A womans work, p.1
A Woman's Work, page 1
PRAISE FOR VICTORIA PURMAN
‘Heart-achingly raw yet filled with the beauty of the human spirit, this novel is a triumph that will linger in the heart and psyche.’ — Karen Brooks, author of The Good Wife of Bath on The Nurses’ War
‘Heartfelt, heartbreaking, emotional and so very moving.’ — RBH Historical blog on The Nurses’ War
‘Post-war Australia is captured brilliantly in all its relief and celebration, as well as the struggle and heartache … Victoria’s characters are real women—complex and compelling. Once again, Victoria reeled me in to a richly imagined (and meticulously researched) world. I loved the characters and slowed down in the final pages, reluctant to finish the book and leave them behind.’ — Better Reading on The Women’s Pages
‘Victoria Purman’s books are always well researched; they never disappoint or leave you wanting more and are a pleasure to read … five stars.’ — Karen Reads Books on The Women’s Pages
‘Seamlessly merging historical facts with fiction, Purman’s focus is on exploring the post-war experiences of women in this enjoyable, moving, and interesting novel … Heartfelt and poignant, with appealing characters, The Women’s Pages is an excellent read … an engaging story that also illuminates the real history of post-war Australian women.’ — Book’d Out
‘I consider Victoria Purman one of Australia’s leading storytellers in the field of historical fiction … The Women’s Pages is a rich historical fiction title that leaves a strong imprint on the reader.’ — Mrs B’s Book Reviews
‘A richly crafted novel that graphically depicts life during those harrowing years. A touching tale and an enthralling read.’ — Reader’s Digest on The Women’s Pages
‘A powerful and moving book.’ — Canberra Weekly on The Women’s Pages
‘An engaging tale about family life and relationships at this turning point in Australian culture. Dealing with the legacy of the old whilst carving out the new. It valiantly shone the spotlight on the women who fought to break free of a solely domestic role in search of greater independence.’ — Great Reads and Tea Leaves on The Women’s Pages
‘This is an enjoyable novel to read … The historical research is invisibly sewn into the world building. Most importantly, the characters are vivid and believable.’ — Other Dreams Other Lives on The Women’s Pages
‘… an engaging tale from a foundation of extensive research that deserves its place in the canon of Australia’s wartime-inspired fiction.’ — News Mail on The Land Girls
‘Moments of great sadness and grief, as well as moments of pure, radiant joy, unfold in this gentle, charming tale … the genuine heartfelt emotion and the lovely reimagining of the way we once were … makes The Land Girls such a rich and rewarding read.’ — Better Reading
‘A moving tale of love, loss and survival against the odds.’ — Better Homes & Gardens on The Land Girls
‘Purman’s almost lyrical description of this particular point in Australia’s history is a richly crafted treat veering cleverly through the brutal hardships faced at the time while also filtering in little moments of beautiful, historical nostalgia. It’s a well-told story filled with multi-dimensional female characters.’ — Mamamia on The Land Girls
‘I would recommend The Land Girls for its historical significance, romance and power to make the reader feel proud to be Australian.’ — Chapter Ichi
‘A beautiful story with rich characters, vivid settings and the whole emotional range.’ — Beauty & Lace on The Land Girls
‘There is a wealth of detail woven into this novel … Victoria Purman just seems to be going from strength to strength with her historical fiction.’ — Theresa Smith Writes on The Land Girls
‘What a lovely tribute this book is to all the women of the Australian Women’s Land Army. … I enjoy her style of writing, the characters and the in-depth description she gives to make you immerse yourself into her world.’ — Reading for the Love of Books on The Land Girls
‘A heart-warming 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.’ — 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
‘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
VICTORIA PURMAN is an Australian top ten and USA Today bestselling fiction author. Her most recent book, The Nurses’ War, was an Australian bestseller, as were her novels The Women’s Pages, The Land Girls and The Last of the Bonegilla Girls. Her earlier novel The Three Miss Allens was a USA Today bestseller. She is a regular guest at writers’ festivals, a mentor and workshop presenter and was a judge in the fiction category for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature and the 2022 ASA/HQ Commercial Fiction Prize for an unpublished manuscript.
To find out more, visit Victoria’s website, victoriapurman.com. You can also follow her on Facebook or Instagram (@victoriapurmanauthor) and Twitter (@VictoriaPurman).
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
The Women’s Pages
The Nurses’ War
www.harpercollins.com.au/hq
To my dear friend, bookseller and
so much more, Sarah Tooth
‘We do not exist as people in our own right. We are often missing from history; our language virtually ignores us; our names are not our own; our lives are lived through others. We are someone’s daughter, someone’s wife, someone’s mother; our role in life is largely determined for us. Our God is masculine, our laws are made by men; we are attacked by men, defended by other men; even our bodies are not our own, and if we think at all we are said to be men. We must write our history, reform our language, keep our own names, live our own lives, redefine our God, make our own laws, learn to defend ourselves, demand and get control of our bodies, and affirm that it is feminine to think.’
—Margaret Whitlam, 1975
Some of the language and attitudes reflected in A Woman’s Work are of their time and place and culture. To fully tell the truth about the past, it’s important to be honest about it. While there is still much more progress to be made, we are a long way down the road to doing better and being better people.
Contents
Praise
Also by Victoria Purman
June, 1956
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
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
JUNE, 1956
Chapter One
Kathleen
‘Mummy!’
Kathleen O’Grady could usually tell which of her five children was trying to get her attention by the particular tone of the screaming coming from one room or other of the square-edged weatherboard house in St Kilda, not so far from the streets she’d walked as a child and the frightening, gigantic leering face of Luna Park’s clown.
But not today.
She hadn’t had enough cups of tea to decipher which child was bellowing. Their house wasn’t big—three bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room, one bathroom and an outside laundry—but it was going to be fully theirs one day and that made her a very happy wife. Mr and Mrs Peter O’Grady had secured a loan from the Commonwealth Bank, back in March 1951, on the strength of Peter’s wage as a car mechanic. Each year since he’d been busier than ever, now that the hardest days of austerity after the war were over and everyone was buying new cars, and the more cars on the roads, the more cars needed fixing. Back then, when they’d bought their house, there had only been two children and one on the way. Kathleen sometimes looked back on those days with a sense of wistfulness. The whole family had been able to fit in one car back then, the baby in a Moses basket on the back seat and the other two squeezing into the space on either side.
Now there were five little O’Gradys, almost exactly two years apart: Barbara, James—although he’d always been called Jimmy—Robert, Mary and Little Michael, who was two years old and still in nappies.
It was Monday evening and Kathleen was bone-tired. Washing day took it out of her like no other day of the week. When she’d heard the radio forecast for a dry and windy day, she’d washed and hung out the sheets from the children’s beds, the crisp white cotton tugging on the spinning Hills hoist so boisterously that if Robert hadn’t been at school with his two older siblings, he would have announced it was a pirate ship and then climbed on top, hoisting aloft an imaginary sword in a battle for mysterious buried treasure. Once, Kathleen had tried to imagine what the view from the sky might be like on washing days. If she could transform herself into a magpie and soar above all the houses in the street on a stiff breeze, would they resemble a flotilla of ships with so many sails energetically flapping? She imagined green lawns, lemon trees, and white sheets whirling like dervishes in every backyard, snapping to a mysterious symphony from the sky.
Peter was always gone by seven so mornings were hers to organise. After breakfast for the five children—Barbara, Jimmy and Robert liked porridge in winter, Mary liked toast with jam and Little Michael ate whatever was left—she waved Barbara, Jimmy and Robert off to school, with a stern warning to Barbara to mind her brothers, and commenced the weekly washing.
By the end of the day, she’d soaked and washed and hung and dried and folded Little Michael’s nappies and had balled thirty-five pairs of the children’s socks and seven of her husband’s. She’d read stories to Mary to keep her quiet while Little Michael was down for his afternoon nap. She’d peeled and diced potatoes, covered them with water in a saucepan and left them to sit, ready to be boiled and mashed for that night’s dinner. A bunch of carrots and a brown paper bag filled with peas sat ready to be sliced and shelled. Sausages were wrapped in butcher’s paper in the fridge. She’d made all the beds and tidied the children’s rooms. She’d picked up her husband’s singlet and underpants from the bathroom floor and left them to soak in the concrete trough in the laundry, in the vain hope the odour of car grease and petrol might dissipate with a good dose of Rinso because those suds really got to work on washdays and left whites and coloureds simply dazzling. Or so the advertisement told her.
‘Mummy!’
She’d mopped the kitchen floor and dropped to her knees to scrub away the black scuff marks from the children’s school shoes and then mopped the bathroom too while the mop was wet. While she worked, she had the radio tuned to 3AW. At nine o’clock it was Hour of Stars, followed by one of her favourites, Housewives’ Quiz. Kathleen loved the company of the voices from the radio. While she washed and mopped and cleaned and scrubbed and cooked, it was easy to imagine she was privy to real adults in the house engaging in stimulating conversations, even if she couldn’t answer back. There was a certain familiarity and comfort in having friends from inside the radiogram fill her days.
At precisely five minutes to one Kathleen had stopped, washed her hands, made herself a cheese and pickle sandwich and settled down at the kitchen table for fifteen minutes to listen to Portia Faces Life, ‘a story taken from the heart of every woman who has ever dared to love’, as the slick-voiced announcer purred at the beginning of every episode. How Portia Manning managed to combine her high-flying career as a lawyer with her motherly duties was a mystery to Kathleen. Poor Portia. Every time she’d dared to love, she’d been terribly let down by men.
Kathleen had sliced a loaf of bread and prepared a plate of Vegemite sandwiches cut into neat triangles for the children to share when Barbara, Jimmy and Robert tumbled through the front door after school, satchels and legs akimbo and tummies rumbling. She had laid a blanket on the back lawn between the lemon and orange trees to tempt them outside, because even though it was July in Melbourne, it hadn’t rained so they could do with the fresh air after being stuck in their classrooms all day.
And then, with the children playing after school, or arguing or jousting with pretend cutlasses or wheeling dolls in little prams in the backyard, Kathleen tried to remember to slick on a touch of lipstick so she might look slightly more presentable when Peter arrived home at the end of the day.
‘Mummy!’ Which child was it? Kathleen rested an elbow on the kitchen table and cupped her chin in her hand. Her back ached. Her feet ached. Perhaps she was getting her monthlies.
Across the kitchen table, his eyes firmly fixed on the form guide in The Argus, Peter muttered, ‘You gonna see to that, love?’
She stood and followed the sound of the shouting. Ah, yes. Robert.
‘What is it, Robert?’ Kathleen retied the bow on her apron. In her experience, when boys called there was sure to be some protection required.
‘Mummy! Come quick!’
Two steps into the hallway and she could smell the trouble before she set foot into the boys’ bedroom. Robert had backed himself into a corner, his chubby little fingers firmly pinching his nostrils together. Little Michael stood in the centre of the room, grinning proudly. His nappy was open on the rug. His hands were smeared with poo.
‘It’s a horrible stink, Mummy,’ Robert squeaked, squinting in disgust.
She let out a deep breath. After five children, nothing was a surprise to her any more. ‘It is, isn’t it?’ Kathleen scooped up Little Michael and he clamped his hands firmly around her neck. The warm smear of excrement soaked through her cotton frock. She tightened her lungs, forcing herself not to breathe.
Barbara, Jimmy and Mary appeared in the doorway and guffawed at the messy spectacle.
‘Yuck!’ Barbara held her nose.
‘Little Michael. You’re disgusting!’ Jimmy taunted.
‘Poo poo. Poo poo!’ Mary laughed and waggled her finger at her little brother.
Robert rushed past her now the threat of being chased by his youngest brother was over and the other children ran in a gaggle through the house to be as far away from the disaster as possible. Kathleen heard the back door slam.
‘Barse, Mummy?’ Little Michael murmured into her shoulder.
‘Yes, time for a bath. Let’s clean you up.’
Kathleen stopped at the doorway to the kitchen, jiggling Little Michael in her arms. ‘Peter, can you run the bath?’
Peter scoffed at the odour. ‘Bloody hell, love. Not in the kitchen, I’m still eating me dinner.’
He took an exaggerated puff of his cigarette and butted it out next to the peas and carrots on his dinner plate. Every night she served him up peas and carrots next to the mashed potatoes and every night he left them.
‘The bath?’ Kathleen repeated. ‘Michael’s made a mess of himself and of me and I don’t want to put him down.’
