Australians at War Film Archive

Well I was born in Dubbo in New South Wales in 1941. I was the fifth of seven children to,

my parents separated during the war. My father was in the army. He was in Sydney at South Head on an artillery battery. My mother left Dubbo then, which when I was just on two and she was pregnant with my youngest brother. She went to live in Leeton in New South Wales where two of her brothers were working, and we settled there.

And we, I don’t know too much about that early part, but my mother eventually remarried in about 1945 or ’46 I think it was, and I had a half sister. She was the one that passed away in ’69. We weren’t terribly well off, bit

of struggle with seven kids. We had a very, we were a very close family. My eldest brother is 12 years older than I am and my sister is next and she is six years older than I am and then steps and stairs, you know, sort of, my next brother is four years older, the next one is 12 months older and then me and then two years to the youngest brother and then five years I think it was until 1948 when my

youngest sister was born. I went to the local high school to the equivalent of Year 10, called Intermediate Certificate in those days. Used to work during the school holidays to earn pocket money. We used to do things like go around after all the footy matches and pick up all the beer bottles and sell them to the bottle yard

to earn pocket money, collect newspapers and sell them to the fish shop. First job I had was, I think I was in high school. I worked in a jewellery store during the summer holidays and I can remember one sales

rep came into the store one day and we were just chatting. He said, “And what are you going to do when you leave school?” I said, “I’m going to be a nurse and then I’m going to join the army”. And that was sort of the prophecy that came back and bit me. But I think what put that idea into my head at that stage we used to have radio, this is well pre-

television days, they had radio plays on and one of them was White Coolies which is a book written by Betty Jeffrey who was one of the POWs [prisoners of war] in Sumatra I think she was, and we were allowed, you know, normal bedtime was 8.30, but once a week when that was on we were allowed to stay until it finished, which was 9.30 and

I sort of, that was probably what sort of put that idea into my head, and I sort of forgot about it after that. I finished school when I was 15, having gained my Intermediate Certificate which is all you needed in those days to become a nurse. Either that or you had to do a nurse’s entrance exam. In between leaving school at 15 and starting my training at

17, I worked in the local newsagents. That sort of kept me occupied, gave me some money so far, and one of the girls I went to school with and I had applied to Albury Base Hospital to do our training. We were both accepted so in May of 1958 we

travelled by train down to Albury, the coldest place on earth in winter and the hottest place on earth in the summer. I always thought Leeton was bad but Albury was worse. I spent four very happy years down there training, and passed my general certificate without too much trouble.

We had to travel up to Wagga Wagga which was the regional area to do our finals and was a big event, and after that I did some private nursing down in Albury because I wasn’t sure, I didn’t particularly want to go back to Leeton but I did eventually, but I worked as a private nurse for a

lady who was a quadriplegic for a bit over 12 months and then I went back to Leeton and got a job in the hospital there as a theatre sister. I started off on the wards first and then ended up working in theatre for the rest of the time I was there. The matron of the hospital was actually one of the White Coolies.

She was, her name was, Elizabeth asked me this, what was her name, but I only ever knew her as Mickey Sayer and, but I re-read a book called The Captives which was about the women that were interred and POWs in Sumatra, sort of

and she’s mentioned as Ada Sayer there. So I presume that was her correct name, but she was Mickey, and I was quite happy there but I was starting to get restless. I didn’t get on terribly well with my stepfather and I thought well, one of the other girls and I were talking about going to Canada

to nurse. Anyway she got married so that sorted that, I wasn’t going to go on my own and I was reading a New Idea magazine I think it was and there was a little ad in the corner, bottom left hand corner of the page for Nursing Corps. That sounds interesting so I wrote away and I was sent an application form which I duly filled in and sent back and I was accepted, but unfortunately I,

that was in ’65, early like about January, February of ’65, but because I was the only sister in the hospital that had any theatre experience at that time Mickey Sayer, the matron, wouldn’t let me go. She used the Old Girls’ network, she knew the Director of

Army Nursing Services in Sydney and she said, “Look, I can’t let her go, I’ve got nobody to replace her”. And this went on and on and in the end it was coming on the end of June and I said to her, “Look, this is not good enough, I’m going and you’ll just have to find somebody”. So I did. I left there, I went to Sydney. We were, I should say I was,

sent out to North Head for all the swearing in and signing your life away really. It was a two year commission and that just happened to be the day that the first intake of National Servicemen were also being sworn in and they were all out at North Head, so I came in with the first lot of Nashos [national servicemen]. People say, “I didn’t know they had women in the

National Service intake?” But sort of, but that was the day and it was in July, and I was posted to Ingleburn just outside Sydney near Liverpool. I don’t know, have I covered enough of my childhood?

White Coolies was the name of the book that Betty Jeffrey wrote and the way the Japanese treated the nurses that were taken prisoner of war, the ones they didn’t murder,

they were treated as coolies, you know, sort of slaves working in the, you know, sort of living in degradation and working under extreme conditions. There’s several books being written about it. The most famous one, and I’ve not forgotten her name, who’s recently died, Vivien Bullwinkle. She was

on the last boat where they evacuated the nurses against their will from Singapore. She was on the Vyner Brooke, which was the name of the ship. It was bombed, there were sort of other female internees, female civilian women that had been evacuated as well, and of the 30-odd nurses

that were on the Vyner Brooke, the ones that made it to shore after the ship was sunk, they did it in various lots, they didn’t all come ashore together, and there were about 15 or 20 in the group that Vivien was in, and they got to shore and they

surrendered to the Japanese. They didn’t have much choice, they were sort of captured and they had to surrender. They took, the Japanese took the men off around the headland and shot them. Then they came back and then they made all the women, all the nurses turn their backs and march into the sea, and as they went into the sea they opened fire and Vivien was the

only survivor of that particular episode. She was shot in the hip and pretended to be dead. When they’d all gone away she crawled off into the jungle and she found an Australian soldier who had been wounded and they stayed in the jungle for as long as they could but eventually had to, because of lack of food and water ‘cause they both needed medical attention, they

went into a local village and they were then turned over to the Japanese. Nobody ever mentioned the fact that Vivien was with, you know, sort of what group she had been in because she would’ve been killed so that she couldn’t tell the tale, but from all accounts the life they lead was

very bad. They lost more sisters and civilian women in the POW camps which they kept moving around Sumatra, sort of from one place to another for no apparent reason apart from, you know, we’ll make them walk from, and they’d mostly have to walk from one place to another.

Occasionally they were put on trains not knowing where they were going and they were treated like slaves, not slaves, coolies, the lowest of the low. They worked the land, they lived in squalor and they had very little comforts. Well, they had no comforts. From the descriptions they lived on,

slept on wood or concrete or mostly wooden slats, you know, sort of just a body’s width room for them and their possessions, what little they had. There’s been a few, there’s a book called Behind Barbed Wire, I can’t remember who wrote that one. The Captives, White Coolies and,

The Captives. There was a movie, I can’t remember

Paradise Road. I’ve actually got it on CD [compact disc] there.

That took place in the camp that Vivien Bullwinkle was in. I don’t know that they mention her name in it but she is the most famous of the

POWs because she survived the initial murder attempt, which shows that the Japanese have a lot to answer for even now. We lost one of the other POWs just recently here in Brisbane, Florence Trotter who was actually the sister-in-law of Mickey Sayer.

She married Mickey’s brother, but she reverted back to her maiden name.

Yes, well it did. I mean that wasn’t the only one, I mean there was Douglas Bader’s

story. I can’t remember the name of it [it is Reach for the Sky], but he was the airmen who had no legs. They were the sort of things they put on, then, as their radio plays. Yeah, White Coolies I can vividly remember, you know, sort of sitting there glued to the radio, and my stepfather who

did not appreciate it, but my mother overruled in that case. He was brought up very strictly by his grandparents and sort of you do what you’re told to do and you do it then, and if not you get a hiding, and that happened. Actually, no, he didn’t, he never ever hit us. I think my mother would’ve knocked him from here to hell and back if he had have done, but

she did. You know: “They’re my children, I’ll punish them.” and it was a case of spare the rod and spoil the child in those days, and if you got into mischief or didn’t do what you were told to do out would come the jam spoon which was actually a piece of apple case, you know, pine they used to make apples, make cases to put apples in, and she had shaped it and she used to make all her own jam, and it was about that long

and about that wide at one end and narrow at the other, and that was to stir the jam with but that was also used to mete out punishment.

It did, but we only got it when we deserved it, and I guess we deserved it.

I did read The White Rabbit,

I think she was called the White Rabbit. I had seen the movies, but that didn’t sort of catch my imagination as much as, because she wasn’t army. I mean I didn’t see them until after I’d been in the army so I didn’t sort of equate with her at all, although it was a very interesting story and

probably back, you know, sort of when I was listening to these radio shows it got into the subconscious and stayed there, and sort of after I did my training and wondering what to do, and just happening to see this advertisement, sort of, “Oh yeah, I’ll do that.” And it wasn’t until a long time later that I thought, “Yes.” Back when I was 14 I told somebody

that’s what I was going to do, and it would be quite hilarious if that fellow was still around in the ‘60s and remembered me because when we went there was a whole lot of publicity when we went to Vietnam.

Yeah, whether he would actually connect the two.

Well actually they were there. I wasn’t actually sworn in with them.

Oh no, they were there. I mean it only takes a day to fill out all the paperwork and do a psychological test which wasn’t terribly difficult,

and then you sign on the dotted line when everything was agreed and then you were driven out, I was then driven out to, I may have been driven back to headquarters at the barracks in Paddington I think, somewhere around there, and then out to Ingleburn where I was issued with all uniforms and ward dress

and basically because in those days all officers had tailor-made uniforms so you had to go off and be measured for your summer walking-out dress, your winter walking-out dress and you had to wait for those to be made. I’d never had anything tailor-made before.

Well it was greatcoat and

there was a winter walking out dress and a summer walking out dress which was really rather good. Ward dress was standard issue, they came in multiple sizes, long sleeved grey dress, button, silver buttons, corps buttons down the front and a cape, veils, a little starched white collar

and black shoes, seamed stocking. You wouldn’t even know what they were, would you?

Well no, these weren’t black lines. These were actually silk stockings we were issued with ‘cause you could still get silk stockings in those days.

In fact my first pair of stockings when I was about 15 were silk stockings my mother bought for me, with seams in them. I still remember that ‘cause my sister borrowed them and brought them back with a big ladder in them, but you could mend silk stockings. You had this special little hook thing which you could catch each thread and take it back up to where the hole was which hopefully was above the skirt line and sew

it off and still have a pair of stockings. But there as no pantyhose, it was just suspender belts and the seams had to be perfectly straight or, and your shoes had to be highly polished, uniforms had to be starched. The laundry used to starch the uniforms but then we used to redo them because they were never to our satisfaction. They’d come back and they’d

be wrinkled, and you didn’t wrinkles. The collars and the veils we used to starch ourselves and that was a three hour effort.

Raw starch.

Well that’s made out of corn starch and it’s just a powder. You

mix it with cold water and you dip your veil in it. Then you take it out and hang it on the line and it comes in and it’s all stiff. Then you have to iron it very carefully so that you don’t scorch it and you add more starch to it to get it as stiff as you possibly can. I’ve got a photo over there in my ward dress and it’s from there up, which you can see is a veil.

They were made out of like an organza material. They were very thin. In fact I’ve still got a couple of my veils.

Once a week, because they get dirty. The hair was all back, or most sort of, depending

on your matron. Sometimes we were allowed to have sort of a little bit of hair. Depending if you had short hair you could have some hair showing, but if you had long hair it was back or there was just a little bit here and the veil came around and hid the rest of it.

Yes, of course, as I said there was no general intake of nurses, you just went in if you wanted to and then every year or two or three times a year they would have an indoctrination course down at Healesville. That’s what they used to call it, indoctrination. But in the meantime so that you weren’t exactly stupid about what army life was like there was

a warrant officer from the field hospital. We were in a camp hospital as it was called then. The field hospital was on paper, sort of that was what they pulled together to send off to war, taking people from all different units, and they were at Holsworthy which was just next door, and he would come over twice a week and he would give us lectures on military etiquette, military law,

saluting, some marching but not much because nurses never went on parade in those days thank God, and he’s here in Brisbane. His name is David Collier. He worked his way up through the ranks and he’s, he was Captain Collier when I was in

Vietnam and then he retired as a major. So he was warrant officer in ’65 and I don’t know when he got out, but he got in the ‘80s, ‘70s, ‘80s I think as a major and he’s a marvellous fellow. He taught us so much and he made it so much fun,

you know, sort of the idea of saluting was the thing that turned me off the most because the only time we ever had to salute was if we had a hat on and not a veil. So you know, all the Diggers that knew we were sisters, they would hang around and wait until they saw one of us come along in walking-out dress ‘cause we had to go through the hospital to get to the bus stop to go

into Liverpool or Sydney or wherever we wanted to go, and if we happened to be in uniform then they’d come around the corner in file sort of and there was enough space in between them so that they would salute, you’d return the salute and they’d go on, and then the next one would come and it was horrifying experience (UNCLEAR) go up like this,

and you had to have everything, the arm had to be level with the shoulder, the hand had to be like that and it just had to touch the brim of your hat and you had to come from that, up like that sort of. So

Well army and air force salute the same

and I think the navy do, and the Americans is this, but ours is this, following on the British tradition. I mean the Nursing Corps originated from the British Army nurses, the Queen Alexandra Army Nursing Corps. Our nursing services actually started in 1899.

Our first nurses went to South Africa for the Boer War [1899-1901] and we had our 100 years centenary of nursing services which is the memorial in Canberra is for in 1999. So there’s a lot of history and unfortunately it’s no longer a nursing corps as such. It’s been amalgamated with the medical corps and

they don’t wear the grey and scarlet anymore.

No, they went from the grey and scarlet into a white ward dress. That was after I got out, and their walking-out uniform, and it was supposed to be the financial aspect of it. Instead

of having, they had the WRAAC of the Royal Australian Army, the Women’s Royal Australian Army Corps, they wore green so they decided that they would, instead of having grey and green, they would put them all into green and they looked atrocious, they really did. There was a sort of rivalry between the WRAAC and the Nursing Corps when I was in the army

‘cause we each looked down on the other. We were the better ones, they weren’t, and vice versa, you know sort of, and for the Nursing Corps to go into WRAAC green and it wasn’t even a nice green. It was a leafy colour, it was horrible. Then they, I hadn’t been out to the hospital recently, but

they were supposed to be going back into a grey ward dress but the only time I had been back our there was when my son was here in Amberley and he had a couple of episodes where he had to be admitted to hospital and mostly they were, they were in white but there were mostly civilian nurses looking after them. You very rarely saw a nursing officer excepting maybe

in casualty or A&E [accident and emergency] as they call it.

I enlisted in July. Actually it wasn’t an enlistment, I received my commission.

I was commissioned, yes,

in July of ’65 and I went to

Vietnam in May of ’68, ’67, ’67. I came home May ’68.

12 Months, three days and 19 hours.

Well it was actually

called a field ambulance when we went there. Didn’t become a hospital in name until the 1st of April 1968 when it became 1 Austfield Hospital. Up until then it was called a field ambulance but basically it was a hospital but it expanded. A field ambulance is a small unit, but this one had expanded but still retained the name.

And we were the first sisters from memory, we were the first army nursing officers ever posted to a field ambulance. They sort of had camp hospitals and other units, but not, a field ambulance actually worked out in the field. It picked up the wounded,

brought them back and then went out again. So it was, the biggest part of it was at Vung Tau. There was a detachment of it at Nui Dat where the headquarters, the battalion headquarters were where all the troops were, and they would bring even them down by road or come down by chopper [helicopter] with them.

So,

We were only 20 minutes by chopper from many of the battles that our troops fought in. So they were wounded, they were picked up by the chopper, flown back to us and it was so different to other conflicts, Malaysia, Korea, Second World War, where

it took so long for the wounded to get back to medical assistance, which is why our death rate was so low by comparison to the other, you know. In the First World War and the Second World War it could be days before, you know, sort of from the time they’re wounded until they got to

a medical facility. But the advent of the helicopter made things so much better. So a lot of our fellows if they’d been left out in the field even 24 hours the infections that they got in their wounds, and I never saw a clean wound. I mean I looked after

soldiers that had come back from Vietnam before I went ‘cause the first battalion left in 1965 just after I was commissioned and went to Vietnam, and as I said I went in ’67. So we had casualties coming back who had been treated in either the field ambulance or by the Americans, and everyone,

there was always an infection. No matter how hard you tried you couldn’t get all of that material out of their wounds straight away. Some of them had to go back to theatre three, four times or more. In fact there was one fellow that I looked after at Ingleburn before I went to Vietnam, he was in a construction squadron and he had had his

foot run over by, they were making a road, you know those big roller, steam roller things, and the front part of his foot had been run over and he was medevaced [medical evacuation] back to Australia before I went to Vietnam and when I came back from Vietnam and I was out here at Yeronga [Queensland] which was then where the hospital was, he

was admitted there for ongoing plastic surgery to his foot. He had had numerous lots of surgery and had just reached the reconstruction stage of that injury.

No. They’ve always had medical

personnel, but usually male out in the field. Then women, the nurses were never meant to be in the thick of the fighting. They were on the outskirts of it. The hospitals were there, they’d have to evacuate the hospitals and move them back as conflict came closer in

a normal war, if there’s such thing as a normal war, but you know, sort of back in the First World War and Second World War the hospitals were sort of built on the edge of the battlefield and then as the enemy advanced the hospitals would be moved further back, most times. Some times they didn’t quite get the chance but they could’ve,

were often under fire, but with the advent of the helicopter and more modern vehicles and things like that they were able to keep the hospitals out of range hopefully. Although there were attacks on hospitals, mostly Americans, the American hospitals because they had so many of them and they were so big and they were, you know, sort of right in areas where

there was a lot of fighting. I mean our fighting was, as I said, 20 minutes away, that we know of, and there was no, and in those days there were only female nursing officers. Nowadays there are male nursing officers, so they can be sent to a forward unit but the female officers never were.

I don’t know. It was just something that I had decided that’s what I wanted to do. There was, I didn’t

go onto, back in my day if you went on from Year 10 it was because you wanted to go to university. I wasn’t that brainy. I had to work hard at my studies and I passed Year 10, plus financially my mother couldn’t afford to keep me at school and

it wasn’t necessary, because I wanted to be a nurse it wasn’t necessary for me to go onto the Leaving Certificate and matriculation which was combined and the only people that did that were the ones that wanted to go to uni and become doctors or what have you. So I don’t really remember ever

not wanting to be a nurse. One of my cousins was a, started her training and she never finished it, but it’s just something that was there I guess and it must’ve been the right calling because it was 38 and a half years from the time I started training from when I retired.

Oh yeah, we did have a good time. It was very strict. We all, everybody had to live in the nurses’ quarters. There was no living out at all, and there was a

home sister who made sure that all the student nurses behaved themselves. You had to be in quarters by half past 9.00 at night, the door was locked, and if you weren’t there then you had to go over to the hospital to see the night sister to get her to let you in. If you didn’t have, we were allowed one late pass a week, which meant we

could stay out until 11.00 o’clock and twice a year we were allowed what they called a ball pass where you could stay out until 1.00 to go to a ball, and sort of balls were big in those days, big formal affairs sort of, and otherwise, you know, sort of you were in at 9.30. Our hours were long. We worked I

think it was, our day shift started at 7.00 and finished at 5.30. We had an hour for breakfast and an hour for lunch, and they had a broken shift that started at 8.00 and finished at 1.30, came back at 5.30 and worked till 9.00. Night shift was from 8.30 until 7.30 with one meal

break. No sisters on night duty. There was one sister on night duty for the whole 250-bed hospital. We had a room about the size of our kitchen which had a bed and a wardrobe and a chest of drawers in it and two people lived in that. One actually slept in the room and one slept out on the verandah, a covered in verandah.

It was covered in with wire screen and canvas blinds. As I said, winter was cold. If you, and our lectures weren’t, I mean these days they all go to university, but later on Leeton was a training hospital when I went back there. The nurses would have lectures in blocks.

They’d have a few weeks in lectures, then they’d come back onto the ward, and the same, after I got out of the army and before uni training came in, but we had lectures whatever time suited them and we were always rostered either on a broken shift if there was an afternoon lecture, or a day off. We could not leave

the ward to attend the lecture, and if you were on night duty, that’s too bad. You had to get up and go to the lecture, but the night sister knew who had lectures because when you finished night duty you had to be in bed by 8.30 of a morning and she would physically check to see that the nurses who were on night duty were in bed by that time and you weren’t allowed out of your room until 3.00 o’clock in the afternoon unless you had a lecture.

I mean you could stay in longer but that was the earliest you could get out. I was going to say something else then. I can’t think what it was.

Yes, you could get up and go to the toilet. That’s what I was going to say, we did three months night duty at a stretch twice a year. So you’d have three months on, six months off, three months on or sometimes it’s three, three, three nights, three days, three nights and three days, but you were allowed to get up and go to the toilet.

That’s about all. Except, and you were moved. They had a special corridor for night staff so every three months you’d have to pack up all your belongings and move them to the night duty room and then at the end of your night duty you had to pack them all up again and move them back to the day duty rooms. At least on night duty you had a room to yourself, you didn’t have to sleep out in the

balcony or the verandah they used to call it.

Yes, as a junior nurse. It wasn’t until third and fourth year when you were classified as senior nurses that you got the choice of where you slept, unless of course you were with somebody in your own group. Then it was, you know, a donnybrook to see who got to sleep

inside and who got to sleep outside until about six months before our finals, and they moved the finalists, and there were six of us, down to the sisters’ corridor and we had like a little lounge room where we could study or meet. We were kept segregated, apart from work, from the rest of the nurses to give us time to study, and

that particular time was the time we really played up because the sisters corridor, our lounge room was on the same side of the laundry. The bedrooms were on the same side as the corridor and I mean we were 21, almost 21 and you know, it’s alright when you’re 17 being told what to do, but when you get to

21, this is not good, we want to go out. So we did, and we had it so that the blinds were always drawn so when the night sister came checking she could see at least one or two people studying and then would assume that the rest were in bed, whereas in actual fact the rest were out and we stayed up until they came and they just knocked on the window and we went and opened the laundry door and let them in. So we had a great time

doing, we all passed. We must’ve done enough study, but during the rest of the time we also had a system worked out that if we worked out you had to go and see the matron and ask for a late pass, but if it was on the spur of the moment, somebody had a late pass, “I’m going to a party, do you want to come?” “Oh, I haven’t

got a pass.” “Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ll let you in.” And so you’d come home, you’d have to go over to the hospital and get the night sister who would come over and unlock the nurses quarters for you to go in and then she’d lock the door again and go back to the hospital, and the person who had the late pass would wait until the all clear and our, beside the door was a boiler room

and that’s where we used to hide. It wasn’t locked, and we used to hide in there until the night sister had gone and then the one that had the late pass would then come and open the door and we’d quickly sneak back inside. They didn’t actually do bed checks on us. They should’ve.

Thankfully, yeah. But we sort of, we, the nurses quarters was right on the main street of,

in Albury. It was actually, went down the main street, turned left to go over to Wodonga and the hospital was built on that corner but the nurses quarters faced the main street, and across the street there were a couple of pubs, and so we’d get all the drunks and in the summer time the canvas blinds were rolled up, you’d get all the yahoos and you know, sort of

“Come and have a drink nursie”, or all the drunks walking up and down were knocking on the, ringing the door bell. We had, it was good, we had quite a good social life within the limitations of the hours we were allowed to, and we had television. That’s when television came in, when I was training in 19, let me see. It started in ’58 so it would be

about ’59, ’60 when we actually got a television set.

Black and white. Colour TV [television] didn’t come in until 1974, in Victoria anyway. That’s where we were then. But yeah, black and white, and it was the greatest thing. I can remember there was a great craze when, everybody bleaching

their hair and this is my natural hair colour and I thought a girlfriend, a very close friend of mine, had black hair and she wanted to go blonde and I said, “Well, I want to go blonde too”. So off to the chemist and we bought the blonding kits and we went back and we put it in our hair and we went down and sat and watched television and forgot the time,

and when we realised that it had been on longer than we should have we dashed upstairs to the bathrooms to wash it out, and Min washed hers out and she was lovely and blonde. To me it hadn’t made as I thought, the slightest bit of difference. My hair was still this colour, and until I went, actually it was a bit ginger, more ginger, like everything it fades with time. I went

home a couple of weeks after that and my mother said, “What have you done to your hair?” I said, “Nothing”. “Yes you have, you’ve been trying to do something to it. It’s not the same colour”. And apparently it had lightened it a couple of shades and she noticed but I didn’t. So I never attempted to do anything to my hair then until I was finished my training and I was 22 and I then

decided I’d go, well, if I’m going to have ginger hair, I might as well have auburn hair and I put an auburn rinse in it and that stayed until 1967, no, 1997. I continued to colour my hair but I had to stop then because I had a big skin cancer cut out of up here and I wasn’t allowed to do it anymore. So now I’m back to natural.

I can’t remember back that far.

Yeah, I know. No, I honestly can’t because there’s nothing. I can’t even remember what sort of programs were on. I think it was mostly,

oh, you wouldn’t remember either.

No, I can’t even remember any movies.

Well, there was always a party going on somewhere because the army were just across the border at Bandiana.

There were private parties in private houses, friends of friends sort of having a party, “Come along”, sort of. I used to go, still go to church regularly and met up with some people, young people there or we’d just go to a pub and have a drink, you know, under age, but.

Nobody told anybody ‘cause the drinking age was 21 then, like voting age. We were still very much under parental control which has sort of changed a lot since then.

No, they didn’t. We never ever went to the pubs across the street because, you know, sort of

that was just too close to home, but there were a lot of pubs in Albury and as I said, we used to go across to Wodonga and we used to get, the sales reps would come to town and they’d want some company and we never ever went out singly, but there might be two or three of us would go out for dinner and

the movies, or the pub for a couple of drinks and then back. Depends, you know, how late you wanted to stay out, but yeah, you forget about those sort of things. I hadn’t thought of that for ages. On days off we used to

go out, go to the river or parts where there were beaches, which were really close to the hospital. The Murray River runs through Albury not far from the hospital and I can remember on night duty we had a woman brought in. She’d gassed herself or she tried to gas herself,

an old lady and when she revived she sort of said, “Well, I tried to drown myself”. She went down to the river and she was going to jump in the river but it was too cold, so she went home and put her head in the gas oven instead. Yeah, so the river was very cold, very deep and very fast, in those days. I don’t think it is anymore.

But we had, there was the monument up on the hill. We used to go for walks up there or if anybody had a car we used to go for drives up there at night. You couldn’t walk up there at night, it was not considered safe, but it was good exercise during the day if you didn’t get enough exercise running around the ward. I mean I’d say the first three to six months of our training, I mean we

were taken in in blocks. We did six weeks of classroom work and then we were thrown to the wolves on the ward, but as a very junior nurse you spend all of your time in the pan room.

Cleaning pans. The closest you got to a patient was actually going around and collecting bed pans and taking them into the pan room, putting them through the flusher and then, they were all made out of metal

and they had to be polished with like a gumption, like a solid abrasive cleaner, and you had to keep that pan room spotless all day and if the charge sister of the ward who were usually old maids and

very nasty, went into the pan room and there was one pan or something out of place in there that wasn’t spotlessly clean, you were made to stay back after your normal rostered hours and clean it, and you know, that was your introduction to nursing sort of, and meal times you got to feed the patients and then sort of gradually as time progressed you were allowed to

actually touch a patient and wash them basically. That was all you did, wash them and made them comfortable and made their beds and fed them, and then little by little you were allowed to do simple dressings and give out tablets under the supervision of either a fourth year nurse or a sister,

depending. There was usually only one sister on an evening shift until you got into night duty. Once you got night duty you were a senior, then you gave out the medications yourself, but not dangerous drugs. I mean dangerous drugs were kept locked in a cupboard and I remember on night duty you had to count. Morphine came it tablet form, it had to be dissolved in sterile water, drawn up over heat,

drawn up in a syringe, but to do that you had to get the drug and the drug book out of the drug cupboard. You had to take it and the patient’s chart around to the night sister in her office who would then supervise the dissolving and drawing up of the injection. Then you had to go back to the ward and give it to the patient with another

nurse with you to make sure you were doing the right thing. But it’s so different to these days, you know sort of, you just go and get it. You’ve got the doctor’s orders, you go and get it and you get a nurse, say, “Look, this is for that”, draw it up and then you go and give it to her, but you know sort of, if the night sister wasn’t in her office then you had to physically go around the hospital. You couldn’t ring her because as soon as you picked up the phone in the ward at night time an alarm went right through the hospital.

So that she would know that somebody was trying to ring her. As I said, there was only one sister on for the whole 250 beds, general hospital and private wards. The only place that had more than, had any other sisters was the labour ward, the maternity hospital, which was sort of next door.

Yes, like

fire. Fire and haemorrhage were the two things that you used the phone for, and we had, it was a very old rambling place at one end next door to the ambulance station which was next door to the hospital but sort of tucked in behind, was the TB [tuberculosis] chalet where we nursed active TB patients. On the other,

and that was purposely built, but at the other end of the hospital was an old house that had been converted to an isolation ward and it was just a series of rooms, and each room was designated to a particular disease. There was a hepatitis ward, there was a whooping cough room, the, what else did we have?

The polio wing was actually purposely built. We didn’t have any active polio patients in there but the ward was there, but we had sort of, everything that is now treated at home was, severe cases were sort of put in this infectious ward and there was one nurse on each of those wards at night

and they, we could in emergencies ring the phone to get the night sister, but you learnt very quickly not to do that. You sort of managed on your own. Like a kid choking with whooping cough, you just grabbed them by the feet and hung them upside down and belted their back until they got the, they could breathe properly again, and sort of it was

a matter of changing gowns to go into each room, and of course you do rounds every half hour, so you’d be forever getting out of one gown. You might have two or three patients in the one room, and we did some, used to play some nasty tricks on some of the girls. The girls in the TB chalet in particular. We had one girl and she was terrified, she hated working there on night duty.

I think she had a fear of the patients and she used to lock herself in. I mean everybody used to lock herself in but she would lock herself in and she wouldn’t answer the door if, you know sort of, I was working on the female ward this particular time and we had two deaths in one night. The morgue was in between these two buildings and

I sent a junior nurse over to say, “Look, we’re going to be late relieving you for a meal tonight because we’ve just had a death and we’ve got to get the”, and she wouldn’t answer the door. So very irreverent, we laid the body out and we had one wardsman on for the hospital. He actually looked after the boiler house, but he was supposed to come to the ward and

help us take the body to the mortuary, and he wouldn’t come. So this particular night, eventually I had to go over and get him, no, I actually got, the night sister came around and she went and got him. She yelled out from the back of the hospital, “Dracula,” it was his nickname, “Get over here”. So we thought, “Oh, this is going to be fun.” So

instead of putting the body on the trolley, one of the nurses got on the trolley, covered it up and we walking, Dracula and I were wheeling the trolley over to the mortuary and the nurse sat up, and he screamed. He was a New Australian, ‘cause Bonegilla, the migrant camp, was just over the border too and a lot of our domestic staff came from there. He screamed

and he didn’t come back to work for three nights, and then this particular girl that we had, we didn’t like very much and who didn’t like working in the TB chalet, this is actually another night. It might’ve been the same night we had this other death. So we went over and knocked on the door but instead of, Dracula wasn’t there, two of us took the body over. It was a little old

lady I think. Well it had to be, I was working in the female ward, and we very gently picked up the body off the trolley and put it on the doorstep and knocked on the door and ran and hid in the bushes. Well she was expecting to be relieved for a meal. So we, she opened the door, looked down, saw the body, screamed, slammed the door shut. We immediately got out, got the body and took it over to the mortuary and put it in and then raced back to the

ward in time to hear the alarm go. She’d picked up the phone, and Sister Moffitt, she was gorgeous, our night super. She’d been night supervisor for 12 years at that stage. That’s all she did, was nights, and six out of seven nights at that, and she knew damn well it was us and what we’d done, but she said,

“I don’t think that sort of thing should happen again”, because she could stand this nurse either. It was so funny. In retrospect sort of how horrible and irreverent we were to a body, but it was you know, sort of three months night duty you had to do something to get a bit of joy out of life.

Very strict, which is why I didn’t find joining the army such a hassle because matron used to do her ward rounds every

day and everybody had to stand still, line up by the beds, stop whatever you were doing while matron did her ward rounds. If one of the honorary doctors came in to do his ward rounds, same thing. There’d be him, matron, the charge sister of the ward and the other, any other sisters that were on and they did the ward round, and us nurses had to stand, you know, sort of pretty well to attention. When we got into the army it was very

similar. When the CO [Commanding Officer] did his ward round, his name was Bill Watson, he was a major, he was devil and he used to like to pick at the nurses, and our matron, Margaret Carmody has since passed away, she was one of the older sort of Second World War sisters

and she, or maybe not, yeah, she would’ve been Second World War, and he’d come into the ward, you know sort of, the beds were all sort of, it was one, just long wards and the beds were all separate, certain spaces, the chairs had to be there, the bed tables had to be there, the lockers had to be there with just the right stuff on it, sort of no mess, and the counterpanes as they called them,

the bedspreads were white with a red cross on them and that had to be actually centred and he used to come along with a coin and bounce it off the bed. The patients weren’t allowed to be in bed, they had to sit on the chair beside the bed when he did his rounds, and he always wore a white glove and we knew when he did his rounds we had to have the place absolutely spotless because

if he found a speck of dust our life would be hell from matron down until after we got the next clean inspection, and this particular day, and the wards were Second World War buildings so they were dirty. I mean not physically dirty on the inside but they were old I should’ve said. They were old and old buildings collect dust

very easily and he walked into the ward with his white glove on his hand and he sort of put his hand up over the top of the door as he walked in and went like this and without saying anything he just put his hand back like that to matron and she said, “Yes, clean isn’t it?” There wasn’t a speck of dust on it. But he, it was that sort of thing that was similar to what my training was like. So the discipline in the army was not a problem for

me because I’d had all that discipline, and I suppose it would be the same for the other girls because training in those days was very regimented and going from one regimented place into another it sort of just made it easier, whereas after I came back from Vietnam and was here in Brisbane, the training was three years and you were allowed to live out and all that sort of thing. Not in the

army, but sort of when you were training, and there wasn’t the regimentation that we’d had. And it sort of, the girls that came into the army after I came back from Vietnam were, you know sort of, they had no respect for regimentation. They didn’t, they weren’t brought up with it. They,

you know sort of, “Oh, it’s just another job,” you know, but I wear a different uniform, and my big hate was and you know, against all mess policy you did not walk around in the mess without shoes on, but these Queensland girls did, and you know sort of, I was president of the mess committee and I used to tell them off.

“Look, you know you’re supposed to wear shoes. Go and put your shoes on.” “Are you telling me this is, just because you’re senior to me?” I said, “No, I’m telling you this because I’m the president of the mess committee and this is my place and you do what you’re told”. I mean even the CO and the matron, you know, sort of abided by mess rules.

This is when I’d come back.

No.

We had our own mess, the sisters had their own mess which was actually, it’s on the banks of the river at Yeronga and it’s an old house, a heritage listed house called Rindara, and that was the property that, it was before the Second World War the Salvation Army owned it, it was a home for wayward girls,

then the army took it over and built a camp hospital on the site using some of the buildings that were already there, and this beautiful old mansion, sort of you walk up the stairs and there’s a verandah around that way, big bay windows. You walk in, there’s a massive cedar staircase going up to the second floor. On the right was

the mess ante-room with the marble fire places and the deep red carpets and the big bay window looking out onto the verandah and then out onto the river, and it was the sisters’ domain. No men were ever there unless they were invited. Unfortunately that all changed when they amalgamated the two

and, I mean I left there in 1970, I went back out there as a civilian to work in 1981 and the men who had their mess down by the, at the bottom of the unit, they had a nice little mess down there and a swimming pool and all the rest of it, they had actually moved in and it was joint mess

and it lost all its character. There was no history. You know sort of all the nursing corps, we had formal dinners joint with the males, and we’d use the ante-room and we had it all set up with, you know, long tables and we bought silver chandeliers, candlesticks

and things like that and we had these fantastic mess dinners in that room, and across the other side of the hallway the other bay window was the breakfast room and that’s sort of, you went in there for breakfast and that was cleared away and it became sort of a general purpose room after that, where you could go in

your sort of, in your ordinary everyday clothes and not have to worry too much about etiquette. You could go into that room, it was more like a day room, but if you went into the main ante room then you had to be shoes, stockings.

It was, and you know sort of the girls these days don’t have that, and the girls from you know sort of, I can’t

remember when it happened because I got out of the army in ’72. We lived down in Victoria until ’76, no, ’70, yes, Kirsten was born down there, ’76 we moved up here to Queensland and I didn’t have anything much to do with the army apart from marching on Anzac Day in 1977 when I was six months pregnant with my son. That was the first I’d

really had anything to do with the army until 1981 when the big exercise, Kangaroo ’81, was on and they had to send nurses off there and they were short staffed and one of the, the matron of the big barracks here rang me up and said, “Can you come out and work for us?” So I did that for the next five years virtually.

Yes.

No, well I only trained at Albury, my general training, but this first unit, first posting was Ingleburn and Bill Watson was, who is still alive but not terribly well and lives in Adelaide

I think. Might be Melbourne, can’t remember.

I don’t know. My mother was never, she never had a very high opinion of nurses which surprised when I was allowed to go nursing.

Probably because back in those days the girls that went nursing were the ones that were easy, is the term to describe them, and having this cousin of mine who had started training at Leeton Hospital who told me on no, you know, never ever train in your own home town, got pregnant

half way through her training so she couldn’t finish it, and that seemed to be the general consensus of opinion amongst a lot of people that because you were a nurse you were easy and this probably dates back to the times when nursing was done by low class women. In, you know,

back beginning, the end of the century, you know sort of, no well bred woman would nurse. It wasn’t until the advent of Edith Cavell [World War I Red Cross nurse] and Florence Nightingale [Crimean War nurse] that nursing actually started to get a good reputation, but the nurses who did the dirty work were all

peasant type girls, and in those days I suppose a lot of them were promiscuous. If they couldn’t get work anywhere else they went and did nursing but they still had their other lifestyle, and I think that’s where it sort of came from and like a lot of things it doesn’t, once something’s got a bad name it sticks, and I

think that’s why our training up until recent, the last couple of decades, was so regimented so that there wasn’t that temptation put in their way. They were kept under luck and key. The only thing they didn’t supply was a chastity belt, but it was, I think that’s basically where it came from and

if I hadn’t become a nurse I probably would’ve worked in the newsagents, found a boyfriend, got married and had half a dozen kids before, by the time I was even thinking about getting married.

When you read back,

and not the glossed over versions of some things, the actual doctors didn’t think very much of women that went into, I mean they had men doing that sort of job, but when women started to come in to do it the doctors never had

a high opinion of women who were willing to actually look after a male body. They had no shame, if they could wash and tend to wounds and bed pans and things for men they had no morals, and I think that sort of basically where it sort of started off and this,

I suppose there were cases where some girls had questionable morals and went nursing to get away from home so that they could indulge those sort of things, but that, it seemed to me that was the general, and it had been said to me,

I can’t remember by whom, but you know, sort of, you know, nurses were classified as easy. If you wanted to go out on a date and have a good time you rang up a nurse.

Around ‘60s and ‘70s. I won’t say it now because, well I don’t know, because they’re uni students these days.

They don’t have any discipline, but it was in the, in the ‘70s when I was working in Victoria it was different then, after I got out of the army, I mean for the seven years I was in the army that sort of things wasn’t verbalised. I mean it might still have been there but you never sort of

heard anything about it, although we used to keep a very strict eye on our upper ranks. Do bed checks on them.

There is, and a lot of that I attribute to this university training because they’re not learning

the basics. They’re not, they don’t have time to apply the basics of nursing to the patient, and when they do have to do it in some cases they don’t know how to do it. They may have learnt it theoretically and during their practical experience they are very, and this is from my personal experience, very

reluctant to do hands-on nursing. Yes, take a temperature or a blood pressure, yeah, but ask them to clean up a dirty bed and you know, “Ooh, I’m not gonna do that”. And you know sort of, I have had that experience with these university trained nurses. All they want to do is sit down at the desk and discuss patients’ treatment with doctors

when they don’t know the patient and they don’t know the appropriate treatment anyway, and that’s what they did. The first lot of graduate nurses that I worked with was out at Redcliffe Hospital, or not graduate, they were still training. They had no interest in the patient or patient care. All they wanted to do was sit down and air their knowledge.

Yes, a very loving caring sharing personality. You have to love what you’re doing, you have to be very caring towards other people and you have to be willing to share yourself with other people, and I’ve only come across

one graduate nurse since that I can recall who was anything like that, and that is my son’s girlfriend, but she put herself through uni by working in a nursing home. So she learnt all the dirty work and how to associate herself with a patient and sort of not think, you know, “I’m God and you can do what you,

you know, I don’t do anything that I don’t want to do. If you’re in a dirty bed, well you can stay in a dirty bed until somebody else comes along and changes it.” And that was the attitude, and they would sit down and talk to the patient but they wouldn’t talk about their general lifestyle. It would all be the psychology of nursing. I mean we never did

psych nursing, psychology when I was training. It was all general nursing care and that’s where it all comes from. It’s got to come from where you go into nursing not because you want the glory and the glamour of saying I’m a registered nurse. You go into nursing because you want to help people, and to help people you’ve got to be able to do the basic things. You’ve got to be to, you know,

change a dirty bed, feed a patient that can’t feed themselves, be compassionate with people that are, with the relatives when their loved one is sick, dying, knowing how to deal with that side of it as well as sort of just generally building up a rapport with your patient so that you know what is wrong with them, you know what

treatment they need and you’re prepared to give it.

Yeah, and I can’t see how they get any satisfaction

out of it because they don’t put anything into it. I mean both my husband and I have had trips into hospital over the last few years and you can tell when there’s a nurse on who’s hospital trained and just by looking at them you can tell the ones that aren’t, that are out of uni. There’s just no comparison. I mean I was in hospital,

I had surgery on both feet in 2001 and I was in a private hospital and the nurse came in and she said, “I’m so and so, I’m looking after you today”. I said, “Oh, that’s nice”, and that was the last I saw of her for the day. I was told the day after I had surgery of both feet to get up and go to the shower.

My husband had a hernia operation a couple of years ago. He was in a private hospital. He had surgery in the evening, in the morning. They came in the evening to give him his meal. He had no bed table over his bed so they put it on a desk and said, “You can get out of bed and eat your dinner there”.

And being my husband he said, “I bloody well will not. You get me a bed table. I’m paying your wages young lady”. He said, “Who do you think pays your wages?” “The hospital.” “Where do they get the money from? From me because I’m in here as a private patient. I want a bed table.” And then the next day they tried to turf him off into the shower and

this was the second time around for this particular operation and he was told by the doctor he wasn’t allowed to get up for 24 hours. Oh no, out into the shower. “I’m not getting out in the shower”.

I mean they have no, I mean we used to keep them in bed too long after an operation, you know, 10 days, you had your appendix out, hysterectomy,

gall bladder out or something you were in bed for 10 days. Then, not my natural Father, he had his gall bladder out in ’66. He had, was in bed for 10 days. He got up one day, went home the next day and had a stroke from a clot that had broken off, that had formed while he was in bed and had worked its way up into his brain from the time he

got out of bed until the next day when he went home, had a massive stroke and was you know, 23 years paralysed down one side and unable to speak before he died.

We’ve progressed from that stage. I mean that’s just only one example, it happened to a lot of people because not only did we keep them in bed but we used to have them sitting upright and to do that we used to get a bolster,

pillows wrapped in a draw sheet or a sheet, tied under the, on the bed underneath here to keep them upright so they wouldn’t slide down in the bed to keep their chests clear, but at the same time we were putting pressure on the blood vessel at the back of the neck, the knees, and clots were forming in some patients, clots would form, break off, go to the heart or the brain.

So you know, nursing has progressed in the way we do things, and we do get them up earlier now than we used to but there are cases where you can’t sort of say, “You’ve had surgery today, you get up and have a shower tomorrow”, like me with both feet in bandages up to here, and my husband with a

hernia problem and he had spinal surgery last year and they tried the same thing on him (UNCLEAR) there and this is a private hospital.

The basics were always there. Just the diseases, I mean we not only had battle casualties, we had tropical diseases and, like malaria and pneumonia. I mean even in the tropics you can get pneumonia. The basic nursing care is the

same. It’s just the, instead of a clean surgical wound to look after you’ve got a dirty battle injury.

Like lots of shrapnel. Although we usually tried to get the shrapnel out before they got to the wards if we could, ‘cause I spent

the best part of that 12 months in, working in theatre.

Yeah, letters and I used to

send them tapes once a week or every couple of weeks. I’d sit down and I’d make a list of all the things I wanted to say and I had a little tape recorder, and I bought one up there and sent it home to them and the whole family used to get around and make a tape and send off to me. But unfortunately they taped over all the things that I already

No,

that’s right, and I haven’t got the letters that they wrote. My Mother may have some of the letters that I wrote. I don’t know. I probably won’t find out until she dies.

Yes, she’s 93 in December.

I think instead of writing a letter to the four boys and my two sisters, my younger sister was still at home, I decided on this tape. Actually a friend of mine whom I’d met, was a Marist brother at a high school cadet camp before I went to Vietnam, he used to correspond with me

and he got this idea of making tapes, and he was a very worldly brother, Marist brother he was, and he used to make these tapes and send up to me, and then I would make tapes but I found that I could say things to him a lot easier than I could say things

to my family. Unfortunately he did the same, he taped over the tapes that I sent so I had no record of anything, but at least I had photographs and things like that. Not like poor Colleen, her trunk got lost on the way home.

Yeah, and all of her photos, memorabilia, everything that she had was in that trunk

and she’s got nothing.

No.

High Church of England, but the generations there have been large families. I mean

my mother was the youngest of 10. She had seven, my mother was the youngest of 10, her Father was the second of 15. This is going back when they first came out from England and then you know, back further large families all the way through. But you’ve got to remember this is in the days prior to birth control, sort of the pill,

but then there were six years between my eldest brother and the next child, my sister, and there’s, so there was a method of birth control.

I do know what it is, but I don’t know whether

Well, I said to Mum, “How come there’s six years between Colin and Shirley?” I said, “Didn’t you want anymore, you know sort of, couldn’t you have any more?” She said, “Oh yeah, I could’ve but”. I said, “Well what did you

do?” Said, “Well as soon as it was finished I used to get up and sit on the potty and squeeze it out”.

Yeah.

No, not until the last one. She’s

48, she was 1909 was the, she was 39. 48, she was 39 when she had the last one and she was a big baby, an overdue baby, and she had a lot of problems having her but not with the rest of us.

Well her mother had told her and nanna had 10 children and there were two years between each of them.

Well, lived on a farm, my grandfather was a brick layer. Mum, there were five boys born first,

one of whom died in infancy but the four boys that remained and then the five girls came later, and my grandfather was a bricklayer and three of the four brothers, sons were bricklayers. The other one joined the police force, and when they were all away laying bricks and building Dubbo swimming pool and bakers’ ovens all over the country, and

even down in Leeton they built, there’s still buildings standing that my uncles built, nanna and the girls ran the farm. So they needed all those children, and a lot, I mean one of my uncles had 11

children, 10 girls and one boy.

Yes.

You had to be on death’s door before you didn’t go to work. The only time I had off due to

illness was when I had my appendix out when I was training. We didn’t seem to get sick. If we got sick it was hangover and that was self inflicted and you couldn’t claim that anyway. I suppose some of the girls got sick but I don’t recall anybody being off duty sick. You just went to work. I mean I still, even up until I retired, if I had

a heavy cold or something I still went to work. I would have to be sort of bedridden, like I was after I fractured my spine, but that you know, sort of an injury, not an illness. A lot of the younger girls used to take time off. They’d have a hangover, can’t be bothered going to work today, so they’d ring in sick, but

if I had a day off sick I was sick.

Healesville was, there was no nursing involved in the indoctrination.

It was just all military training and we covered all aspects of military life, especially military law.

Well, if, military law is sort of external to civilian law. There are certain things in military life that are controlled

by the military, like somebody goes absent without leave, they have to be charged with being absent without leave, then they have to go to a court martial, or if they disobey an order, you know sort of, it’s how all that has happened and you had to know all the parts of the military law pertaining to those because as an officer you could be called on to sit on a court-martial board

or you could be the prosecuting officer in a charge. It was, I’ve forgotten most of it.

But it is just the law pertaining, I mean everybody in the military is subject to civilian law but they are also subject to military law and

so it’s the law of the services that is what we had to study, and we had to study marching, you know, sort of drill and corps history, military etiquette.

I can’t think what else there was but it was six weeks of lots of fun and lots of hard work.

They all have to learn portions of it, but as you progress in rank, I mean the ones probably who know

the most about military law are the warrant officers and that’s the most senior of the other ranks, and they’re sort of between commissioned rank and enlisted rank. They are the ones that actually do the policing of it I suppose, for want of a better word, of

the unit as a whole, you know, sort of they are responsible for the behaviour of the other ranks and then they’re also there for the guidance of junior officers. So if you had a problem with a soldier, you didn’t go to the CO, you

went to the warrant officer of the unit and tried to sort it out that way, and at his suggestion that a soldier be charged, or unless you were ordered to by a senior officer then the patient, the soldier was charged and then you would have to go and depending on the severity of the incident, usually is heard by the CO, you had to present the

evidence and facts to the CO who would then pass judgment and sort of seven days confined to barracks, seven days loss of pay. Sort of usually they went together which meant they were allowed to go to work but they weren’t allowed to go anywhere else.

That was at

Ingleburn.

Very respectfully. I mean you had to the odd one that would pull your leg or tell you something outrageous about military life when you first came in until you learnt better, but the Australian soldier respected and still does respect

the nursing sisters. They have a very healthy regard for them because they know that when they’re sick, whether it be battle injuries or just motor car accidents or general illness, that those sisters will look after them as if they were there own sort of thing.

Yeah, that’s right. I have always been given the greatest respect from the soldiers and

whether they were staff or patients, in my care in the seven years I was in the army, and even when I went back as a civilian out here at Yeronga there were still a couple of guys that I had worked with when I was in the army and I walked in as a civilian and one of the patients said, because I just

wore a white uniform and a veil. They didn’t know who I was, I mean they knew my name but that was all, and one of them tried to pull the wool over my eyes. This medic that I’d worked with before he came up and heard this and he said, “Listen mate, I wouldn’t try that with this sister”, and, “Why, she’s a civilian?” “Yeah, but

she’s ex-army and she got out of the army as a major and she went to Vietnam, mate, so she’s seen it, been there, done that. You can’t do a thing.” So sort of once word got around, ‘cause I wasn’t allowed to wear my ribbons or anything. I used to cheat. I used to wear my return from active service badge. They couldn’t stop me, the army actually stopped me from wearing my ribbons while I was working as

a civilian. Even though you can go to Myers or some of these pubs or some big hotels where they’ve got doormen and they wear their ribbons, but I could not wear my ribbons as a civilian in a military establishment, and I was furious. I wore them for a couple of days and then I was politely told to take them off, so I said, “Righto, I’ll take them off, but on goes the ‘return from active service badge’”, which is very

very individual and the only people who get it are ones who have served overseas. So any soldier seeing that knows exactly what it is, and you know sort of, that’s what I did.

Yeah.

Yes, but not that sort of veil.

No, my husband, he, we were up in New Guinea and we were, I was starching my veil

and for three hours I was ironing this and starching this, spray starching this veil and because the conditions in New Guinea were much like they were in Vietnam, the humidity, and you’d get it nice and stiff and then it was like a limp rag, and I got it just, I’d get it just at the right stage where I thought, “Right, it’s done.” And you’re getting tapped on the shoulder.

And I scorched it.

In the corner, out comes another one, and you know sort of, it was a fine line. If you overstepped that line you ended up with a scorch mark and I don’t mean a little scorch mark, the shape of the iron right in the middle of the veil, so you can’t hide that, yeah.

The coppers [pots used for washing]?

My Mother used to do that. That’s how she’d do all the washing. She’d boil the sheets, all the whites got boiled and when the water had gone off the boil or after she’d done all that, then she’d have to reheat more water and not quite as hot for the coloureds,

wash them, ring them out by hand. My Mother had the strongest hands. She could ring a sheet. She’d start and she’d ring it and it would eventually curl up her arm, but when you hung it out on the line there wasn’t a drip of water come out of it because she’d already rung it out.

Yes.

Yeah. I went to Ingleburn and then I think it was September we had the indoctrination course, and all the sisters that had joined the army since the last course were all there. I think there were 13 of us on the course.

Yeah.

Some of them, yeah. One who is here in Brisbane, still a very close friend. Some of them have gone by the wayside. Got out of the army, didn’t stay in for very long, ‘cause we joined on a two year commission which meant that we couldn’t get out under two years. We could if we wanted to then engage for another two years,

or we could engage for a long service commission which was until we were 55 and after my initial two years that’s what I did ‘cause I had decided in that two years that the army was my life and you know sort of,

Actually it was before Vietnam.

Yeah.

I was, I was married to the army. There was no way. I went to New Guinea and the reason I started going out with my husband because I was a major, a senior nursing officer up there. I couldn’t go out with, married men were verboten, you weren’t allowed to go out with married men. The only single men, I mean I was all of 30, were

second lieutenants straight out of Canberra.

Duntroon Military Academy, or they were native officers, and you didn’t go out with a native officer anyway and they didn’t like us because we outranked them, and women, that’s not their place for women in their hierarchy, and

my ward master, his wife worked in public health. She was in the administration. She worked with Frank and I was saying to Dan, “It would be nice if I could just meet somebody just to go out with to parties or to invite to the mess for a dinner or something

without any entanglements”. I didn’t want any entanglements, and unbeknown to me Frank was saying the same to Margaret, Dan’s wife, and Margaret says, “Well,” she must’ve talked it over with Dan and she said, and he said, “Maggie’s doing the same thing”. I mean my name’s Margaret but I’ve always been called Maggie since I joined the army.

And they, Margaret said to Frank, “Look, there’s a new matron arrived out at the army barracks, she’s single, she doesn’t want any romantic attachments. Would you like me to introduce you?” Frank said, “Oh yeah”. She said, “Oh well, we’ll have a bit of a party at our place”.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, coming up to 30. Yeah.

It was in February of 1971 and my 30th birthday was in April. So she arranged this party and invited us both to it. He didn’t turn up, and I thought, well I won’t tell you what I thought. Anyhow, in the

next couple of days I had to go up to Lae in New Guinea to interview some native sisters to look after the families of the native soldiers and while I was up there, there was one of the girls that was in the army at Yeronga here with me, had

gotten out and she was married to a chap that lived in New Guinea so I went and stayed with them, and I decided to get my hair cut. My hair was down past my shoulders, and Margaret had been telling Frank about my long red hair, and I thought I’ll fix him. I went and had my hair cut. I came back and she’d arranged another party which he did turn up for, and that was on the 9th of February

only I didn’t have long hair anymore. And we went out a couple of times, we went to the drive-in. There wasn’t many places to go to in Port Moresby. We went out, went to the drive-in one night and we had two of Margaret and Dan’s kids in the car with us, and they were in their car. They went to the drive-in too, and the drive-in there had a restaurant so you didn’t,

you actually went, you didn’t sit in your car, you sat in the restaurant and ate and drank while you watched the movie. So that was our first date and we were going out for about two weeks I think and it dawned on me that, you know, that was a man that interested me and he, and I can remember crying,

walking around crying. Actually the girls that were there with me told Frank they’d hear me crying in my sleep saying, “I don’t want to get married. I’m married to the army”, and he said, “I hadn’t even asked her”, and as I said we were only going out for four weeks and one of the girls, Patricia, who is Anthony’s Godmother, she, it was her birthday on the 11th of March which also happened to be the battalion’s birthday.

So being a nice generous soul I offered to work the evening shift so that these young ones, who were four years younger than me, could have their party in the quarters. Anyway Frank was invited to the party and he would ring up, kept ringing up the hospital every, well it started off an hour,

then it got down to half hour, then quarter hour, “When are you coming back, when are you coming?” You know, “What time do you finish work?”. I said. “11.00 o’clock”. OK, so he said, “I’ll meet you downstairs when you come in”. So after numerous phone calls I drove back, parked under the house and here he is at the bottom of the stairs with my favourite drink which was scotch and water, and he met me. You know, I got out of the car, he had a drink in one hand and I got a great

big bear hug and a kiss just as the guard was changing. They marched from headquarters down past the sisters quarters to the main gate and changed the guard every four hours I think it was. They were just marching down and of course the place was all floodlit underneath and they could see what was going on and you could hear, “Yahoo, yahoo”, and then the

NCO [Non-Commissioned Officer] that was in charge of them called them all to order. But anyway, to cut a long story short, after a while we went out on the back stairs of the quarters and sat there, had a couple of drinks and were talking and for about three hours we told each other why we didn’t want to get married, and then we went inside and

he had an onyx ring and he took it off his finger and he put in on my left hand and we went back inside and said, “We’re engaged”, and one of the girls who had had a bit to drink said, “Oh, bullshit, you’ll change your mind in the morning”, and then all of a sudden it dawned on me, “You better bloody not!” and so that was that and we got married. We were going to get married the following January

and we thought, “Oh what the hell, why wait?” So we got married on the 28th of August.

No. We flew home for the wedding because it was too expensive to fly family up for it, so we flew home.

He worked, actually he was working for the Victorian Electricity Commission and he’d been seconded to the administration in New

Guinea and he worked in the Health Department and that particular time and then later transferred to Treasury, but he was up there on a contract for four years and we decided we’d extend our contract ‘cause we both, we could save money up there, and we did. In six months we saved $6,000 which was

the difference between a War Service Loan at that stage and the cost of the house we were going to build, but he got an infection in his big toe and he was treated by the civilian hospital, but he developed gangrene in his big toe and we had to send him home in February of ’72, and he went home

to Melbourne and they amputated, or they told they were going to amputate and he thought they were going to take off his big toe, but the gangrene had spread half way up his leg so they took his leg off below the knee.

Well, basically the care was the same. The only difference was the rank, sort of, we were called

sister, we had to call our patients by their rank, you know, Private so and so, Corporal so and so, and there was no, whereas in training, sort of you could become friendly with your patients and play jokes on them, which we did, and they’d play jokes on you, but in the army there was a strict discipline even in the hospital, you know sort of,

discipline was strict between staff, nursing staff and patients. Instead of having trainee nurses working with us we had male medics and female medics doing the ordinary, changing bed pans, not that we stopped doing it. We did everything for our patients

that we would normally do except that there were maybe one or two sisters on the ward and sort of 30 to 40 beds on a ward and you had the medics to do a lot of the work, but you had to supervise and train them.

They also did a course at Healesville on basic nursing, but army medics are trained to replace nursing sisters in a battle field, so their training was increased over their period of service so that eventually, as in Vietnam before we went there, all of the

nursing was done by medics. The sergeants were the senior ones, and down. Even in the operating theatre they had special training working operating theatres for which they were selected and they did basically the same thing that I did when I went there,

but it was just, the difference in nursing wasn’t so much basic nursing. It was the military aspect of it. I mean nursing is the same the world over, but in the military it’s the military aspect of it that, you know, it’s a fine line. You have to be careful you don’t cross it because there’s no fraternisation between the ranks, between officer

and other ranks.

Oh yes, it did, but it was not done publicly. At one stage I was going out with a warrant officer but he wasn’t from my unit and we never went places where we would be caught, for want of a

better word.

Well I used to, he’d never pick me up at the hospital. I used to always catch the bus into town and he’d pick me up there and we’d go to the movies or wherever we wanted to go, bowling, things like that.

In the daytime, if we had days off at the same time we used to go for picnics down the beach or up in the mountains or you know. I mean some of the girls knew but you didn’t dob on each other, but none of the senior staff knew and that was the thing.

And I wasn’t the only one. There were others as well.

Actually I think I met him in the sergeants’ mess. They had a function on there to which we could invited and you could only go there on the invitation of the president of the sergeants’ mess committee, and it had to be a formal invitation from them to the officers’ mess, that you know,

we could go and I think that’s how I met him. I think, I can’t remember. I can’t even remember his name now.

No, I don’t think so. We went out for, not on a regular basis, but you know sort of, we had some fun. I know I was going out with him when my father had his stroke, and he was very supportive because my father was in Sydney at the time

and my younger brother was at agricultural station just near Liverpool, not far from me. But we thought he was, everybody thought he was going to die and the whole family came up and once he got passed his critical stage we’d go out. His name nearly came to me,

and used to come along with us and we used take them bowling, picnics and things because they were up there for a couple of weeks.

What on duty?

Well, we didn’t really. It was, that was part of the delineation between the ranks. The only time we ever had any fun I suppose, we had officers on board and we could become a little bit more familiar with those, and one of them was Digger James [Major-General W.B. James, AC, MBE - Member of the British Empire, VC – Victoria Cross]. I don’t

know whether you’ve heard of him but he was, he’s still around, major general retired. He was an artillery, he was in the tanks in Korea and he got blown up and he lost one foot and part of the other foot and he was admitted to the hospital. He was a, after he got out of the army he went through medical school

and became a doctor, and he was actually admitted to the hospital and I can’t remember what for now, but we had a little sideboard for officers and he was a real villain because there was a no smoking policy with patients. Bill Watson, our CO said, “No smoking 14 days before surgery or 14 days after”, and

Digger used to go down to the ablution block at the end of the ward. They didn’t have separate ones, they had to use the same ones as the other ranks, and he never let on who he was and he’d catch these fellows smoking and he used to get us to go down and charge them.

Or you know, sort of threaten to charge them. I only ever had to charge one and that was for smoking and that I was ordered to do by Major Watson, who actually sort of, and this was this fellow with the foot that got run over by the steam roller. He was caught in bed just after surgery smoking on the CO’s rounds, and I happened to be there and he just turned around to me and he said, “Charge him”. So I had to charge

this particular soldier for smoking because there were standing orders, standing orders for this, but there were standing orders for patients and written ones, and every soldier that was admitted to the hospital had to read and sign that he had read and understood standing orders and it was in this particular CO’s realm of,

that he had decided this was going to be a standing order, no smoking 14 days before. How they could police that if it was routine surgery I don’t know, but 14 days after while they were still in hospital, yes, you know, but, so I got the job. That’s the only soldier I ever charged. I beg your pardon, there was one other. That was in Vietnam. No, I didn’t charge him, our senior nursing officer did that.

The only time in seven years I had ever actually charged a soldier and that was on orders.

No, it was the boss’s call.

Yeah. No, he used to sort of catch them down there and just talk to them.

“Oh, what are you in for son?” Because he was an older man. “Oh, I just had surgery on my”, or, “I’ve come in, I’m having an operation tomorrow”, or “I’ve just had an operation a couple of days ago”, sort of thing, and he said, “You’re smoking?” He said, “Yeah”. He said, “Well the standing orders I signed said that you’re not allowed to smoke before and after surgery”. “Oh yeah, but there’s nobody down here to see it”, and he’d say, “But I am, and I’m Major James and I’m a doctor”.

And you know sort of, and he’d sort of, “If you keep it up I’ll have you charged”, you know, this sort of thing, but then he tell us, “Watch them, if they’re doing it down there they could be sneaking outside and doing it”. But yeah, and he got to the stage where he spent more of his time down in the ablution block checking up on soldiers smoking, I think he had a chest infection,

than resting in bed, and the only way we could keep him in bed when we took his artificial limb off him and took it up to the office. So when he wanted something he had to ring his bell, if he needed to go to the toilet so we could take his leg down for him and then we’d go down and wait for him to come back and we’d take it off him again. But he was recently retired, he’s head of the RSL [Returned and Services League].

But he’s still going strong and he’s not a young man.

Yeah, but very brave. He went to Vietnam too. Even with his prosthesis, ‘cause one foot I think was in the shoe, but the other one was from about there.

Well, as I said, we got patients back from Vietnam but Ingleburn and Holsworthy was the big military base and like all young men they go out on the town and drive around drunk or have accidents or they, sort of car accidents,

training accidents. They’d get the flu or other medical conditions like everybody else, but mostly fit young men, but if they got sick, they got sick like everybody does at some stage. But they’d have hernias or they’d have appendicitis or tonsillitis or

a broken arm or a leg or been involved in a car accident and have more than one fracture. There was always a hospital full, except at weekends. At weekends if they had somewhere that they could go and they were fit enough to be given weekend leave, they were given weekend leave on a Friday afternoon and they came back on Sunday.

That’s long term patients, and they still do that.

Well yeah, I mean the hospital was still staffed and that’s when we did all of our long term maintenance, you know sort of, ‘cause nothing came pre-packaged then as far as nursing was concerned. I mean you didn’t have,

in the hospitals you didn’t have pre-packaged dressings and things like that. You had to make them all up and that sort of, then we did all that sort of thing.

There was the medical ward, the surgical ward. I suppose it would’ve been about 120 beds,

and we used to do a lot of elective surgery too, a lot of dental surgery. They’d have to come into hospital to have general anaesthetics to get their wisdom teeth out and things like that. We were the only military hospital. So there was an air force hospital at Richmond.

There was no, no navy hospital as such, but then we could only take a certain degree of seriousness. We’d have to transfer some patients into Concord. You know the one that All Saints is, thing is based at Concord

Repatriation Hospital as it was then, and we used to have high school cadets come into camp and we had them in one, I can remember vividly this young guy, young kid about 13, 14, who was swinging on a rope and instead of letting go and landing in the water, he held on and he wrapped himself around a tree and ruptured a kidney

and they brought him screaming into the hospital and we just transferred ambulances and went screaming from Ingleburn to Concord in 15 minutes. I know, I was sitting in the back of the ambulance, and the driver, I mean it was urgent. I mean a ruptured kidney is bad. We, he comes to

traffic lights and they’d be red so the driver would go up over the median strip, around the lights and down the other side. I don’t know what else he did, but in 15 minutes which is normally a half hour drive. So there was a broad scope of patients. In those days high school cadets was a big thing.

They used to have camps once a year and different schools would have schools at different times depending on the size of the school and there was always somebody injured. I can remember I’d been in the army six weeks and another sister who had been in just a couple of weeks less than that, and I was sent up to

Singleton to look after a high school cadet camp up there, which is where I met this brother that corresponded with me in Vietnam, and they had a truck turned over. Rolled over when it was loaded with high school cadets. We had to sort of organise them off to civilian hospitals because we didn’t have, I mean we had a ward but it was only for minor injuries sort of thing.

But the serious ones were all sent off to different hospitals. I mean there was always a training accident. No matter how fit you are somebody’s only got to step on a rock or fall, drop their rifle and you know, sort of do something to injure themselves.

No, because I did spend a bit of time in theatre working on them then so I sort of, and at this stage there was no question about nursing going up. Absolutely nothing in the pipeline whatsoever that we heard of. The fellows in Vietnam

knew about it and some fellows in Australia did too because of what they had to, the stores they had to send up like sanitary napkins. They had to send those up so they knew there were females coming, but we didn’t know until 10 days before we left. We were told on the Friday, Friday evening that we were going to Vietnam and that was told to us about 8.00 o’clock in the evening and the Prime Minister,

Bob [Robert] Menzies, announced it to the country at 10.00 o’clock on the radio.

No. Colleen, the girl from South Australia, she wasn’t told before the announcement was made and her parents heard about it over the radio. I was fortunate that I was able to get to a phone and ring my

Mother and let her know.

“If that’s what you want to do.” She was very philosophical about it, and I was on night duty that night so I had to go to work. Matron wanted to give me the night off and the boss said, “No, she can go to work and she can start having her inoculations and she can go on pre-

embarkation leave on Sunday”. So I worked Friday night, the Saturday and I had off and the Sunday I left to go home, but I had all of my inoculations on the Friday night and I think there was about six including smallpox, yellow fever, tetanus, typhoid, cholera.

What was the other one? Can’t think of it. But by the time I got in my car to drive to Leeton which was 330 somewhere, 300 odd miles away, I got home, it was about a six, seven hour drive and I was feeling quite funny and I thought, “I’m so tired, I’m so hot.”

And here’s a nurse, you know, typical nurse, doesn’t recognise her own symptoms, and my young sister said, “You feel hot”, and she went and got the thermometer and I had a temperature of 40 degrees or back then it was, you hadn’t gone to metric then, so it was

over 100 degrees, and it was all a reaction from the injections I’d had and I’d driven 300 miles like that, so you know, I had a very quiet couple of days with lots of aspirin until it eventually wore off.

Oh, I was just so honoured.

I was over the moon to think that out of all the nurses there in the nursing corps who had been in the service longer than me, that I was one of the four that were chosen, and I was so proud and I am still so proud of that fact, that somebody must’ve seen

in me something that I didn’t know I had, and I’ll never forget it as long as I live. The fact that they had that faith in me that I’d be able to do a good job. I mean when we were commissioned that was one of the things we had to sign, was to say that we were willing to serve overseas, anywhere

at any time, but Vietnam had been going for two years. I mean longer than that we found out in hindsight with the training team over there, but the battalion went over in ’65 so that’s two years and there was no inkling that they were going to send nurses over there, and since then we found out that it was a political

decision. It was because the RSL had kicked up such a stink with the government that it was the first time that Australian soldiers had served overseas without Australian nurses looking after them. So “Ah-ha, we’ll send a token force, four.” So we went over. We

didn’t all meet until the 5th of May.

Yes. We were told that there was only four of us. Actually Terri I had met, she did the indoctrination course with me so I knew her. Colleen I hadn’t met at all, she joined the service after I did. Amy had been in for a long time, she’d been,

I think she was in Malaya, yeah. So we didn’t actually all meet together until after our pre-embarkation leave and we were quartered at WRAAC school on North Head I think it is, and we were equipped and set up with all the things we needed and then

the publicity. Photographs on the front page of every paper: “They will nurse the diggers.” I’ll show you some after, they’re still there. ‘Cause everyone that got one sent one to me, and it wasn’t just the capital cities in Australia. It was, there’s one from Toowoomba that somebody sent me. The local paper at home.

Oh yes. Yeah, well they had to,

you know, sort of right the wrong so to speak to let people know that they were sending nurses to look after our Diggers because apparently when our soldiers were being nursed by American, there was a bit of conflict because, you know, our soldiers are used to calling registered nurses sister. The Americans don’t like being called sister. In fact they consider it an insult and I heard, I don’t know how much truth is

in it, but at least one soldier got his face slapped because he called an American nurse sister. But you know, ours is, it’s a term of respect.

But, I’ll tell you this now because I might forget to afterwards. We’d been in the country about six weeks and we’d just

been joined by a New Zealand Army nurse and we had an invitation by the American nurses at 36 Evac Hospital in Vung Tau to go to the American 1st Division Headquarters at Phuoc Vinh, which was about 60 kilometres north of Saigon. It’s the headquarters of the whole American 1st Division, because not only was it in our papers here,

but it was in the Stars and Stripes [a US services newspaper] you know, Australian Army nurses coming to Vietnam, and they said they’d like to meet us so they sent this invitation and it happened to be in the period when they still didn’t have battalions out in the field, and so we were relatively quiet, and they arranged for, the 1st Division headquarters to send down two

Iroquois choppers plus two escort gun ships, and they picked us up, one picked us up. We had to go out to the airfield and we were put on the two choppers, the Americans in one and us, the Americans nurses went up, and us in the other, and we went up in our greens feeling all very gung-ho and we were taken, I mean we’d only been in the country about six weeks. Our toilet was a deep trench latrine.

Our shower was a little shed out the back. We were taken to our accommodation the two nights that we were there. No, one night that we were there. Yeah, one night, and we had a proper building, a proper bed. I’ll ignore that. Can you stop for a minute? We got running hot and cold water in the showers, flushing

toilets, we hadn’t had those for six weeks. And then we were told to take civilian clothing with us, so we all had a shower and got changed and then the girls took us over to the officers’ club as they call it, and we walked in and

we were introduced and the American nurses introduced us to the commander of the 1st Division and all his senior officers, they were all that was virtually there, as Sister Fitton-Grey, Sister Roach, Sister Ahearne, Sister Mealy. “Well now sister, what can I get you to drink?” And Amy said, “I’ll have a beer”. Colleen said she’d have a beer. Terri

said, “I’ll have brandy and dry”, and I said, “I’ll have a scotch and water thanks”, and then out came the cigarettes because we all smoked, and we could see the funny looks we were getting, and it got too much for this one officer. He said, “Excuse me sister, but which religious order do you belong to?” And we all burst out laughing and the American nurses, we couldn’t resist,

but that’s what the registered nurse in Australia is called, sister. So we had the whole, they were absolutely shocked because they thought we were nuns: “Which religious order did we belong to?” ‘Cause they thought it must’ve been very progressive, you know, we were all drinking and smoking.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No. I would’ve flown over anyway, but I had a week’s leave, seven days pre-embarkation leave and I was well and truly over it by then. It’s a sort of a

just a generalised temperature and you know what causes it and you just treat the temperature and over three or four days it goes away. Except the smallpox ones, it doesn’t usually. It takes a bit longer because it comes up like an ulcer and that heals, but when we first went into the army everybody was immunised against all these things

anyway. So they were all repeat inoculations and the reaction to the smallpox wasn’t as bad the second time around, ‘cause you have to have all of these things done on a three yearly or at risk situations, either repeated every three

years or five years to keep your immunisation at a proper standard, but if you’re going to be at risk then you have another re-inoculation of them, and you know sort of just over, say about two years since I had them,

but you know sort of it was just localised. You get over it.

The 8th of May, 1967.

Yeah.

Terri, yeah.

No, I met them in Sydney. We all left from Sydney on the same flight. We went on a Qantas flight from

Sydney to Manila in the Philippines, and then Philippine Airline flight to Saigon and then from Saigon by RAAF [Royal Australian Air Force] Caribou to Vung Tau.

No, there was only the four of us that I can recall, and we were flown first class which was lovely, champagne all the way.

Yes, we were very well looked after, across the equator I had my certificate saying I’m a legitimate airline crosser of the equator. They don’t do that now but back then it was a big thing. Every time you crossed the equator, if you were on a ship you got dunked in the water but I think we got drowned in champagne.

No, it left in the morning, stopped here in Brisbane and then we flew, it’s about an eight hour flight so it must’ve been, it might’ve been longer than that.

Then on to the Philippines and we stayed overnight in the Philippines. It was daytime when we got there, so, I can’t remember the times. I know we got out of the plane and the first time in the tropics and the heat just sort of hits you and sort of knocks you back. We had a bit of a tour of Manila and stayed overnight and then the next day we got

the Philippine Airlines flight to Saigon. We stayed overnight in Saigon and a couple of the officers from the unit came up to Saigon to meet us and took us out to dinner. It was all very civilised, a French restaurant in one of the hotels. A big French influence in Vietnam because it was a French colony and the food was fabulous.

And then we hopped on a plane the next morning, a RAAF Caribou, and flew from, and that was a culture shock, it was you know, sort of a transport plane.

Caribou is the name of an aircraft and it’s a transport plane and it has no seats, no proper seats, it’s just sort of seating down the side made out of webbing and you just sit on that,

and buckle yourself in. It’s very noisy, there’s no conveniences and I’d hate to be on a long flight, and we arrived in Vung Tau and we were then given out to the hospital.

Yes, the whole way in uniform, taken to our quarters

or taken to the mess first I think from memory, which was a tent on top a sand dune. It had a wooden floor but that was about the only resemblance to civilisation.

No, only the two officers. One was John Kelly and there’s a little bit of, I can remember John Kelly whom I first met at

Healesville in 1965, but he came up to meet us because the anaesthetist that was there when I was there, he had written a book and in the book he says that it was him and one of the other doctors that came up to meet us, but I don’t recall that. All I can recall is John coming up. There was somebody else with him but I can’t remember who it was.

Pardon me. So that was our sort of, until we actually go to Vung Tau. We didn’t meet any of the other people that we’d be working with.

Everything was organised for us. We just had to,

when we got to the Philippines we were met, but I can’t remember who by, and taken to our hotel, taken on a bit of a sightseeing tour. The next morning we were picked up and taken to the airport again and put on the plane. Saigon, we got picked up from the airport and taken to a hotel and John and whoever it was took us out to dinner

and I think we met a few of the headquarters people then, but sort of I can’t remember it. I mean it couldn’t have been very outstanding, but I do suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder so I do have memory problems. It’s no good me trying to write a book because I can’t remember.

Hot and dirty.

We had a little bit of a look around Saigon, not much, just up and down the street sort of thing and it was dirty.

Oh yes, yeah, and beggars everywhere.

Beggars, and then when we got to Vung Tau it was fairly clean, you know, sort of compared to Saigon.

Not as many people there of course and it was a very, they used to call it the Riviera of the East, South East Asia because the French had turned this particular village into a beautiful, you know, sort of wide streets, beautiful old houses, sort of the old planter’s type houses and everything was so clean. I mean there were

parts of it that weren’t, but the general area we drove through was, you know, really picturesque and it didn’t look Asian to what I know what Asia looks like now, and we got out at the hospital which is on what they call the Back Beach.

Yeah, yeah.

It [the hospital] was actually outside. Vung Tau is sort of on the bottom of the peninsular Cape St Jacques, and the village is on one side of the peninsular and the hospital was on the other. There’s only about 15 minutes drive in between, if that, and it was built, what struck us there was the sand because the whole place was built on the sand dunes.

We drove through the gates and that wasn’t sand. That was on the edge of the sand dunes and then as we drove towards the hospital we drove into the sand dunes and the whole hospital complex was built on sand. The quarters were up on the top of the sand

dunes, the hospital was down, right, only 150 metres, 200 metres from the sea actually, from the beach.

Yeah, well we thought it might’ve been. We had a water spout we thought was going to come in. We had to evacuate the hospital at one stage but it didn’t, it turned off. The officers’ mess, as I said, was a tent on top

of this hill and we used to go up there for morning tea, and we were sitting having morning tea and looking out over the ocean and all we could see was this water spout coming at us, and so we had to evacuate the patients to higher ground, but then instead of coming towards it turned off and went into an area the Long Hai Hills where all the fighting was.

I don’t know what I,

we weren’t really given a lot of information about what to expect when we got there. Mainly because nobody had been there before except the men and I suppose they thought, “If we tell them it might frighten them off.” I don’t know, but we weren’t really told what to expect. We just sort of arrived, and not actually thrown in the deep end because the battalions were in changeover period,

and we had a couple of weeks or a month to get acclimatised and find out where things were and how things were done. We were taken down to our quarters which apparently had been built for the padres because it wasn’t far from the chapel, and it was a wooden hut with five rooms

in it and a lounge room, five bedrooms and a lounge room and the bedrooms were built on one side and there was a corridor running down. There were no windows, no glass windows, there was no floor coverings, bare wooden walls. The walls didn’t go up to the ceiling, they stopped about

three feet short of the ceilings. It wasn’t lined and all there was in the rooms was a bed, some nails on the wall to hang your clothes on and an old army locker, troops for the use of, they used to call it, and it’s just a top with a drawer and a cupboard on one side and that was it.

No. We decided collectively that, you know, not a good place to live in. We’d have to improve on that. So over a period of time we acquired some paint and we painted them and because we really had no choice in colours we were given whatever was available, and one room was blue, one room was yellow, one room was red

or a pinky colour and another was green and the lounge room we painted grey because that’s the only paint we could get, and these were bright colours too. They weren’t a nice lemon, a nice pale pink, they were really strong colours, and then Amy said, “It’s not good enough. We need some furniture. We need a wardrobe to hang our clothes in and we need

some curtains on the windows. We need curtains, we need something on the door”. There wasn’t even a door on each room, and she acquired some money from somewhere and we went off into town and we bought material, oh, and we had a mosquito net over our beds, that was about all. We couldn’t put doors on. You know those

plastic beaded curtain things? That became our doors, and we had tiger prints and leopard prints and all those, because the furnishing fabric wasn’t that great either. So each room had a different theme sort of to go with the colour of the walls.

And mine was tiger. Yeah, mine was bright yellow and I had black and yellow

tiger print curtains and bedspread, and we bought another sort of chest of drawers type thing and a wardrobe for each room. They did put a fridge in the lounge room and we bought some, or we acquired I think from the mess, some chairs and a table as our sitting room, but

surrounding that was this green canvas fence. The canvas was actually attached to star pickets which were about 10 foot tall and that was about, and on the road side of the building it was only about two feet away. There was the sand bags that ran around the bottom of the building and about a foot out from that was

this big green wall. It kept out every skerrick of breeze and on the other side it sort of went out and it encompassed the shower and the toilet and it came back in again, and all we had was the sand bags and there were two doors, one coming into the lounge and one coming in from the side entrance. It was very very basic.

Amongst other things, yeah. Everybody used to try and decide whether the canvas was put up to keep us in or them out. We still don’t know.

Would you believe I’ve forgotten, and it’ll probably come to me afterwards.

I think The Nunnery was one. There was another name that was quite appropriate but I can’t remember.

No, we all stayed together.

Yeah. We had the New Zealand sister that came six weeks after we arrived there. She was

posted for six months. She left and another one came. And the only other female, Australian females we had any contact with were the Red Cross girls but they lived in the village of Vung Tau, or the town of Vung Tau, and only came out to work at the hospital until the beginning of ’68 and then they moved out and so did all the

civilian nursing teams that were from, different hospitals would send over a team of nurses and doctors to work in the local hospital with local people about every three to six months. We didn’t have very much to do with them because they worked as hard as we did, but during the ’68 Tet Offensive, when the whole country

exploded in war, was Chinese New Year. The Americans and their allies declared a truce so that they could celebrate the Chinese New Year. The Vietnamese, North Vietnamese said, “Righto, this is fine”, and then we’ll have a truce but just at the beginning of the year,

the holiday period which stretched over a month they decided to attack and they started, and it was from the demilitarised zone in the north right down to the south. The whole country was, every military unit belonging to the allies was attacked including us. So when that started they started bringing in all the

nurses from the civilian hospitals into our quarters but at this stage they had started to build more because I think they realised that they were going to have to replace us with more than four, and they had started another building and that had just about finished when all this happened and everybody was sort of billeted in the other building.

Well the CO was a doctor but he was mostly doing administrative work. We had one surgeon, we had one anaesthetist. We had a pathologist, we had a psychiatrist and we had a

physician and two other doctors, Maurie Peacock and Mick Boyle, and that was it.

Yeah, plus a dentist.

We went on, the hospital was staffed 24 hours a day as any hospital is. You go on duty 7.00 o’clock, do ward rounds, medications,

dressings, and in the meantime the medics were showering and making beds and then the doctor would do his rounds and meals would come into it, and a normal sort of hospital routine until we got word that we were getting casualties.

We had a proper kitchen, proper cooks. They

Australian, yeah, Australian Army Catering Corps were there. They looked after that side of it. They had, I’m just trying to think where we ate. We didn’t eat in the kitchen.

You know, I can’t think where we ate. We didn’t eat in the mess, and the other ranks’ dining mess was down near the kitchen. I think we must’ve had a dining room down there somewhere ‘cause I know we did eat. That’s terrible, isn’t it?

We always had the operating theatres ready for casualties, always. That was one of, I virtually went straight into the operating theatre

and I had to learn from the medics, the theatre technicians, what the routine was when casualties came, so it took me a couple of days to get organised with that, and I didn’t change anything. You don’t change something that works. (UNCLEAR), if ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Yeah, and they were very good,

And they helped me to get acclimatised to that part of it.

This is theatre, yeah.

Yeah, I spent a lot of my training in theatre. I spent all the time I was in Leeton before I joined the army in theatre, so I knew my way around an operating theatre, but just the way things worked in a war situation

was a bit different to what I’d done. When we were notified that casualties were coming we would immediately set up, I mean the common term for it now is a triage area, but it wasn’t, it was just called casualty then. I mean that was an American term that came in after. We had about six beds

down one side and on the ceiling above were like, or hanging from the ceiling, were the rails that you see in hospitals that they usually have curtains on. Well we didn’t have the curtains, but those rails we used to hang intravenous fluids, and when we knew how many were coming we would set up that

number of beds with all the resuscitation equipment and we would have at least four bottles of IV [intravenous] fluid, IV normal saline hanging from that ready primed to be put in, and each one of those bottles of normal saline would have 100,000 units of penicillin in it because penicillin was the

most effective antibiotic against most of the infections that came in the wound and everybody got that unless their dog tag said they were allergic to penicillin.

The maximum amount was what we had during the Tet Offensive and we had, because the hospital beds could be

added to, made into double or triple bunk, we had up 180 patients in the hospital and about another 50 or so in, it was like an R and R centre, rest and recuperation centre, you know, sort of the least,

the patients that required the least care were put there, but we did have up to 180 during the Tet Offensive.

No, no.

Colleen did. I mean Teri and Amy had done theatre but that wasn’t their

theatre, their expertise. As I said, I spent most of the time in theatre and when I wasn’t in theatre, Colleen was, but when we had a lot of casualties everybody was in the casualty area for the receiving and sorting out of the patients and initial treatment of, but then once

that was all sorted out, well actually as they were sorted out we took them into theatre and operated. Terri looked after the intensive care unit which had two beds in it and she was over there looking after the ones we’d finished with and Colleen was in the surgical ward. Amy was jack of all trades and she’d sort of supervise the rest of the hospital because I said we had sort of medical patients as

well.

Yeah. There were times when we didn’t have a lot. We might have three or four come in or we might not have any,

but we had routine surgery, sort of injuries again, and some of the fellows decided well they’re a long way from home, they’d have a circumcision done. So we used to have one day every now and again when the rabbi as we called him, one of the doctors, Maurie Peacock, used to perform circumcisions.

Well, it was

not only for their, for their health reasons too, because you’re out in the bush and you’re out there for sort of a week, two weeks or something on end and you’ve got no way of washing yourself. We were getting cases of infections because of lack of hygiene facilities and those that had had infections were

offered the circumcision, or some of the guys just thought well, I haven’t had it done, I’ll get it done while I’m away from the wife, you know, but they weren’t the greatest number. It was mostly the guys that had been out bush, got infections and of course once you got an infection you can’t go back out bush until it’s all cleared up. So it was easier to perform

surgery and get them healed up and then they were OK to get back out bush.

I had assisted with circumcisions, not only with babies, but on adult men in the course of my time spent in theatre.

Oh yes. Oh, very much so. It’s quite painful. I mean

for babies it’s painful enough but for an adult or Chris might be able to equate with it, having the surgery is quite, well it was quite painful and some of them had to be sedated because you know sort of, it stimulated their, I won’t say sex drive, but it

stimulated their erections and if they had an erection, you know, sort of soon after the surgery it could rupture the sutures and then they would bleed and then they would have to go back to surgery for more. So they were kept sedated especially at night.

No, they don’t sedate babies.

Well I had assisted at a lot of circumcisions on babies and when it came to my son being born, the circumcision was, you know, sort of not popular and I said to

the doctor that I wanted him circumcised, and “Why?”, and I quoted something that I said to an American aviator that I knew over there. He happened to come to the hospital one day and there were all these patients had been circumcised and he wanted to know what they were. “Why, why do you circumcise them?”

Well, I said, “You don’t go out bush but your soldiers do. They have no way of cleaning themselves. They’ve got a minimal water ration. They can’t sit there, they’ve got no facilities, so they can’t sit there with it hanging in their drinking cup cleaning it out every day”, and I said, imagine this, I said this to the doctor I’d asked to circumcise Anthony,

and he said, “Do you think he’s going off to war, do you?” And I said, “Well, there’s always a possibility”, and he said, “Right, I’ll do it but you’ve got to hold him”. So I did. I knew how to hold him.

No, because I knew it was for his own good.

Yeah.

Well we were supposed to have one day off a week. Sometimes we got it, sometimes we didn’t.

If we did we washed the hair and loll around, read books. There was no TV, go for a walk along the beach, swim if there were no sea snakes, and there were a lot of sea snakes, and get sunburnt, and the weekends, if you happened to have a day

off weekends when it was quite, we used to have barbecues down the beach between, in the scrub between the hospital and the beach, we had a barbecue area there, but the whole unit sort of, those that were not actually on duty would turn up and cook some barbecue for us and out would come the beer, and that’s how we used to relax.

It was very, I mean we couldn’t go out unescorted. We used to have somebody with us, preferably armed. When we did go out socially, and we used to get a lot of invitations from the Americans. Not just the nurses but different units

would hear about us and they’d invite us to their club for dinner and a drink or just drinks, what have you. They would have to pick us up and it was always an armed vehicle, and then bring us back home again same way.

That was great.

I made some terrific friends while they were over there. One particular unit was an aviation unit. They used to fly Mohawks which were equipped with infra red imaging to photograph the areas, and they actually took off, their flight path, they didn’t know, in fact they didn’t know at the time that there was a hospital there, but their flight path was right over our hospital from the airfield.

And they, these planes had, sometimes had a habit of dropping an engine just after take off and if, after I met these, we met these guys, if they had dropped an engine when they normally did it would’ve landed in the middle of the hospital so they elected,

there were 13 pilots in this unit, they elected that if they had engine trouble they would instead of keeping to the flight path they would veer off to the left and ditch the plane rather than crash or having anything crash into the hospital.

Yeah, well they’d have to get it out so it was over the sea. Yeah, I presume they’d parachute out. They never sort of mentioned that but they said they’d ditch it. But it never happened thank God, but there was a possibility. Apparently it had happened in these planes before but until they met us they had no idea that the hospital was there.

Americans, they’re probably still Americans around today that don’t believe there were anybody else except Americans in Vietnam. I mean the Philippines were there, the South Koreans were there, we were there, no, Thailand wasn’t there, but there were at least three other nationalities,

but to the Americans there was, a lot of the Americans (UNCLEAR) only Americans there. It’s just like DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs], there were never any women there.

We were sort of kind of expecting it to be fairly quiet because this truce had been called and then

all of a sudden we were getting signals saying there’d been a major offensive against the allied bases and to expect multiple casualties, which we got. I can’t remember the exact dates but it was sort of at the very beginning of the Tet Offensive and we were actually

confined to the hospital area, the whole ALSG [Australian Logistics Support Group] area, but to us that meant the hospital, for the best part of three months. We never left our area to go anywhere because it was too dangerous. We, our first, we started getting casualties in

three and four at a time and we’d get 20. The chopper would just come in and we had wall to wall casualties and one particular stage, me and my theatre team worked for 36 hours straight to deal with the worst of the casualties. Then we had a bit of a break and another team

took over, Colleen and some other theatre technicians sort of took over the non-serious ones and one of the other doctors that did a bit of surgery, because it was all prioritised. The urgent ones got done first and it sort of went down the line. The minor ones were left, still treated but left off the theatre list until such times as we’d dealt

with the major ones. We had some really horrific injuries from that. I mean the soldiers just sort of didn’t sit back and take the, you know, sort of let themselves be overrun, they fought back. We had one lad that,

he was on point guard. He was going through a section of the jungle and he was shot through the head. The bullet entered on his right temple and exited on his left taking a good amount of brain matter with it. That’s how he came in, with a dressing holding his brain tissue against his head. We weren’t equipped to deal with that type of surgery,

so he was put on another chopper with a doctor and my best theatre technician and transferred to an American neurosurgery unit. We later heard that he died which we sort of kind of expected, but it was only a couple of years ago now that that same theatre tech,

Roy Sprake, told me that he was talking to some fellows that he knew that worked for the council down around Logan [Queensland] way and he was talking to this fellow about this particular night and this guy that he went with, and he said, “The poor bugger died”, and this fellow said, “No, he didn’t”. “He did, we were told he died”. He said, “No, look, there he is over there”. He had actually lost

the sight of one eye and he had some residual brain damage, but he was alive and working for the council, and here was I, sort of not believing in miracles at that stage thinking that we’d risked the life of a chopper crew and a doctor and a medic for this poor kid that’s not

going to make it, and I was furious because I didn’t want to lose anymore people because it was at night. You know, they were flying over enemy territory where people were throwing bombs and blowing things up and shooting anything that moved, but I’ll never forget when Roy told me that the kid made it. I mean he was a kid, he was a National Serviceman. He was sort of

barely 20 and he survived. He’s one of that sticks in my mind, and there was another one. He was on patrol and he stood on a claymore mine, and I don’t know whether you know what a claymore mine is?

Roughly, it’s sort of buried in the ground, it’s got a little metal trigger and you step on it, it clicks.

The click is quite audible. You know that once you lift that foot that mine is going to jump and explode. So he realised he was on the mine. He told, he didn’t tell us this, his mates did, he told the rest of the patrol to scatter so they all dived into the jungle and then he attempted to dive off the mine.

He sort of dove into the ground but the mine jumped, exploded and it took his buttocks from the back of his knees to above his hips. There was just mangled flesh, you could see all of his internal organs. He was still alive when he got him, but only just, and we pumped every ounce of blood and

other IV fluids that we had into him, but unfortunately we just couldn’t keep it there. As fast as we put it in it just ran out, and he was the only soldier that died in that casualty area in the 12 months I was there. There wasn’t a damn thing we could do to stop it.

Isn’t it? His wounded mates that were on patrol that came in, they told us. Some were injured but not like that. And we had some other pretty horrific injuries too, but those two are the ones that sort of stuck in my memory and if I’m asked about

any they’re the only two that I can really recall except for a couple of POWs [prisoners of war] that we got in. One woman, she was Viet Cong, she’d been wounded in the head and she’d been peppered with shrapnel but she had head injuries,

other lacerations and bits of shrapnel, but her right foot was just sort of hanging by a thread. As I said, we only had one surgeon and this particular surgeon was Arthur Crawford who was from Brisbane, has since passed away, and he was fantastic. There’s many many a soldier walking around today who has two arms or two legs because he would not give up if there was any

hope of trying to reattach or rejoin blood vessels, he would try and 99 per cent of the time he succeeded. It didn’t matter how bad the injury was, he was just patience itself. I mean we had two tables in the theatre, but he sort of, a lesser serious

injury would be done on the other table by Maurie Peacock or Mick Boyle and depending on the case that Arthur was working on I’d work with him, and he was just so meticulous and he had all these slides because he used to get the boys to take slides of everything he did

and he was going to give them to me but he died, and I didn’t know any of his family so I couldn’t ask for them. I didn’t feel like asking for them either. But back to this POW, we had several. One was a man who’d been shot in the chest and captured. We operated on him, put him

in intensive care. Terri looked after him until he was well enough to be moved and then he was taken to Saigon for questioning. He was actually a colonel in the North Vietnamese Army. He was taken, questioned and shot. This woman, as I said, she had head injuries, shrapnel wounds and right foot almost amputated

and Arthur was working on her head, the upper part of her body, and he said, “Maggie, take the foot off”. I said, “What, what, what, what?” He said, “Yeah, come on, you know how to do it”. There wasn’t much, I mean the bone was broken, it was just a matter of sort of trimming off the flesh and making a stump. So I did. I actually got to do a bit of surgery with,

sort of when Arthur was working on one part of the body and there were lacerations or something to the lower part, sort of he felt that I could deal with, and I also got, was trained by Marshall Barr, the anaesthetist, to give anaesthetics which is something we don’t do in Australia, just because having the two tables and he could

not be at the two tables at the one time, even though they were sort of that far apart. So he taught me to, unless you know anything about anaesthetics, first of all you’re put to sleep and then you’re given a drug which actually relaxes every muscle in your body including your respiratory muscles. Then you have to pass a tube down their throat and into

their lungs, blow up a balloon to stop it there and attach them to oxygen. Now in that period before you inject the relaxant and the, you’ve got less than three minutes before the brain suffers from lack of oxygen, so you have like a maximum of three minutes to get that tube down, get it inflated and get the oxygen on, and he trained me to do

that. He supervised a lot from his table or he’d pop over and he’d say, “I think he needs a little bit more pentothal”, or something, “Turn the gas up a little bit”, but that way we were able to work on more than one casualty at a time. I don’t know what happened after I left, whether they had more surgeons,

but we only had one qualified surgeon who has, you know, sort of his specialty. There was one there when I got there and I can’t think of his surname, and he was there for three months. Then Arthur Crawford came. I mean he was there before I got there so he was, there was him and Arthur Crawford

and he left then and then Don Baird came from Adelaide. He was another excellent surgeon. The first surgeon was good but he was a real rough diamond. He was still a good surgeon, good trauma surgeon but he didn’t have the finesse that Arthur Crawford had, in my experience anyway. Don Baird did.

Well, there’s nothing, there wasn’t anything that I, it was like a variation of motor vehicle accidents. You know, sort of multiple injuries,

and you coped with the first ones first. We had, you treated the worst ones first. We had to improvise a lot with, ‘cause of lack of basic equipment. I mean our steriliser, and in theatre you need to have, everything has to be sterilised. Normally your steriliser in those days was a downward

displacement steriliser which operated on steam. You know, put the steam down and through the hose and vented it out again, or the instruments and the drapes. That was outside in the sand and that’s where all our sterilising had to be done, outside in the sand. So the boys and I would make up our operation packs. We had a basic pack and then little bits we could add to it.

We did that inside. Our washing facilities were inside, it was a little room off the side. We had sinks and there was a washing machine there that got used when we had time to use it. During the Tet Offensive and this particular night when we worked 36 hours the whole of the hospital was on duty, we didn’t have time, we were so busy in theatre and

casualty sorting out patients, we didn’t have time to wash linen. We didn’t have time to wash instruments. We didn’t have time to pack them. We didn’t have time to sterilise them, and the boys, it didn’t matter what job there was, their particular job in the rest of the unit, whether they be cooks or storemen or cleaners or whatever. They were there, they were washing the linen, they were washing the instruments, sterilising them

and bringing them back to, we actually didn’t have packs made up. They sort of they, the medical store opened and they just provided all this linen, and the guys that knew how to use the steriliser sterilised bundles and bundles of linen. I mean we had a list of what we needed for different things and if they could they would do it. If they couldn’t they’d just bundle a lot in wrapped

up and sterilise it and bring it in and we’d have it in the corner of the theatre out of the way so it wouldn’t get contaminated and we’d just use as we wanted it, and the same with the instruments in the end because we didn’t have an unlimited supply. We only had so many of each one but each case seem to need what we’d had in the case before, and we had an instrument steriliser which was a fast one, but everything had to be

scrubbed ‘cause surgical instruments, 90 percent of them have got teeth on them or grooves, so they had to be scrubbed and cleaned and dried and packed or thrown into the steriliser and it was the biggest most co-operative effort I have ever seen in anywhere in 38 and a half years of nursing,

was that particular episode during the Tet Offensive. I mean we had other days when we had, you know, sort of a lot of casualties but this particular effort sort of has also stuck in my mind, and I remember when it was all over and we had the last patient out of the theatre and we cleaned up and it was just coming on dawn

and I grabbed my theatre group and I said, “Come on, down to the quarters”. “Oh, we’re not allowed in there”. I said, “You’re coming down to the quarters”, and I went in and I got some beers out of the fridge and we all sat on the sand bag and drank beer and talked about what had happened the previous night and day, and that was the way we coped. That was our coping mechanism, was to talk

about what we’d done, what we had had in, what the outcome was likely to be, whether we were optimistic or pessimistic. As I said, we only had the one death while we were there. There were more later on after we left, but we only had the one. There were some before as well, but looking back on it

it was very hard, very challenging but oh so rewarding to think that we had made a difference in the lives of those young guys that had been, the average age of them was 19.

Well the dust off teams, which is the name they gave to the helicopter crews, they would virtually prioritise the worst ones to bring in first. They would come in and they’d land on our helipad which was called Vampire

and

Well apparently, and I was only reading this a couple of days ago in our association magazine, the Americans named their airfields or helipads after birds and one doctor, and I won’t mention any names, up there the only bird he could think of

was a shag, and as that didn’t sound real good because shag has another meaning and they were talking in the magazine, well this could’ve been called the Shag on The Rock instead of the Vampire Magazine, but Vampire, well I suppose the connotations of vampire and blood, and so we were called, Vampire

was the call sign for the unit and it was the name of the helipad. So they would bring them into the helipad which was bitumen on sand, a fairly stable platform, but from the helipad to the hospital was a bridge of sand. As I said, we’re in the sand dunes so we didn’t have any dirt

to make, I mean this was in place before I got there and I do have a photograph which shows it, but not very clearly, and it was about that wide and I don’t know whether you know what marsden matting is?

It’s got little holes in it. That was laid in two tracks across. So the boys would run out with the stretchers, get the

injured off the choppers and then take them across this, about 50 meters, of marsden matting. Now if the wind was blowing it would blow the sand out. It might blow it out from one end of the marsden matting or it might blow out of the middle and it just depended who put their foot where as to which way the patient went. I mean if

it was out the far end and half way across the bearer on this end sort of trod on it, he could go up in the air, or if there was one under the middle they could go sideways. Fortunately it didn’t happen but there were some very close shaves. We had very quick footed medics getting them off. They would then bring them in and the, half way from the

chopper finish at the hospital on the left was the intensive care unit and on the right was casualty and theatres. So they were brought in until the beds were full and then they were sort of just lined up on the stretchers outside until they could be dealt with, and as I said, we used to have the penicillin and fluids all ready. We were all trained, and this was something

else that I had to be trained in, was putting IV lines in. The boys already knew how to, but I hadn’t done it because nurses weren’t allowed to do that in civvy [civilian] life, so I, they can do it now by the way, but in those days they couldn’t, and we would have, if they had two arms and two legs they would have four IVs, depending on the severity of their would

but they would have at least one, and then as more severe they got two, three four and possibly the anaesthetist would put another line in here. I mean if there was no way you could put, because of wounds, you could put an IV line in and then the anaesthetist would come and put a central line in here which goes in behind the collar bone into

a vein in there. I never learnt to do that. I never wanted to learn to do that because it’s very dangerous.

Well, you can either go through the artery and rupture it, the vein rather, or you can go into the artery and you don’t put IV fluids in arteries. You put them in veins to be taken back through the heart, but now I can’t remember (UNCLEAR)

(UNCLEAR) but it was just a case of the worst one was done first and they were taken in order of the severity of their injuries, the amount of blood loss, the amount of shock. Some of them were in shock and couldn’t go to theatre straight away so they had to be treated out, sort of stabilised

with IV fluids, blood transfusions and things like that.

Because it’s not a good idea to give a shocked patient an anaesthetic. It can kill them ‘cause their brain and their body starts to shut down when they’re in shock and if you introduce drugs that are going to put that brain to sleep, you might put it to

sleep permanently. So the ones that were really shocked were sort of treated for that before they went into theatre, but they were all given IV fluids and where necessary, blood, before they even went in. They had to be stripped off, they had to be cleaned because they were usually covered in mud and we’d have to, once we got them into theatre we’d just

have to clean out their wounds with massive irrigations to wash out any debris before, because a piece of shrapnel goes in it just doesn’t go in on it’s own. It goes through the clothes, it takes the clothes with it and whatever else is on them. I mean these kids have been out in the bush for days, they’re clothes are none too clean, covered in mud and leaves and general

dirt.

Well, you’ve got to replace their blood loss which is usually the cause of the shock, and that’s basically it, give them blood, fluids and warmth, and depending on whether they had already been given

morphine which they, a lot had, and they had a big M and the time on their forehead. We’d give them pain relief. That’s basically it, basically all we had time to do and then we got them into theatre as soon as we could, dealt with the injuries and sent them out to the wards.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s right. Shrapnel is any piece of flying metal. The Viet Cong had nasty habits of making booby traps and using some horrendous stuff in it, buffalo dung and on

pointed bamboo and sort of bamboo stakes that, did you ever see the movie The Green Beret, John Wayne? There was a couple of prime examples of their booby traps in that, the pit that one fell into, the other one was the bamboo wall that hit him into the tree. They had another good one that the Americans actually taught them how to do this, not how to

do it, but how to utilise it. The Americans when they go out on patrol, according to our guys who hated going out with them, they would smoke so the Viet Cong could smell the smoke for miles. They would have their ghetto blasters up to their ears. The Viet Cong aren’t deaf, and they used to take their cans of Coke with them and then somebody had been along before and tossed and empty

can on the side of the track. The Viet Cong used to collect those and fill them with shrapnel and explosive. The next Yank comes along, “Oh, a can of Coke”, give it a kick, bang. They didn’t learn. When we went to Phuoc Vinh, the American 1st Division, they actually took us through an area that they had set up with every known to them

Vietnamese booby trap or Viet Cong booby trap, and if we had not been, I mean we wouldn’t have come to any harm, but we would’ve triggered so many booby traps. It was just an area of about an acre I suppose and it was all set up with a little path and things and all these things were there. So we had an

idea of the type of things that could cause injuries before we actually got a lot of them in. So we knew that if somebody said, “He stepped on a claymore”, we knew what that was and we knew how it, what damage it could do or “He fell into a booby trap”, we knew the pit in the ground and the punji stakes as they call them covered in all sorts of excreta,

animal, vegetable, you name it and they inflicted terrible wounds because they got infected. The stuff was putrid when it was put on them, stayed there for maybe days before somebody would trigger it, whatever, but the damage was horrendous.

As I said, no, Arthur wasn’t there during the Tet Offensive. We didn’t actually,

from memory I don’t think we had any amputations. We had a couple of close calls where it could have gone either way and it’s only the brilliance of the surgeon that prevented it, but most of them were sort of

bony injuries, you know, like one guy that I didn’t deal with there but after I came back and I was here in Brisbane, he came back and was shot in the hip and we got sort of that type of injuries. A lot of compound fractures from shrapnel and from bullet wounds so there’s a lot of orthopaedic surgery involved, a lot of general surgery involved

and later on after they came home there was plastic surgery involved as well, or reconstruction surgery, but you sort of, I can’t define any other type of specific injury. They were rifle wounds,

shell blasts, mine blasts, gunfire or gunshot wounds and there was the odd accident. I mean we had a few stripped fingers and things like that.

Men wearing their wedding rings and jumping off the back of trucks and getting caught on the back of the truck and it’s taken their finger off.

It happens.

Well, they’d take, they’d keep that part of the finger but from here up they might still have some bone but nothing else, and so that would have to be amputated because they wore their wedding ring so they banned them. Not allowed to wear rings of any sort. We had about four I think, very nasty.

We had I think it was five beds

in there and then, I mean when I said we had the others lined up, they weren’t sort of just left there until we finished what we were doing. Somebody else was looking after them and prioritising then and taking care of them too. So it, at least we didn’t do what the Americans did.

The ones they couldn’t help were put aside.

If they thought they couldn’t help them they were put aside.

We never did that, but then our forces were not expendable.

We lost 500 in four I think it was in the whole time. A lot of those died in, or the majority of them did. I know that after we left there were a few deaths in the hospital but things, you know sort of, they couldn’t be prevented,

but we were lucky we only lost the one and there was no way, not even God himself could have performed a miracle and given that poor little fellow his life back.

Yeah, well that came into it too.

Well, each week a doctor, a nurse and a couple of medics would go to a village just outside of our hospital area and it was orphanage run by, a Catholic orphanage. The priest in charge

was Vietnamese who couldn’t speak English but spoke French. The nuns were Vietnamese, the same, they could speak English but not French. Vietnamese couldn’t speak any English. So we had an interpreter with us and it was usually a Wednesday afternoon and for some reason or other Wednesday afternoons were always very quiet in the beginning,

and we’d go out and we’d see these patients. The priest would bring all the sick people to this little room that he had in his orphanage and he would bring them in and the doctor would say to the interpreter, “Ask Father what’s wrong with him”. So that was in English, from the French, you know,

“Father, what’s wrong with him?” From French to Vietnamese, “What’s wrong with you?” And then back would come the answer that way, you know, sort of four ways, and we used to do that sort of every week and do basic sort of simple treatments, give out medications, like antibiotics and things like that.

Do dressings on ulcers and if there was anything that was too, was serious, we would then transport them into the civilian hospital on our way back from the clinic, and Colleen and I usually did those to sort of, we’d either both go out together if it was quiet or if one of us

was on a day off we’d say, “I’ll come with you”, sort of thing or depending on the work load at least one of us went out, and if for some reason the doctor didn’t go out, and this happened to me, for some reason Marshall was away and none of the other doctors were available and instead of letting the priest down it was suggested that I go out

and sort of conduct this clinic. I was fine and there was this little old man came in and he had a huge lump in his right groin, and so the question answer bit went around, and it’s been there for a long time. “Is it sore?” “Yes”, and I looked at it and I thought oh, poor bugger, he’s got

a strangulated hernia because it was right here, and I thought well, he needs surgical treatment and I told the interpreter, he told the priest, the priest told the patient. So we took him into the civilian hospital on the way back. I never thought, with my diagnosis, strangulated hernia, you know being purely a surgical nurse to me that’s what it was, and it wasn’t until several weeks later that we

were actually at a function with the civilian nurses and they said, “Oh, do you remember that strangulated hernia you brought in a couple of weeks ago?” I said, “Yeah, how did he go?” They said, “He didn’t have a hernia”. I said, “Well, what did he have?” She said, “The Plague”, and it’s, you know sort of, I found out after that. I mean I had no idea what the [bubonic] plague was like but that’s one of the

things they present with, a huge mass in the groin.

I don’t know how they treated him. I never got around to asking.

Yeah, like the bubonic plague.

Yeah.

But we did this, as I said, every week. One time we were out there

and we got a call over the radio that we had to get back. There were casualties coming and we sort of had to throw everything in the back of the ambulance and take off. Instead of going around the long way we took the short cut through the scrub which was dangerous too. We found out, or I found out later. I didn’t know it at the time. I thought it was something they used all the time, but we had to get back for these casualties that were coming in.

Oh, if you didn’t have a sense of humour you might as well be dead, because if you weren’t dead you were a nutcase. You had to be able to see the funny side of life to survive. There was sort of,

the only recreation you had that could take your mind off it was drinking. That’s why there’s so much of a problem with the veterans with alcohol. I mean if they’d been out in the bush and they were given R and R, you know, sort of five days in Vung Tau to recover from their

time in the bush, they would be drunk the whole time. There was a special hotel in Vung Tau that they all used to stay at but they used to go off to the bars and the girls and things like that. But drinking was the only thing, and drinking was the only

way that I could forget things that I didn’t want to remember. I was verging on alcoholism when I came back and it took me until well after we were married to cut the habit down. I mean we still have a drink, Frank and I, but it got to the stage where

I’d be a cupboard drinker. He didn’t know. He still doesn’t know about it, but now I’m out of that. I now drink occasionally although there are times I could sit down and drink a bottle of Scotch without any trouble. I mean I used to do it when I was in the army out at Yeronga because I used to work after I came back.

I was in theatre and I was on call seven days a week, 24 hours a day and then once a fortnight I’d have a weekend off. We used to go down to happy hour on a Friday in the male officers’ mess on a Friday afternoon, have a few drinks, buy a bottle of Irish whisky, hop in the car, drive up to Caloundra, book into a motel and drink the bottle of whisky. Then when I woke up I’d drive back.

Oh yeah. Oh yes, it was very cheap too.

From both. We got American beer and you could drink a lot more of that because it’s only half the alcoholic content. We used to get the Americans stoned on our beer because they’d think they could drink like they drink their own. But yes, in the mess we had a bar. The Diggers had

a bar. Every unit had their bar. Alcohol was freely available, I mean you had to pay for it but it was there, and how much you used or abused it was up to you, and nobody ever said anything to anybody about their, unless they actually went on duty drunk then nothing was

said about anybody’s drinking habits because everybody did it. It was a coping mechanism.

No. They, the really sick ones didn’t want to of course, but the

ones that were staying in-country, they were allowed to have a beer, but you know, sort of it was regulated. If they were in for a few days, a week or so, they were allowed to have a beer and then they’d go back to their unit, but the battle casualties are good. 70 to 80 per cent of them were sent straight home or sent home within two weeks depending on their

fitness to travel. The RAAF would come and pick them up and fly them home.

Yes. Which was why we got to know the Americans, although this particular group that I became friendly with, not only just me but there were some of the male officers

because they flew these you-beaut planes they wanted to ride, so they became very friendly with me so that I could get them a ride in this plane. They were all married, all these guys, the whole 13 of them. They called themselves the Dirty Dozen, but they made no secret of it, you know, they’d bring out photos of the kids and the unit doctor was fantastic

and I corresponded with him and his wife for years afterwards and we’d sort of, they’d sort of come and get me and take me to the club. One day they picked me up at 5.00 o’clock in the morning to take me out to the airfield because the unit was being presented with a Presidential Citation and they wanted me to see it. They were just nice guys to go sort of, you’d go to the club, there might be

maybe one or two of us, maybe an American nurse, maybe a Vietnamese girl or something but most of it was men and they were true gentlemen. They were all from the south, they were southern gentlemen and, you know sort of, they ranged from great big, how they got in the, one of them, the CO, how he got in a plane I don’t know because he

was humongous.

Solid. He was tall and he was broad and it was all muscle. They were all delightful. You’d go, you know, JB would bring me out to the club, we’d go upstairs and immediately there’d be

a table with about six or eight chairs around and you’re not having it all to yourself mate, and we’d just sit and we’d just talk and we’d talk about not so much the war, but about life in the States and life in Australia and we’d teach them slang words and tell them we have kangaroos jumping up and down the streets, all the usual garbage. JB came out to Australia for his R and R [rest and recreation], to Sydney,

and I was home then and I drove up to Sydney and stayed there and I sort of took him around and showed him around Sydney. Took him to Les Girls.

It’s a nightclub in Sydney in the Cross, but it’s not girls, it’s all men. And he could not get over all these beautiful women, and I said, “Yeah, they’re not bad for blokes, are they?” And he

said, “Wha, wha?” He could not believe that he had been sitting there mouth agape looking at all these beautiful women and they were actually blokes. You know Carlotta?

She was one of them. I mean this is back in ’68. I was still on leave, it was just after I came back so it was sort of mid ’68. I took him to Taronga

Park Zoo and I took him to the, there’s a reptile park up, somewhere up there.

Up at Gosford, yeah.

Amy. And she reported directly to the CO

of the unit.

No, we were all very good friends although we did have our moments. I had my moments, I can’t speak for the others, over seamed stockings. It was not long before we were getting very short,

you know, so it was time to come home and I was down to one pair of stockings and I washed them out the night before and we had a clothes line hung up in the hallway and I pegged them on the clothes line. Got up the next morning, no stockings, and of course couldn’t go to work without stockings on, and I ranted and raved and apparently it was

Terri who thought they were her stockings, and Terri’s very laid back. Nothing ever bothers Terri, and you know sort of, the whole world could be exploding around her ears and still it wouldn’t bother her. She’s just that sort of person and here’s me with my vile temper ranting and raving at her and she said, “Oh Maggie, here you are”, and she just took them off and gave them back to me. She said, “I wasn’t aware that they were yours. I thought they were mine

and I didn’t know that you only had one pair left”. It made me feel like a real heel in the end.

No, because that’s just, when I stopped and thought about it, it’s just Terri. She’d forget, she’d put something down and she’d forget she put it there and she’d find it a week later, “Oh, so that’s where I put it”, you know, whereas me, I’d be frantically tearing everything apart until I found it. I still do.

But she’d go to work and she always had lipstick on her pocket, always, and she’d whip out the lipstick and go, and we’d say, “Terri, how do you do that? How can you put lipstick on without looking in a mirror?” She’d say, “My lips are always in the same place”, and it was in 1999 that we went down for the dedication of the memorial.

We were at the lunch and Terri said, “Has anybody got some lipstick?” And I said, “Yeah, I think I’ve got one in my bag”. Took it out, Colleen said, “I don’t know how you do that?” And Terri said, “You told me that years ago and I’ll tell you the same thing, my lips are always in the same place”.

I can’t do it. I have tried and I usually get it up here and down here, but she

just knew which way to do it.

I probably bought her a drink that night, but she came home first.

Well they had to stagger us to come home because it wasn’t between battalions, but unfortunately her replacement didn’t arrive

on time. There was, you know, sort of a bit of a mis-communication between Australia and Vietnam. We were given dates when we were supposed to come home and our replacement was to arrive before we left. Terri’s didn’t arrive before she left and Amy in all her wisdom said, “You’re going”, and sent off an urgent signal, you know, sort of send a replacement, she’s gone, and then it came I was next

and Terri’s replacement hadn’t arrived, mine hadn’t arrived. I had organised for all my family to be at the airport when I arrived. Terri’s family were from Goulburn so they didn’t have far to come. Mine were from Leeton, the whole lot of them had to come sort of 300 odd miles,

and then my departure was delayed and I said, “Right, you’re going to have to”, to the unit, “You’re going to have to contact my relatives and tell them I’m not coming on that day”, because you know, so they did that and then they decided to send me home after all, so then they had to contact them again and say, “Yes, she is coming”, and my brothers had to take time off work. I arrived

back without a replacement up there for me, and it wasn’t, Colleen, Terri’s replacement arrived before Colleen left and then they sort of came. They didn’t replace with four, there was eight, eight or twelve, I can’t remember, but at least double the number of sisters replaced us.

It was the worst anybody came across really. The worst prior to that I think was the Battle of Long Tan in ’66. There was a lot of casualties from that. It was when one Australian

company held off a battalion of Viet Cong. Long Tan Day is the 15th of August, I think it’s August, and they are now deciding to call that Vietnam Veterans Day, but that was the 3rd Battalion Royal Australian Regiment were involved in that and they got a US Presidential Citation for it.

That was before you went to Vietnam.

No, I had very close friendships but no sort of,

one thing that would have you sent home in disgrace and discharged or your commission revoked was if you played up with a married man or got yourself pregnant or whatever. You were home, you were out. So you couldn’t go out with the Other Ranks although we used to socialise, but there was no

relationships. All of our officers were married, and you know sort of, they made it very clear to us that they were married and we were very thankful for that. Marshall wasn’t, our anaesthetist he wasn’t, but he didn’t want to, what was the expression he used in his book,

shit in his own pond. So he, apparently he and Nick decided that Colleen and I might be nice to take out and then they decided they didn’t want to shit in their own pond so they found girlfriends in amongst the Red Cross girls, but we, in fact Nick ended up after they came back, he and his wife got a divorce and he married one of the Red Cross girls, and he has since

died from cancer in his eyes, and she lives in Adelaide and she has cancers, cancer of the breast, and she’s had a lot of other problems. Cancer is a very big problem with Vietnam veterans, a very big problem.

Mmm. I had cancer of the cervix and had to have a hysterectomy.

1981, fortunately I’d finished my family.

It was, it was very aggressive too. It wasn’t there one week and the following week I had the operation and it was there in all its glory. Don’t ever not have a pap smear because it was how it was, I’d never had one until after I had my son.

Never.

Yeah.

No, no.

Yeah, yeah.

Talking about nationalities of patients we used to get the occasional South Korean or Philippine soldier in that, you know sort of, if they were within our area of operations and they were wounded they would be brought back to us, but the worst was during the Tet Offensive when we had a whole lot of POWs brought in and we had to treat

them. They were put in the same ward as the soldiers that they had been fighting and they had lost some men and they had to actually get the Military Police in to guard the Viet Cong prisoners from our soldiers. They were put in, they caged off the area where they were so they were sort of behind

bars but they had MPs [Military Police] guarding them otherwise our soldiers would have killed them.

They wanted them for questioning, and you know sort of, we didn’t know the first couple of time we did it that we actually operated on Viet Cong. This is the male colonel that I mentioned, the woman with the leg. We spent hours

in surgery and after surgery getting them to the stage where they were fit to be interrogated. They were then transferred to Saigon for interrogation. Now we didn’t know for a long time after but as soon as they were finished being interrogated they were shot or hung in Saigon.

By the South Vietnamese

Army, and that made us mad because the amount of time that we had dedicated to saving their lives and getting them to a state where they could be moved on, was time that we could have spent, every war somewhere along the line

nurses treat POWs, but I haven’t heard of anywhere where this has happened except in Vietnam, and we were horrified and disgusted that our time and effort, our knowledge and compassion because they were human beings too

was wasted like that, just so that they could find out what they needed to find out from them and then either hang them or shoot them, and I don’t know whether that happened to these soldiers or not that we had but they were all taken away.

I think they were frightened they didn’t know what we were going to do because of the language barrier, but they were treated, I mean, I won’t say we differentiated between the two but they got the treatment without the caring if you know what I mean.

How can you show

compassion for, I mean you’re supposed to show compassion for people who are ill but when you know those very soldiers that you’ve got there have killed a mate of the ones over in this side of the ward, you give them what they need, the care that they need to keep them alive and to care for their wounds and then at that time then you’ve got to turn around and go over to the

soldiers over there and say, “Sister, how can you? How could you look after them? They murdered so and so, my mate got blown up in front of me. How can you look after them?” And you‘d have to try and explain that’s part of your job and because they were taken POWs. Any of the allies

that were taken POW, they weren’t treated. They were thrown in holes and prisons and tortured and what have you and everybody knew that but they couldn’t understand, the soldiers couldn’t understand why we treated them instead of, to them it seemed that they were getting special treatment and we weren’t, whereas they

weren’t. Where on the other hand they were getting the rudimentary care that we had to give and trying to give more to these guys over here to try and make up for what we had to do over there, and it was very very hard.

Yeah, and the medics were in the same situation but they were there the whole time, in the ward the whole time and they used to cop

it physically in some cases. “You bloody ratbag, I’ll punch your nose. How dare you treat those scum”.

No, they would’ve preferred to just get a gun and put a bullet in them.

Pale, clammy, cold, their whole

body is very pale because when you go into shock the blood goes from your skin to the internal organs to keep them alive. So their pulse is high, their respirations are usually shallow trying to conserve the effort

of breathing but their pulse rate is high trying to get that blood around to the vital organs of the body, and it’s nature’s way of protecting the internal organs that keep people alive, the brain, the liver that you can’t live without, the heart you can’t live without, the lungs you can’t live without, and that’s where all the blood goes to keep that part

of the body in operation. But sort of gradually shuts down other sections of it to the point where it’s only just barely, I mean there’s still blood going to those areas but not the volume that it should be. So that’s why everything’s pale ‘cause there’s no blood on the surface of their skin. It’s all deep down. Sweaty is a reaction to that, cold and clammy, ‘cause all the heat’s

been internalised from the blood and I can’t really describe why, the clammy feeling is because there’s no warmth and it’s the cold and even the sweat, if they’re sweating the sweat is cold.

Yeah, because it was the

easiest to give and I mean there are other drugs but morphine is used every armed force as front line analgesic for wounded because everybody knows what the M stands for and they have a texta

type pencil or, what were those ones? Indelible pencils that they used to draw the M on and the time. I mean if it was our wounded going to an American hospital they would know that M stands for morphine. If you gave them anything else they may not know what it stands for and give them another dose.

You can, especially somebody who goes into shock if you give them too much analgesic because morphine represses the respiratory system, so if you give them too much morphine you can actually kill them by stopping their breathing.

The medics,

you mean in the movies?

No. I don’t recall seeing that in a movie, but they wouldn’t have had enough unless it was a really severe injury. They wouldn’t carry enough ‘cause if they used it all on one and they had another lot of casualties they’d have

no more. Out in the field you only have a limited quantity. You can’t carry 100 ampoules of morphine.

Yeah. They have a lot of poetic licence in the movies.

No, it was in New Guinea actually. I actually delivered a couple of babies in New Guinea for native women, but

They squat on the floor

and just deliver the baby, or if they’re out in the bush they squat in the bush, wherever they happen to be when the baby decides it’s going to come they just squat on the floor, squat down and the baby just comes out.

They’re very muscly.

It doesn’t seem to take them long. They’re standing and walking and working

while they’re up to the very final stage of labour and then they just squat down, and I got a call one night when I was on evening shift to go to one of the married quarters and these married quarters were concrete floors, bare concrete floors, and I got there just in time to catch the baby before it hit the concrete.

So we just cut the cord, put Mother and baby in an ambulance and sent them into the Port Moresby native hospital for them to deal with.

No. The closest I came to babies was a PR [public relations] exercise at one of the villages where that photo of me and the baby was taken, and some well meaning group

in Western Australia had sent up these bouncinettes. You know the old fashioned bouncinettes, thinking that the local women might like them, and I was, I think in that album is a picture of Amy and I trying to get this baby that had no pants on that I was nursing that had piddled on me into this bouncinette which was made out of this net stuff, and he had no knickers, no pants at all on and he wasn’t

going to co-operate. He didn’t like the feel of this, but that and kids at the (UNCLEAR) clinic were the closest I came to it, apart from that little Not, the little boy that we had at the hospital for months.

Yeah, I think he was about 10 and he had tuberculosis, active tuberculosis. He had malaria.

He had an enlarged spleen, he had I don’t know, rickets, every deficiency, vitamin deficiency disease you can think of he had and he was only about this high, but he won everybody’s hearts and the medics, especially

the fellows that had families would sort of be carrying him around and the ones that didn’t would be sort of spoiling him rotten and the sisters did to, the Red Cross girls, everybody except the CO who kept trying to get rid of him, but we kept saying, “No, he’s not ready yet”, and the doctors were on our side too.

He slept in the Red Cross hut. They had a little annexe at the end of

one of the wards and they had a little cot made up for him there and he used to sleep there.

No, I don’t. I believe he went to an orphanage but sort of after that I don’t know.

Yes. Just once. Once was enough.

It was during the Tet Offensive and there had been a contact on our perimeter. They don’t know what it was,

but thought at the time it was Viet Cong, and we, all through the Tet Offensive we had total blackouts. So there was not allowed to be a light showing to the point where on night shift if you had to go into the intensive care ward, you had to knock on the door, they would come and they would turn the light off inside, open the door, you would go in,

shut the door and turn the light back on outside. So everything was in total darkness, and I can’t remember who was on duty but I had, I was actually down in the quarters and the hospital was on this side of the sand dune and the mess is up there and the quarters are down that side and there’s a road on the other side of the quarters,

and I was down there resting between, I mean I didn’t want to be up drinking in the mess. I wanted to have a sleep so basically I was down there. As I said there were no doors on this building. I think the front had a door on it but the side didn’t, and somebody must’ve thought now where is everybody? And they counted for everybody except me, and she must be down in the quarters.

So even though it was Tet and things were a little hairy over the country, everybody still enjoyed their drink. The first I knew about this contact on the wire was I heard these footsteps coming towards the quarters. I wasn’t asleep, I was lying in bed, and I heard footsteps coming from one way and footsteps

coming from the other way, you know, coming from the lounge room end and coming from the other entrance and my room was there, and they were stumbling sort of footsteps and I thought, “Somebody’s creeping around, what’s going on here?” And I sort of crept out of bed, went over and parted my little curtain and here’s two male figures with guns pointing at each other, or sort of,

and I’m in the middle, and it turned out that these two officers which I will not name had decided that they were going to check on Maggie. So they came down the hill together, “I’ll go this way, you go that way”, and I mean had I stepped out of that room fully they were in the state where either of both

of them could’ve pulled the trigger. They had loaded revolvers and I felt very very scared. I think that was one time. It was the only time that I actually felt that way, in physical danger because, I mean had they been sober it wouldn’t have been so bad,

had it not been the middle of the night, or you know, sort of middle of a total blackout it wouldn’t have been so bad. I could have laughed it off, but it was just too close for comfort.

I think I sort of, I can’t remember exactly but I probably said, “What the bloody hell are you two idiots up to?”

And there wasn’t enough light to see who they were. I said, “Who are you and who are you?” They were both the same height so I had a rough idea who they were because I knew who were two fellows that would be so stupid as to try something like that, but what I couldn’t understand was why the other officers in the mess said, “No, don’t do it. We’ll send the girls down.”

They just let these two drunks come bolting down the sand dunes, through the door and no door to protect me, just string beads, but that was, I could say that was the only real time that I felt like my life was in danger. I mean it could have very well been at other times but I wasn’t aware of it, but this particular night I was very much

aware of it.

No.

No,

not really because it didn’t manifest itself while we were there. It came, possibly a lot of it had to do with the unpopularity of the conflict, the treatment. I mean we got the newspapers and we got all the news about all the demonstrations against us being up there. We came home, fortunately

it didn’t happen to us at the time, but when the battalions came home they were vilified. They were refused entry into any RSL, even the RSL turned their back on them. I mean that was atrocious. They had no way, and there was no counselling process set up. I mean they didn’t have it in the Second, First World War. They didn’t have it in the Second World War.

Why should we have it now? But they’re still treating diggers from the Second World War for shell shock. They’re still treating soldiers from Vietnam with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, me included, and out of, three of the four that went over, Terri, Colleen and I have all got Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I don’t know about Amy because she lives over in Perth and I’ve only seen her twice since we came home, and there was, I mean it’s offered now with East Timor and Afghanistan and Pakistan and the peacekeeping forces in different parts of the world. They are offered counselling,

we weren’t. Got off the plane, told to report somewhere the next day to get your pay, leave pay and your next posting and that’s it, but we didn’t come in to the shell shocked area in

Vietnam because they, if they showed any signs of anything like that they would’ve been sent home straight away. They may have been treated. We had a psychiatrist there. I don’t know that he ever treated anybody. He could’ve but I personally don’t know about it, but he

certainly didn’t do rounds in the wards to talk to the soldiers after they’d been wounded. I don’t know what he did, have no idea, but he was a psychiatrist and he was as mad as one too. I shouldn’t say that because the psychiatrist I see is lovely.

Yeah,

still is. It’s a, tears were an emotional release at the time. The drinking was there to help you forget things you didn’t want

to remember, but it didn’t really because I came home in ’68. I was diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in 1997, and all those years in between I had been living with it and I had been using alcohol and other coping mechanisms to,

I never recognised it as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. I didn’t, one of my corporals did and he suffers from it as well, but he became an advocate for diggers who want, to sort of help them deal with the DVA [Department of Veterans’ Affairs] , and he eventually after about

five years of telling me, “Come and see me, come and see me”, I relented and did. This was after I had a very, I retired from work because of stress and that made me realise it wasn’t just the stress of work, it was

stress going back years. But he could recognise the symptoms in me having been through it himself, but I couldn’t or wouldn’t until the time when I had actually retired from work and he said to me on Anzac Day, “Maggie, come and see me”, and I said, “Yeah OK, one day”. Gave me his number

and we went overseas that year, my husband and I, for about three months and when we came back I said to Frank, “I think I’ll give Roy a ring”. He said, “About bloody time”, or words to that effect. So I rang up Roy and made an appointment and he sort of started the ball rolling and it took me,

towards the end of ’97, took six months of fighting the DVA before they would recognise the fact that A, I was female and I had been in Vietnam and B, that I suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder even though they had a letter from a psychiatrist saying that I had this, and they kept putting obstacles in my way. I’d be given so many points for something that they attributed

to my war service. When I initially injured my back and it was discovered that I had osteoporosis, that was in ’94, I applied to the DVA to have that recognised because one of the causative factors is smoking and drinking and I did both in excess.

I mean I used to drink and smoke before I went there, yes, but not to the extent that I did while I was there and after I came home, but it took six months before they finally, they’d say, “Oh well, cancer of the cervix, yeah, that can be attributed”. All cancers are attributed to service in Vietnam. What else was there? I had

a very bad dermatitis that I contracted in Vietnam which at one stage I was receiving a 50 percent disability for. Then when I had my hysterectomy for my uterine cancer they gave me 50 percent for that and cut my dermatitis down to five, and sort of this is what they were doing the whole way through until, as I said, when I found out I had osteoporosis

I applied for that to be recognised and that was knocked back, not attributable to war service. The very end I was five points away from getting TPI [Totally and Permanently Incapacitated pension] and the fellow that was looking after my case who was then moving on to somebody else, or somewhere else wrote me a letter which I have in there, saying that if you were to apply to have your

osteoporosis attributed to your service in Vietnam I feel that it would be accepted. I rang him up, I didn’t write to him, I rang him up and I said, “But I’ve already done that and it’s been knocked back”. He said, “Do it again”. So went through it all again and sent it in, and this guy had moved by the time it came up for the decision making and there was this girl in his place and she

took great delight in saying, “You’ve got it”. She rang me up and said, “You’ve got it”, and I was the first female in Queensland to get it. There are several Vietnam veteran nurses living in Queensland but I was the first one in, first female from anywhere to get, in this state and DVA in this state are very hard.

Well I was ready to throw it in. It’s only my husband and this corporal who himself had to give up being an advocate half way through because of his health and he was actually training a war widow, a Vietnam War widow, to do this sort of work and he handed it over to her, but he was on the phone to her every day to find out what, how my case was going and

guiding her, but I got there eventually and I mean it helps with the treatment. I see a psychiatrist still, nearly six years now, every six to eight weeks. All my medications for my osteoporosis which are extremely expensive

and are not covered by PBS [Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme] are paid for, and everything else. My back injury which is from the osteoporosis, any treatment for that is covered for that, and actually all my medical treatment is now,

you know, sort of, I can go into, used to be a private hospital but now with all these doctor’s things going on it’s intermediate patient in a public hospital. Everything is looked after except these orthopaedic surgeons that won’t look after, and the reason they won’t is money, because DVA do not give them enough money.

They pay them what they used to pay them about 10 to 15 years ago before all this big insurance business came. They can’t, and DVA have actually dropped the remuneration to doctors. I should say not dropped it, not kept pace with

the increases of

CPI [consumer price index], that’s the word I was looking for, yeah. So they’re just getting paid the same whereas the doctors’ expenses and everything else have been increased, like the cost of living and everything else, and that’s why they won’t, I went to the orthopaedic specialist who operated on my husband’s back and I asked him would he have a look at mine.

I’d get a referral, and I said, “I’m DVA”, and he said, “I’m sorry, I won’t see you”. The doctor that originally saw me when I was working and injured my spine, he won’t treat me, wouldn’t treat me anymore. I went to, I rang up another doctor who I’d been given a referral to. He said no, he won’t treat DVA patients, and in the end I

had to ring DVA and said, “Look, what the bloody hell’s going on here?” And they, I said, “I want an orthopaedic specialist to look at my back and I want you to find me one”. I said, “You can cross this name, this name, this name and this name off the list because they’ve already told me no”. Eventually I found one, but they can’t do anything about it anyway.

But I was sort of, I can fracture my hip or crush another vertebrae in my spine by bending over. That’s how I did the first one. I bent over to pick up a piece of paper on the floor on night duty. Bang, I felt like somebody kicked me in the back.

I suppose first of all it was sort of a social thing,

but then when things started to get on top of me, you can only take so much, the stress of work, the images that you see. You can’t sort of just say, “I’m not going to look at that anymore”. It gets stuck in there and comes to the front when you don’t want it to, and you think

“Well, I can stop that. I’ll drink and it makes me forget.” Drinking helps me forget all these problems, all these things that have happened, things that I’ve seen, things that I don’t want to remember, and there are things that I still won’t talk to anybody about, not even my psychiatrist. I just don’t want to open that can of worms

because I think I’d end up as a patient in Keith Payne unit at Greenslopes and not just a sort of a six weekly visitor, and that’s basically why most of us veterans drink or used to drink to excess. I mean

as I said, I’ve come to the place now where I don’t need to drink to forget it because it’s there and it’s not going to be opened, ‘cause when we first came back it was every man and his dog was asking, you know sort of, every soldier, all the sisters and the returned sisters from the Second World War and

the family, they all wanted to know what it was like, “What did you see, what did you do?” There were some things that I learnt to talk about just to shut them up sort of, things that didn’t hurt as much, things that I sort of told myself, “Now, these things I can talk about. I don’t want to

bring out those other ones”, and I still can’t. I can’t do it with my psychiatrist. I couldn’t with you, I couldn’t with Nick, not even with my husband.

In fact he learns more about what I did in Vietnam and what I didn’t do from these interviews he sees on television because

I just can’t talk to him about it, and it feels wrong. I should be able to, and it’s the same with our son when he went to East Timor. I vowed and declared there, I was terrified he was going to sort of come back the same way I did, a big face on everything, a good face on everything and sort of

the rest stirring in the back of your mind. I believe he has got some problems but I’ve tried to encourage him to talk and my psychiatrist said, “Yes, encourage him to talk, encourage him to receive counselling if he feels as though things are getting on top of him”. He hasn’t sort counselling but he has been to speak to the padre of his unit. We are a Catholic family

now. My husband was Catholic and he’s got a very deep faith in the Catholic Church and he can go and talk to his padre and it helps him get over that, but I didn’t have that. By the time I came back from Vietnam I had lost all faith.

Because of what happened

I think over there. I mean it wasn’t anything nasty to me. I mean I wasn’t violated or anything, not physically. It’s all the emotional aspect of it is still sort of, and that was the reason, I mean we all used to drink a lot.

I don’t know whether the other girls would admit it now but I will quite readily, that alcohol was my way of forgetting things then. When I came back to keep me going it was my crutch. Now I’m crutchless.

But I still haven’t given up the fags.

Yeah.

Yes.

I occasionally lost my temper before I went to Vietnam actually with an officer who refused to get out of bed so that the nursing orderly that was on with me could make his bed. Because in those days on night duty every patient had to be

showered, shaved, shampooed, bed made before you went off duty at 7.00 o’clock in the morning, and this guy absolutely refused to, and I walked past and I said to the nurse, “He hasn’t got his bed made.” “He won’t get out of it, sister”. So I poked my head in the door and I said, I mean there was no physical reason why he couldn’t, “Hop out of bed so that your bed can be made before

day staff come on please, lieutenant”. I was a lieutenant too, so you know, but he didn’t do it and I started getting upset with the nurse, and she said, “But sister, he won’t get out of bed”. So I remember going in and I’ve never heard such silence in my life because there wasn’t

a sound coming from the Other Ranks in the ward itself. I dressed this guy down so much and I was so angry that apparently my face was white and I was shaking. I knew I was shaking. It doesn’t happen very often but it used to, when I got angry I would shake and my face would go white. You couldn’t see the difference between the veil and there, the only

thing was the hair in between. He did get out of bed and did have his bed made but the whole ward heard it. They didn’t see it, they heard it, and I never had any problems with those patients again, but I had to record the incident in case he, a snotty nosed little sub-lieutenant, as

the words that I used to him, “No snotty nosed little sub-lieutenant is going to disobey an order”, he was a second lieutenant, that’s right, (UNCLEAR) “by a senior officer”. I said, “If it was one of the men out in the ward they would be charged”. I didn’t yell, scream or anything like that. I don’t do that when I’m really angry. I just get very quiet,

very forceful and let him have it. As I said, every man and his dog out in that ward were very good for me anyway for the rest of the time they were in there. I got a nickname when I was in Vietnam actually, called Big Red One or Big Red,

which probably sort of followed me there, but Big Red One was the American 1st Division and that was a big red number 1 on a colour patch. The local people used to call me the “fire headed lady” because they’d never seen a redhead before, and my nickname just sort of got abbreviated to Big Red after that, and they

still, you know, I’m still called Big Red at Anzac Day and other reunions.

Very much so. The first time I marched on Anzac Day was the year I resigned my commission and Frank was in hospital, in the rehabilitation hospital at the time,

and I went home to Leeton. The RSL had actually asked my mother to contact me to see if I could come home because the Vietnam veterans were leading the parade in Leeton on that particular day and there were four of us, three men and I. So I marched in uniform because I hadn’t actually been discharged until May.

The next time I marched was at, when I was out at Yeronga with the Amberley March. I didn’t march again then until I came to Brisbane because I was always working on Anzac Day or having babies or just had a baby or something, and it was the Nursing Corps’ 75th birthday and they wanted as many

ex-Nursing Corps and serving men to march and Jeannie O’Neil, who is one of the returned sisters, she was Korea, Malaya and Vietnam, she rang me up and said, “Maggie, we want you to march”. I said, “Jeannie, I’m seven months pregnant”. She said, “So”. I was six months pregnant,

April, May, June, yeah. He was due in the end of the July. “You won’t need to worry, there’ll be enough of us there to look after you if anything happens.” So I rolled up on Anzac Day, and Frank never goes to Anzac Day. He used to take, go in when the kids were little but Anzac Day is my day. That’s the day that I go and tell waries [slang for tall stories; sometimes known as “I was there” stories] and listen to all the,

he drove me over to Sandgate ‘cause we lived out at Redcliffe and I caught the train in and met up with all the others and there was all these people that I’d worked with in Vietnam. They were all there and they were all marching and they were all marching with the sisters, and Arthur Crawford was one of them. He was

one of the surgeons I was talking about. Then I marched every year with the returned sisters until one year the kids asked me to march at Redcliffe. They wanted mummy to march. I only did it one year because it didn’t feel right. I did it for the sake of the kids. They were marching with the

school and then I marched in ’94 in April. It was the end of May that I hurt my back and I couldn’t march for the next three years ‘cause I couldn’t march. Then I marched again for a couple of years and then I had surgery on my feet and I couldn’t march the next two years.

I had surgery again at the beginning of this year but it was only on one foot and I was able to march. So yeah, it’s a big day and last year my son was actually, he didn’t march with me, he was on catapult duty on the war memorial in town. You know, standing there with guns reversed, from the dawn service right through until the end of the parade.

He was there so it was great, we had a good Anzac Day that day, that year.

It’s a day of remembrance. It’s a day of remembering those that have lost their lives, but it’s a way of

remembering the ones you worked with, the ones that became part of your life because of your service, the friendships you’ve made. It might be the only time in 12 months that you see a lot of these people and sort of a gathering and a remembering of the good times because you don’t talk about the bad times. It is

a remembrance of those that have served, not just the ones that have died, but the ones that have served in the past and their hardships. I mean that’s what it always has been and I guess because my father was in the army and my step-Father was one of the Rats of Tobruk, Anzac Day has always been a big part of our lives and in a small country town Anzac Day is a big part of everybody’s life.

And always, all my life I’ve attended an Anzac Day service somewhere. Even in Vietnam we had an Anzac Day service. In New Guinea there was a dawn service out at, Bomana War Cemetery was so spooky especially seeing I’ve got a cousin buried there.

Yeah. Yeah, sort of the dawn service and the sun rises up and there’s a big white cross and as it comes over the top of the trees it hits that white cross and it illuminates it right down to the ground. It’s really just, the cross was set, they must’ve studied that sun on that day for a long time before they put that cross there, and they’ve put it just in the position that like

in the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, the light comes on the 11th of November at 11.00am, the light comes through and illuminates the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. It’s like that, it’s been set up just that way and to see that sort of in this cemetery of our soldiers it really gave me the shivers.

Anzac Day has always meant a lot to me and will always, and for as long as I will march I will march and my eldest daughter said, “And when you can’t march Mum, I’ll push you in a wheel chair”. She usually goes in. Anthony, it depends where he is. This year he was down in Sydney and

he was involved in the dawn service down there.

No, I don’t think it had changed very much. I mean I was still nursing fellows coming home from Vietnam and still operating on them, but as well as operating on

them I was in the theatres. We were doing clean surgery like eyes and ears and things not affected by gunshot wounds and clean orthopaedic surgery like torn cartilages and things like that, and I hadn’t dealt with that for 12 months and I wasn’t happy with the idea of being

put in the theatre and said, “Here, deal with this”. So I spoke to the CO and said, “Look, you want me in there, I want to be in there but I need refreshing on all the nice surgery”. So they sent me to the PA Hospital.

In Brisbane here, to work in theatres for eight weeks,

eight to 12 weeks to relearn the nice, the clean surgery, and so I got over there and one thing which I can’t stand and that’s burns. I hate burns, I hate looking after burns and the sister in charge of theatre thought, “Oh, this girl’s

been to Vietnam, she’ll be good.” She used to send me to the burns theatre and they had one theatre that all they did was operate on burnt patients and some of them were atrocious, and I went twice and I was nearly sick. We had a special instrument that they use to take skin grafts with and

instead of taking skin grafts with this in the theatre they were actually cutting off dead skin, dead flesh. It’s called a smiley knife and I’ve never been able to see one of those since without thinking about seeing it used in this way on these burns patients. I mean it was very effective but I had skin taken off my leg when I had this big

skin cancer up here. They used a smiley knife and I said to him, “Did you use a smiley knife?” He said, “Yes”, and I said, “Yuk”, and I had to tell the surgeon why, why I said yuk because the mental image kept coming back. Anyhow I eventually got to do what I was sent there to learn and I went back and I took over theatres and I was

quite happy. I mean I still had my battle casualties coming in, my car accidents, my training victims, eye surgery, ear surgery. We had a fair bit of ear surgery because of blast deafness. The eye surgery was usually to correct a vision after an injury. There wasn’t a lot of that.

Neurosurgery, had some of that as well, but it hadn’t, nursing hadn’t changed, it was just my attitude towards it that had changed that I didn’t feel competent to operate or assist an operation on people that weren’t battle casualties, that weren’t filthy and needed all this extra

care. I wasn’t used to sort of taking somebody’s appendix out of fixing up a hernia or setting a clean fractured limb, putting pins in a leg that had been not shattered by bullets, you know, sort of things like that, and then after November, it was in the November of 1970 they sent me to New

Guinea and the hospital up there, or medical centre it was called, had actually decided that they were going to have an operating theatre there, and I was sent up there to open up this theatre and get it functioning. Apart from being senior nursing officer it just happened that I had a lot of theatre experience and that was

probably why I was sent up there. But again the patients we looked after were mostly native. A few of the white servicemen were up there, they were all, it was all basic general nursing care. Sort of go up and train the theatre technicians who actually had been sent to Australia to Sydney, to Ingleburn, to

have their theatre technicians training. Both before and after the sister in charge of theatres down in Ingleburn and myself rewrote the training manual for theatre techs. We had both been to Vietnam and we thought there was things in the old manual that needed changing, so we rewrote the training manual and these guys had been trained

under this system. They sort of went back and we had to sort of get them used to taking over from us if, theatre, not that we had any major surgery in that place but there was minor surgery done and we sort of, “Right, this is what you’ve got to do. Now we’re going to stand back and watch you do it”,

because you can’t say, “Well this is something you should do. You can do it this way or you can do it that way”. Their mind is not capable of accepting that. You’ve got to say, “This, you pick this up, you put that there, then you pick up your needle and put your thread through it”, or whatever. Everything had to be done in plain simple language. There’s no grey area

where sort of one of our own theatre medics we’d say, “Oh yeah, well if that’s got to be done this way then it can be done this way as well”. You can’t say, you’ve got to be precise and it’s got to be the same every time. You can’t say “Do it this way this time”, because they don’t understand. “If you can do it that way that

time, why have you got to do it this way?” It’s all got to be black and white literally, black for them and white for us and there’s no grey area in between.

I just wanted to get out of Brisbane. I’d been there three years, that was too long.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I just wanted to get out of there. Didn’t care where they sent me. I went to matron and I said, “Look, I want a posting. I don’t care where

it is, I just want a posting”, and not long after that she just said, she called me up into her quarters and said, “How do you feel about going, being promoted to major and going to Port Moresby?” I thought I’d love that and it’s where I ended my nursing career actually, my army nursing career, when I left there ‘cause when Frank came home

and had his leg amputated they sent me home and we lived in the Latrobe Valley in Gippsland which is 80 miles from Melbourne and the nearest medical unit was in Melbourne at Watsonia and I wasn’t ever, no way, I was newly married with a husband with only one leg, was I going to travel backwards and forwards every day to Watsonia or as they suggested that

I do, stay down there during the week and go home at weekends. No way, so very reluctantly I resigned my commission and became a housewife.

I’m not entitled to be called by my rank.

I have no authority, I mean if you retire from the army at retiring age you can if you wish join the reserves and become a member of the reserves where you go off once a month and do a weekend, once a year do a

week’s camp or something, but you can only do that if you retire. If you resign your commission it’s not offered to you, so it actually severs all ties with the active army.

Not from the army, no. You have to be in until retiring age to get what was then called the Defence Force Retirement Benefits Fund,

DFRB. They call it something else he tells me now, but the contributions you made to the fund, it’s just like superannuation because it can’t be carried over to any where else it’s given back to you, sort of your contributions.

That was ’72, Kirsten was born, no, that was in May ’72, Kirsten was born in April ’73.

Well I was 30, nearly going on 32, I was only two weeks off my, she was supposed to be born on or around my 32nd birthday. She came two weeks early, yeah. I thought that was old enough, was about time I

started.

No, no, no, no.

We had planned on staying up there longer and would have done if he hadn’t had to come back for his health, but they had

announced that independence was coming while we were there and the situation became, began to deteriorate in the way the black people were treating the white people. It was an apartheid in reverse. They were the ones that were mistreating the whites, whereas you know, in South Africa it was the whites against the blacks and this was

the blacks against the whites and they raped white women, they bashed them up, they attacked nuns. If you walked down the street you could be pushed in the gutter and the storm water gutters were about that deep. You know, sort of all sorts of horrible things were staring to happen.

This was in late ’71, early ’72. This is when

it was, they first said that instead of the year 2000 or something I think they were supposed to get independence, I can’t remember exactly, they brought it forward and as soon they announced that, I mean I was alright in the army because, you know, sort of military discipline but Frank wasn’t allowed to call one of the natives “boy”,

which is Pidgin English, “boy” is the Pidgin for a man and “meri”, M E R I, is Pidgin for woman. So that’s part of the language, but there was so many things you couldn’t, so many things you couldn’t say to them or treat them any way because then they could

turn around and redress you and have you charged with, you know, sort of, what am I looking for? Not apartheid, but sort of

Discrimination, that’s the one.

Well, I went up in November 1970 and I came back in February ’72. I had planned on staying,

I’d actually asked for and been granted an extension on my posting. It was a one year posting and I was going to stay for two years, but when Frank had his leg problem I had to come home. I mean I didn’t come home straight away. It wasn’t until they decided that they had to amputate that I actually came home, and that was with the blessing of the matron in chief,

and I was replaced, but sort of our plan was to stay another 12 months up there but once, apart from his health the working conditions were just so bad for him. We lived in a flat in, just outside the centre of Port Moresby. We were alright, nothing ever happened to us but other white people living in

the flats were broken into. The flat on the other side of sort of a big block with two, big block of land, two lots of flats coming down on the other side, one of my sergeants, native sergeants lived there and I lived over this side. I didn’t know he lived there until all these break-ins started happening and he said to me, “You don’t worry matron,

nobody touch you. I live there”. So he was the only reason that we didn’t get broken into and sort of if you were home when they broke in you could be bashed at the same time. They weren’t very particular.

No, and the thing is if you got broken into you couldn’t touch them unless they were actually inside your building, you know.

If they had opened a window and put their arm in and their arm was in you could chop the arm off, but you couldn’t go outside and belt him up because he wasn’t actually in your building, and apparently afterwards it was, friends stayed up there for another 12 months. They said it was the white people

that were sort of hiding behind sort of big walls with armed guards and attack dogs and broken glass and razor wire on the walls just to keep them out because they were so brazen in their attack. No woman, no white woman was game to walk down the street.

Well, before I actually

became pregnant with Kirsten I was working at the local hospital. I couldn’t sit around and not do anything. Frank was back at work and I applied for a job at the local hospital and got one. We moved into our new home and I was working on the wards, on a surgical ward there and worked until I was six

months pregnant, then I gave up. I had Kirsten three months later. I went after she was born, I went back on a part time basis and got pregnant with Rachel and while I was pregnant with her I was doing night duty and Frank was looking after Kirsten at home, and she was born. I went back to work again when she was three months old until they retired Frank from work because of his leg and I thought,

what the hell are we living here in the cold for.

Down in the Latrobe Valley in Victoria.

Yeah, and we came up on a holiday. We had a caravan and brought Frank’s parents up on a holiday and we decided, well living down there in the cold, we’d come up to Queensland so we moved up here in ’76. I’ve been here ever since.

He was born up here, yeah,

in ’77 and I didn’t work up here until 1981 when I went out as a civilian to Yeronga and I worked off and on, mostly on until 1986 ‘cause we were living at Redcliffe and working at Yeronga it was over an hour’s drive

backwards and forwards each day. I got too tired and so I gave that up and I had three years and three months off work and I decided, no three years, and I decided I’d go back to work and I hadn’t been doing anything much, I’ll go and do a refresher course. They were advertising one at the hospital. So I applied for and I got that. That took three months,

which I had to pay for but it caught me up on all the latest equipment and treatment like that and I was offered a job. Just because you did the course didn’t mean to say you got a job, but I was offered a job in the surgical ward so I started there and that was in 1989, but three months of the

course took me over the three months absence you can have without loss of pay for years of service. So I went back to a first year sister’s pay and I had to start building myself up again. So I worked there from then until 1970, 1996 rather. So I was seven years there and retired.

Oh, I forgot about that. After Anthony was born. Because I started telling you we were having a multiple birth and we had to build another room. We had a three bedroom house but if we were going to have three, four or more where are we going to put them. So we put an extension on the house and because I was pregnant and not working and Frank had been retired on a pension we borrowed to do this,

but we needed to pay it back so I decided I would go back to work. Frank said, “Oh well, if you want to go back to work why don’t you do midwifery?” I said, “Oh, I never thought about that”. So I rang the Royal Women’s, Redcliffe Hospital and Mater Mothers. The Royal Women’s had nothing for two to three years or something but I put my name down there. Redcliffe Hospital was the same, put my name down there. Mater said it would be

at least another 12 or 18 months. I put my name down there. This was in, about the October and then in December I got a phone call from Mater Mothers saying they had a cancellation on their course which started on the 27th of December, would I like to take the position, and I said yes, and that left Frank with

a four month old baby to look after.

Or four or more.

Yeah.

No, there was just Anthony thank God. I don’t know how I would’ve coped with a multiple birth, even twins because I as getting

old. I was 37, that’s too old to be having more than one baby.

12 Months.

I went back as a student midwife at Mater Mothers, and it’s quite funny because here’s me who having been a matron and being called sister for all these years and you’re walking down the corridor and a voice calling out, “Nurse, nurse, nurse”,

and ignoring it only to find out that it was the sister in charge, a nun, who was calling me and she actually had to chase me down the ward or down the corridor, “I’ve been calling you, nurse”, and I said, “I’m sorry, sister, I didn’t hear you.” She said, “I was calling out nurse, nurse, nurse”, and I said, “I apologise sister, I’m not used to being called nurse”. I said, “I’ve been a sister for so long”,

but it was good. I had a lot of fun doing midwifery, it was great sort of being on the other side of the bed.

Yeah, and I found I could relate to the mothers a lot more and the mothers could relate to me because they knew I had a young baby plus two other children, that they could, you know, they knew that I

knew what they were going through, ‘cause a lot of midwives do it straight after their general training and they haven’t had that experience. Plus we had some male midwives, it was a first ever for the Mater. There were four fellows did their midwifery training with me and they all passed at the top and the women just loved them. The odd one said, “I’m not having him look at my private parts”,

sort of thing, but they were gorgeous. They had the personality for it. They had a good rapport with the patients and it was great and they were very cluey. If you had a problem you’d just go to one of the boys and they’d say, “Well look, this is what I did”, you know, and they were 20 years younger than me, or it seemed like it. They probably weren’t

because I was what, 30, going on for 38. They were probably a good 10 years, 15 years younger than me.

Yeah, oh no, these guys were good, they were good on the wards, they were good in the ante-natal clinics and sort of in the wards with ante-natal patients and in labour ward they were fantastic. Post-natally sort of, I mean two of them were married and had kids, the other two weren’t but they could wrap the women around their little finger. They could get them to do what they wanted

and the women thought they were marvellous. That’s when I did mid and that’s after I did that, it was after I did that that I had a hysterectomy and I didn’t go back to work then until, that was ‘77

that I actually finished, end of ’77 so it was the end of ’78 and then ’79 I did a few weeks work. I mean we earned the money, paid off the loan, I wasn’t going to work anymore. They called me in to do some work on one of the private floors because something was going on. They were changing

the lecture thing and they needed somebody on the ward for ex amount of days so I worked for a few days as a midwife, that’s all.

And I just retired then until I got bored again in ’87 and went back to work in ’89 rather and went back to work.

Yeah. I like being busy. No, actually in ’81 I went to work for the army. So that sort of slots in there, and on and off for five years and then I told them I had enough of that and that’s when I thought I had retired, but then three years later I was ready to go back to work again.

And then I did retire when I reached retiring age.

Yes, every year I, we correspond at Christmas time. If I happen to be down, going down to Leeton or going through Canberra, although Colleen’s moving to Adelaide soon and there’ll only be Terri there,

I’ll call and see them or ring them up. If there up here we’ll have a chat. Same as some of the other girls I knew after that went after me and that I worked with later on. I keep in contact with those, not as close as we’d like but sort of everybody’s got their own life and we feel that that’s

close enough contact for us. We meet up at reunions and things like that. I last saw them in ’87 at the welcome home parade. That was the first time in 20 years that we’d actually all been together. In ’99 we met up again at the dedication of the Nurses’ Memorial.

And that’s the only times that we’ve all been together, and in 2000 I went to a hospital reunion in Adelaide and Colleen was there. Amy hadn’t come and Terri hadn’t come, but you know, sort of I correspond with them and keep in touch. It’s nice to

know what they’re all up to.

Very humbling. It made you feel just how lucky you are to live in this country.

I mean we’ve never had, well, we have had war come to Australia but only to certain parts. It makes you feel lucky that this place has never been invaded by anybody, apart from the whites back 200 years ago. But since then, a few

bombs, a couple of submarines. A few bombs, there was a lot of bombs dropped on Darwin, but we haven’t had the invasions that every other country has had. I mean the English took over the Americas but then the French were there and then the British came again and invaded it again. America hasn’t even missed out. Every country in the world has been

invaded at some stage, but Australia has only been invaded once and that was by the British when we came and took over somebody else’s country but since then we’ve been very much the lucky country.

Go for it because there’s, actually these days with all these peacekeeping forces around, and it’s not just the men that are sent as peacekeepers, they also send nurses and small hospital units. It’s a good life. I mean it was better back then because it was, you know, sort of a

separate entity in the nursing corps and it was like a big family, but it’s still the possible experience of overseas service, but even without that you still get camaraderie of service life and there’s nothing really that can describe it.

You’ve got to sort of live it, but it’s great and sort of as I said, if I hadn’t met Frank I would’ve retired at 55 from the army ‘cause that was retiring age, and I would’ve been in all that time and loved every minute of it.

No, no,

but Frank was meant to be and so were the children. Somebody had a better idea of what I needed than what I did.