Those women fought to keep the farms, factories and hospitals functioning, and to raise money to give the Diggers some creature comforts while on the front line.

Jim Amos, convener of Horsham's Military History and Heritage Section, said hundreds of Wimmera women were involved in these acts of altruism during the first and second world wars.

"They did a lot of jobs that had previously only been done by men," he said. "There was a big munitions factory in Wilson Street, opposite Breuers, that many women worked at folding parachutes and working on projectiles. It later became the Holproof hosiery factory."

Mr Amos said the factory began in 1943, when he was a teenager. He said he remembered a significant workforce of women riding bicycles to the site.

"They had a big supply depot further up past the town hall," he said.

"A lot of women in Horsham also became nurses in the Voluntary Aid Detachment, and they would knit socks and scarves and organise parcels of food for servicemen. They had big rallies to support the war effort.

"They did all of this while having to raise children on their own and living in fear of a telegram boy riding up and knocking on the door with a message to say their father, brother or husband had been killed or wounded."

The critical role Australian women played in wartime is something Gwen Kelm has experienced first-hand.

Now 94 and a resident of Horsham's Sunnyside Lutheran Retirement Village, Mrs Kelm left her birthplace of Ararat at the age of 13 to work in Melbourne - just as World War II began.

"I had five years down in Melbourne living with an aunty and uncle for the first two years before I became independent," she said.

"While I was with my aunty and uncle, I worked at a munitions factory, the cosmos knitting mills cutting out army jumpers and an aircraft training school at Spring Street. At the munitions factory I was helping to make gas masks because at that stage there were concerns gas would start to be used in the war."

She remembered these experiences as "liberating".

"There were great wages at the munitions factory - I could earn up to five pound a week if I worked hard. You got paid for what you had done," she said. "I enjoyed the welding at the aircraft school, too."

Mrs Kelm had three brothers - Stan, Bert and Keith Madex - who went to fight in Syria, Darwin and Borneo respectively.

She met her husband Frank while working at another aircraft factory in Elsternwick, in Melbourne's south-east. Mr Kelm had just returned from Darwin, where he served as part of the 19^th Machine Gun Battalion.

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"We got married in Horsham in 1944 - 12 months to the day after our first date," she said.

"He got me to give up my job in Melbourne and come up and work in Horsham, at a canvas factory in Wilson Street where Prestige Fabrics used to be. I worked there for that year before we got married.

"It was a lovely time after the war ended, and I can still remember all the farmers' sons coming back and carrying on with what they used to do. The girls, instead of doing the men's work, became wives and mothers after that - so we were all busy with our young families."

Mr and Mrs Kelm had four children. The Kelms were one of the soldier settler families to take up land at Drung after the war.

Mrs Kelm helped build the property's fences in addition to raising Robert, Dennis, Glenda and Jeff, staying until 1997 when her husband's health began to deteriorate. Mr Kelm died in 2010.

Today, she is the sole surviving member of the original group of Drung settlers.

Mrs Kelm said she hoped more people could appreciate the work women did on farms during and after the war.

"The girls that worked the hardest of the lot I think were in the Women's Land Army. They had to saddle up eight-horse teams and get them ready for the day's plowing out in the paddock - they didn't have tractors. I take my hat off to those girls," she said.