Wieland looks at the responses of Australian women poets to the First World War. He argues that 'for the most part these voices are erased from history and have little place in standard literary histories. Such absences, of course, affect the way we consider Australian responses to the war, seeing them as almost singularly masculine. They weren't. [...] Not to understand why and how they spoke as they did, or not to hear alternative voices is to have the responses to war muffled and distorted' (p. 487)