Australian history has not always been favoured by Australian publishers. Recent years have seen a steady decline in the number of scholarly titles making their way on to our bookshelves. And whilst there has been some welcome innovations in the industry, older university presses appear to be retreating from publishing Australian history altogether. The demise of Cambridge's Studies in Australian History Series is a case in point. Today, PhD theses (however topical or brilliant) seldom make that difficult transition to a monograph and even well established authors (what the industry calls the 'big names' of the profession) are invited to return their manuscript with a hefty publication subsidy. In short, Australian history doesn't 'sell': the market (we are told) is too small (too 'fickle', too 'discouraged') to make publication commercially viable.	1
If Australian history is in decline, that decline is by no means universal. Some titles in some areas are doing extraordinarily well and war it seems, is amongst the best sellers. Of course, the quality of these titles varies enormously. Oxford University Press has taken the initiative by commissioning a scholarly and well-regarded series on Australian military history. Several of these titles have been written by academics affiliated with either ADFA (the Australian Defence Force Academy) or the Australian War Memorial. Military history was also a facet of Cambridge's aforementioned Australian History Series and again it is instructive that one of the few titles to run to a reprint in that series was Jeffrey Grey's Military History of Australia. At the other end of the spectrum is what publishers call the more 'populist' market, the spate of solider diaries edited for publication and the long rows of Carylon's Gallipoli lining supermarket shelves attest to the seemingly insatiable desire for 'war stories'.	2
But the study of war is certainly not confined to the specialisms of military history. Labour historians have long been cognisant of the impact war has had on Australian culture and society: events like the conscription referenda and the general Strike of 1917, not only shaped the course of labour politics, they also provided a foundational scholarship for our discipline. In more recent years, as labour history embraces a more 'culturalist' perspective, several of our number have used the study of war to enlarge and in many ways challenge our discipline. In this the work of feminist scholars, Marilyn Lake, Gail Reekie, Joy Damousi and Rae Frances amongst others, has proved particularly successful. Indeed one could well claim that labour historians have led what Joan Beaumont has called the 'the war and society' genre of military history. It is a measure of the versatility of our discipline that it could make so significant a contribution to an area so often outside our political sympathies.	3
This review article has been designed to assess the ways in which labour historians have approached the study of war and society. Of the scholars selected, two began their academic careers closely associated with the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History and continue to referee for our journal; three others are active member of the Editorial Board of Labour History and one of these (Melanie Oppenheimer) also serves on our National Executive. The works chosen suggest common themes and interests; each involves a searching examination of grief, commemoration, memory and what might well be called 'emotional labour'. But they also offer very different methodologies and approaches, ranging from oral history to archival research and from innovative inquiry to scholarly synthesis. Though some are more consciously theorised than others, all reach out to a far wider readership than the Academy.	4
The timing of this article is quite deliberate. Even as I write, the Howard Government seeks to commit Australian forces to a war that has neither a moral nor a political mandate. Indeed the conflict looming in Iraq echoes a long and sorry history of Australia's military engagements. A foreign war, fought in the interests of a foreign power, and one which seriously compromises our sovereignty as a nation.	5
Michael McKernan's book This War Never Ends is by no means the first study of the prisoner of war experience. Like Hank Nelson and Tim Bowden before him, McKernan describes both 'the brutality and terror of captivity' under the Japanese and also 'the nobility of spirit that allowed these men to rise above their confinement'. (p. xv) Indeed, the most moving parts of the book recovers the dreams, hopes and memories that kept these starving, diseased and battered men alive. But unlike so many other POW narratives, McKernan's does not end with liberation. Indeed, the focus of the book is the prisoners' painful reintegration into civil society. An alarming number were actually reluctant to return to their families, crippled not just the hunger and disease but also the guilt of having survived the nightmare. And for those who did make it home there would be 'no clean slate and fresh beginning'. In one of many resonant phrases, McKernan writes of what he calls 'the tentacles of war', the horror visited on one generation, stretching on to another (p. xiv).	6
This is a haunting book which recaptures not just the agony of Australian prisoners of war but also the suffering of the families they were taken from; it involves a sensitive and often deeply disturbing investigation of the meanings of loss and bereavement. 'If only I knew what became of him' is the title of McKernan's second chapter — it is also the constant refrain of wives, mothers and loved ones left waiting for news in Australia. Of course, the news never came. Unlike other nations that went to war, Japan refused to release even the names of its prisoners- word of their survival was filtered back for propaganda purposes, a letter released to the Red Cross, a crackling, censored broadcast on Radio Tokyo. In time, many of these relatives felt as abandoned as the men themselves. And for most, all the years of waiting and hoping were futile and wasted. One mother's story (gleaned from the hundreds of government files devoted to family correspondence) captures the suffering of them all:	7
Mrs Evans from Heathcote, Victoria, reported in March 1944 that her youngest son was with the 2/22nd Battalion in Rabaul when the Japanese invaded: 'I received one letter from him the letter was in a mail bag that was dropped from an airplane over Port Morseby. It was written in my son's handwriting and said he was in the best of health, that he was well treated and that I was not on any account to worry about him. I have not heard of him since.' Mrs Evans wanted to let her prime minister know that she was suffering. She would learn, when the war was over that her son had died on 1 July 1942, nearly two years before she had written to John Curtin (p. 35).
As Mrs Evans' testimony suggests, this is a multi layered history. It moves from the private and deeply emotional realm of the family to the public arena of government policy towards repatriation and (indeed) the denial/suppression of atrocity stories. McKernan is particularly careful to show the (many) ways that (usually well intentioned) authorities bungled the complex processes of returning these men to the civilian lives they left behind them; Thousands 'did not have the language and the knowledge' of the years taken by captivity. And for the families of the 8,000 men who never returned they became 'the focus of intense interest as the possible bearers of personal news'. It was a crippling responsibility, in an age long before any effective trauma counselling (chs 3, 5). Then there was the question of these men's ambivalent 'military' status. It was not just that three years captivity compromised the title of 'returned soldier': the question of separate service organization and separate provision of medical services underscored these men's dissociation from the 'heroic' legends of Anzac.	8
McKernan's task is to reintegrate these men into what he calls 'defining stories of the nation'. Their endurance, compassion, dignity and courage transcends even the degrading circumstances and adds a new dimension to the meaning of Australian's sacrifice in war. His book concludes with a call for 'more mature understanding' of our military heritage. That alone, he argues, will rescue these men's stories from the 50 years of shame and silence (pp. 174–5).	9
And it is at that point that one begins to take exception with this eloquent and well-crafted narrative. I no longer expect to find a bibliography at the end of a history book (that too seems to reach beyond the budget of most publishers). But elsewhere McKernan might well have acknowledged the work of other scholars who have sought to 'break the silence', in particular Stephen Garton's impressive study of the repatriation process. McKernan has retrieved the angry, anguished words of friends and family from government correspondence but the 'voice' of the prisoners themselves is sometimes surprisingly absent. A more extensive oral history, akin to the earlier work of Nelson and Bowden, would have loaned even greater depth to his narrative. But these are emendations rather than criticisms. I am inclined to agree with McKernan. A nation that 'take[s] no account of the sufferings and trauma of our own' has, at best, 'an impoverished history' (p. xii).	10
The economies of the publishing industry are one consideration of a review article; questions of marketing are another. It is something of a truism that one cannot tell a book by its cover and certainly that is the case for Joy Damousi's study of war and bereavement in post war Australia. The dust jacket depicts the blighted landscape of the Western Front, gaunt trees, duckboards and the fragile figures of soldiers. Superimposed on this is the image of a woman deep in thought, her sombre dress and tightly coiffured hair suggest a distinctly Edwardian etiquette of mourning. The reader might well assume that this book will be a study of the Great War and its 'aftermath', a war that cost 60,000 Australian lives and visited this powerful image of grief to countless, homes, neighbourhoods and families. But he or she would be mistaken. Living with the Aftermath is a study of women who lost their husbands in World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The battlefields they died on looked nothing like the No Man's Land of Passchendale.	11
At one level, this reminds us of how little control authors have over the presentation and marketing of the books they write. The publishers choose the image that they hope will sell and in this case an image from the Great War triggered a powerful collective memory. But this disjuncture of image and subject matter also suggests a rewarding field of inquiry. In a way, 'the language of mourning' established in the Great War structured the way death, loss and bereavement was dealt with in all subsequent military conflicts. And like Jay Winter (the author of that resonant phrase) Joy Damousi is intensely interested in the very complex ways grief was expressed and the very different ways each of these wars came to be remembered.	12
Living with the Aftermath is the sequel to Joy Damousi's earlier study of war and bereavement, Living With Loss (Cambridge 1999). This first study of the interwar period relied, for the most part, on the archival testimony of diaries and letters. Living With the Aftermath brings Damousi's work into the mid to late twentieth century and employs extensive oral history. Though the number of informants is necessarily limited, this oral testimony involves a frank exploration of the pain of loss and mourning. Like McKernan's project, Damousi's book is moving, searching and often quite disturbing.	13
A cultural historian of some standing, Damousi is interested in the rituals that frame collective memory and the ways that mourning itself can be mobilised and politicised. She notes that war widows organised themselves into guilds and societies and claimed a space for themselves in the public arena. This was not just a matter of contesting the many public rituals that structure commemoration. War Widows Guilds turned their grief into political channels, wresting concessions and recognition from governments (and sometimes communities) all too ready to ignore them.	14
She is equally concerned to reconstruct the 'emotional world' of loss and mourning. This is an ambitious project and one not generally attempted by historians. Informed by the work of psychoanalysis, Damousi charts the distinctive phases of grief and bereavement. It is here that the oral testimony of her informants is at its most poignant. The memories of women who lost their husbands in battle, Damousi tells us 'are imbued with particular images of nostalgia, lost opportunities, hopes left unrealised and a … longing [for] a world devoid of loss' (p. 193).	15
This is an important contribution to a recent and growing field of historical study. It sketches what Damousi calls 'the many routes' to grief (p. 166); and (in the tradition of the best oral history) invests the historical narrative with the subjectivity of lived experience. But it also makes bold claims about changing attitudes to death (and war) in twentieth century Australia and here I am not entirely convinced by her argument.	16
Damousi's thesis is that there was 'a significant shift' in the way war widows dealt with loss and trauma. Grieving was once 'restrained by [a sense of] obligation and duty' but comes to be expressed fully and openly in the later twentieth century. This reflected growing community recognition of 'the need to grieve' (p. 3). One is entitled to ask the question, which community? Grieving practices were surely not the same for Irish catholic working class families as they were for the protestant middle class. It is the latter group which dominates Damousi's (unavoidably selective) sample of informants. Perhaps there is a need for closer attention to the ways that ethnicity, class and religion mediate grief and a clearer acknowledgement of the diversity, ambiguity and unpredictability of individual experience. Nor can one assume that sermons on the nature of grief or the tracts issued by psychologists and counsellors faithfully represent actual practice. It is rather like the guides to marriage and child rearing popular in the nineteenth century. We have to be careful to distinguish between prescription and practice.	17
Having said that, Damousi has opened up a rewarding field of inquiry. This and her earlier book demonstrates that 'grief does have a history'. And that is a history other historians of war have also sought to recover.	18
The loss of war is probably the single uniting theme of Peter Cochrane's ambitious survey. In a little under 300 pages, the reader journeys from the dusty distant battlefields of South Australia's Veldt (where a genuinely Australian Army made its first amateurish appearance) to the steaming jungles of East Timor and the high politics and professionalism of the INTERFET engagement. The book spans over a hundred years of Australia's involvement in war and relates the course of several very different conflicts. But it is far from a conventional military history. Cohrane's first concern is what he calls 'the human dimensions of conflict'. That involves not only the terrible sufferings of men and women on the frontline but also the anguish and grief, fear and confusion of the families they left behind them. It is in Cochrane's own words 'an emotional history' (p. xiii).	19
Cochrane describes his book as panoramic. We can take that description quite literally. It is not just the bold narrative sweep. A writer of great confidence, Cohrane's story moves seamlessly from the generals' accounts to the politicians' and privates', from the battlefields to the home front and back again. There is also a rich, powerful and often deeply personalised visual testimony. Some of the images are familiar: the bold blunt photography of Damien Parer and Neil Davis, the haunting portraits of Stella Bowen's lost airman, the sepia squalor of Boer War and Anzac correspondent. But hundreds of other images are as challenging as they are unfamiliar: the burning homestead of Kitchener's war against civilians, soldiers bartering equipment for eggs with black South Africans, the stockpile of knitting mounting at the feet of patriotic citizens, nurses sheltering in a grave yard in Greece, Aboriginal soldiers drilling without weapons, 'pacification' exercises in Vietnam and anti war demonstrations in Melbourne. A review in the War Memorial's magazine Wartime protested that this was not quite what one expected from a military history. Arguably, it is Cochrane' determination to stretch his reader's perception of what war entails that is one of the book's strongest recommendations.	20
Many of these images are carefully juxtaposed. There is nothing accidental in the way Cohrane has positioned soldier and protestor, recruitment rally and graveyard, the debris of war alongside the industry of the munitions factory. And similar contrasts are evident in the written narrative. Much of the opening chapter on Australia's involvement in the Boer War taps into 'the deep vein of imperial history', Anglo Australians longing to see themselves as the heirs of Wellington and Nelson (pp. 16–17). But Cochrane quickly raises the voice of dissent: in this case, the labour movement's principled protest against a war fought largely against civilians by an 'immoral and piratical Empire'. And in the space of a few sharp sentences, the imaginary 'adventure' of war is thrown up against the reality.	21
At first camping was both spectacle and bliss. As far as the eye could see, lines of horses and tents covered the plains … while night campfires twinkled like stars come to ground. Then it rained. It rained for a month. [S]oldiers made temporary bivouacs from blankets … and bridle reins … They slept on flooded ground as enteric fever … spread through the camp and dysentery, pneumonia and rheumatism spread with it. The rats arrived. Men lay among these scampering, sodden delighted things, like pigs in a sty … Hospitals … filled to overflowing so too did the cemeteries … The black soil plains became an expanse of pulverised slime under the feet of man and beast … [M]en shivered scratched and starved. They were there for seven weeks. That was about twenty funerals a day, one nurse observed (p. 22).
Indeed it is the 'observations' of contemporaries that are skilfully woven throughout the narrative. Blocked extracts from letters and diaries enforce the newsreel like quality of the book, relaying the broken images of war back home to Australia. Again it is the medley of voices, the free play of contrasts that makes this testimony so persuasive. In one column, Banjo Patterson's ballads celebrate 'the glorious rides for the good of the empire', alongside rests the curt testimony of J.H.M. Abbott of the 1st Australian Horse:	22
There is no forgetting the carts that rumble through the streets, loaded with those stiff blanket shrouded shapes which had been vigorous men- ... the crowded sick tents, the unfed, unwashed, unhappy men who filled them (p. 22).
Partly, it is the medium itself which makes this innovative presentation of Australians experience of war possible. Australians at War is a folio publication, printed on high quality paper with a budget that extended to maps, graphics and full colour illustrations. A companion to a major television series, it enjoyed the support (though not — as claimed elsewhere — the funding) of the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Australian War Memorial. But if the book has an almost 'coffee table appearance' there is nothing lightweight about Cochrane's analysis. There is original work here as well as a creative synthesis of existing scholarship. His discussion of misplaced military strategy, an expeditionary mentality that bound the fortunes of Australia's forces with the ambitions of one or other foreign empires, is at once engaging and challenging. The book (unlike the television series) is prepared to question some cherished Australians myths; mateship is not its dominant theme, Australian soldiers do desert and even 'Breaker Morant' is presented as a war criminal rather than a hero. Finally, there is the social history dimension that enlarges and informs Cochrane's view of war. Strategies alone did not decide the course of battles, but economies, work forces, the total fraught and costly mobilisation of civil society. As such Australians at War is about the experience of all Australians, not just those who went to battle.	23
Like all general histories, Cochrane's will not satisfy everyone. There is the question of the relative weighting given to different conflicts; the ever shifting balance between the home and battlefront, even the exclusion (or inclusion) of various branches of the Armed Services. The discussion of tactics and strategies will probably seem over simplified to the specialised reader while the uninitiated will struggle with points of language and detail. But a reviewer should also judge a book on its own terms. Cohrane has offered us a social history of war which is at once innovative, persuasive and engaging. And like McKernan and Damousi, he has made the emotional world of soldiers and families alike, a legitimate avenue of inquiry.	24
From Cohrane's national, century-wide survey we move on to work of much more localised dimensions. John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War focuses on one conflict and one particular corner of North Eastern Victoria. But that in no way diminishes the size of his achievement. From the outset, the book is intended to correct a long-standing imbalance in Australian history. While the themes of the Great War may seem 'well and comfortably established', McQuilton reminds us the literature 'rests heavily on metropolitan sources'. There is a need, he argues, for an examination of the war's impact on rural Australia. One cannot simply assume 'that the war [there] simply reflected the war in metropolitan Australia' (p. 1).	25
There is nothing simple in the analysis to follow. In a closely argued and carefully researched study, McQuilton argues that the war in North Eastern Victoria was shaped by variables long familiar to labour historians, the deep and overlapping ties of class, family and community. The politics of the country town prove very different to those of the city. The intimacy of rural life, and the way particular families and individuals could dominate public proceedings, shaped a radically different discourse. This is best seen in the course of recruitment drives and the conscription referenda to follow: communities that had rendered up virtually all their able-bodied men to war offered little anonymity to the 'shirker'. McQuilton's reconstructions of public debates, the 'rowdy, divisive, even spiteful' proceedings that rocked the Town Hall and hustings, are both forceful and compelling (p. 59). On the other hand, the anti-German sentiment pervasive in the town was largely absent in North Eastern Victoria. The German families who had settled there were closely integrated into the pattern of rural life, they were friends, neighbours, and work mates rather than enemies.	26
If rural life was 'intimate' so too is McQuilton's narrative. The same regard to detail that distinguishes his account of Kelly country, is apparent in this subtly nuanced study of North Eastern Victoria. Reading McQuilton, it is possible to chart the life stories of families and communities at war, personal papers, service dossiers, and an exhaustive study of the local press informing and shaping the narrative. And one senses, at times, that these are McQuilton's people. Born and educated in North Eastern Victoria, he has an empathy for his subject that is the measure of a sympathetic and engaged historian.	27
It may well be that conscription and recruitment, ethnic and religious divisions are 'well established' themes for Great War historians. But no less than Damousi, Cochrane or McKernan, McQuilton also embarks on challenging and largely unmarked areas of inquiry. Far too little attention has been given to the efforts of voluntary labour in the Great War; indeed historians have often satirised the knitting circles and recruitment drives fielded by Red Cross and Patriotic Societies. McQuilton shows the way that these activities provided a measure of social cohesion in times of deep trauma and division. He explores the ways in which women carved out a place in the public domain and mobilised their grief and frustration into both pro (and anti war) activities. Here McKernan is deeply interested in the 'symbolic' construction of women in war, the oft-examined stereotypes of patriotic worker, devoted nurse and sacrificing mother. But for McQuilton these are real people, not the reified abstractions favoured by some poststructuralist analysis.	28
But what was the experience of women who were soldiers' mothers in the North East? At the public level, it is easy to trace the pattern of their experience. Many joined the Red Cross. They journeyed to Melbourne to meet their sons, or they sent daughter in their stead, perhaps shy at the prospect of meeting sons they might no longer know … Some were frightened by the changes war had wrought … Charlotte Lawrence was a member of the Rutherglen Red Cross. Her son returned in May 1918. He had been severely wounded. Several operations were needed to repair him physically but he had also been profoundly affected psychologically. Mrs Lawrence surrendered her Red Cross book and the money she had collected over the last month, went home and quietly took her own life (pp. 133–4).
As Mrs Lawrence's story suggests, Rural Australia at War is also a study of grief and remembrance. Ken Inglis's magisterial work has argued that war memorials occupy 'a sacred place' in the Australian landscape. Localised studies like McKernan's offer rare insight into the meanings embodied by those memorials; carefully linked to the families they commemorate, they can tell the story of loss across a generation and across a community. The pain of that loss echoes throughout McQuilton's narrative. In much the same way that Damousi employs oral history, and McKernan recovers repatriation files, McQuilton's use of family papers, archival records, material artefacts and an 'elusive' community memory recreates the 'emotional history' of the Great War in North Eastern Victoria. Perhaps that is nowhere better expressed than in Maria Keat's story.	29
Maria Keat received a small pension after Alick's death, but she was more concerned about the return of his personal belongings. A parcel … sent by the Defence Department … included Alick's pocketbook, shredded by shrapnel, stained with blood. The pocketbook contained photographs of family and friends, a view of Mt Bogong and a haystack with a black kelpie, Boxer, sitting in the foreground. … Tucked away in the address book were pressings of the plants and flowers Alick had collected the morning he had been killed … Maria Keat was awarded Alick's Victory Medal in 1923 [but she] never saw herself as noble, as a Spartan mother, as a woman who had done her stern duty. She had lost a son. She kept every item Alick had sent home, and every item sent home after his death, even the pocket book. She fretted that all her son's possessions had not been returned … [and wrote] to the Defence Department asking for the matter to be followed up, stating how important it was to her … The Defence Department sent a form letter, with a rubber stamp signature, assuring her that no further possessions had been found (pp. 136–7).
While Rural Australia and the Great War is an exemplary local study, the book ends with more questions than it answers. As McQuilton acknowledges, we really don't know if other regional communities exhausted their pool of volunteers more quickly than the cities, or if the war promoted the unionisation of the seasonal work force, or if the north East was 'unique' in the way it involved women. Wary always of generalisation beyond his evidence, McQuilton's conclusion calls for further regional studies. Rural Australia and the Great War may well have set a model others will strive to follow.	30
Melanie Oppenheimer's study of Australian civilians volunteers in wartime is the final title of this review essay and in a way it intersects with all the other books we've considered. Oppenheimer's volunteers packed the comfort parcels for Australian prisoners languishing in Singapore. Brimming with food, medicine and longed for news from home, they might have saved hundreds of lives. Instead, (as McKernan notes), the Japanese refused to distribute them, the work and love of thousands cruelly, criminally wasted. We see the faces of the volunteers scattered through Cochrane's handsome collection; raising funds, pouring tea, cheering on the troops and bringing in the harvest. Mostly, of course, they are women's faces. As Melanie Oppenheimer notes, bodies like the Red Cross were 95 per cent women; 'patriarchal structures', men only dominated the higher echelons of leadership (p. 179). It would be interesting to speculate how many of Damousi's informants undertook voluntary work. Certainly it were volunteers who brought these women comfort when loved ones were killed or worse fell into the terrible vacuum they called the 'missing'. But above all else Oppenheimer's is an organisational study. She charts the rise of the volunteer movement across two centuries of war and peace with the same painstaking attention to detail which distinguishes McQuilton's regional study.	31
The cover of All Work, No Pay, by Melanie Oppenheim, showing NSW Voluntary Aids at Woolloomooloo wharf about to embark on HMS Glory, September 1945. Source: Nivison Collection, Walcha
All Work, No Pay is a book labour historians should welcome. As Oppenheim notes, volunteer work has not achieved the attention it deserves, despite the fact that this 'third sector' of the economy was crucial to the prosecution of the war effort. The figures speak for themselves. In World War II alone over 8,000 patriotic funds were established. In bush, town and city they raised over £28 million, a staggering $A1.6 billion in today's currency. And they provided every service one could imagine, from nursing the troops to sewing their clothing. It is interesting to speculate why so sizable and so energetic a workforce should so long be 'forgotten'. Partly, as Oppenheimer explains, it is because voluntary work lies outside our 'collective memory of war'; 'battle scarred soldiers' is what one associates with war, not the women who sewed their bandages, nursed their wounds or cared for their grieving families (p. 2). But one also suspects it is because unpaid work has too long been denied legitimacy, even (I fear) by labour historians. Oppenheimer's achievement is in showing us just how crucial that work was. Its value is not to be measured in goods and services alone. Rather, Oppenheimer argues, the voluntary principle is part of the social capital that binds communities, neighbourhoods, families together. The way the state has assumed, and more recently abandoned, much of the welfare work attempted by volunteers is another important dimension of her analysis.	32
These women are largely absent from conventional histories of war and society and in their own time their efforts were not always welcome or acknowledged. One is apt to associate World War II with the 'total mobilisation' of both the male and female workforce. Oppenheimer reminds us how that war began and how slow, even reluctant, authorities were to 'concede' women's involvement.	33
Any offers of help from women were … firmly rejected by the authorities. The experience of the extraordinary Gladys Sandford was not uncommon, Gladys worked as a driver during World War I in Great Britain … Having lost two brothers and her husband during that war, she returned to New Zealand and worked as a car saleswoman. In 1925, she became the first New Zealand woman to obtain her pilots licence. She also spoke Arabic, French and German. [Living in Australia at the outbreak of war] she wrote to Brigadier-General Stantke offering her services … 'I am anxious that you should understand I am fully capable of handling and maintaining anything from cars to heavy trucks. I feel there is so much I can do and am definitely able to relieve a man for front line work'… Gladys received a curt reply from Army officials stating that her offer could not be accepted. Her experience… reflects the intransigence and stifling attitudes of the time regarding full citizenship rights and opportunities for women (p.107).
As those closing remarks suggests, All Work, No Pay is a study of gender at war; the way women negotiated some recognition for themselves in 'intransigent' and stiflingly male authority structures. But it also notes the opportunities war offered women. While for many men abroad it was a time of enforced confinement, 'their' women at home enjoyed hitherto unprecedented freedom, control, even (eventually) status. And Oppenheimer is equally concerned with the complex ways class intersects with gender. Perhaps one of the most important achievements of the book is the way her patient analysis of recruitment figures contests the abiding image of the volunteer worker as some kind of Lady Bountiful. Oppenheimer writes of weary factory workers packing comforts in lunchtimes and after hours, she notes the role industrial suburbs played in collecting money for defence funds, and the part union movement played in supporting Red Cross Prisoner work. Here again it is a labour historian who is best qualified to recover this important (and largely forgotten part) of Australia's wartime experience.	34
All Work, No Pay is a sequel to Oppenhiemer's earlier study of the Voluntary Aids Detachment movement in New South Wales. It offers the national story and it covers over a century of voluntary organization. But in extending the story she unavoidably loses something from her analysis. The most interesting parts of her first book involved a close inspection of the actual work done by her volunteers, work that was dirty, demanding and breached all the expectations of what was 'appropriate' for women. This close examination of the labour process is largely absent in the National Story, and the identity of her volunteers also (to some extent) suffers. But that does not diminish her achievement. Oppenheimer has recovered a story labour history and military history alike has long been in a need of.	35
And the cover of All Work No Pay might well be an appropriate place to conclude this article. It features a group of ten uniformed women on the Woolloomooloo wharf. Seated on their suitcases, smiling and confident, they are about to board HMS Glory on a mission to the Pacific. For the next three months, they will nurse Australian prisoners on the long journey back to Australia. These women are not military personnel, their Red Cross badges signal their civilian status; their task not so much one of war as of mercy; they will be paid nothing for their efforts and at home their work will earn no medals and no pensions. But these women were no less affected by war than the sailors who manned their battleship, the troops who escorted them or even the prisoners they rescued. Their presence reminds labour historians that writing about war is too important, too inclusive a task to be abdicated to the memoirs of veterans or the specialism of military history. The five authors considered here have reminded us of the price of war paid by all Australians. At this sorry juncture in the world's history, it is price we do well to remember.	36