Letters from the Ladies

One nurse, Sister Narrelle Hobbs, was with Australian forces at Gallipoli. She wrote:

I’ve been a soldier now for nearly three years, and please God I will go right to the end ... if anything happened, and I too passed out, well, there would be no finer way, and no way in which I would be happier, than to lay down one’s life for the men who have given everything.

She died five months later, in May 1918.



Another nurse, Gertrude Doherty, from WA, wrote to her cousin Muriel in Sydney:

We look forward to our letters on mail day. Of course we can never make our letters sound as cheerful as yours. I am sure you will understand why when I tell you that we are surrounded by sadness and sorrow all the time ... do you know, Muriel, that as many as 72 operations have been performed in one day in our hospital alone ... you could not imagine how dirty the poor beggars are, never able to get a wash, mud and dirt ground in and nearly all of them alive with vermin. They feel ashamed being so dirty, we always tell them that if they came down any cleaner we would not think they had been in it at all.
A group of Australian nurses sailed for France in 1916, organised by the Australian Red Cross and financed by the Australian Jockey Club. Their blue uniforms were made by department store David Jones, hence their name The Bluebirds. They were, they said, "gifts to France".



Comment on the effectiveness of these two sources in their expression of the experiences of women during WWI.