‘I simply can’t go back to my old life’: female gender identity in Australian contexts of war and peacetime

Abstract

In 1920, Olive Kelso King of Croydon, New South Wales, returned to Australia from the First World War. King held the position of sergeant in the Serbian army, and was decorated with numerous awards including the Cross of the Order of St. Sava. In letters to her family from the war front, King argued for continued independence upon her return to Australia. Through an extensive campaign of self-construction that placed focus on her wartime achievements, King explicitly positioned her experiences as distinct from normative femininity. She sought to label her deeds, and by extension herself, as ‘extraordinary’, and thus exempt from traditional expectations of Australian society. However, after her voyage home, she found herself distanced by both her family and her society from her wartime goals, values and accomplishments. This article argues that King’s active attempts to manipulate her circumstances and delay her homecoming may be distinctly traced through her remaining epistolary writing, and that her examination of her experiences illuminates the often marginalised experiences of Australian females engaged in the military sphere.