Australian Women War Reporters: Boer War to Vietnam

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN

WAR REPORTERS

JEANNINE BAKER is a historian at Macquarie University who researches Australian media history and women’s history. She was awarded the University of Melbourne’s 2014 Dennis-Wettenhall Prize for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian history. She has also worked in the media and museum sectors as a researcher, curator and documentary maker.

AUSTRALIAN WOMEN

WAR REPORTERS

BOER WAR TO VIETNAM

Jeannine Baker

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Jeannine Baker 2015

First published 2015

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Creator: Baker, Jeannine, author.

Title: Australian women war reporters: Boer War to Vietnam/Jeannine Baker.

ISBN: 9781742234519 (paperback)

9781742242156 (ebook)

9781742247489 (PDF)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Women war correspondents—Australia.

Women journalists—Australia.

War—Press coverage—Australia.

Dewey Number: 070.4333

Design Josephine Pajor-Markus

Cover image Iris Dexter in her war correspondent’s uniform, 1943.

Source: Australian War Memorial P0 5161.017.

Printer Griffin Press

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: the rise of the woman war reporter

1 War from a woman’s angle

2 Breaking out of the women’s pages

3 With ‘our boys in Malaya’, 1941

4 ‘Lines of communication’: on the home front, 1942-43

5 ‘We had to fight to get there’: reporting from Europe, 1939–45

6 Narrowing the gap: reporting from Asia, 1945-46

7 Cold War conflicts … and beyond

Afterword

Notes

Select bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book was made possible through the contributions and support of many institutions and individuals. The State Library of New South Wales started me on this research journey by awarding me the Nancy Keesing Research Fellowship. A bursary from the Australian Federation of University Women-ACT enabled an extended research trip to Canberra. I am also grateful to the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Faculty of Arts at Macquarie University for financially supporting this publication.

Several people generously passed on invaluable memories, documents and images that have enriched this book. In particular I would like to thank Monica Attard, Ginny Stein, Sheridan Stumm, Carol Bursill, Rennie Keith, Elisabeth Knight, Richard Astley, Nancy Phelan, Caroline and Duncan Melville, Steve Lipscombe, Evol Ferguson, Jan Olver and Anne Mancini for their involvement.

Associate Professor Georgine Clarsen, Professor Bridget Griffen-Foley, Associate Professor Fay Anderson and Professor Kate Darian-Smith have provided wonderful guidance, friendship and encouragement.

I am thankful for the expertise of a great team at NewSouth Publishing, in particular publisher Phillipa McGuinness, who took on my project with enthusiasm. I would also like to thank editor Emily Stewart, copyeditor Anne Savage and designer Josephine Pajor-Markus. Thanks also to indexer Neil Radford.

My wonderful circle of friends provided practical assistance, support and laughter. I would especially like to mention Maria Beukers, David Croft, Louisa Raft, Kate Jeffery, Karan Jones, Helena Foley and Al Battestini. Thanks also to Linda Brainwood, Janice Garaty, John Baker, Richard Trembath, Liz Giuffre, Frances Steel, Richard White, Craig Munro, Sharon Connolly and Clare Hallifax.

Lastly I am grateful to Adam Fox, Huon Fox and Thea Fox for their love and patience over the last ten years.

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

THE RISE OF THE WOMAN WAR REPORTER

Women may serve the military, but they can never be permitted to be the military.

– Cynthia Enloe, Does Khaki Become You?¹

When Sydney journalist Iris Dexter was asked in 1941 to contribute a column to the AIF News, it prompted her to write in exasperation to her brother Bill, ‘I suppose they want what is rather loosely known as the woman’s angle … and there’s nothing I hate more than the woman’s angle on anything’.² The following year, Dexter and fifteen other women journalists were accredited as war correspondents by the Australian Army, and given the job of recording and publicising the activities of the auxiliary women’s services. I can imagine Dexter’s irritation when Woman magazine announced that she would be travelling around the country ‘getting the feminine angle’ on the war.³

The belief that women journalists were suited to writing about war solely from a female viewpoint has persisted ever since women began reporting on them. When Cora Stewart Taylor covered the 1897 Greco-Turkish war for the New York Journal under the pen-name of Imogene Carter, her report appeared under the headline ‘War Seen Through a Woman’s Eyes’. Three years later, an article about the South African War by Agnes Macready, the ‘lady correspondent’ of Sydney newspaper the Catholic Press, was headlined ‘A Woman’s Note from South Africa’. Macready downplayed her own role as an eyewitness and journalist, stressing that she saw the war only ‘through a woman’s eyes’.⁴ In contrast, the articles by Macready’s colleague Francis Timoney carried headlines that stressed both his proximity to the battlefield and the heroic excitement of his undertaking: ‘Stirring Adventures on the Veldt’ and ‘Amid the Battle Smoke of Africa’.

Macready’s newspaper articles focused on what she called ‘the grey side of a campaign’ – the aftermath of battle and the role of women and other civilians. Like many of the women who followed her, Macready felt herself to be on the periphery of the battlefield.

The war reporting done by women has been viewed as distinct and separate from the war reporting done by men through most of the twentieth century, an attitude based on assumptions about women’s place in war and in journalism. Many female journalists rejected the expectation that they were capable only of covering war from the ‘woman’s angle’, and Dexter was not alone in expressing frustration with the limitations posed on female reporters – restrictions that applied to their movements as well as their journalism.

This book charts the emergence of the Australian woman war reporter, her rise to prominence during World War II, and her growing acceptance following the Vietnam War. Between 1900 and 1975 more than thirty Australasian women reported on conflict for the Australian and overseas press, including the London Daily Mirror and Evening Standard, the Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman magazine, the Sydney Daily Mirror and United Press International. Over twenty Australasian women covered World War II. Most were officially accredited by the military, and were provided with uniforms, shoulder flashes and identity cards that identified them as war correspondents. Others travelled to military areas with the approval of military or government authorities but without official accreditation. A third group self-identified as war correspondents, but were in military areas without official endorsement or accreditation. In the decades following the Vietnam War, scores of Australian women have reported from trouble spots all over the world, for print, radio, television and online news services.

The enduring image of a war correspondent is adventurous, individualistic, and undeniably masculine. Risk-taking Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis, who became famous for his work during the war in Indo-China, is a case in point. Australian literature and journalism academic Sharyn Pearce describes him as ‘partly a Hemingwayesque tough guy showing coolness in danger and grace under pressure’ and ‘partly also a heroic larrikin in the ANZAC mould’. Australian war correspondent Elizabeth Riddell, who reported from Europe during World War II, recalled the equally iconic Ernest Hemingway as being ‘hung with guns’ and ‘looking very war like’. The mythology, and its edge of glamour, was one that male correspondents themselves encouraged and revelled in.⁵ The women uncovered by this book display many of the same characteristics we associate with male war correspondents: bravery, tenacity, conviction, ambition and news-sense. Like their male colleagues, they could also be rebellious, competitive, self-important, reckless and loose with the truth.

While reporting from occupied Japan in 1946, Australian Women’s Weekly journalist Dorothy Drain tackled the appeal of the war correspondent in the popular imagination:

Foreign correspondents are supposed to be men who rush round the globe, call presidents by their first names, pontificate on problems on which no ordinary fellow would dare to make up his mind, and end up either by marrying American heiresses (film version) or drinking themselves to death. Women correspondents leap in and out of planes in a cloud of fox furs and Chanel No. 5, and (film version also) marry the correspondent the heiress didn’t get.⁶

At the core of Drain’s light-hearted piece are serious questions. Where do 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 when she is officially accredited as one? These issues are addressed head-on in this book.

Through much of the twentieth century female journalists had to battle the military, the government, newspaper editors and male journalists to get close to the front and to report war from beyond the domestic or ‘woman’s angle’. The military rebuffed applications to enter operational areas with arguments about women’s vulnerability, their need for male protection, their inability to understand or cope with war conditions, the negative impact on male behaviour, and even the lack of women’s lavatories.

At the base of this exclusion was the deeply held belief that women simply did not belong in the military environment unless they were working in an essential support role such as nursing. If necessary, they could be tolerated on the periphery of operational areas, but their presence in combat zones could lead to ‘blurred lines of command’ and narrowing of the gap between combatants and civilians. The belief that women distract from the real business of war and ‘slow down the march’ was entrenched within the armed forces, argued Cynthia Enloe in her influential book on the relationship between women and the military.⁷ But non-military officials also made assumptions about women’s inability to fit into the military world. While reporting from Singapore in 1941 for Collier’s Weekly, Martha Gellhorn was advised by an English press officer (and former journalist) that ‘as a layman’ she ‘would not understand’ how the troops related to each other.⁸ These attitudes, and the military policies that flowed from them, stressed the differences between men and women rather than their commonalities, and normalised and reinforced the belief that such differences were natural.

The perception common to newspaper editors and military and government officials that women’s journalism was inherently inferior and insignificant has also contributed to the ways that women war reporters have been defined, managed and remembered. In revealing the diversity and breadth of Australian women’s war reportage this book also examines women’s place within Australian press culture, and reveals the various ways female reporters managed or manipulated restrictive assumptions about their role in journalism.

Previous histories of war reporting have tended to minimise or dismiss the experiences of female journalists. The emphasis of most studies has been on embedded reporters of front-line combat - a focus that excludes all but the most exceptional women reporters. Behind the omission of women’s experiences lie a number of assumptions, however: that women have played only a brief and peripheral role in reporting conflict, and that women’s journalism is of limited value because it is perceived as being solely concerned with the home front. Some previous historians have commented that the achievements of Australian women reporters are minor in comparison with those of their famed American and British counterparts such as Martha Gellhorn and Marguerite Higgins. I set out to do something different – to find out how the experiences and the writing of women journalists were shaped by their national identity, and by the particularities of Australian attitudes to women and to war.

It is not my intention to argue that women’s war reporting has been equal in scale, significance or impact to war reporting by men. It is undeniable that in the period covered by this book the number of women involved in war reporting was small, and that their reporting tended to be focused on non-military aspects of war. Prior to Vietnam, female reporters were unlikely to face situations of extreme danger, unlike most male combat reporters. But women journalists have covered conflict in greater numbers than has been previously suggested, and from a variety of locations and in a diversity of ways. While this book reveals that many women covered war from overseas military areas, it also challenges the assumption that war writing from a non-combat perspective is inferior or insignificant. Aspects of war that were previously considered only of marginal interest – and therefore usually allocated to women – are now the meat and potatoes of news coverage of conflict. The role of medical and other support personnel, the immediate and long-term impact of conflict on communities, the plight of children and refugees, are integral to how we understand war today.

Some of the wartime events and issues covered by Australian female journalists have been far from mundane: Anne Matheson was one of the first women to land in Normandy after D-Day; Lorraine Stumm reported on Hiroshima just six weeks after it had been destroyed by an atom bomb; Dorothy Cranstone flew into Burma in 1945 with the Royal New Zealand Air Force; Kate Webb was one of the first reporters on the scene after the American embassy was attacked by the Viet Cong during the Tet Offensive. Even in World War II, when Australian women reporters were supposedly quarantined from combat, they witnessed the horrific human consequences of war. What are the consequences of reporting in situations that are dangerous, frightening or morally confronting?

When I came across journalist Iris Dexter’s funny, poignant war-time letters to her brother, in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, I was intrigued by the catalogue’s description of her as an accredited war correspondent during World War II. I wondered how many other Australian women had become war correspondents, where they reported from, and what subjects they covered. Answering those simple questions took years of investigation in public archives and private collections in Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. Even as this book was nearing completion, I stumbled across a short biography of Edith Charlotte Musgrave Dickenson, the second Australian woman to cover the South African War, and the first to be accredited as a war correspondent. Undoubtedly many more stories of remarkable women journalists are out there waiting to be uncovered. It is my hope that future historians will expand on this research, and write a complete history of women in the Australian press – not just about their wartime work, but about the whole gamut of their experiences and their journalism.

1

WAR FROM A WOMAN’S ANGLE

I see with a woman’s eyes, and my point of view is limited.

– Agnes Macready, nurse and journalist, South African War¹

Just two weeks after war was declared in South Africa on 11 October 1899, Agnes Macready, a Sydney nurse and journalist, left Australia by steamship, determined to ‘get to the seat of war as soon as possible’. She was the first nurse to travel from Australia to South Africa after the declaration of war, landing even before the first contingent of Australian troops arrived.² Over the following two years Macready wrote regular lengthy feature articles for the Catholic Press. The experience of nursing the wounded and the sick in deprived conditions, and of witnessing the ruthless methods of warfare by the British against the Boers, ‘shattered all the romance of war’ for her.

Macready was the first Australian woman war reporter, but she was not the only one in South Africa. Journalist Edith Charlotte Musgrave Dickenson travelled to South Africa in 1900 as a special correspondent for the Adelaide Advertiser, and her exposés of the horrific conditions inside the British concentration camps were to influence famous British activist Emily Hobhouse. In subsequent decades other Australian women journalists made the trip from Australia to the battlefield. These women – Agnes Macready, Edith Dickenson, Louise Mack, Katharine Susannah Pritchard and Janet Mitchell – paved the way for the numerous women war correspondents to follow in the watershed years of World War II.

AGNES MACREADY

Macready was born in Rathfriland, Northern Ireland, the eldest of five children, and migrated to New South Wales with her family in 1867, aged twelve. Her mother Jane died two years later, and in 1880 her father, Reverend Henry Macready, was elected Moderator of the NSW Presbyterian General Assembly. Agnes Macready, however, converted to Catholicism as an adult. From the narrow range of occupations available to her Macready chose nursing, although she was already over twenty-five (normally considered the upper limit for nurses in training) when she began training at Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney. Macready’s record of service noted that she had a quick temper and was better working alone than with other nurses.³ She subsequently worked at Melbourne Hospital and then as matron of Bowral Hospital. By 1898 Macready was contributing sketches and poetry to the influential Sydney-based newspaper Catholic Press under the nom de plume ‘Arrah Luen’.

Between 1899 and 1902 British forces and the independent Boer republics of the South African Republic (also known as the Transvaal) and the Orange Free State battled over control of southern Africa. The Boers, later known as Afrikaners, were descendants of the Dutch who had originally settled in the southern Cape region of Africa in the mid-seventeenth century. After Britain’s colonisation of the Cape region in the late eighteenth century, the Boers migrated north and established the two republics. The subsequent discovery of gold and diamonds in both Boer republics escalated tensions between their governments and British and American mining interests in the region. The war was ostensibly fought to protect the rights of the Uitlanders (Outlanders), or expatriate migrant workers, who been denied the franchise in Johannesburg.

Australia’s early participation in the war demonstrated its loyalty to the British Empire, and over the course of the South African War (also known as the Boer War) up to 20 000 Australian men served in Colonial and Commonwealth units.⁴ Fighting alongside the Australians were volunteers from Britain, New Zealand, Canada, India and South Africa. At this time Australian nurses were attempting to advance the status of their profession, and military nursing in Australia was in its infancy. The sole military nursing organisation in the colonies, the New South Wales Army Nursing Service Reserve (NSWANSR), was founded in late 1898 and headed by Nellie Gould as Lady Superintendent of Nurses.⁵ At the outset of the war hundreds of Australian women volunteered to go to South Africa as nurses, but Colonial authorities declined their services. Many of these women were motivated by strong imperial loyalties. Typical of their sentiments were those expressed in the application of Sydney woman Dorothea Fawcett Story, who claimed that she was ‘prompted entirely by a desire to be of service to the brave British subjects who may be injured in upholding the dignity and liberty of the British nation’.⁶

Around 1400 female nurses served with the British in South Africa during the South African War, and historian Craig Wilcox estimates that about eighty of them were Australian.⁷ The first organised group of nurses, from the NSWANSR, departed Australia with the Second Contingent of the New South Wales Army Medical Corps (NSWAMC) via the Moravian on 17 January 1900. Other small groups from South Australia, Western Australia and Victoria followed. Dozens more women travelled independently to South Africa, covering their own expenses, and finding nursing work on arrival.⁸ Whether Macready made an official request to be sent to South Africa is not recorded. She paid for her own passage – the equivalent of nine months’ salary for a registered nurse – and carried letters of support from the Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal Patrick Moran, the Premier of New South Wales, William Lyne, and senior medical men in Melbourne and Sydney.

As the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Agnes Macready was exactly the sort of respectable middle-class young woman seen as ideally suited to the ‘ladylike’ profession of nursing.⁹ But as a Catholic, Macready differed from the women in the NSWANSR, who were all either Church of England or Presbyterian.¹⁰ She was also opposed to Britain’s imperialist expansion, as were many Irish-born Catholic Australians. Macready was moved more by ‘the cause of charity’ than ‘the spirit of jingoism’ in deciding to go to South Africa, said the Catholic Press. She had both esteem for the soldiers on the British side, and ‘admiration for the manliness and bravery of the Boer Peasantry, but she had no delusions about the motives of the big political heads’.¹¹

In the early stages of the war, press correspondents from the British Empire, Europe and the United States flocked to South Africa. More than a dozen Australian reporters covered the conflict, including renowned writers AB ‘Banjo’ Paterson, representing the Sydney Morning Herald, Reuters and the Melbourne Argus, and Arthur ‘Smiler’ Hales for the London Daily News and several Australian newspapers. Macready was one of two special correspondents for the Catholic Press. The other was Father Francis Timoney, the Catholic chaplain to the New South Wales Citizens’ Bushmen, the third NSW contingent to be sent to South Africa, which departed Australia on 28 February 1900. Irish-born Timoney was the founder and former editor of the Catholic Press, first published in 1895.¹² Another chaplain, James Green, the Wesleyan chaplain to the New South Wales Citizens’ Bushmen, wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.

The British War Office initially intended that nurses would have only a limited role in supervising hospital orderlies, rather than nursing at field or stationary hospitals, but military commanders in South Africa disregarded the instructions from London and sent the women wherever they were most needed. There remained strong prejudice against nurses in the British Army Medical Service, the system into which the Australian nurses were incorporated. On her arrival in Durban, Macready wrote, she ‘was distinctly conscious that men are really superior to women’. Male volunteers were welcomed, but it was more difficult to find places for nurses.¹³ Another issue was that nursing arrangements were in the hands of the British sisters, and ‘the lines are naturally conservative’. Her suggestion to the authorities that she might instead be of medical service to the Boers was met with ‘a cold stare of amazement’. Macready proceeded to Pietermaritzburg, the capital of the British colony of Natal and the base for the British Army. There the principal medical officer employed her as nursing sister at the Fort Napier Military Hospital.

In Macready’s first article for the Catholic Press, written on the eve of an expected battle, she reflected on her outsider