Preface

In her 1992 study on the history of Australian Army Nursing, Jan Bassett attempted to “construct a[n impressionistic] social profile”[1] of the more than nine thousand Australian women (and those small but significant number of men) who had officially served as army nurses since the Boer War in 1899. Bassett states how her framework approach stemmed from the divide by Australian historians whom had previously reconstructed their wartime experiences by either entailing a superlative yet undiscerning sanctification or neglecting them altogether.[2] Michael McKernan observes how the official historians had “amass[ed] such a wealth of detail that for many years the official histories and the companion battalion histories remained all that was written on Australian military history.”[3] As a result, whatever valuable insight that could be accorded towards their experiences in war came mostly in the form of compilations, unit histories, and private diaries (or surviving correspondence letters). Throughout much of the twentieth-century, Australian army nurses were, of course, inherently conservative, interned by their background training that had once adhered them towards the philosophic principles of separate allocations for men and women within the medical profession. Their history in the defense force, too, has been inhibited by a sort of hierarchical order – where nurses were considered being ‘in but not of’ the army.[4] Up until 1941, the only rank that a woman could extol within the army was that of a Staff Nurse (and, in some cases, physiotherapists). Still, a nurse awarded with the Royal Red Cross (RRC) medal for rendering nursing services on behalf of the military were appraised as the highest merit bestowed upon women. For when it was instated, in 1883, the RRC was the first noble exemplar of an elite Order encompassed exclusively for women. Perhaps it was only until the 1970s and 80s with the emergence of the significant shifts towards social/gender issues and the methodology in historiography – that which focused upon the microcosms of ordinary peoples – did historical academia in Australian army nursing finally receive its just recognition, through such scholarly works by Bassett, Rupert Goodman, and Catherine Kenny. This Public History project, therefore, profiles two army nurses who had either graduated or worked (or both) during the lifetime of the former Prince Henry Hospital based in Little Bay NSW (formerly named the Coast Hospital up until 1934).[5] Whilst, primary sources, particularly war records and contemporary newspaper accounts, will be the secular anchorage for formulating each historical profile, secondary source materials will also serve as the essential background and foreground elements – due to the existing void within the historiography data – in order to create, as per Bassett’s dictum, an ‘impression’ of each nurse’s individual war histories.

[1] Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War. (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992): 2.

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid., 2.

[5] George Caiger, ed., A Coast Chronicle: The History of the Prince Henry Hospital 1881-1981. (Sydney: The Board of the Prince Henry Hospital, 1981): v; Maylean Cordia, Nurses at Little Bay. (Sydney: Prince Henry Hospital Trained Nurses’ Association, 1990): 508; “Sister Margaret de Mestre,” Monument Australia,

https://monumentaustralia.org.au/themes/people/military/display/93107-sister-margaret-de-mestre (accessed November 29, 2022).