The Purpose of Futility: Writing World War I, Australian Style

By Clare Rhoden

In The Purpose of Futility, Clare Rhoden surveys Australian Great War narratives, demonstrating their particularly Australian features which help to explain the unique and disputed position of the Great War in Australian history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: UWA Publishing
• Release date: Feb 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781742586908

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

World War I was an astonishing event. The millions of people caught up in the war had never experienced anything like it. For the first time, much of civilisation was trapped in a life-or-death struggle. Whole societies were pitted against one another in a devastating, horrific, technological war. Cultured Europe was transformed into a gigantic threshing ground that crushed cities into shards and men into bloody pieces. No wonder people thought this was the war to end all wars. It seemed likely to be the war to end all of humankind. Everyone continued to fight because to lose such a bloody war was unthinkable; losing could only mean total annihilation, a return to the Dark Ages. The war was so horrific that everyone was sure this would be the last time humanity ever resorted to the battlefield.

Everyone was deluded. World War I, far from preventing more wars, probably made World War II – which transformed ‘The Great War’ into ‘World War I’ – inevitable.

World War I, however, did change the world in significant ways. There were undoubted advances in engineering, medicine and science, driven by necessity: improved machinery, engine technology, motorised vehicles, aerodynamics, weaponry, surgical instruments and techniques, medical and rehabilitation procedures, prostheses, building methods, communications technologies, and so on.

There were also irreparable damages and losses.

One of the most astonishing outcomes of the war was the proliferation of art and creativity, both inspired by and addressing the war. Viewed as the most literary war ever fought, World War I was the first to involve literate populations on a grand scale. The trove of written memorabilia from the war and the mass of writing about it since ensure it will remain a focal point in the mainstream consciousness of the West.

The literature of the war, both poetry and prose, has its own momentous existence, quite separate from the history of the war. Thousands of texts commemorate the war; thousands more critique the commemoratives. In Australia, there is a tendency to prefer overseas texts as World War I commemorations above the home-grown variety. This is a phenomenon which bears investigation, and which deserves robust challenge. Australia at the time of World War I was arguably a more distinct entity among Western nations than it is today.

Building on previous studies, this book offers new and different perspectives to reposition Australian World War I literature in relation to the popular canon of European works. The Purpose of Futility argues that Australian World War I prose is a distinct subgenre. This book provides a moderating frame over previous research which effectively identified the Australian writers’ reliance on old-fashioned heroic modes of writing war. Our central discussion of how leadership is represented in literature establishes Australian cultural egalitarianism as a factor in the infamously poor discipline of Australian troops. Our underlying premise – that literature has both constructive and commemorative cultural value – goes some way to explaining Australia’s infatuation with all things Anzac.

Some people believe that the years 1914–44 are one continuous, twentieth-century version of the medieval Thirty Years War. From our viewpoint, World War I was a causal factor in much that followed, and its obscenities have been superseded by even worse horrors. For example, 50,000 soldiers killed on the first day of the Somme battle sounds appalling, and is appalling, but that number pales beside the instant death of 140,000 citizens of Hiroshima. World War I’s mustard gas was vile and evil, but witness the work of its descendants such as Agent Orange and napalm. The idea of the ‘Lost Generation of 1914’ is very sombre, but the killing fields of Cambodia more surely extinguished an entire age group. The long shadow of the Nazi Holocaust, estimated to have killed more than ten million people of various backgrounds, reaches much further into succeeding generations than do the echoes of the Western Front.

As they put pen to paper in the 1920s and 1930s, the soldier authors who wrote about World War I had no such comparisons to make: it was still ‘The Great War’ then, rather than the first in what has ever since threatened to be a series of World Wars. The veteran-authors are very right in seeing World War I as the worst calamity of their lifetime, of many lifetimes, because they could not have anticipated the horrors that followed.

History proves that writing truthfully about World War I – as with the modern-day broadcasting of explicit images of wars across the globe – does not prevent future wars and even worse horrors. All the countries involved in the 1914–18 conflict were sufficiently satisfied with using armed force to solve political stalemates that they returned to war only twenty years later, having, they surely felt, come to the end of alternatives. Many have, a number of times since, used force to pursue political objectives. After exhausting or discarding other courses of action, it has been all too common for twentieth-century nations to choose to fight, rather than to employ whatever alternatives were available at the time.

Nevertheless, even if they have no power to prevent conflict, the writings of the war-veteran authors remain relevant. Their warnings and their evidence still have value. Their words must be heard, because their testimony has much to tell us civilians about war and its effects, its necessities and its sacrifices, its inanities and excesses, and especially the toll that war takes on individuals. Until the popular and political will of the entire globe decides otherwise, war remains a constant in human existence.

Part of the difficulty we have in understanding the effects of war comes directly from the writings of veterans. Although the most popular World War I narratives tell a story of disillusionment, horror and grief, most of the writers have a degree of pride and even enjoyment in their service. Many remember war as the best time of their lives, because its dramas, intense friendships, and shared purposes created a sense of community and personal worth that peacetime can never match. Survivors need to believe that their experiences have some meaning, and the vast majority of soldiers wrote about World War I as a meaningful event. Reading their words in a later age, we use our somewhat jaundiced hindsight to view their motives and actions with a mixture of disbelief and amazement. We tend to evaluate the writings of veterans in terms of our own moral and ethical standards; we doubt that men truly enlisted with the joy of anticipation, with a desire to fight. To most of us, knowing the continued cost of war across the twentieth century, war is the worst calamity which humanity can inflict upon itself. Even though many veterans look back with pride and nostalgia on their service days, we prefer to believe that everything about war is repulsive, and that no aspect of it can be viewed positively; we believe that those who record their war service as the best time of their lives must be deluded.

The truth lies everywhere in between: no simple dichotomy exists, from which we must choose our side; no balanced midpoint satisfies all perspectives. It is not possible to say that war is either the worst event that can befall us or the best situation for comradeship and meaning. More often, war is both the best and the worst, and also, like most human experiences, quite ordinary for much of the time. This is the heart of war’s mystique for the writer and the reader. Stories of war can reveal much to us about the joys and the costs of living in a fragile world, because such stories reflect both the best and the worst of human life itself, and tend to elide the ordinary days. In war stories as in everyday life, small decisions can be fateful, and accidents, happy coincidences, and inexplicable sufferings are daily occurrences.

The Purpose of Futility takes a fresh look at Australian narratives of World War I. This may be surprising: many readers do not even know that such narratives exist. They do; and they deserve to be read and remembered. So our first step will be to introduce readers to the Australian veteran-authors of World War I, before we proceed to investigate the works themselves, their literary and cultural legacy, and the place of World War I in Australian culture as we enter the centenary of our engagement at Gallipoli.

1

THE AUSTRALIAN NARRATIVES

Many readers will be surprised to discover that there is a rich tradition of Australian narratives about World War I, both by veterans of the conflict and their civilian contemporaries. The World War I stories written in recent decades are better known, but are still seen as secondary to the novels of overseas writers.

Tracking down Australian World War I stories is difficult, because the English-speaking world has decided that there is plenty of better literature about the war. Most of us know the work of Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, and Ernest Hemingway. The phrase ‘all quiet on the Western Front’ has become part of everyday language, but the Australian novels of the time have largely disappeared.

Our focus here is on Australian prose narratives of World War I which tell a story of individuals or groups of individuals, rather than those texts which recount as their major business the history of military actions. We will not examine poetry; official military narratives such as unit histories; popular histories such as illustrated guides and battlefield expositions; or individual diaries and letters – all of which are treated extensively elsewhere. We will keep in mind the work of C. E. W. Bean, Australia’s official historian, whose books are credited with helping to cement the Australian heroic style. However, the ever-increasing stock of World War I narratives, especially in the genres of fiction and popular history, must limit our exploration to a selection of texts, concentrating on those of more literary ambition. The more famous canonical texts also occupy the more literary end of the raft of World War I texts, standing apart from the many hundreds of lesser narratives which reprise traditional heroics.

Although we will make use of the dichotomy of disillusionment opposed to heroic narration which generally, if rather simply, divides World War I literature, we will see throughout our journey that these two literary modes are not as distinct as many discussions would imply. Indeed, they form part of a larger cultural distinction between disillusionment and traditional writing, which in itself comprises a rather extensive spread.

It is worth enquiring into the reasons behind the practical disappearance of Australian narratives of World War I. The preference for disillusioned narratives has reduced our appreciation of most Australian World War I works and consigned them to ephemeral status.

There is also a conflation of the actions and achievements of the Anzacs and the political uses to which their record has been put. This leads cultural critics to deplore the Anzacs as well as, or instead of, deploring their recruitment as icons of either conservative or left-wing cultural values (and it is also interesting to consider how the Anzac can be used to bolster opposing ends of the political spectrum). The use of the Anzac legend as a call to nationalistic pride needs to be separated from discussion of the legend itself: neither debunking nor affirming its historical basis will prevent or promote the legend’s conscription into the political arena. Concentrating on the political uses of the texts inhibits our comprehension of their literary value, and cuts us off from an important window into the thoughts and experiences of an earlier generation of our countrymen.

Australian texts not only provide valuable perspectives about an event crucial to the shaping of the twentieth century, but also constitute a distinct style. While 1930s–1960s cultural biases have elevated disillusionment (equated with British, American and European canonical works) above traditional narration (understood as fundamental to Australian texts), we can identify unique philosophical positions which underpin Australian World War I writing style. All such perspectives are inextricably bound up with the literary works; writing from either a ‘disillusionment’ or a ‘traditional’ position affected the literature produced.

One of our main focus points here is the representation of leadership in World War I narratives. In World War I stories that are written from an underlying ethos of rupture with the past (disillusionment), leadership is often shown as blameworthy, while stories generated from a continuity (traditional heroic) perspective treat World War I leaders less harshly. In particular, the representation of leadership in Australian World War I narratives proposes that the actions of both leaders and ordinary soldiers, however futile in terms of achieving their immediate aims, serve some purpose which is either tangible or can be easily discerned.

For example, a feint may look like a failed attack, but may actually enable another more effective action to take place. Standing to arms in the face of inevitable annihilation may delay the enemy’s advance. Attacking against insuperable odds may serve the deeply unenviable purpose of upholding a reputation for courage. This is the critically derided, traditional value system that underpins many Australian World War I narratives.

Although the field is crowded, there is room for critical exploration and comment, especially for Australian narratives, as we enter the war’s centenary. Books from the British, European and American disillusionment canon have been researched for decades, but little attention has been paid to Australian World War I texts. In particular, the role of leadership in Australian narrative accounts of the achievements and successes of the Australian Imperial Force has been neglected. Here we will redress the imbalance somewhat through a close consideration of Australian narratives, including both contemporary and more recent texts, and an analysis of the leadership styles they portray.

So one important consideration of this book is to survey and describe the representation of leadership in Australian World War I narratives, and this discussion of leadership’s characteristic features will help us to identify and describe the unique literary aspects of these narratives. The investment of even futile actions with purpose is a psychologically potent mechanism for creating meaningful narratives from the chaos of wartime experience. But before we embark on this discussion, we will have a closer look at some of the texts.

The following descriptions outline each of the major Australian texts we are considering, their authors, their reception and their publication history. Further information about each text and its author can be found in the sources named in the respective footnotes.

Leonard Mann, Flesh in Armour (1932)¹

Leonard Mann (1895–1981) was a clerk, a lawyer and an arbitrator in industrial relations, and he pursued a career in writing on the side. His experiences in World War I led him to write Flesh in Armour, a brilliantly complex novel of the conflict, which he self-published in 1932, as no publisher would take it on. Nevertheless, the book won the Australian Literature Society’s gold medal for best book of that year. Eventually released by a publishing house in 1944, Flesh in Armour has been reprinted a number of times (including in 1973, 1985, and most recently with an insightful introduction by Janet Turner Hospital in 2008).

Mann enlisted in 1916 at the age of twenty, and fought on the Western Front through the horrific days of 1917. He was buried alive by a shell explosion at Passchendaele, and was some hours being rescued; the effect of that experience is movingly conveyed by the similar fate of Mann’s protagonist, Frank Jeffreys. Jeffreys is far from the traditional heroic model usually associated with Australian works of World War I, but although he realises that he lacks the heroic spark himself, he is perceptive enough to recognise it in some of his fellow soldiers. Flesh in Armour is populated with a cast of eminently Australian characters, and also expresses the prototypical Australian view of the war, the British, and the army with great clarity.

Mann’s work deals extensively with life outside the trenches as well as with the fighting. From the drawing rooms of England to the estaminets of embattled France, Mann’s Australians navigate their war as an entirely alien experience. Jeffreys also has a love life, one effectively marred by the circumstances of the war (an inversion of a popular World War I trope, in which the protagonist’s love life complicates his war experience).

One of the great strengths of Mann’s novel is that it encompasses such a range of perspectives. For example, in a very realistic way, Jeffreys is sometimes revolted by war and at other times astonished and impressed by the military tradition and the scale of the events around him. His war is a condensed event which intensifies many of his experiences and emotions. Eventually, feeling that he has let down his mates, and shattered by the apparent betrayal of his fiancée, Jeffreys commits suicide. Although the rest of his platoon realise what has occurred, they hide the fact and make sure that the cross over his grave reads ‘Killed in Action’.

J. P. McKinney, Crucible (1935)²

Jack McKinney (1891–1966) is perhaps best known to modern Australians as the husband of celebrated poet Judith Wright. Jack understood his fellow Anzacs, their values, their casual manners and their despair. He never mistook them en masse for thoughtless or shallow, and his book Crucible is the most balanced portrait of Australians to come out of World War I. Crucible won a competition run by the Victorian branch of the Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Imperial League of Australia over other notable books including Mann’s Flesh in Armour. A reviewer for The New Zealand Railways Magazine in 1936 described the book as:

one of the finest war novels I have read. So vivid, so sincere one could imagine that the author was the hero he has created…The book also is a mighty argument against the horror and futility of war.³

In the early 2000s, some Australian World War I books resurfaced, but McKinney’s Crucible was not among them (thankfully, the novel was reissued in 2014). Published in 1935 by Angus & Robertson, Crucible proved unique among the Australian works encountered in the course of this research. It is witty, sad, and thoughtful. It has a love affair, death, battle, survival, undying friendship, an unexpected baby (if such a creature can be imagined) and a compromised return home. It is so frank about Australians that the Australian reader experiences moments of acute embarrassment – as well as recognition – and moments of extreme sadness. McKinney portrays Australians with a fine eye for their multiplicity as well as their commonalities. He regards the range of his fellow countrymen with tolerance and understanding, and a firm belief that we could be more than we were – than we are.

McKinney was born in 1891 in Numurkah, in the ‘Sun Country’ of northern Victoria. He enjoyed writing from an early age and became a cadet reporter at the Argus. He soon discovered that interesting events have their ugly side. Sent to interview a woman widowed by a horrific workplace accident, he was revolted by the task. Either the emotional intensity or the gruesome details – aspects of events he later related so tellingly in his war novel – must have sickened him. Leaving his promising cadetship behind, twenty-year-old Jack went bush.

Bringing a mob of cattle south from Charleville in Queensland in 1915, McKinney arrived in Melbourne where he enlisted on 6 September, aged 24. His attestation papers show that despite his bushman’s travels he described himself as a ‘journalist’. He had decided that he was first and foremost a writer. During the war, McKinney served on the Western Front, in similar areas to Leonard Mann.

McKinney went on to write distinctive philosophy; he made emotional sense of a world trying to exist on a purely rational plane. The writer and Wright-scholar Fiona Capp thinks that Jack’s philosophy appeared before its time,⁴ before his ideas could be fully appreciated. Crucible is like that too: worthy of reconsideration by readers of a later age.

Frederic Manning, The Middle Parts of Fortune (1929/30)⁵

Frederic Manning (1882–1935) was born in Sydney, but moved to England at the age of 15. He lived most of his life in England and would have considered himself English, or at most an expatriate Australian. However, his highly acclaimed narrative of World War I, The Middle Parts of Fortune, contains features which differentiate it from the canonical disillusionment works and connect it strongly to the Australian World War I narrative tradition.

A friend of T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence, Manning wrote a creditable body of literature, both poetry and prose, which is evidently the work of a sensitive mind and of fine powers of observation. His own war service began in 1915 and lasted a little over two years. Manning’s military career was rendered troublesome by his problems with alcohol. He failed to complete officer training, despite his superior education and social standing, and served in the ranks of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry, with most of his active service on the Somme. He was eventually commissioned in 1917. Manning was often in disgrace because of his difficulties with drunkenness, for which he was at least once court-martialled. He resigned his commission late in 1917 when it seems both he and his superiors could see no value in his continuing to serve.

Manning’s The Middle Parts of Fortune is perhaps the most even-handed novel to come out of the war, but it sits just outside the canon of the best-recognised works. First published privately and anonymously by subscription in 1929 as The Middle Parts of Fortune, the novel was republished, with the language toned down for a wider audience, as Her Privates We in 1930. It has since been published a number of times, under both titles (for example 1964, 1977, 1999, 2008, 2012), and later editions are unexpurgated. It is also now available as an ebook through Project Gutenberg. Both of the novel’s titles are drawn from the Shakespearean quotes which introduce each section.

Whether The Middle Parts of Fortune can be claimed as Australian is moot. Nettie Palmer discussed the issue in 1932, concluding that Manning is not an Australian writer, but that if he could be claimed as Australian ‘he would be in the front rank’.⁶ Manning’s protagonist is a man of no known first name, relatives, or home. Manning gives us an infantryman serving in the British Expeditionary Force, providing us with a very different perspective from the canonical disillusionment novels, which are all told from the viewpoint of the junior officer, and also from the typical Australian narratives, which concentrate on the volunteer soldiers in the Australian Imperial Force.

So Manning’s Bourne is unusual in the canon. He is a frontline soldier, evidently not English, and somewhat dislocated in the BEF:

He felt curiously isolated even from them. He was not of their county, he was not even of their country, or their religion, and he was only partially of their race. When they spoke of their remote villages and hamlets, or sleepy market-towns in which nothing happened except the church clock chiming the hour, he felt like an alien among them; and in the vague kind of homesickness which troubled him he did not seek company, but solitude.⁷

However, Bourne occupies a place that was historically filled by thousands of colonial-born men who rushed to England to enlist at war’s outbreak (it is worth noting that there were many more thousands of such men than there were executed men, who have been treated much more often in fiction, and are therefore possibly over-represented in modern narratives). It is debatable whether Manning’s mysterious Bourne is an Australian, as is hinted in the text, and to some extent it is not important, as Bourne is a kind of everyman.

Manning appears to have considered himself European rather than Australian, yet The Middle Parts of Fortune contains a number of passages which resonate with an Australian or at least southern perspective, for example references to Bourne’s ‘childhood…among rocks from which reverberated heat quivered in wavy films’.⁸ We will see, later in our discussion, how well The Middle Parts of Fortune matches other identifying patterns of Australian World War I writing. For our current purposes we will consider it as an Australian work, because it bears a closer resemblance to the shape of World War I literature that we will define as ‘Australian’ than it does to the disillusionment canon. In fact, it may be because The Middle Parts of Fortune differs so substantially from the European canon that it has, perhaps, been rendered almost invisible to many critics of World War I literature. Those who consider it regard it highly, but most overlook this work.

The fraught question of Bourne’s military status complicates the action and reflection of the novel, his evident higher-class background rendering him inexplicable as a ranker to both officers and men of the BEF. His reflections on the soldiers’ daily routines, the military hierarchy, the progress of the war, and the disposition of the men towards each other, enrich a novel which generally contains a high level of introspection, in a somewhat self-consciously literary fashion, seen for example in the Shakespearian extracts which introduce each chapter.

G. D. Mitchell, Backs to the Wall: A Larrikin on the Western Front (1937)⁹

George Deane Mitchell (1894–1961) was a man of great personal courage and skill, with a reputation for larrikinism and a dislike of officialdom. Mitchell is one of the best examples of the traditional Anzac spirit; he is the quintessential Anzac. He left us a legacy in the form of his memoir, a spirited narrative developed from his diaries and memories. He enlisted in September 1914 and was an original Anzac – landing at Anzac Cove on 25th April 1915.

Mitchell provides us with an insight into what was important to the first Anzacs. While today the British Empire has dwindled into a gathering of old colonies practising for the Olympics at the Commonwealth games and retaining a dream of democracy which exceeds its real existence, some of the Anzac ideals which Mitchell espouses have passed the test of time. Mateship, courage, endurance, a fair go, egalitarianism: whether we prefer to scoff at these ideas or applaud them, they are part of the Anzac story.

Of over 316,000 Australians who served overseas in World War I, only about 7,000 lasted from Gallipoli to Armistice. Mitchell was one of them, and despite serving his whole stint as a front-line soldier, he was never once wounded, though he was hospitalised more than once with illness. His outrageously brave individual actions won him promotion and a Distinguished Conduct Medal at Bullecourt in 1917. He also won a Military Cross at Dernancourt in 1918. During the war he was promoted and then demoted six times for various offences including insubordination and drunkenness, before finishing his World War I military career as a Captain in 1918.

He had little respect for rank, and none for British airs and graces. Once, when Mitchell was visiting a British mess, a shell exploded nearby. Mitchell ducked outside to check the welfare of his men and to make provision for the wounded, while the British officers retreated to the deep dugout. When the British commander asked where he had been, and why his sergeant had not been given that particular duty, Mitchell explained that in the Australian Imperial Force it was unacceptable for an officer to shelter in safety while his men were under fire. He wrote in Backs to the Wall that Australians

were a long way apart from our English brothers. In our army, the man was nearer to the officer, the officer nearer to the man. I would not have it any other way. We had no fear that our men would not respect us if we associated too closely with them. If they did not respect us, well ______ blast ’em!¹⁰

Mitchell went on to serve in, and survive, World War II, having never quite settled into peaceful suburban Australia. Mitchell and his mates believed they had saved Australia from the edge of hell, saved it as the country of the egalitarian fair go. Certainly, he would ‘blast the socks off’ anyone who used the Anzac legend to divide the community.

Ion Idriess, The Desert Column (1932)¹¹

Ion Idriess (1889–1979), one of Australia’s better-known authors, wrote prolifically throughout his life. Many of his books were reprinted up to fifty times; many readers of this work will have encountered Idriess’s stories at school level, in a collected edition. Always strongly linear in structure, the stories told by Idriess are populated with readily identifiable Australian characters. His novels emanate a deeply positive outlook both for life, and for traditional Australian values.

Ion ‘Jack’ Idriess enlisted in 1914 and served as a trooper in the 5th Light Horse. He saw action at Gallipoli, where he was wounded, and then in Palestine, where he witnessed the charge at Beersheba and was involved in the first entry into Gaza city. Unlike most World War I narratives, Idriess’s memoir/novel The Desert Column tells of the war in Palestine – a war fought in atrocious desert conditions, but nevertheless a traditional war of movement, which contrasts strongly with the stalemated situation on the Western Front. In Palestine, mounted troops struggle with sand, thirst, and an implacable enemy; they follow and flee the enemy as the fortunes of war dictate. Jack Idriess was wounded at Gaza and invalided back to Australia in March 1918.

Idriess made a significant impact on Australian publishing and literature, in particular creating his own vision of Australian literature as distinct from other world literatures. In many ways, Idriess is the natural inheritor of the traditions of Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, propagating and disseminating the mythic Australia of mateship, self-reliance, ingenuity and irreverence. Arguably, this is a tradition passed down through novelists like Frank Clune to popular twenty-first century historiographic works such as those by Les Carlyon and Peter FitzSimons.

Jack spent much of his life travelling the country, learning to appreciate both city and rural values as well as spending time with indigenous people, and incorporating all these aspects of Australia into his writing. His book Flynn of the Inland made a deep impression on everyday readers in Australian cities, and contributed to the version of Australia that dominated our thinking in the middle parts of the twentieth century. Somewhat romantic in his views of Australia’s past, Idriess conveyed a strong belief in the country’s people and its future. His writing is descriptive, underlining how important and distinct he believed our landscape and culture to be. The writing of Idriess is not only recognisably Australian, but could not be mistaken for anything else.

The Desert Column was published in 1932, and republished a week later. It employs a traditional perspective, proffering both heroic narration and absolute confidence in the Australian soldier’s superiority. Here Anzacs laugh at danger, defend their mates, and regularly aid struggling Allied troops. In this war of desert movement, Idriess describes mostly cordial relationships with fellow troops from Britain and New Zealand, though he has some serious grouches about the British hierarchy and the military police. Most recently republished as part of a collected edition in 1986, The Desert Column, unlike some of the works we are discussing, is accessible through many libraries and second-hand book dealers.

Mary Grant Bruce, The Billabong series (1910–1942)¹²

Minnie (Mary) Grant Bruce (1878–1958) was a gifted and lifelong writer whose numerous stories contributed to the development of the Australian bush character as understood