ABSTRACT
The 1939-45 war posed a direct threat to Australia. The war in the Pacific reached the shores of Australia with the bombing of Darwin in February 1942 and the sinking of the hospital ship Centaur on 14 May 1943 when it was a mere forty miles east of Brisbane with the loss of 268 lives, including eleven of the twelve nurses aboard.1 Nursing, as a major provider of health care, held an essential place on the policy agenda during World War II. The demands of a nation at war and the needs of the civilian population, the changes in working conditions and the position of women in the workforce, had profound effects on the nursing labour force. The period was characterized by extreme shortages of nurses caused by the demand for nurses from the military services and the increased competition for employment from other occupations and industries at home. As the threat of an invasion of Australia intensified in 1942 and the requirements of the armed forces and war-supply industries increased, women’s labour became indispensable for the war effort. Women entered industries in which they had not worked previously and took up jobs which had previously been unacceptable, although these were usually semi-skilled jobs. The Australian government’s approach to this crisis of insufficient labour was to enter the names of women on to a register with a view to encouraging them to work in essential industries or in the female branches of the forces. When encouragement failed to provide suitable distribution of this labour, force in the form of direction orders was used. In Britain too, forms of compulsion were used to
enhance the distribution of women’s labour and from 1943 all nurses were obliged to obtain employment through the Ministry of Labour and National Service. Recruitment campaigns which were organized on a voluntary basis, however, were confined to Canada.2
