Victoria Purman’s The Land Girls was one of the first historical fiction novels I had read and it go me hook on the genre.

I was much looking forward to The Women’s Pages and it certainly didn’t disappoint, set in post war Sydney during the 1940’s it tells the story of the families that were left behind. All the characters are real and I was easily transported within the time and environment.

Beautifully researched and written.

I am very much looking forward to rereading it when it comes out.

The Women’s Pages is Victoria’s latest and is set in Sydney, Australia in the 1940’s. It tells the post war story of the families left behind and how WWII changed the lives of so many women in Australia.

The war is over and so are the jobs and independence of Australian women as they are asked to return to domesticity and free up positions for the men returning from war.

Tilly Galloway is the story’s central character and together with her best friend and co-worker Mary they wait desperately to hear news of their POW husbands as all the prisoners are being liberated and names released now the war has ended. The only information Tilly has is that her husband was a prisoner of war of the Japanese since 1942 and missing.

Tilly is a waterside worker’s daughter and a newspaper reporter for The Daily Herald where she is pressured to work on the women’s pages of the newspaper of which she finds dull as she wants to be a war correspondent or write about something more meaningful than women’s fashion.

We take a look at Sydney’s waterfront during this era and the appalling conditions in which Tilly’s father and other wharfies endured.

This story deals with survival, loss, politics, unions, wartime and mental illness.

The story is well researched and I recommend it for it’s historical significance. It shares a wealth of detail and I found it to be both informative and absorbing.

An interesting book set in Sydney right at the end of the second world war. Like most of this author's books it was full of historical facts about the period. She certainly enjoys her research!

There was so much packed into these pages - politics, trade unions, rationing, returning soldiers, the atrocities of war. As I read I did start to wish that the book concentrated more on a few topics and did not attempt to describe everything. I was drowned in facts when I wanted more story.

The central theme was the women who stayed behind. The main character, Tilly, who loses all contact with her husband when he is taken by the Japanese, works as a reporter. She is one of the many women who enjoys the advantages of taking over a man's position when they all join up to fight. Of course in her role she is also constantly being made aware of what may be happening to her husband. Then the men start to return with all the troubles that accompanied them.

The ending is realistic and holds promise for the future. Altogether an enjoyable read especially for readers who like their historical fiction heavier on the history than on the fiction.

The Women’s Pages is a well researched and enlightening novel about the day to day struggles of Australia women (and their families) during and after WWII ends.
Focussing on Tilly Galloway and her circle of friends and colleagues at the Daily Herald newspaper, we take a look into the lives of women awaiting the return of their men from battle and Prisoner of War camps.

The novel also takes a look at society of the time and what women were expect to do (or not do) whole the war was raging and what role they were expected to return to once the soldiers came home.

While there are focusses on the mental health and deterioration of the health and well-being of returned servicemen, what I liked most about this novel was the intense focus on the women of the time, something that is not often strongly portrayed in historical fiction or stories of the war.

It was also fantastic to read about this time from an Australian perspective!

<i>"These women had had a taste of independence, of the freedom of their own pay packet and of the kind of camaraderie that comes with growing to know the people you work alongside. [...] What would all those women do now for work and for money and for friends?" </i>

When the war ends in the Pacific and the world appears to once more be at peace, women who had been given fantastic work opportunities during the war are asked to step aside to let men "have the satisfaction again of being the breadwinner in their families".

Tilly Galloway is a female war correspondent at a Sydney newspaper whose job and life suddenly change when the men start returning from war. Still waiting on the return of her husband, missing as a POW since 1942, Tilly hopes to continue working hard as a reporter - not just in the women's pages of the paper.

But the war, and its end, have changed everything, and continue to change the lives of the women who stayed behind.

I really enjoy Victoria Purman's historical fiction. The Land Girls was incredible, and I possibly loved this even more. The writing is rich with historical information but never in a way that seems forced, just giving a factual undertone to what is a lovely fictional story. The characters were vibrant and enjoyable, and I liked that the focus was on one character - Tilly - as opposed to a range of POVs. Overall, an excellent read: one that I would recommend and one that I plan to buy a copy of in print.

‘Sydney 1945. The war is over, the fight begins.’

‘The day the war ended, Tilly Galloway sat at her desk on the second floor of the Daily Herald building in Sydney’s Pitt Street and cried with delirious joy.’

The war is over. Tilly and her friend Mary are waiting for their husbands to return. But society is about to change yet again. Not every serviceman will return, and many of those who do have been deeply scarred by their experiences. And many of the jobs that women have been doing will (once again) be restricted to men.

Tilly has worked as a war correspondent, but now the only job available to her is on the women’s pages writing about fashion and makeup.

‘We are all doing the best we can, aren’t we, Tilly?

Tilly’s husband Archie is a prisoner of war, and while she’s not heard from him since he was captures, she’s eagerly awaiting his return. In the meantime, her flatmate Mary’s husband returns from Changi. He’s a very different man.

Ms Purman brings the challenges of post-world war life, especially for women, to the fore. Women, many of whom have lost husbands, brothers and fathers, women who’ve been a vital part of the war effort in Australia are expected to quietly return to a secondary role.

I picked this novel up and found it difficult to put down. These are the times in which my parents were born, glimpses of times mentioned by my grandparents: shortages, anxiety, sacrifices. Ms Purman brings these times to life, with her well-developed characters and her handling of contemporary issues. I finished the novel, continuing the story on in my imagination.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin HQ Fiction for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

The Women’s pages by Victoria Purman

A truly exceptional read. I love historical fiction and especially well researched Australian fiction. Victoria Purman has created a fascinating story about women in a time of Australia’s history when men were the decision makers and women were fighting for their independence. It is the end of World War II and men are returning from fighting, from being POWs and from being away from their loved ones for years. The women of Australia were fighting their own war on the home front in carrying the burden of everyday life, working jobs that previously men undertook and waiting for loved ones to return home. It is a different world to what life was before the war. The men that have come home are shadows of their former selves and the women want more than to be domestic wives.

Matilda (Tilly) Galloway (née Bell) waterside worker’s daughter from Millers Point, Sydney becomes the Daily Herald newspaper’s first woman war correspondent. She is waiting for her husband Archie to return home. He is a POW and she has had no news of him or from him since his capture. Tilly is a strong independent woman and we see the world and it’s changes through her eyes. Tilly shares a flat with her best friend Mary who is also waiting for her husband Bert, a POW to return home.

Tilly struggles with how unequal life is for women workers and just like her trade union father, Stan, she is determined to make a difference and shine a light on women’s issues through her journalism. Tilly comes from a working class family where her mother Elise cares for those doing it tough and supports her ailing husband and his beliefs.
“The watersiders were treated no better than the horses harnessed to pull carts along the docks. They were meat, not men, to the stevedores and the international shipping companies”.

Better pay, better working conditions and better lives for ex service men are all themes touched on in Women’s Pages but it is the spotlight of the experiences of post war Australian women that is the main focus of the book.
“Women who gave their all during the war, making uniforms and bullets and canned food, picking grapes and turnips and digging potatoes, creating maps to keep an eye on the enemy and to keep us safe. Women who served as nurses and even doctors and Red Cross workers. I’m not reading about them and what they will do now the war’s over and their husbands may or may not have come back from the war in one piece, if at all. Where are they in our pages?’’

“These women had had a taste of independence, of the freedom of their own pay packet and of the kind of camaraderie that comes with growing to know the people you work alongside. .........What would all those women do now for work and for money and for friends?”

Women Pages is a must read for those interested in Australian history especially women’s issues. My mother was a war veteran’s wife so this story resonated with the stories she told me growing up. The long wait between receiving letters, friends who lost their husbands and friends whose husbands returned ‘damaged’ either physically and/or emotionally. Another Victorian Purman gem 5/5

A beautifully realised novel that speaks to the true history and real experiences of post-war Australian women.

The war is over and so are the jobs (and freedoms) of tens of thousands of Australian women, they are advised to return to their "real purpose" of domesticity and free up the workforce for returning Australian World War Two veterans. The armaments factories are making washing machines instead of bullets and war correspondent Tilly Galloway has hung up her uniform and been forced to work on the women's pages of her newspaper - the only job available to her - where she struggles to write advice on fashion and make up. She longs to write meaningful stories, but being in the male-dominated media industry, Tilly finds her work cut out for her.

I loved learning about the roles that Australian female war correspondents played in World War Two, and was appalled at the way they were treated by the military and their male counterparts. Stumm was the only Australian woman to be given the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Ribbon, awarded by US General Douglas MacArthur to war correspondents who had ‘shared the hardships and dangers of combat with United States troops and whose presence has contributed to the welfare and effectiveness of our troops’. Interestingly, MacArthur’s description did not distinguish between men and women war correspondents. Within Australia, however, women journalists who have reported war, sometimes at great personal risk and long-term cost, are still not celebrated or remembered in the same way as male war correspondents.

The fascination with Australian war correspondents and war photographers such as Damien Parer, Neil Davis, Charles Bean and Alan Moorehead continues to grow with each retelling of their exploits. But it is perhaps hard to see where women fit into the picture of the daring, heroic combat war reporter, who shares all the risks and dangers of the troops alongside him. Can a woman journalist confined to the margins of the battlefield, and engaged predominantly in writing non-combat news, rightly be called a war correspondent, even if she was officially accredited as one? Australian women journalists have reported on conflict since 1900, when Sydney nurse and journalist Agnes Macready covered the South African War for the Catholic Press. During World War II, twenty-one Australasian women worked as war reporters in the South-West Pacific Area and in Europe. The Australian Army accredited sixteen women as war correspondents in 1942 and 1943, for the express purpose of publicising women’s war work on the home front. Two Australian women, Elizabeth Riddell and Anne Matheson, gained accreditation with the Allied forces in Europe in 1944. Other women reported from overseas without official accreditation, but often with the permission of the Australian or New Zealand military or government. At the end of war in the Pacific, a further group of non-accredited women journalists reported from Asia on the cessation of hostilities and the transition to peace.

In both theatres, the military defined a ‘war correspondent’ as a reporter of frontline conflict, and a ‘woman war correspondent’ as a reporter of non-combat war news, or what was often referred to as the ‘woman’s angle’. Arguments about women’s vulnerability, their need for male protection, their inability to understand or cope with war conditions and their lack of understanding of military hardware were used to support the exclusion of women reporters from military areas. Australian military authorities, in particular, categorised women reporters as untrustworthy, shallow ‘sob sisters’ and argued that their visible difference from the troops could jeopardise military operations.

In late 1942, the Australian Army’s Director of Public Relations, Brigadier Errol Knox – a former journalist – established a limited accreditation scheme for Australian women war correspondents. The newly minted women war correspondents were provided with a uniform, green-and-gold ‘War Correspondent’ shoulder flashes and a war correspondent’s licence stamped ‘Lines of Communication Only’, meaning they were not permitted in operational areas. Australian military authorities, along with their counterparts in the European theatre, attempted to control the movements and the writing of women reporters by confining them to the periphery of the military zone, where they were mainly limited to covering stories perceived to be of interest to women, such as the work of women’s auxiliary services. While some women reporters were relatively acquiescent, others openly resisted the military’s rigid definition of their role.

Just like their male colleagues, many women reporters found proximity to danger exciting, and they could be just as fiercely competitive in the pursuit of a scoop. While women felt pressured to file news other than routine ‘hospital stories’ to keep their jobs, ‘trying to get anything else meant breaking rules’, which in turn jeopardised their positions. Even in World War II, when Australian women reporters were supposedly excluded from frontline areas, they encountered the devastating human cost of conflict. In Riddell’s case, the realisation that she had been just ‘a spectator, an observer’ of the war eventually disgusted her and she decided to return to Australia before it ended. ‘When you’re a war correspondent you are, whether you like it or not, part of a great organisation, a machine for war.' While the majority of women had little choice but to write non-military stories because they had limited or no access to the frontline, others actively chose to do so because they recognised their importance for understanding war.

During wartime, women reporters were constantly reminded of their difference from the troops and were kept quarantined from them. In the immediate postwar period, Australian women journalists in Asia benefited from a softening of the lines of demarcation between the civilian and military domains, but their gender remained a strong point of focus for authorities and was often foregrounded in their journalism. In late September 1945, Woman journalist Iris Dexter reported from South-East Asia on the restoration of peace and the circumstances of newly released Australian prisoners of war. In 1942–43, Dexter had been an accredited war correspondent with the Australian Army on the home front, but she now referred to herself ‘apologetically’ as a ‘peace or postwar correspondent’.

Although Australian women had proved they could be ‘very solid conscientious correspondents’ during the war, as Riddell observed, afterwards there was a return to the status quo for some decades. Riddell nonetheless believed that she and other women war reporters had paved the way for later female foreign correspondents such as the celebrated Margaret Jones, who in 1973 became the first Sydney Morning Herald journalist to be based in Beijing since the war’s end. ‘That’s a great thing that’s happened to women,’ Riddell remarked to Bowden on ABC Radio National, ‘that they can be trusted to be sent out, to do the work, go everywhere and run their job properly. So one can only say that if that arose from the war then that’s a good thing. And I think probably it did arise from the war.’ The extraordinary New Zealand-born journalist Kate Webb, who covered the Vietnam War from 1967 to 1975 and many subsequent conflicts, was also rightly hailed as a pioneering woman reporter.

As Sydney swells with returning servicemen and the city bustles back to post-war life, Tilly finds her world is anything but normal. As she desperately waits for word of her prisoner-of-war husband, Archie, she begins to research stories about the lives of the underpaid and overworked women who live in her own city, such as her mother, Elsie, and younger sister, Martha. Those whose war service has been overlooked; the freedom and independence of their war lives lost to them. Demobilisation was a long process, drawn out over months as soldiers were freed from captivity, and were then repatriated to hospitals for further treatments for illnesses and then the identification process and they sailed back to Australia on long boat journeys. The Japanese refused to give out any information concerning their prisoners. They refused to connect with the Red Cross and they didn't deliver any letters or packages sent by loved ones from home to their prisoners. They were that cruel. At least German POWs were bound by the Geneva Convention and received letters and packages from loved ones and the Red Cross. Everyone scoured the newspapers everyday for lists of names of Allied POWs and those missing in action, waiting to see if and when they'll come home. The events that had been censored during the war are only now being reported pieces by pieces such as the murder of 21 nurses on Bangka Island by the Japanese, with nurse Vivian Bullwinkel being the sole survivor.

Tilly's husband, Archie, served in the Lark Force, a real Australian Army formation established in March 1941 during World War II for service in New Britain and New Ireland. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Scanlan, it was raised in Australia and deployed to Rabaul and Kavieng, aboard SS Katoomba, MV Neptuna and HMAT Zealandia, to defend their strategically important harbours and airfields. Most of Lark Force was captured by the Imperial Japanese Army after Rabaul and Kavieng were captured in January 1942. The officers of Lark Force were transported to Japan, however the NCOs and men were unfortunately torpedoed by the USS Sturgeon while being transported aboard the Montevideo Maru. The 2/22nd Battalion was one of its Allied garrison units.

Meanwhile Tilly's waterside worker father is on strike, and her best friend Mary is struggling to cope with the stranger her own husband, Bert, has become since liberated from Changi, a broken man. As strikes rip the country apart and the news from abroad causes despair, matters build to a heart-rending crescendo. Tilly realises that for her the war may have ended, but the fight is just beginning...

Meanwhile, Australian POWs who've returned home have become a shell of their former selves. They have volatile moods, and have born the brunt of Japanese cruelty in their physical and mental scars. Servicemen and servicewomen came back to realise that the Australia they've returned to is now drastically different to the country they left from on the war's onset and pre-war memories. There is a dramatic housing shortage as all manufacturing and construction efforts, and their manpower had gone towards building Australia's war effort. Married couples are staying with either their parents or mates, waiting to save up and buy a home of their own. The cost of living is high as necessities such as petrol and electricity are still being rationed, and clothing is ridiculously expensive, despite their poor qualities. New kitchen appliances such as the refrigerator are out of reach for many people living in poverty.

Furthermore, workers in the mining, waterside and coal power industries striking because they are disillusioned with big corporations such as BHP Billiton overworking and exploiting their services. The workers demand fair pay and better working conditions for them all, but people are ignoring their sufferings and the capitalist press insult them by dubbing them "drunkard troublemakers" and accusing stevedores of stealing shippping supplies when they were loading in the docks and insulting their support for Indonesians wanting to rid themselves of Japanese occupation and Dutch colonisation. The work was physically arduous and tiresome, and the current conditions weren't at all good. Men fought each other for limited shifts just to put food on the table and a roof over their heads and pay the bills. There was no work-life balance, and Tilly's father, Stan Bell, had to work 24 hour shifts with little food and rest. This sort of work put a massive strain on workers' health. The only newspaper they seemed to trust was The Australian Worker, a newspaper produced in Sydney, New South Wales for the Australian Workers' Union. It was published from 1890 to 1950, which understands their plight. The workers supported Prime Ministers John Curtin and Ben Chiefly, the latter for his "light on the hill" speech seen as seminal in both the history of the party and the broader Australian labour movement. And they detested Robert Menzies for ignoring the working class, and concentrating on his moral middle class. These workers sought to improve the conditions of their respective occupations by striking and appealing to the Labour Government to help their case.

Additionally single parent war widows and their children were awarded little provision by the government. Their families tried to help their daughters and grandchildren out, but there was only so much that they could do as they themselves were struggling to keep it all together. We hear a lot about the Aussie diggers stories but we hear very little about the stories of the women that were left behind to carry on. Their husbands had died in the war, and were killed for Australia, and yet their widows and children were destined for a life of poverty without these women fighting for the rights. These women fought for public recognition and expression for their loss. When World War II ended, many Australians celebrated, but thousands of war widows were faced with an uncertain future. The war widows' pension was below the basic wage and many women and children faced living in poverty. The War Widows' Guild became a powerful lobby group, influencing government on issues such as pensions, education benefits and health care. Many of the benefits that war widows have today are a result of the courage of those early guild members who resisted a life of poverty, social isolation and invisibility. The War Widows’ Guild of Australia NSW Ltd is a not-for-profit membership-based organisation whose mission is to promote and protect the interests of widows in NSW. The Guild was founded in 1946 by Mrs Jessie Vasey, widow of Major-General George Alan Vasey.

Overall, this was a brillant, trailblazing novel about women who sought to break out of their domestic moulds and fight the good fight for female empowerment and independence-and to all the workers who sought better pay, better working conditions and having a fair go.