Australia and New Zealand now beckoned, but like the troops, many nurses wondered how easy it would be fitting back into civilian life. The readjustment for many would be painful. Some nurses found themselves unable to let go of the commitment to caring for their patients. Others were treated shabbily by governments on their return. Adelaide sister Dora Birks, who served at Boulogne, recalled the story of a colleague who declined a suitor’s offers of marriage and served overseas. On her return, she worked at a military hospital where she nursed a man who was paralysed from the shoulders down.
He used to get his pals to bring him drink secretly, and when he left hospital she went with him, and married him. To the relief of all of us who knew her he died in two years. She never married again. She was a lovely girl, and we all loved her. She was a really good sport, and I grieved when I knew she had married this man in Adelaide.
2
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survivor Sister Gladys Metherell had served four years in Alexandria and then England before returning to Christchurch in April 1919. Two months after her return to New Zealand, she wrote to Brigadier-General G.S. Richardson, drawing his attention to discrimination against returned nurses compared with returned soldiers in relation to financial help such as housing loans. Gladys wanted to build a house for her widowed mother.
I must apologise for troubling you, but upon arrival home I was disappointed to find that the privileges to soldiers with regard to money lent for building etc was not extended to members of the Army Nursing Service.
So I thought I would write to you before Parliament sits to ask if you could have this law altered to include the Sisters.
I know it is generally understood that women have no responsibilities, but I know of several like myself whose life-long ambition it has been to erect a house for the mother who was left a widow in their infancy, and you can imagine my feelings when after a four years’ absence, I return to find boys with only a few months’ service to their credit in some instances, enjoying these privileges.
Thanking you in anticipation for your attention.
3
Her request was turned down. She spent the rest of her life sharing a house with her sister, and they had to take in a boarder to supplement their income.
In New Zealand, planning started early to commemorate the
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nurses. In 1927 the Nurses’ Memorial Chapel was opened in the grounds of Christchurch Hospital, dedicated to their memory. The Nurses Chapel with its
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museum and stained glass windows dedicated to nurses has survived attempts to have it demolished and is the country’s only memorial built in memory of New Zealand nurses killed in war. Australia was slow to acknowledge the nurses who served in the war. This was belatedly rectified in October 1999 when a memorial to Australian nurses who served in all wars was unveiled on Anzac Parade in Canberra.
For the Bluebirds, the post-war period left a sour taste from the discrimination they experienced. Fifteen of the twenty had renewed their contracts for the final six months of the war, but they were afforded shoddy treatment when the war finished. To their dismay, they had to work their passage home as duty nurses caring for AIF wives and babies on ships. The same treatment was given to nurses who married, including Olive Haynes and Elsie Eglinton, while Charles Laffin had to find the fare to bring his wife Nell Pike home to Australia while knowing that the government was paying the fares of English war brides. To rub salt into the wound, Prime Minister Billy Hughes decreed that the returning soldiers on the ships had ‘done their duty [and] should be amply provided with games [and] books . . . in short, they must be treated with that consideration which their great deeds and many hardships have earned’.
The Bluebirds also found themselves denied the government’s war gratuity, paid at a flat rate of 1s 6d from the date of embarkation to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles on 21 June 1919. In contrast, the gratuity was ultimately awarded to the 129 Australian nurses who worked with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service. Because the Bluebirds had also seen active service, various approaches were made to win them the gratuity, but the Government refused to budge, worried that such a payment could open the floodgates to all volunteers. The Government argued that the Bluebirds were given a free passage on the proviso that the Commonwealth accepted no liability for them on their return to Australia.
This left the responsibility with the Red Cross, which paid the fifteen who returned to Australia a 25 pound bonus, and resolved that no further action be taken, even though several became ill as a result of their work. One, Sister Annie Jamieson, was committed to an asylum and struck off the nursing register as insane in 1928. Historian Dr Melanie Oppenheimer points out that Annie had spent nearly a year nursing in a mobile hospital near the front and had been gassed several times. ‘It is reasonable to assume that her war work could have contributed to her later mental illness, ’ Oppenheimer says.
4
For all the returned nurses in this early post-war period, it was soon clear that they remained invisible from the emerging Anzac legend, which comprised only men. This was a product of the times, when women were still regarded as dependents of men. Authorities in Australia saw the nurses’ role as secondary to that of the soldier.
Yet despite early resistance from some medical officers, Australian and New Zealand nurses had quickly proven their competence and won acceptance. It was the soldiers who were in the best position to understand the Army nurses’ achievements and give them the respect they deserved. To them, they were the other Anzacs. Sister Elizabeth Rothery enlisted in 1914 and served on hospital ships and in hospitals for the wounded overseas. In June 1918, while home on leave, she died in Beechworth, Victoria, of peritonitis. Her brother Henry had died in action at Gallipoli in November 1915. Their grief-stricken father wrote to military authorities that even though he had given his only son and one of his daughters ‘to the cause’, and had made no financial claim on the Commonwealth, the military had failed to return a single item of either Elizabeth’s or Henry’s possessions.
5
The local paper reported that Sister Rothery’s last thoughts had been of the boys overseas. The returned servicemen of Beechworth gave her a military funeral. The coffin, draped with the Union Jack and her uniform laid on top, was carried through the streets by six veterans as a large crowd stood in silence. Other veterans stood at the graveside with rifles reversed. Three volleys were fired over the grave, and the Last Post was played.
6
The funeral had been arranged entirely by the ex-servicemen and civic leaders; Army officials had no hand in it. Elizabeth Rothery, like her nursing colleagues in Australia and New Zealand, had won recognition and respect from those who mattered.
And that respect continued. In the 1930s Nell Pike took her children to several Anzac Day marches in Sydney, watching from the George Street footpath. Nell’s daughter Daphne remembers men breaking away from the columns of ex-diggers to embrace her mother, crying, ‘Little Sister, Little Sister!’
For some nurses, their experiences in the war were so overwhelming that they felt compelled to leave the profession. Tev Davies was one. ‘I have finished with nursing Mum, ’ Tev wrote from England. ‘I don’t want to work all my life. It is too funny to hear all the girls talking, some are going to make sweets, others take flats and sub-let them, others tea rooms, we are all sick of having women over us and will do anything to be independent. I think the government will advance money at easy rates to returned people.’
7
Olive Haynes headed back to Australia in February 1918, a month after her husband, Pat, who had been medically boarded to also return. Before she left, she wrote to her mother about one of the wounded. ‘There is a poor old Aussie over here with both arms off, both legs off, and both eyes out. He got someone to write to the King, asking to be put out of his misery, but the King refused—wasn’t it terrible, to save him in the first place?’
8
Olive and Pat had seven children. Until their deaths in 1978, Olive and Pat remained close friends with Pete Peters and her husband Norm, who had married in England shortly after them.
Before Pearl Corkhill left England in late January 1919, she attended an afternoon tea in London. One of the nurses had married a medical officer.
The day before I gave the boys in my ward a party, most of them are returning to Australia on the hospital ship which may go next week, Sister and I wanted to give them something before they went. So we had a very nice spread and music and singing. Then one of the boys invited us to step forward, and made a speech and presented us both with a beautiful silver manicure set. They were so delighted that they had sprung such a surprise on us. They are grand kids and I will miss them horribly.
9
During World War II, Pearl was matron of a home for limbless soldiers in Sydney. After the war, she returned to the New South Wales south coast to become Senior Sister at Bega District Hospital. She never married, and died in 1985. It later emerged that she had been engaged to a soldier in 1915, but he had been killed.
After returning to Australia, Elsie Tranter married William Cumming, who had served with the 13th Field Ambulance in Egypt and on the Western Front. They lived in Launceston and had two daughters. Elsie died in 1968.
May Tilton returned to Melbourne on transport duty in March 1918 and, after a period at the Caulfield Military Hospital, worked for nineteen years as a welfare sister with Prahran Council. She also became a trustee of the Edith Cavell Trust Fund. She never married and died in 1964, aged eighty.
Daisy Richmond did not marry either. According to family folkore, her fiancé died in the war. She was awarded the Royal Red Cross, became matron of Wollongong Hospital and supervisor of nursing services in Tasmania, and was involved with the Bush Nursing Service. She was invested with the MBE in 1964 for her service to the community, and died in 1969.
In May 1918, Kath King gave birth to a daughter, Betty. She and Gordon Carter returned to Australia in April 1919, and settled at Roseville in Sydney. Less than a year later, baby Betty took ill with blood poisoning. Kath wrote in her diary, ‘We lost our little girlie at 10.30 p.m.’
10
After so much death and loss, Kath and Gordon were emotionally spent.
Three sons followed, and one more daughter, Shirley. Gordon became the New South Wales government’s chief electrical engineer and later, mayor of Kuringai, which kept Kath busy as lady mayoress. In World War II their sons joined up, and in April 1944 one went missing while returning from enemy territory near Dunkirk. He was never found. On 24 April, Kath wrote in her diary: ‘John is now presumed dead and there really seems very little hope.’ In July 1946, when her two surviving sons and daughter were demobbed, Kath wrote with relief, ‘Thank goodness.’ Gordon died in 1963, and Kath in 1972.
After the war, Elsie and Syd Cook moved to Perth, where he was appointed Commonwealth Works Director for Western Australia. In 1940 he was transferred to Sydney in the same position, and was responsible for federal defence works such as the Garden Island dock and defence roads to Darwin airfield. In Sydney, Elsie opened an antiques store and named it after the London establishment where she’d celebrated the end of the war—the Grafton Galleries. In later years, their grandchildren would run their fingers over the groove on Syd’s scalp left by the bullet at Lone Pine. Both Elsie and Syd died in 1972.
Before the war was quite over, Elsie Eglinton returned to a hero’s welcome at Murray Bridge, South Australia. ‘Although it was damp and foggy I might say half the town was on the station and when the band struck up “Home Sweet Home” we nearly all cried and could scarcely listen to any of the speeches.’
11
Some time later, she wrote of her experiences in the first few years after the war.
The next twelve months was the hardest time I have ever put in, to feel so far away from what had been part of one’s life. It would have been quite a different home coming had the war been won, but even in July, 1918 were none [
sic
] too sure how it would all end.
If only I could have gone to sleep and slept until 11th November all would have been well.
But to go out and meet people and try and talk about your experiences, for they all took an interest in you and expected you to talk, was just unbearable at times.
And the quiet Australian life, after the rush and bustle of the other side was maddening.
Well it is all over and past now and the
Euripides
brought me back my Scotchman. So now I am happy and have nothing to grumble about (unless a few butt ends and a few dead matches) but consider myself very fortunate to have served in the most terrible war the world has ever known.
It seems like a long past dreadful dream now and I really can’t imagine it was part of my life for such a long period.
My dear little boy and girl sometimes hear their father and I talking of the war and later when we are alone will beg—‘do tell us some of the stories about the war Mummie, I’m just going to be a soldier when I grow up.’
I pray God that never as long as the world may last will there ever be such a dreadful slaughter.
12
As Anne Donnell discovered, returning home had its lighter yet poignant moments. On board the troopship when she sailed from England in January 1919 was a ‘dear little Pomeranian doggie’ that was being smuggled back to Australia. When it was discovered, the officer commanding ordered that it could not be taken ashore and would have to be put down. The senior medical officer intervened and won a reprieve. The dog’s future became the focus of the passengers’ conversation.