The history of war and the history of photography could both benefit from reconsidering women's war photographs. In Australia, as in many other nations, these photographs have generally been excluded from the iconic imagery of war. Yet there are strong arguments for including home-front photography in the analysis of war photography, as Pippa Oldfield makes clear in her recent work on women's photography during the American Civil War. Oldfield also builds a case for examining women photographers’ entrepreneurial and business activities, which are often overlooked by scholars who focus exclusively on artistic issues.

The consideration of women's war photography builds on wider movements to include women in the cultural memory of conflicts. Researchers in numerous fields have emphasised the range and significance of women's participation in war. On the battlefront, women offered voluntary aid, locating those missing, wounded or killed; they were also present in large numbers as nurses and medical support personnel. On the home front, women raised war funds and charitable donations, bolstered morale, took on work traditionally done by men and engaged in political activism both for and against war.

Yet war photography in Australia has generally been considered a male domain. The defining images of the nation during the First World War drew on combat photos by Frank Hurley, Charles Bean (Australia's official war correspondent) and other journalists such as Phillip Schuler. In this chapter, we look at two very different situations where women photographed soldiers on the cusp of battle. The sisters May and Mina Moore ran commercial portrait studios, while Doris McKellar (née Hall) was an amateur snapshot photographer. What these women had in common was that they were not setting out to create authoritative war photography but to make photographs for personal use, manifesting an intimate connection between war and the home front. Their photographs, particularly their portraits of soldiers, shed light on the war experience, offer insights into the experience of war at home, and confer on their subjects a rarely seen emotional depth and range.

May and Mina Moore

May and Mina Moore were two artistically inclined sisters born in New Zealand in 1881 and 1882. They had limited experience with photography before they embarked on professional photographic careers.