Quick Take
- Narration: Anna McGahan brings genuine warmth and restraint to these letters and diaries, her Australian cadences matching the material’s geography without calling attention to themselves.
- Themes: Women at war, duty and friendship, the gap between official record and lived experience
- Mood: Intimate and often harrowing, punctuated by moments of fierce camaraderie
- Verdict: A carefully assembled tribute to nurses whose contribution to the Anzac story has been systematically undervalued, and one of the more affecting WWI histories available in audio.
I was partway through the Gallipoli sections of Anzac Girls when I had to stop and make myself a cup of tea. Not because the prose was difficult, but because Peter Rees had just reproduced a letter from a nurse describing what it felt like to work through a night of mass casualties without adequate supplies, without sleep, without any reasonable expectation that the next morning would be better. The letter is exact and unsentimental, and Rees, to his credit, trusts it completely. He does not step in front of it with interpretation. He lets the voice speak.
That is the method of Anzac Girls, and it is the right one. Peter Rees has assembled the diaries and letters of Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War across multiple theaters: Egypt, Gallipoli, the Western Front, Lemnos, England. The women who emerge from these documents were not, as the synopsis rightly notes, looking for heroism in any abstract sense. They wanted experience, usefulness, connection. What they found was an industrial system of wounding that exceeded anything their training had prepared them for, and they adapted to it with a resourcefulness and psychological toughness that the official histories of WWI almost completely erased.
Voices Assembled, Not Invented
The archival method here is worth noting because it shapes everything about how the book feels. Rees is not telling us what these women thought or felt based on inference. He is pulling language from the documents they left behind: letters to family, diary entries written by lamplight in hospital tents on Lemnos, postcards sent from Cairo. The result is a polyphony of individual voices rather than a single unified narrative voice, and this is both the book’s great strength and its occasional structural challenge. The reader gains intimacy with several nurses in particular, Elsie Cook and Alice Ross King among them, while others appear more briefly. The accumulation of voices sometimes resists the kind of narrative drive that would make for a more conventional reading experience, but it rewards patience.
One Audible reviewer calls it a superbly crafted and respectful book, which is the right register. Rees is not exploiting this material. He understands that the most profound tribute he can pay to these women is to get out of their way and let them speak at length.
What the Letters Reveal That the Official Record Suppresses
Among the most striking aspects of Anzac Girls is its documentation of the nurses’ emotional lives alongside their professional ones. The book does not sanitize the friendships and romances that developed in these extreme conditions, and it does not pretend that grief and exhaustion left no marks. One of the recurring tensions in the diaries is between duty and the need to protect oneself from feeling too much. Rees frames these observations within the broader context of what was being asked of women who had no military rank, no formal protection, and no institutional acknowledgment proportionate to their contribution.
By the end of the war, 45 Australian and New Zealand nurses had died overseas. Over 200 received decorations. Rees makes clear that these numbers, significant as they are, do not capture the cost of what these women witnessed and absorbed. The psychological afterlives are harder to document, and the book is honest about that limitation.
The McGahan Performance and Its Particular Strengths
Anna McGahan narrates with a quality that I can only describe as earned quietness. She does not impose feeling onto the letters; she reads them as though discovering them for the first time alongside the listener. Her Australian accent grounds the material geographically, and she handles the shifts between nurses’ voices with enough variation that the different women remain distinct without resorting to caricature. The more harrowing passages, the descriptions of surgical tents and the sound of mass casualties, McGahan reads with a steadiness that amplifies rather than distances the horror.
The runtime of just under eleven hours feels appropriate. The book is not padded. Each section earns its place.
What the TV Adaptation Gets Wrong and the Book Gets Right
At least one Audible reviewer mentions this is the source material for an ABC television series, which is true, and it is worth saying clearly: the book is a different experience from any dramatization. Television requires compression, character selection, narrative arc. The book’s value lies precisely in its refusal of those constraints. It accommodates the sprawl of many voices over four years of war. Listeners who have seen the series should not expect the book to feel like the behind-the-scenes companion. It is the primary document from which the series borrowed, and it is richer for being that.
Who Should Listen, Who Should Skip
Anzac Girls is essential for anyone interested in the female contribution to WWI, Australian and New Zealand military history, or the history of nursing in wartime. It works well for listeners comfortable with a documentary structure that privileges archival voice over narrative momentum. Those expecting a conventional biography or a single propulsive story should adjust their expectations. The rating of 4.4 across 658 reviews reflects a book that has found exactly its audience, which is to say a large and grateful one.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Anzac Girls cover nurses from both Australia and New Zealand equally?
Rees draws from both Australian and New Zealand nurses’ accounts, though Australian voices are somewhat more prevalent given the archival sources available. The book is explicitly framed as an Anzac history, and it honors both contributions. Listeners interested specifically in New Zealand nurses may want to supplement with other sources.
Is this book based on primary sources, or is it largely Rees’s own analysis?
The book is primarily constructed from letters and diaries written by the nurses themselves. Rees provides context and connective tissue, but the weight of the narrative comes from the women’s own words. This is what gives the book its intimacy and archival authority.
How does this audiobook relate to the ABC television series of the same name?
The TV series was based on this book. The two are substantially different experiences: the series necessarily compresses and dramatizes, while the book accommodates many more voices and a longer span of the war. Watching the series first may help orient listeners to the key figures, but the book contains far more depth.
Is the content graphic enough to be difficult for sensitive listeners?
Yes, in places. The descriptions of battlefield wounds, surgical conditions, and mass casualties are specific and unflinching, because the nurses wrote about them specifically. Rees does not sensationalize, but the material itself is harrowing. The book is better approached as serious history than casual listening.
