Sometimes the best way to teach history is to tell it as a story, and this author has mastered that technique in her many books for children, young adults and adults.
Those Girls is about the Australian Women’s Land Army (AWLA), formed during World War II to replace the labour of men leaving rural properties to join the services. Its central character is Hilly, a schoolgirl who sees a poster for the Land Army, is eligible to join as she is over 16, and has an unhappy home life.
With groups of Land Army girls, she harvests potatoes, strawberries and pineapples around the Brisbane area, picks fruit on the Granite Belt, and works individually as a rouseabout in a shearing shed near Charleville.
Rushby writes of the prejudice shown by young women when the Land Girls came to their local dances; the disapproval shown by some older women; and how some Land Girls were subject to sexual harassment by their male employers.
She slips in items of history such as the fighting in Brisbane between Australian and American soldiers; the fears for the fate of brothers and sons taken prisoners of war; and the eventual return at war’s end of some of those men, emaciated and ill.
Hilly grows and matures during the war, finding her way as a writer by sending stories about the Land Army to The Australian Women’s Weekly. Along with her friends in the Land Army, she is appalled when told they are not recognised as a ‘service’ so cannot march in the victory parade in Brisbane in 1945.
Hilly meets an American soldier who wants to marry her, but is he the right man for her? An easy read, this book reveals an important page in Australian history.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
Age Guide 14+
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I was born in Queensland, Australia, more years ago than I care to divulge.
I grew up (mostly) in Ipswich, though my family spent a couple of years in Penang, Malaysia. High school years were in Ipswich.
As long as I can remember, I’ve been a reader. And ever since encountering, at the age of about six, a photograph of Enid Blyton, seated at her desk in an English country house, dogs at her feet, probably engaged on rattling out another Famous Five adventure, I decided that that was the life. I wanted to be a writer.
I achieved it after taking the long way round of working as an advertising copywriter, a publicity officer and a pre-school teacher; studying ancient history, journalism and art history; and writing and producing for television. As technology changed I also wrote and produced multimedia.
Along the way I got married, had two children (both now grown up) and travelled whenever and wherever I could.
I now live in Brisbane with my husband and son (our daughter is married, also a writer, and she and her husband have produced a delightful daughter and son). There’s also six or seven (it’s hard to tell, they all look alike) free-loading scrub turkeys that peck at the back door for handouts.
I write full time, and do my best thinking while swimming laps in the backyard pool.
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