The Land Girls Read online

  PRAISE FOR VICTORIA PURMAN

  ‘A heartwarming novel … The story of Bonegilla is a remarkable one, and this novel is a tantalising glimpse into its legacy.’

  — The Weekly Times on The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  ‘Victoria Purman has researched and written a delightful historical piece that will involve its readers from the first page to the last … written with empathy and understanding.’

  —Starts At 60 on The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  ‘Victoria Purman has written a story about people exactly like my family, migrants to Australia … I came to this novel for the migrant story, but I stayed for the wonderful friendship Victoria Purman has painted between the four girls … The story is written in such a friendly, welcoming style that you can’t help but be embraced by the Bonegilla girls and become one of them … don’t be surprised if you find yourself crying at the end.’

  —Sam Still Reading on The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  ‘A story told directly from the heart … The Last of the Bonegilla Girls is a wonderful ode to the bonds of female friendship and the composition of our country.’

  —Mrs B’s Book Reviews

  ‘… a moving and heartwarming story [and] a poignant and compelling read, The Last of the Bonegilla Girls is … a beautiful story about female friendship and how it can transcend cultural and language barriers.’

  —Better Reading

  ‘… so rich with emotion, detail and customs that are almost unheard of these days, and thankfully so [because] the best way to get to know these characters is to read their story for yourself.’

  —Beauty and Lace on The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  ‘The Last Of The Bonegilla Girls is a touching and compelling story of female friendship and celebration of what it means to call Australia home, no matter where the journey began … beautifully told … with an ending that will leave you dewy eyed and [with] a renewed sense of hope.’

  —Bluewolf Reviews

  ‘An enjoyable and well-written historical novel with tragedy, love and friendship in a harsh landscape where the only option is hard work and survival.’

  —S.C. Karakaltsas, author, on The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  ‘…a celebration of Australia’s multicultural history, of love, friendship, tolerance and building bridges … [and a] glimpse into a chapter of Australian history we normally hear little about … The Last of the Bonegilla Girls is an insightful, uplifting and feel-good book that I recommend to all lovers of Australian historical fiction.’

  —But Books Are Better

  ‘I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, but at the same time I didn’t want it to end. It kept me guessing from the beginning.’

  —Rachael Johns, bestselling Australian author on The Three Miss Allens

  ‘Serious social issues, including the plight of unwed mothers, domestic violence and the place of women in Australia’s history are wrapped up in poignant romance.’

  —Good Reading on The Three Miss Allens

  ‘Reading a Victoria Purman book is like taking a sneaky day off work to huddle beneath the doona. It’s warm, comfortable and once you are done you’re left with a great feeling of satisfaction.’

  —Rowena Holloway, author of the Ashes to Ashes series

  ‘An intriguing story told brilliantly.’

  —AusRom Today on The Three Miss Allens

  ‘Some writers just … draw you in and wrap you in their world before you’ve even realised, and Purman—most definitely—offers that here.’

  —Debbish on Only We Know

  ‘Kudos to Victoria Purman for a debut novel that feels like a breath of fresh air. What more could you want? … sand, sea, surf, good love, good friends and good wine. *sigh* … idyllic.’

  —The Eclectic Reader on Nobody But Him

  VICTORIA PURMAN is a multi-published, award-nominated, Amazon Kindle–bestselling author. She has worked in and around the Adelaide media for nearly thirty years as an ABC television and radio journalist, a speechwriter to a premier, political adviser, editor, media adviser and private-sector communications consultant. She is a regular guest at writers’ festivals, has been nominated for a number of readers choice awards and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature. Her most recent novels are The Three Miss Allens, published in 2016, and The Last of the Bonegilla Girls (2018).

  Also by Victoria Purman

  The Boys of Summer:

  Nobody But Him

  Someone Like You

  Our Kind of Love

  Hold Onto Me

  Only We Know

  The Three Miss Allens

  The Last of the Bonegilla Girls

  The Land Girls

  Victoria Purman

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  To the Mobbs family, who were all touched by war.

  Though most have now passed on, thankfully they survived

  the war to enjoy long and happy lives.

  Roy Mobbs (RAAF) and his wife Olive; their daughter

  Vilma; their sons Reginald (AIF) and his wife Davina;

  Dudley (RAN) and his wife Marjorie; and all their children,

  grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

  A father and two sons served in World War Two in the

  Middle East, New Guinea, the Pacific and in Darwin, while

  on the other side of the world, my own family were made

  refugees because of it.

  I married one of Roy and Olive’s grandsons and I feel so lucky

  to be considered part of the Mobbs family.

  Contents

  Praise for Victoria Purman

  Also by Victoria Purman

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  At last, recognition

  Acknowledgements

  Excerpt

  Chapter One

  Flora

  December 1942

  It was perhaps from a magpie chick, this soft thing nestled in Flora Atkins’s palm.

  Or a cockatoo, a sulphur-crested. It was weightless, lighter than a baby’s breath. As white as if it had been soaked in lemon juice; a puff of summer cloud suspended in her hand.

  When she exhaled, it danced and floated and she gently closed her fingers over it to keep it still.

  Perhaps someone had ripped it from a young chook, gripping and tearing this new feather out of puckered, pink f
lesh, before slipping it into an envelope, their rage still white hot. Or perhaps they’d done it calmly, in a pre-meditated fashion, before dipping a nib into an inkwell on their writing desk so they could slowly and calmly inscribe the word coward on a card and slip it inside the envelope with the feather.

  The card sat on the kitchen table, propped up next to the china sugar bowl. Flora’s anger welled up inside her, stronger and harder, until she felt she might vomit.

  ‘Don’t they know?’

  Her brother Jack sat, hunched over, his elbows on the table that was already set for dinner, his fingers in a tight knot. He hadn’t even taken off his suit jacket, and his flat cap still sat low on his forehead.

  If their mother was alive, she would have chatted Jack about wearing his hat indoors, but she wasn’t there, hadn’t been for fifteen years, and all her careful household rules had fallen by the wayside.

  ‘Sit down, Flora.’ Their father, John, turned off the stove under the boiling kettle. He filled the teapot and carried it to the table, setting it on the trivet. ‘Cup of tea, love?’

  She nodded. ‘Yes please.’

  The radiogram was loud in the living room—some jolly music she supposed—but with the buzzing in Flora’s ears it was nothing but static. She pulled out a chair to sit down. She lowered the white feather next to her white gloves.

  John filled Flora’s cup. She had craved it the entire walk home from the tram stop at Camberwell Junction to their house on Waterloo Street, but now she didn’t feel the slightest bit thirsty. Or hungry.

  The three Atkinses stared at the feather, soft and beautiful and cruel.

  ‘Where did it come from?’ Flora finally asked.

  ‘Pardon?’ Jack asked, cocking his left ear in her direction.

  ‘I was asking,’ she said, slightly louder this time, ‘did it come in the letterbox?’ Her mind whirred. ‘You don’t think it was Mrs White, do you, or one of her daughters?’ The Whites from number thirty-seven had lost a son the year before in North Africa, at the siege of Tobruk. Flora’s heart sank at the idea. She and her father and Jack had mourned with the Whites at Tommy’s memorial service. His young wife had held her new baby in her arms and wailed.

  John frowned and shook his head. His grey hair flopped over his forehead and he pushed it back with a hand. He looked older than his fifty-five years. The deep wrinkles carved on his cheeks were crevasses. His brown eyes, the ones that she and Jack and their younger brother Frank had inherited from him, were flat and watery. He looked old, Flora realised. Worn out. A wife long dead, one son off fighting the Japanese, another unable to, and his eldest a thirty-year-old spinster.

  ‘Your mother and Mrs White were friends. They went to school together. It couldn’t be them, Flora.’

  ‘Or … or,’ Flora stammered. ‘What about the Craigies? Don’t they still have cousins in London? Maybe something happened to them in the bombings and they—’

  John held up a hand and Flora stopped. Her father’s words were quiet, considered. ‘I saw this during the last war. People on one side or the other about conscription. Should we force our boys to go and fight or not? I was too old and your mother and I had you kids by then. You two and Frank, of course.’ Her father probably wasn’t even aware he’d done it, but he’d blinked at the empty chair at the end of the table. ‘Baby Frank. That’s what we called him.’ A smile curved his mouth. ‘Even when he’d grown out of short pants.

  ‘We knew about the white feathers then. My uncle got one. He was lame from falling off a horse and couldn’t fight but that didn’t matter. And everyone was all high and mighty about putting on a uniform, fighting for the king. But then there was Gallipoli and Pozières and Ypres. And after that, a lot of people thought none of our blokes should ever be forced to go off and die for someone else’s war ever again.’

  No one had forced Frank to go to war. He’d joined up back in July 1940 after the Battle of Britain had been all over the newspapers and the wireless. He’d come home one day, dirty from his work labouring on the dockyards, wearing a huge smile, which had only broadened when he told his family that he and his best mate Keith had enlisted.

  ‘They’ve smashed the Luftwaffe, Dad,’ he’d said, pacing the living room with a cigarette dangling from his lips, his flat cap waving in his other hand. ‘The Hurricanes and the Spitfires did their job, all right. Now, they’ve got to send Hitler all the way back to Berlin.’

  He’d kissed them all goodbye, marched to the Victoria Barracks and enlisted, and in short order had been sent to Trawool in central Victoria for training. He’d written them a letter at the beginning of October, after the whole battalion had marched the entire one hundred and forty-three miles on foot from Trawool to Bonegilla on the banks of Lake Hume, saying it was the best adventure he’d ever had.

  He’d written to them from Palestine and Syria and was now training in Queensland after the journey home on Laconia, preparing to head north to the jungle. Their father had pinned a map to the back of the kitchen door and every time he heard news on the wireless about the whereabouts or activities of the 2/11th Field Regiment of the 8th Division, he marked the spot with an X and the date in pencil.

  Frank’s letters home were stored in a biscuit tin in the sideboard in the living room. He wasn’t prolific, never had been one for school or books, but the pile had grown steadily during the past two years.

  Jack rubbed a hand over his face and pushed his cup of tea into the middle of the table. ‘The thing is, Dad, it’s not someone else’s war now. Not since the Japs bombed Darwin and made it into Sydney Harbour. They’re coming after us, right here in the Pacific and in South-East Asia. Curtin had the right idea, bringing Frank and all our boys back from Europe to protect us here at home. We can’t rely on the Poms to do it, can we? Not any more.’ Jack listened to everything, read all the accounts in The Age and The Herald, and even stood for ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ when it was played at the pictures right after ‘God Save The King’.

  He might not be able to fight, but he kept himself informed. The war was hard to avoid. Signs of it were everywhere. Posters were plastered in shop windows and in trams and buses, urging young men to join up. ‘What are you doing to ensure victory for Australia, for Britain, for the Empire?’ they beckoned. ‘Are you satisfied that, come what may in the troubled months ahead, you will be proud of the part you played—be able to say—I did my best?’

  There were advertisements in the newspaper, too, and even in the Women’s Weekly as Flora browsed recipes or the latest short stories. There was almost nowhere to escape the calls to duty, the reminders not to gossip, the newsreels that asked Australians to do all they could to help smash the Japs or send tanks in to crush Mussolini or to knock out Hitler.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Flora started, ‘is how on earth someone could slip this in the letterbox, knowing Frank’s off fighting. If they know you, how could they think—’

  ‘Flora.’ Jack hurriedly reached for his tea and the cup and saucer jumped and rattled. A wave of milky tea overflowed into the saucer. She looked across the table at him. His shoulders rose and fell. His lips were pulled together like the people in the posters—loose lips sink ships—and his eyes were hard and dark.

  ‘Jack. I was just trying to—’

  ‘You don’t need to be suspicious of anyone in our street.’ He removed his flat cap and held it tight in his fists. ‘It wasn’t the Whites or the Craigies or the Plummers or the Tilleys. Or anyone we know. During smoko today, a fine-looking young lady stepped in front of me on Swanston Street and handed that envelope to me.’

  ‘On Swanston Street?’ Flora asked, disbelieving.

  Jack nodded, closing his eyes for a long moment. ‘When I saw her coming my way, I thought she was handing me a pamphlet, you see, so I took it and thanked her. She gave me a little smile, and I let myself think just for a minute how lucky I was that a pretty girl had given me the time of day. And that smile on her face? She looked like she was spreading the wor
d of God or some kindness. Imagine that. I thought she was being kind. I thanked her.’

  A pain radiated up into Flora’s throat, tightening it, and her heart seemed to crack inside her chest. ‘Did she say anything at all to you?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Not a word,’ Jack replied quietly. ‘She strode off, looking right bloody proud of herself. I opened it right there in front of the newspaper stand near the corner of Bourke Street.’

  Since she’d been fifteen years old, Flora had cooked for all the men in her family, washed their clothes, ironed their shirts, made sure her father ate dinner and got out of the house every now and then, counselled her brothers when their hearts were broken and their knees were scraped. Frank was always getting into some misadventure or other. But never Jack. Lovely, kind Jack. When he had been so sick with meningitis at fourteen, she’d sat by his hospital bed for a week. In many ways, she had felt more like a parent to her younger brothers than a sibling, and a motherly instinct rose in her gut now, churning, stinging, and made the pounding in her head stronger and louder.

  ‘What a wretched young woman,’ she said finally.

  Her father sighed. His teaspoon clinked in his teacup. He’d learnt to cut down on his sugar since rationing had been introduced, but he’d never got out of the habit of stirring his tea while he thought.

  ‘You’ve got that right, love. It must a sweet life, hey? To walk around Melbourne, all high and mighty, not knowing the facts about things,’ John said wearily, his voice hoarse with a controlled anger. ‘Jack’s in a reserved occupation. All customs agents are exempt. And a whole lot of other blokes are too. Tram drivers. And watchmakers. Did they know that?’

  Jack tapped his right ear three times. ‘Dad, I couldn’t go even if I wanted to.’

  They stared at the feather. When Flora exhaled, her breath caught it and it floated and then settled again. She reached for it quickly, snatched it into her fist and stuffed it into the pocket of her skirt.

  She forced a smile. If she smiled, she wouldn’t cry. And she couldn’t cry now. ‘Let’s not think about it any more. People will always be ignorant and cruel and I’m not sure there’s much we can do about it but keep to our own business. I’ve had a long day typing letters for Mr McInerney about shipping insurance and now I’m starving,’ she lied. ‘Shall I make us some supper?’