ABSTRACT

The thousands of professional female nurses in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) working overseas in the First World War experienced changes to many facets of their work as they nursed wounded and sick men often miles away from home. Australian authors Jan Bassett, through Guns and Brooches, and Rupert Goodman, through Our War Nurses, largely wrote Australian Army nursing “into being,” providing a chronology of the progress of military nurses through Australia’s involvement in overseas conflicts. 1 Their works highlighted the personal impact of war on nurses themselves against a background of military nursing administration and nurse movements. 2 Others have also written on Australian military nurses reducing the paucity of scholarly research into nursing and military nursing history in Australia, although publications are of an uneven quality. 3