The Daughters of Mars

The Sisters

Naomi and Sally Durance grow up on a dairy farm in the New South Wales countryside, daughters of a mother dying slowly of cancer. The novel’s opening section, set in the weeks before the war begins, establishes their very different natures through the way they respond to their mother’s suffering. Sally — younger, more impulsive, more given to direct action — does something on the night of their mother’s death that forms the secret at the novel’s centre, a mercy that is also, under the law, a crime. Naomi knows what her sister did. This knowledge, never spoken about directly between them, travels with them through four years of war.

Keneally uses the sisters’ temperamental differences to triangulate the experience of wartime nursing from two angles. Naomi is more methodical, more inward, more likely to manage suffering by containing it. Sally is more immediate, more liable to be overwhelmed, more willing to be changed by what she sees. Both are brave. Both are competent. Both arrive in the war with assumptions about what they will encounter and what it will require of them, and both are wrong. The specific education of the war — learning that medicine cannot keep pace with the injuries it is asked to treat, that the institutional structures of an army hospital are as capable of killing patients as saving them, that the men who survive the first wound may not survive the second — is delivered to each sister differently, and Keneally is careful to let both responses be valid.

The relationship between the sisters is the novel’s emotional core, and Keneally handles it with considerable skill. They are not straightforwardly close or straightforwardly estranged. They are two people who share a secret that binds them together and keeps them apart at the same time, navigating the war in close proximity while carrying something they cannot discuss.

The War They See

The sisters’ first posting is to a hospital ship in the Dardanelles during the Gallipoli campaign of 1915, and Keneally does not soften what they find there. The scale of the casualties from the landings exceeded every projection, and the medical infrastructure had been designed for nothing like it. Men arrived on the ships in states that the nurses and doctors did not have the equipment, the drugs, or sometimes the knowledge to treat. Keneally’s research is evident throughout these sections — the specific injuries, the specific inadequacies of the medicine, the specific protocols and their failure — but the detail is always in service of the human story rather than overwhelming it.

From Gallipoli, the novel follows the sisters to the Western Front, where the war has settled into the grinding static slaughter of the trenches. The scale here is different in character: not the chaotic improvisation of the Gallipoli landings but the systematic production of casualties by an industrial process that both sides have more or less mastered. Keneally is interested in what it does to a person — specifically, to a woman trained to care — to spend months and then years in proximity to this. The nurses develop professional armour, dark humour, and a specific intimacy with suffering that has no equivalent in civilian life. They also fall in love, form friendships, grieve colleagues, and try to maintain some sense of a future that extends beyond the next convoy of wounded.

The novel is meticulous about the specifically Australian experience of these theatres. Gallipoli was where the Australian national myth was made, and Keneally is interested in that myth without being uncritical of it — in what it meant to Australians to be there, and in the gap between the myth and the specific, terrible reality of the campaign.

Women at War

The large body of World War I literature is overwhelmingly male. The canonical texts — All Quiet on the Western Front, Birdsong, Regeneration, Sassoon and Owen and Graves — are written from the perspective of the men in the trenches, and for understandable reasons: the trenches were where the defining experience of the war took place, and the men who survived them wrote obsessively about what that experience had cost them. Women appear in this literature largely as the ones left behind: mothers, wives, sweethearts, the domestic world the soldier has left and may not return to.

Keneally’s novel belongs to a different and smaller tradition — alongside Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth and more recent works like Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale — that insists the women who served were witnesses to the same war, not observers of it from a safe distance. The nurses at Gallipoli and the Western Front saw the same bodies, dealt with the same deaths, and worked within the same institutional structure that was in many respects indifferent to whether they survived the experience whole.

What Keneally adds to this tradition is his particular attention to what sustained exposure to mass death costs a person over time — not the dramatic trauma of a single terrible event but the cumulative weight of years of witnessing. Sally and Naomi do not return from the war unchanged, and the novel is honest that some of what the war has done to them cannot be undone. It is this refusal of false consolation, as much as the research and the characterisation, that gives The Daughters of Mars its lasting force.

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A carefully researched, deeply felt account of World War I from a perspective the canonical literature has too often overlooked, anchored in two sisters whose relationship the war tests without destroying.