Dianne Bardsley: The Land Girls In A Man's World, 1939-1946

University of Otago Press

$39.95

Review: Gordon McLauchlan*

The Womens Land Service (WLS) in the Second World War lacked glamour, especially among townie women who could look much more chic and feel more directly involved in the war in the Womens Auxiliary Air Force (WAAFS), the Womens Auxiliary Army Corps (WAACS) or the Wrens (Womens Royal Navy Service). If they had to leave home it was to go to bigger and brighter towns and work with servicemen, whereas land girls were shipped off to the back of beyond, where working garb was gumboots and dungarees.

Mostly it was no contest. Some young women did opt for the rural life, and did prove to some farmers what we all know now - that a good woman is at least as good as a good man at pretty well any task. The WLS became, by the end of the war, the largest single group of servicewomen, most of the women having come from farms, bravely stepping in for fathers, brothers, neighbours or labourers who had joined the Armed Forces.

A chronology at the front of this book demonstrates what a long haul it was to get women accepted for farm work. The first call for a women's land army was made within days of the declaration of war in 1939. Three years later, when the Government decided, belatedly, to reorganise the service into a credible force, only 203 women had been placed on farms. At the end of 1942, farming was made an essential service, and two feisty women MPs, Mary Grigg and Mary Dreaver, went on a WLS-recruiting tour of the country.

Why did it take so long? Well, Arthur Michener, in Tales of the South Pacific, said New Zealanders at the time of the Second World War were socially the most conservative people in the world, apart from the Spaniards. The most conservative New Zealanders were farmers, most of whom stoutly believed a woman's place was in the kitchen during the day and the bedroom at night.

A problem with this book is that the author seems to think she has discovered this conservatism and is belatedly outraged by it. So instead of briskly stating the case and then letting her story illustrate it, she rails on and on, endlessly editorialising.

Here's a random example: "At the South Canterbury Farmers Union meeting on 17 December 1943, land girls were once more the subject of full and frank discussion. Mr W.J. Fletcher concluded that ... " What about: "At the South Canterbury Farmers union meeting on 17 December 1943, Mr W.J. Fletcher said ... " The book is clogged up with this sort of cumbersome prose and cliched comment. No narrative thread pulls it along at pace. After a laboured attack on just about everybody alive at the time for not trumpeting the need for women to do farm work, the book becomes a patchwork of scattered facts and autobiographical notes.

But for the reader who hangs in there, the stories of the women are rich in social history and a reminder of what hard slog work on the land was until automation began to take over in the 1970s. Many of the women were on farms without electric power. They mustered, made hay and fed out on horseback; ploughed with horse or primitive tractor; milked by hand or with inefficient machines, often in the dark; shore sheep with hand clippers; killed and dressed carcases in open paddocks.

Perhaps the most remarkable was Grace Johnson, who grew up in the Marlborough Sounds and became a symbol of the Kiwi Land Girl, not only among her peers but in newspapers and magazines. On her 21st birthday, she shore 115 sheep with hand shears. Early in the war she took over a large property when its owner went off to war.

The stories of remarkable women make the book worth the effort needed to get through it. My disappointment was heightened by my expectation that here at last we would be able to read the long-neglected story of these women who did such great work on farms to raise the production of food for troops in the field, for Americans training here and for beleaguered British civilians. Alas, it's a clumsily organised and badly written piece of work.

* Gordon McLauchlan is a Herald columnist.