Laura Isabel Sandwith

Born 9 December 1909, Laura was the fifth child of Samuel Fisher Sandwith, a farmer at Millbrook near Ballarat and his wife, Ellen Cornish. 

In 1938, Laura, together with her colleagues,  Rita Nunan and Marion Pittaway, earned their general nursing qualifications from the Ovens District Hospital. Their timely graduation was particularly fortuitous, as the Victorian Charities Board had deemed the hospital, established in 1857, to be in such disrepair that it no longer met the standards required for modern medicine or nursing. Faced with the threat of closure, the hospital needed a new facility to continue operating. 

Also, due to the hospital’s daily occupancy rate falling to less than forty, it's designation as a full time training school was changed to part time. Consequently, Laura, Marion and Rita  would need to complete an additional six months at a larger hospital after their three years at Beechworth. Rita and Laura, in 1939 chose to do their additional six months at the Queen Victoria Hospital. 

Laura in March 1941 was appointed as an Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) staff nurse with the 2nd Australian Imperial Force and was nursing at the 115th Australian General Hospital (AGH),  also known as the 115th Heidelberg Military Hospital. In November of the same year she was granted 6 days pre embarkation leave. This indicates that she had been assigned to active service overseas. However, she chose not to go overseas and was at the 115th AGH until March 1943 when she, now a Lieutenant, transferred to the No. 6 Ambulance Train.  In 1942 the number of beds had increased to 1,200 with a nursing staff of 120; a nurse to patient ratio of one to ten.

The No. 6 Ambulance Train ferried wounded and convalescing soldiers from Melbourne to Heidelberg station where they were collected by ambulance and taken to the 115th AGH. The train consisted of a staff car to house medical officers, nursing sisters and other personnel, a personnel car to accommodate the balance of medical staff, an administrative car to provide dispensary, medical and storage space and office room, a kitchen and dining car and ward cars for both walking and cot cases. Patients were accommodated in hospital type bunks arranged in three tiers. Later in the war, wounded Victorian soldiers, who after disembarking in Sydney, were entrained to Albury where they transferred to the 6th Ambulance Train which brought them to Heidelberg. 

Laura appears to have spent approximately five years as a nurse with the AANS and was still nursing at the 115th AGH in April 1945. The 1949 electoral roll lists Laura, as a nurse living with her parents at Wallace, a village, about 12 miles east of Ballarat.  

Aged forty-six, Laura married a widower, sixty one year old John Erle Downey in 1955. From the time of their marriage to her death, Laura and John lived on a farm at Warrenheip, a rural township about 2 km east of Ballarat. 

©Anne Hanson, 2025                                                                           E-mail:  Anne Hanson