Description
Title: No Mean Destiny – The Story of the War Widow’s Guild of Australia 1945-85
Author: Thorpe Clark, Mavis
Condition: Very Good – Previous owners name on the title pages.
Edition: 1st Edition
Publication Date: 1986
ISBN: 0908090935
Cover: Hard Cover with Dust Jacket – 288 pages
Comments: This is a history of the War Widow’s Guild of Australia.
“No Mean Destiny could better be described as the biography of its founder Jessie Mary Vasey, the widow of Major-General George Alan Vasey …
Jessie Vasey was truly one of Australia’s great women, perhaps the greatest. She brought into being what was to become the most powerful women’s bloc in Australia’s history. Her successful intent was to establish justice and care for Australia’s World War II widows. At the end of the conflict in 1945, this group of bereaved wives were in the same neglected state as had been the widows of World War I in 1918. Jessie herself was widowed only six months before World War II ended. Her husband died in an aircraft accident off the coast of Cairns. She was 48. But the seeds of compassion and caring for the war widows had been sown before her own loss.
When I was commissioned to write this book, I knew very little about the War Widows’ Guild or Mrs Vasey. I expected the work to be interesting but not exciting. How wrong I was. I was not more than a few weeks into the research before I realized that I was tapping into more than a segment of Australia’s war history: I was uncovering a brilliant shining thread of one woman’s achievement.”
