Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend

War is traditionally considered a male experience. By extension, the genre ofwar literature is a male-dominated field, and the tale of the battlefield remainsthe privileged (and only canonised) war story.In Australia, although women have written extensively about their wartimeexperiences, their voices have been distinctively silenced. Shooting Blanks at theAnzac Legend calls for a re-definition of war literature to include the numerousvoices of women writers, and further recommends a re-reading of Australiannational literatures, with women's war writing foregrounded, to break the holdof a male-dominated literary tradition and pass on a vital, but unexplored,women's tradition.Shooting Blanks at the Anzac Legend examines the rich body of World Wars I andII and Vietnam War literature by Australian women, providing the criticalattention and treatment that they deserve. Donna Coates records the reactionof Australian women writers to these conflicts, illuminating the complex role ofgender in the interpretation of war and in the cultural history of twentieth-centuryAustralia.By visiting an astonishing number of unfamiliar, non-canonical texts, ShootingBlanks at the Anzac Legend profoundly alters our understanding of howAustralian women writers have interpreted war, especially in a nation where theexperience of colonising a frontier has spawned enduring myths of identity andstatehood.