Congratulations to Lori Pensini on being selected as a Finalist in the Gallipoli Art Prize this year for her painting, The White Feathers - Coward or Courage (Oil on linen in reclaimed French frame). Artist Statement - The divisiveness caused by the first world war went well beyond the front line. The able-bodied men left behind who did not volunteer for service were looked down upon as cowards and women were advised to ‘not grant your affections to stay at home men, but to save a warm place in your hearts for the boys fighting for the future honour and freedom’. The men were sent white feathers as a symbol of their cowardly, to scorn their failure to be real men. A number of feathers were sent to young men in my great grandparents’ shire of Woondanilling, a small wheat and sheep community in rural Western Australia, with the committee president saying ‘the Empire was better served by the growing of wheat than by the handling of rifles’. Many women endured years of hardship when left to tend the farmlands and feed their young families singlehandedly without hardy men. It would have taken a gallant measure of courage to choose land over country against the glamourised war propaganda campaigns of the times.