The first published piece of war correspondence by a woman journalist was by an Australian who wrote an eyewitness account of the German invasion of Belgium in 1914.
London-based Louise Mack was writing romantic serials before she took herself off to Europe, travelling through German lines to occupied Brussels and reporting on the bombardment of Antwerp.
While her claim of being the last war correspondent to leave that city is disputed, the book she wrote of her wartime experiences, A Woman's Experience in the Great War, was a bestseller.
"It's a terrific read, she is a very vivid reportage writer," says author Pamela Hart whose new novel, A Letter from Italy, takes its inspiration from the life of Mack.
"Her reporting from Belgium is full of shock, partly because people didn't realise how bad war could be with modern armaments.
"There's a scene where she describes going into a chapel in a church used as a place for raping women, and that was considered terrible propaganda but now we know and we accept the reality of sexual assault in war."
Hart came across Mack while reading contemporary accounts from news pages from World War I while researching The Soldiers Wife (2015) and The War Bride (2016), historical romances in the tradition of the equally prodigious Fiona McIntosh.
"The fact that Australia produced the first real woman war correspondent is something nobody knows," Hart says. "The World War I story in Australia is all about Gallipoli and a bit about France, but there are so many other stories attached to it that we never hear."
Hart sets A Letter from Italy in Brindisi, safe harbour for naval flotillas from Britain, France, Italy and Australia patrolling the Adriatic Sea. Her heroine, Rebecca Quinn, is a reporter living with her journalist husband, Jack.
Like Mack, war for Quinn is a ticket off the women's pages and into a world of real time journalism.
"The scene where Rebecca is listening to the sound of shelling at night, and is thinking, 'I've got to get the story myself'. 'I've got to stop getting stories second-hand' - that's all taken from Louise Mack's book. The next morning Mack set off for the front.
"Women are caught up in these large events, these enormous world-changing events. How does that affect the individual woman? That's what I'm interested in as a writer."
A Letter from Italy spotlights the Royal Australian Navy's role in helping maintain the Otranto Barrage, preventing Austrian U-boats sneaking out of the Adriatic and preying on shipping convoys in the Mediterranean Sea.
Captain von Trapp, of Sound of Music fame, was an able commander of one of the Austrian U-boats and rose to fame in his home country as a result of his daring exploits.
But the overall Allied success of the naval blockade has all but been lost to history, having almost immediately been overshadowed by the huge casualties in Gallipoli, she says.
Hart has published 33 books since she started writing as a children's scriptwriter for the education unit of ABC Kids 20 years ago. "Some of them are very short," she laughs.
"My husband says I get cranky if I don't write. Once you start doing it a lot, you see stories everywhere. People ask where I get my ideas from as though that's the hard part, but the ideas are the easy part.
"I have ideas for something like 11 books in my head, it's a matter of getting them written. They have a certain pressure in your head and you have to get them out."
Under the name Pamela Freeman she has published the primary school Princess Betony series, the epic fantasy Castings trilogy, and won the NSW Premier's History Prize in 2006 for her novel, The Black Dress.
The fictional reimagining of the early life of Australia's only saint, Mary MacKillop, was the hardest book she has ever written.
"You have to find that part of you that is like the character and I'm afraid it's a lot harder finding the saint than an ordinary person."
The Black Dress was her first experience of writing historical fiction.
"What fascinates me about history is that people are shaped by their circumstances, their history and culture but there there are consistencies of human behaviour through time, and it is really interesting to see that intersection.
"I often think about the narrative around suicide bombers, about how insane they are and terrible they are.
"But our boys went off happy to die for the motherland and it wasn't even their country. And they went happy because it would be exciting; they were all off for a lark.
"It's the same impulses twisted to different ends: the desire to be manly, the desire to protect, the desire to have adventure, the desire to be part of a group of men with purpose."
A LETTER FROM ITALY Pamela Hart Hachette $29.99
