cread | read & see

I began reading Thomas Keneally's The Daughters of Mars while travelling in Europe, a deliberate plan to bring alive both the landscape and text. In a very Australian way, this is one of the attractions of the many world war books that we consume - they reflect back to us the experiences our parents and grandparents and our own pilgrimages to those distant shores. Just as sisters Sally and Naomi Durance walk the narrow streets of Rouen, wondering at the cathedral and the place where Joan was martyred, or travel to Paris through Gare du Nord, or feel afraid in Amiens, so too countless Australians will be instantly drawn back to their own moments in these locations. And all the more along the shores of Gallipoli where the sisters from the Macleay Valley, NSW, begin their WWI nursing services on the hospital ship Archimedes. It's not just a tourist's "I've been there", it's more the feeling that we share a common legacy and longing in these far-from-ho