Today I released a new novel, And the Women Watch and Wait. It is set in Coburg, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, between 1914 and 1919 and depicts the struggles of ordinary women left to watch and wait and pray during the four long years that their men were away fighting a war on the other side of the world.

The novel is set within the Catholic community, most of whom had Irish ancestry at this time. The characters are from that portion of the Catholic community whose men did enlist in the Australian Imperial Force. This is a reflection of my own family experience—both my grandfathers enlisted, as did others in their extended families. My maternal grandfather’s parents had been born in Ireland; his father arrived here in 1854, aged six, and his mother around 1870, aged seventeen. My paternal grandfather had one English grandfather, his other grandparents were Irish. While Catholics enlisted in numbers less than their proportion of the male population, it was by a margin of 2 to 2.5%, not so low as to warrant the accusations levelled at Catholics of disloyalty and shirking. Those men who enlisted and their families experienced the same fear and grief as the rest of the population. I have drawn on research and interviews I did in the 1980s for my Master of Arts to build a picture of Catholic parish life during this period.

And the Women Watch and Wait is not based on any one person’s life as my previous novel, Cold Blows the Wind, was. The characters are fictional but I have drawn on family stories to build their lives. The families of two of the characters, Kate Burke and Tom Ryan, have similar structures and something of the histories of my maternal grandparents but they are nothing like them in either appearance, personality or course of life. My characters are ordinary people and, like most, follow the conventional morality and mores of their time, as did the respectable of all classes and religious denominations.

In 1914, Coburg was on the northern edge of Melbourne with dairy farms and a large poultry farm within its bounds. At various times livestock wandered the streets much to the chagrin of the council ranger. It was home to a steadily increasing number of workers and their families and was a proudly self-reliant community. I have done my best to ensure that the historical timeline and my representation of Coburg is realistic and accurate. But And the Women Watch and Wait is not a history of Coburg so only those elements that I believe would have affected my characters are mentioned. Contemporary newspapers accessed via the National Library of Australia’s Trove portal have been invaluable in gaining an understanding of Coburg at this time. Where events were not reported in great detail, I have drawn on the more descriptive reports of similar events in other suburbs to fill in the gaps.

From a population of around five million people, 416,809 men enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force (AIF). This was 38.7% of the male population aged between eighteen and forty-five years of age. Of these men, 331,781 served overseas and suffered 215,585 casualties (64.98%) including 60,284 deaths. Of the 2,861 Australian trained nurses, single and aged between twenty-five and forty, who served overseas in the Australian Army Nursing Service, twenty-five died. The result was an immense burden of grief. I first encountered the weight of this grief when I took over my mother’s genealogical research. In the newspapers, I read the In Memoriam notices placed year after year, into the 1950s and beyond, for the mainly young men who had died overseas. I began to think of what it must have been like to have someone so far from home, in mortal danger, in a time when communication was so slow.

The reality of the war was not hidden from those at home. They may not have known the horrific detail of what happened at the Nek, Lone Pine or Fromelles, to name a few places of slaughter, but they knew enough of what war was to imagine. They saw the effect of war on France and Belgium in the newsreels at local picture theatres. They read of the soldiers’ experience of war in the letters written home, some of which were published in the newspapers, quite often in surprising detail. The scenes of the Gallipoli landing in the popular film The Hero of the Dardanelles, released within three months of the landing, were mistaken as real footage by those viewing it. They knew the cost of war, not only through the lengthy casualty lists but through what was happening around them. They knew families who had received the dreaded visit by the minister of religion, and feared the same for themselves. They saw the maimed and scarred men who came home. And they were denied the usual rituals of mourning; they had no bodies to bury or graves to visit. And through those years of unremitting fear and anxiety, society demanded stoicism. They truly were required to ‘stifle the grief that stirs’.

I try to show in the novel what it was like for the women at home—the daily pressures, the ever present fear and grief, the two vicious campaigns surrounding plebiscites to introduce conscription for overseas service which cracked wide open the existing divisions in society. Despite this, the novel is not unrelentingly grim, there are moments of light—friendships between the women, their support of each other and their men, their stoicism as they carried on. If you would like to get a sense of the novel, you can read the first two chapters here or six chapters of the Amazon sample.

If you read And the Women Watch and Wait, I hope you find reading it worthwhile and come away with an immense respect for those women who watched and waited and prayed.

A novel does not come into being in a vacuum so there are many people I wish to thank. I am particularly grateful to all who read and commented on the novel at various stages: Janine Smith, Gabrielle Higgins, Heather Lyndsey and Sarah Kirby. Most especially I would like to thank Vivienne Brereton, author of the wonderful Tudor series The House of the Red Duke. Vivienne’s friendship and her support through the process have been critical, particularly through those times when I thought the whole project was beyond me. Many thanks go to Jenny Quinlan of Historical Editorial for her detailed editorial help and to Dee Dee of Dee Dee Book Covers for designing the beautiful cover. Last, but by no means least, I would like to thank my family for their support over many years. I am indebted to my husband for his cheerful tolerance of domestic chaos and my random and quite strange questions. Finally, thanks to Dusty for her companionship late into many a dark night—there is nothing more conducive to writing than the gentle snoring of a cat.