Nurses

Military nurses were an essential part of the war effort, and their wartime experiences continued to impact them emotionally and professionally throughout the remainder of their lives.

While Australian women supported the war effort in many capacities (including as farm workers, drivers, interpreters, civilian doctors, and cooks) and in any number of volunteer roles (knitting, assembling care packages, recruiting and fundraising), only nurses were permitted in the armed forces.

More than 3,000 Australian nurses volunteered during the First World War, serving in Australia and overseas. Most were with the Australian Army Nursing Service, which was part of the Australian Imperial Force. Some served with the Queen Alexandra Imperial Military Nursing Service or the Red Cross, and an additional, unknown number of women served in privately funded hospitals or with volunteer medical groups. Military nurses were expected to be single or widowed, though a small number of married women did manage to gain admittance.

Their wartime work, in hospitals and casualty clearing stations, meant that these women experienced dangers and suffering akin to their male soldier counterparts. The conditions were often brutal: long hours, supply shortages, extremes of temperature. Many nurses described how harrowing it was to see the horrific injuries experienced by the servicemen. In some instances, they themselves suffered from injuries or illness.

A small number of Australian military nurses died during their service. Around 20 per cent were medically unfit when they were discharged, and many more became ill afterwards. Half of them would never marry. Military nurses were entitled to claim a war service pension. Yet theirs was at a lesser rate than their male counterparts’, despite the fact that they, too, experienced physical and mental health problems for the rest of their lives. Many continued to be dependent on these pensions while suffering from chronic illnesses.

The names of four nurses appear on the Memorial in QEII Square, Albury: Sister Barkley, Sister Chenery, Sister Collins, and Sister Drummond. Hilda Chenery was born in Albury in 1890. She trained as a nurse before the war, enlisted in 1917, and served in Alexandria, in Egypt. She married Army officer Charles Daniels in Alexandria and returned to Albury in 1919. They eventually moved to Frankston, Victoria. Charles died in 1939, and Hilda held Red Cross fundraisers during the Second World War. She died in 1975 at age 84.

Another Albury nurse was Cecilia D’Arcy, who served overseas with two others from Albury, Alice Pritchard and Jane O’Brien. At the end of the war, she did further training in obstetrics in Britain, then worked in Melbourne before returning to Albury. Despite some reservations from her male colleagues, she was appointed secretary of the Albury Hospital Committee in 1923. She lived in Young Street with her mother and did not marry. She died in 1977.

The experiences of Australia’s First World War nurses were largely ignored until as recently as the early 2000s.