Jeannine Baker

Synchronicity! On Tuesday as I read more of Australian Women War Reporters, Boer War to Vietnam by Jeannine Baker – a fascinating book I discovered from Carolyn Holbrook’s review at Inside Story – I came across the name of Louise Mack, in the chapter called ‘War from a Woman’s Angle’. The women featured in this chapter include Agnes Macready and Edith Dickenson who reported on the Boer War; Katharine Susannah Prichard whose subsequent writing was apparently very much influenced by having witnessed the wreckage of war near the front in WW1, and Janet Mitchell who reported on the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in 1931-32. All these women have interesting stories, but it was Louise Mack who grabbed my attention because she was so unconventional…

Then, to my surprise, the name of Louise Mack cropped up again in Sue’s Monday Musings at Whispering Gums! As Sue says, Louise Mack is hardly a household name so this is synchronicity indeed. Well, like many bloggers Sue is tackling her TBR, and her first book of 2017 is a novel by this same Louise Mack (1870-1935). Sue’s introduction to this enterprising woman is full of all sorts of interesting snippets, but Jeannine Baker’s profile is a bit different because her focus is on the experiences of Australian women war reporters during World War II. Baker’s PhD – which won the Dennis-Wettenhall Prize for the best Australian history postgraduate thesis at the University of Melbourne – is the subject of her book, and so it is Mack’s experience reporting on WW1 which is the focus of her attention.

Baker’s account begins in an interesting way:

The first published memoir or war corresponding by an Australian woman journalist was the purportedly eyewitness account of the German invasion of Belgium and the fall of Antwerp in 1914 by Louise Mack, an unconventional and adventurous writer and poet. (p.25)

Purportedly??

TO read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/01/04/australian-women-war-reporters-boer-war-to-v...… (mais)