhood encounter between the young Kate and her grandmother, where she looks back with empathy and wishes in retrospect that she had responded differently. I am sure we have all experienced such moments, haven’t we?
Dolly experiences the ups and downs of economy, drought, commodity prices, war, Depression; all of which impact on her and her family.These are factors beyond her control but she brings to bear her characteristic decisiveness (and restlessness) as she tries to respond to these big picture challenges.
All you could say was, you were born into a world that made it easy for you or made it hard for you, and all you could do was stumble along under the weight of whatever you’d been given to carry. No wonder at the end of it you were tired, and sad. But glad to have done it all, even the mistakes.
Restless Dolly Maunder loc 281-282This book made me feel, once again, deeply thankful for the achievements of feminism that have allowed women in the western world, at least, to move beyond the small worlds prescribed for them.
She thought of all the women she’d ever known, and all their mothers before them, and the mothers before those mothers, locked into a place where they couldn’t move. My generation was like the hinge, she thought. The door had been shut tight, and when it started to swing open, my generation was the hinge that it had to be forced around on, one surface grinding over another. No wonder it was painful.
Restless Dolly Maunder loc 281We have a long way to travel yet, and so many women around the world still experience difficulties and disadvantages because they are female. Restless Dolly Maunder shows us why that is not acceptable.
Restless Dolly Maunder was published by Text Publishing in July 2023
Tenacious women: ‘Elizabeth and Elizabeth’ by Sue Williams
Sue Williams takes the real-life women of her title, Elizabeth Macarthur and Elizabeth Macquarie, and places them in the centre of this novel about the early colonial years of Sydney and Parramatta. Told through the point of view of each woman, we meet the various characters that stride larger than life through Australian history books: ex-Governor William Bligh, Governor Lachlan Macquarie, Reverend Samuel Marsden, John Macarthur, and many other names that are familiar to us today as place names: Nepean, Evan, Bathurst, Hunter, Huskisson, for example.
At first reading, this novel has a very different take on these women than some other works. Kate Grenville’s A Room of Leaves, for example, portrays the relationship between Elizabeth Macarthur and her husband John in a very unflattering way, with Elizabeth as the publicly supportive but privately despairing woman tied to the erratic and self-serving John.
Reading Elizabeth and Elizabeth further, I could see that whatever Elizabeth’s true feelings about her husband, her circumstances did not allow her to do anything but be a supportive wife. Through the lens of modern understanding of mental ill-health, we might have some sympathy for John, subject to what would now likely be described as bipolar disorder or other serious mental illness.
That does not excuse his corrupt behaviour. Nor does it excuse the many petty personal jealousies and grievances of those in authority in the fledgling colony, and the way personal ambitions undermined the just and efficient administration of affairs in NSW. Sue Williams gives a graphic portrayal of how these factors played out.
We might also have sympathy for Elizabeth Macquarie, a new bride accompanying her husband to his post as Governor of a far flung colonial outpost of Britain. Nothing is as she expects. She and her husband face political opposition from those who see the colony as a way to make money or to rise up the ladder of their ambition. They also have to contend with apathy from the British Government, and their own personal misfortunes and ill-health.
In the end, Elizabeth and Elizabeth is a story about the tenacity of two women who never give up on what they see as the right thing to do, and put all their considerable skills to use in support of their husband, the family, and what they regard as the colony’s best interests. It’s a very readable novel and will be enjoyed by anyone interested in colonial Australian history.
Elizabeth and Elizabeth was published by Allen & Unwin in January 2021.
Colonial women: ‘Daughter of the Hunter Valley’ by Paula J Beavan
In my deep dive into family history during the 2021 Covid lockdown in NSW, I realised that the Hunter Valley played a big role in my paternal ancestors’ lives. Both Great-Grandparents emigrated from England in the mid nineteenth century as children and lived out their lives in the Maitland and Newcastle regions. So it was with interest that I picked up Paula J Bevan’s novel which is set in the 1830’s along the Hunter River.
The heroine, Maddy, is newly arrived from England. Her father has established a farm there and planned to bring his wife and daughter to live in the colony with him; but Maddy’s mother died before she could embark on the voyage, and Maddy arrives alone to break the awful news. To her horror, the very next day her father drowns in the river and Maddy must decide what to do: return to England; or stay in NSW and try to make a new life for herself?
She decides to stay and finish creating the house and farm that her father had begun; but it is a very different world for a young woman from the green gentility of country England. The house her father promised is largely still plans on a page, so Maddy must live in a rough hut with two convict women, and she has to quickly learn how to run a property with only assigned convict labourers, and Daniel Coulter, the overseer, to work the land. There is heat, dust, unfamiliar wildlife and unaccustomed threats, and plenty of hard work. To her surprise, Maddy finds that the new life agrees with her as she gradually becomes part of the local settler community.
The original inhabitants of the region are the Worranua people; they get sidelong references in the narrative, which I found disappointing, though perhaps historically accurate; as many European settlers preferred not to think of the people whose lands they had taken. There is, however, a complicated cast of characters from properties nearby, who I found a little hard to sort out in my head. There are also convicts, bushrangers and an orphaned child.
I enjoyed Maddy’s development from a confused, grieving daughter to a more assured young woman forging a new life for herself. The author based some of Maddy’s character on colonial women who stepped up to run estates in their men’s absence, and I always love it when I read fiction based in part on real people or events.
Daughter of the Hunter Valley is primarily a romance, and I did find Maddy’s preoccupation with Daniel a little annoying after a while – as was her tendency to blush whenever she saw him!
The strength of the novel is in its finely observed portrayal of early colonial life away from the Sydney township; the new environment in which the settlers found themselves, and the hardships they faced. I could picture my own ancestors in similar circumstances in similar locations. Knowing that they, too, had dispossessed Worranua in order to create this new life is uncomfortable, but it is part of my personal history and the history of this country. There are, no doubt, echoes of Maddy’s story in the lives of many of those who came as colonisers to this country.
Daughter of the Hunter Valley is published by HarperCollins in September 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.Rollicking re-telling: ‘The Good Wife of Bath’ by Karen Brooks
In her re-telling of Geoffrey Chaucer’s well-known story within The Canterbury Tales, Australian author Karen Brooks has brought us the dry tone of a mediaeval English woman whose rags-to-riches-back-to-rags life is full of passion, love, misfortune and plain bad luck.
The author’s extensive and meticulous research into the period makes for a warts-and-all glimpse of England in the fourteenth century, including the awfulness of life for so many women. There is the Wife’s first marriage at twelve years old to a man more than twice her age. There is poverty, plague, domestic violence and abuse. There is also humour, bawdiness and plain speaking, making for plenty of laugh-out-loud moments for the reader.
The disrespect in which women were generally held at the time is not airbrushed out of Brook’s version, and her Good Wife demonstrates the struggle that women had to gain and retain any agency over their lives.
Eleanor/Alyson lives out her eventful life against a backdrop of tumultuous times in England and Europe. Death of a king, battling popes, resurgences of the plague, changes in industry and the economy, are all woven skillfully into the fabric of the story, much as the Good Wife herself learns to spin and weave beautiful thread and fabric. Reflecting on her life and the family and community she has created around her, Eleanor/Alyson thinks:
How did this happen? This marvellous workshop of colour and quality – of bonds tighter than the weave itself. I couldn’t take all the credit. It had been a combined effort… every household, every husband, had added its own ingredient – coin, wool, skills, but above all, people.
The Good Wife of Bath p313Brooks explores the long-standing debate over Chaucer’s intent in writing a story that ostensibly mocked women who wish to be in control over their own lives, opting for the interpretation that it was meant as a satire. Whatever his motives, The Good Wife of Bath offers a modern-day take on his original story.
It’s an engrossing and rollicking re-interpretation of a classical English story that will please lovers of historical fiction, especially those set in the mediaeval period.
The Good Wife of Bath is published by HQ Fiction in July 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a copy to review.More stuff I didn’t know! ‘The Codebreakers’ by Alli Sinclair
Did you know that Australia had its own version of the Bletchley Park signals and cipher intelligence unit? No? Neither did I, until I read this new historical fiction by Australian author Alli Sinclair. Set in Queensland during WWII, it tells the story of the women and men who worked in a top secret organisation called Central Bureau.
People were recruited from all walks of life. They needed level heads, problem solving skills, as well as an aptitude for mathematics, patterns, languages, commitment to the war effort and – of course – the ability to keep secrets. They all signed an official secrets act, which meant they could never talk about the work they did. Not to family, friends…anyone.
I’ve often wondered how people who work in these sorts of roles, or in intelligence services more generally, manage to keep their working lives separate from the rest of their personal lives. For most people, work is such a big part of life and to keep it secret… well, I think it would be almost impossible.
What I especially liked about The Codebreakers is that this aspect of their role is not avoided. In fact, the secrecy requirements and the difficulties this posed for women forms a key part of the story.
Added to this is the portrayal of the other factors at play. The women recruited to Central Bureau were young, they lived in barracks and worked together every day, in a garage at the back of a mansion in a Brisbane street (most of the men worked inside the house itself). The women were dubbed ‘The Garage Girls’, and they formed strong bonds as a result of their experiences.
Brisbane during WWII is portrayed brilliantly – the heady atmosphere of wartime; fear of imminent Japanese invasion; grief and heartache at the loss of loved ones killed in action; conflict between Australian and American servicemen; rationing; the quick courtships and impulsive marriages that sometimes happened; living with continual uncertainty and anxiety. It’s easy for us today, knowing what we know now, to forget that at the time, Australians did not know what the outcome would be. Reading this novel I found it easy to imagine how it would have felt, living with the possibility that Japanese soldiers might well arrive on the shores of northern Australia.
The other aspect of the novel that is very convincing is the portrayal of how it felt for Australians, once peace was declared. Of course there was elation, joy, relief. For some, there was also sadness and a sense of let-down. We can understand that for the women in Central Bureau, their employment ceased almost immediately. They were expected to return to hearth and home, making way for the men as they returned from the services. The aftermath of war is not always easy, and they had to exchange the exciting, demanding, important work they had been doing, for more mundane roles at home or in jobs seen as suitable for women.
Shadowed by the mansion at Nyrambla, this little garage had been the centre of her world for two and a half years. Its walls had witnessed the women handling some of the war’s most top-secret messages and ensuring they got into the right hands at Bletchley Park, Arlington Hall and countless outposts around the world. The messages they’d decrypted and encrypted had saved lives and helped the troops come back to their loved ones. All this happened under the roof of a regular-looking garage in suburban Brisbane and no one outside Central Bureau would ever be the wiser.
The Codebreakers p324If you enjoy finding out about lesser known aspects of Australian life during WWII – and particularly the more unusual roles performed by some women – you’ll love The Codebreakers. There is a light touch of romance in the story, though the main themes are to do with friendship, courage and the many ways in which lives are changed by war.
The Codebreakers is published by HarperCollins Australia in March 2021.
My thanks to the publishers for a review copy.