ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this book was made a great deal easier by libraries all around Australia, which digitised newspapers of the period in time for the centenary of the Great War and made them available through Trove.

Staff of the State Library of Victoria had spent years scanning and exhibiting letters, diaries, unit histories, pamphlets, maps and other material from and about the war and the conscription referenda: not for me, but for everyone.

I spent many months researching the history of the war in the air, including wondrous hours watching flying displays of original aircraft at Point Cook RAAF Museum in Victoria and the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire, England. Other invaluable collections and exhibitions I visited included the Imperial War Museum at Duxford and in London; the Musée d’Armée in Paris; Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance and Museum Victoria; the Auckland War Memorial Museum and City Library; and the Australian War Memorial, National Library of Australia and National Museum of Australia in Canberra. The German Albatros shot down by members of 3 Squadron in December 1917 is on display in the Australian War Memorial.

I travelled to Flanders and visited the site of the airfield at Bailleul and its nearby war cemetery, the battlefields of Passchendaele, and the reconstructed town of Ypres with its moving museum, In Flanders Fields.

If you’d like to read more about the events that inspired this novel, here are just a few of the books I read most closely: various volumes of The Official History of Australia in the War, edited by CEW Bean, Wings by Patrick Bishop, Fire in the Sky by Michael Molkentin, The Western Front from the Air by Nicholas C Watkis, Forgotten Voices of the Great War by Max Hastings, Winged Victory by WM Yeates, Massacre at Passchendaele by Glyn Harper, The ANZACs by the great librarian and storyteller Patsy Adam-Smith, Desert Boys by Peter Rees, and That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman by Janet Bomford. I have pages copied from A Military Atlas of the First World War by Arthur Banks stuck all over the walls of my writing room.

Some of the greatest memoirs and diaries of the 20th century were written during or following the war, and I’ve read and re-read many of them over the years, including Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth, Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That, WH Downing’s To the Last Ridge, Frederic Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune, and Siegfried Sassoon’s Sherston novels and Siegfried’s Journey.

The first draft of the book was written during an artist’s residency at beautiful Bundanon, and my thanks go to the Bundanon Trust for providing the time and space to write, in spite of the many distractions outside my window (a paddock full of kangaroos!) I thank my colleagues at the State Library of Victoria and La Trobe University for their patience, wisdom and encouragement.

My father and my uncle Roger shared family stories about the conscription debates, the Women’s Peace Army and the early years of the Australian air force.

Thanks especially to Clare Hallifax at Scholastic, who invited me to contribute to this series and encouraged me to write about the air war and the conscription debates; to everyone at Scholastic who has supported and produced the series Australia’s Great War, and the other writers who have contributed such wonderful books for each year.

Finally, this book is dedicated to the memory of my great-aunt Connie, who worked at the Women’s Farm with her little sister Madge Gardiner, who led the huge women’s peace procession in Melbourne in 1916. Madge was eight years old.—