Those attending art history conferences over the last few years have been beguiled by the papers given to Catherin Speck, based on her research into aspects of Australian women artists and war. Each paper has detailed newly uncovered artists, works and information, and whetted the appetite for Painting Ghosts: Australian Women Artists in Wartime: not a reproduction of Speck’s previous work but fresh information, artists and images (such as Adelaide painter Marjorie Gwynne) placed into better-known depictions of war by artists such as Hilda Rix Nicholas and Nora Heysen.

Speck takes her title, Painting Ghosts, from a statement by Stella Bowen, who was employed to paint portraits of Australian aircraft crews during World War II. When many of her subjects, including those of her best-known work of the series, Bomber crew ( 1944), were killed, often before she had finished the paintings, Bowen commented that it was ‘like painting ghosts’. Before reading this explanation, I had supposed the book’s title referred to the artists themselves: ‘painting ghosts’ sprinted out of an art history and memory. Indeed, Speck’s book resurrects these ghosts: little-known or unknown women artists who expressed their feelings and observations about war; and little-known works concerning war by better-known artists such as Grace Cossington Smith and Margaret Preston.