Wife and Baggage to Follow.

• Author: Kennedy, Peter
• Position: Book review

WIFE AND BAGGAGE TO FOLLOW

Author. Rachel Miller

Published by: Halstead Press, Sydney, 2013, 240pp, $39.99.

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In one sense Australia's early External Affairs Department was quite advanced in its treatment of women. It may have been driven by the wartime shortage of men, but from the first recruitment of diplomatic 'cadets' in 1943 intakes included women (this contrasted with New Zealand where women were recruited only as research assistants, not diplomatic trainees). Women faced a quota of 25 per cent of available places (against application numbers of 40 per cent) but nonetheless the first three appointees announced were all women: Bronnie Taylor, Diana Hodgkinson and Julia Drake-Brockman (the men were on active service and announcement of their appointments took longer). (From the beginning also Australia had a formal training programme for its new female and male officers that was--and remains--ahead of the minimal approach adopted in New Zealand.)

But that is where it ended. In her book Rachel Miller observes that the attitude towards the new female cadets by departmental management on occasion was 'decidedly condescending in tone'. When Bronnie Taylor married a fellow cadet a couple of years later she had to resign (in fact both partners resigned though only Bronnie was required to). Further, the treatment of female administrative staff (including Maris King, who later became high commissioner in Nauru and then Nukualofa) made no allowances for their gender or age. As a 19-year-old King was despatched alone to Chungking (Chongqing), General Chiang Kai-shek's provisional capital, sailing initially on a ship taking a circuitous route through the Indian Ocean to avoid possible attacks by Japanese aircraft. 'I think if anybody in the Department at the time ... had any idea of what the conditions were like in Chungking, they probably wouldn't have let me go'. Like many of the women who tell their colourful stories in this book, King took it in her stride. 'I am surprised my mother let me go, looking back, because life overseas was so hazardous' but 'I had a ball!'

Yet with both diplomatic cadets and administrative staff there was an acknowledgment eventually, if not immediately, that they were valuable professionals. Wives, on the other hand, were treated as something of a nuisance, if they were acknowledged at all. When Judith Dexter sought to join her husband at his language school in Beirut, she went into the...