Photo by Bev Short for the New Zealand Portrait Gallery
Jane released her biography Ettie Rout: A Life of Ettie Rout in 1992 with Penguin Books. It is the winner of a New Zealand Book Award. Her best-selling Convent Girls features interviews with nun-taught women. Penguin Books published it in 1994 and it sold 12,500 copies. Subsequently, Sixties Chicks followed in 1997.
Jane formed the World War 1 Oral History Archive in 1987 with Nicholas Boyack. The pair interviewed 84 veterans, and published In the Shadow of War featuring a dozen edited interviews. Furthermore, it also contains an essay on the post-war experiences of the men in 1990.
To produce An Awfully Big Adventure (2013), Jane put extracts of the interviews into chronological order so that readers could be walked through the war by the soldiers’ stories. In 2014, Jane produced a shorter biography of Ettie Rout, focussing on her war-time safe sex campaign, for the centenary of the war.
Her 2017 work, Make Her Praises Heard Afar, published by Booklovers Books, tells the story of New Zealand women overseas during the war. This fills a major gap in the historiography of New Zealand in World War One.
