By the time Louise Williams was twenty-four, she was a foreign correspondent posted to the Philippines, witnessing the fall of the Ferdinand Marcos government. Within only a few years, she had also covered the rise of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, the emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the secession of East Timor in Indonesia. Not long after her first posting in the Philippines, she found herself aboard a people smugglers’ boat crossing the Sulu Sea – a stretch of water between the Philippines and Borneo, bedevilled by piracy and peril – to chase a story. She did all of this while raising five children.
But making it as a war correspondent as a young woman in the early 1980s wasn’t easy.
“Being a journalist was something I’d always dreamed of, but opportunities were much more limited then. There were very few women reporting in conflict zones at all, let alone women with young children,” she said.
Williams had to fight to be taken seriously by her colleagues – a group of foreign correspondents that were for the most part much older than Williams, and overwhelmingly male. One of these colleagues reacted to Williams’ arrival in Manila by phoning the Australian ambassador to complain about the presence of a “young woman who knew nothing”.
This made Williams’ life particularly difficult in an entirely foreign environment, with story deadlines looming, and where connections were everything. She explains that in the 1980s, before social media gave us news at our fingertips, journalists relied heavily on trusted sources to alert them to developments. Without those contacts, she tells me, you can end up sleeping through a story.
Instead of letting it discourage her, Williams used her difficult situation as an opportunity.
“I knew instinctively that if I was going to succeed I had to find another way to find stories,” she said.
“The boys were never going to invite me to drink with them; there were always going to be conversations that I wasn’t privy to. A lot of the stories were were chasing at that time were about military coups, and the military is such an opaque organisation if you’re approaching it as a woman. I had to find another way in.”
“So from the beginning I learned to go off the beaten track and find stories in unexpected places. It was a challenge, and it meant I missed out on some stories, but in the end it meant I got important stories that other people didn’t.”
It is this attitude that found Williams on the people smugglers’ boat in the Sulu sea; and an attitude that ended up providing the best training a young journalist could hope for, and ultimately turned Williams into a Walkley Award-winning reporter.
These experiences – of finding new stories, of finding new ways to tell familiar stories – are what taught Williams that we desperately need more women writing about war. She says that while we accept that stories of war and conflict are told by men, and about men, some of the complexities of conflict zones will be lost. Such is the fate of any collective narrative that lacks a diversity of voices.
“Women will always tell stories differently, even if they tried to tell them the same way male reporters do – that’s the benefit of having a different perspective. Not only do woman chase different stories and follow different threads of familiar stories, but sources will talk to female journalists differently and offer up different stories themselves,” she said.
She says that amplifying female voices in war reporting will provide an opportunity to find untold stories about war and conflict; stories left untouched by a history where the narratives of war are dominated by men.
It is with this in mind that Williams wrote her most recent book, A True Story of the Great Escape. It tells the story of the famous escape from Stalag Luft III in World War Two – perhaps the most familiar war story in Australia’s history – focusing on escapees and Australian prisoners of war John Williams and Rusty Kierath. By crafting a series of intricate tunnels, the two men, along with other POWs, staged an escape from one of the most secure camps in World War Two Germany.
This story is unique for Williams because it is her own – she is the niece of John Williams, the man at the centre of the story. Williams grew up with the story of the great escape in her family, but her questions about the escape and its orchestrators were not the ones asked or answered in any of the numerous retellings of this story, or indeed in most war stories.
“When I was told the story of two men lying in a dark tunnel waiting to escape, I just wanted to know: Were they afraid?”
So Williams decided to offer her own retelling of the story. Her story starts with the question of the fear the men felt while lying in wait, ready to make their escape – making it not just a tale of courage but an examination of how humans navigate the terror of war; a side of the story of conflict that is rarely explored. The angle of her inquiry, aided by the letters and photographs that had been passed down to her, allowed her to have conversations with men who fought alongside Williams and Kierath that they had rarely had before. It allowed them to open up to her about the emotional experience of combat; about fear and vulnerability as well as bravery.
These conversations, and the light they shed on an important aspect of every story about conflict, are why Williams thinks we need more women writing about war.