Abstract
During the First World War Australian women were attracted to voluntary organisations such as the Red Cross, a transnational humanitarian organisation that focused on the sick and wounded in battle as well as civilians displaced by war. Red Cross work provided patriotic Australian women with meaningful wartime activities that not only gave them a purpose but importantly became an antidote against the rising anxieties of war. This chapter reflects on the fluidity of boundaries and borders of war as it affected a range of women’s experiences in the paid and voluntary domain. It features women who worked on the home front and those who found ways to travel to the war, to actively participate, to use their skills and expertise in creative and sometimes unorthodox ways. Through organisations like the Red Cross, Australian women created an imperial community, not imagined but very real, that offered them a space to feel fully involved in the war effort, actively and effectively. The chapter also suggests that exploring questions of self-identity and gender can help further broaden our understanding of Australian experiences of war.
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Notes
- 1.
“Two Aussie Girls. Red Cross Work Abroad,” Sun (Sydney), 10 July 1919.
- 2.
Ibid.
- 3.
There was one short chapter on patriotic funds in the official history volume: Ernest Scott, Australia during the War (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1936). See also, for example, Michael McKernan, The Australian People and the Great War (West Melbourne: Nelson, 1980).
- 4.
For a broad history of the Australian Red Cross, see Melanie Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Australian Red Cross (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2014). For Red Cross work with wounded and missing, see Melanie Oppenheimer and Margrette Kleinig, “‘There is No Trace of Him’: The Australian Red Cross, its Wounded and Missing Bureaux and the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign,” First World War Studies 6 no. 3 (2016): 277–92. For prisoners of war, see Melanie Oppenheimer, “‘Our Number One Priority’: The Australian Red Cross and Prisoners of War in the World Wars,” in Beyond Surrender: Australian Prisoners of War in the Twentieth Century, eds. Joan Beaumont, Lachlan Grant and Aaron Pegram (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015).
- 5.
For an explanation of the history of patriotic war funds in Australia and the role of State War Councils prior to the establishment of the Department of Repatriation, see Melanie Oppenheimer, All Work. No Pay: Australian Volunteers in War (Walcha: Ohio Productions, 2003), especially chapters one and two.
- 6.
See, for example, the minimalist treatment of nurses’ experiences in Les Carlyon’s The Great War (Sydney: Macmillan, 2006) that won the Prime Minister’s Prize for History in 2007. See also Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I (Melbourne: Big Sky Publishing, 2011); Janet Butler, Kitty’s War: The Remarkable Wartime Experiences of Kit McNaughton (Brisbane: University of Qld Press, 2013); Peter Rees, The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War, 1914–1918 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2008); and Ruth Rae, Scarlet Poppies: The Army Experience of Australian Nurses during World War One (Sydney: College of Nursing, 2004). For Narrelle Hobbes’ wartime experiences, see Melanie Oppenheimer, Oceans of Love: An Australian Nurse in World War I (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006).
- 7.
Bruce Scates, “The Forgotten Sock Knitter: Voluntary Work, Emotional Labour, Bereavement and the Great War,” Labour History, no. 81 (2001): 29–51; Christine Hallett, Veiled Warriors: Allied Nurses of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 8.
Bassett, Guns and Brooches, 2–3.
- 9.
Oppenheimer, “Red Crossing for War: Responses of Imperial Feminism and the Australian Red Cross during the Great War,” in Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, eds. Michael J.K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2015), 26–39; Oppenheimer, “The ‘Imperial Girl’: Lady Helen Munro Ferguson and Her Imperial Childhood,” Journal of Australian Studies 34, no. 4 (2010): 513–25.
- 10.
Philadelphia Robertson, “The Late Viscountess Novar,” no. 33, Box 191, Australian Red Cross Archives, Melbourne (hereafter cited as ARCA).
- 11.
Marie Galway to Kyffin Thomas, 14 July 1919. Letters written to Kathleen Kyffin Thomas, D 5186 (L), State Library of South Australia, Adelaide.
- 12.
Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited: Women, Philanthropy and Power (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
- 13.
See, for example, Angela Woollacott, On Her Their Lives Depend: Munitions Workers in the Great War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield, Out of the Cage: Women’s Experiences in Two World Wars (London: Pandora Press, 1987).
- 14.
Henriette Donner, “Under the Cross—Why VADs Performed the Filthiest Task in the Dirtiest War: Red Cross Women Volunteers, 1914–1918,” Journal of Social History 30, no. 3 (1997): 688.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Ibid., 690.
- 17.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 3–7.
- 18.
Australian Red Cross Society, Fifth Annual Report, 1918–1919, 6.
- 19.
“Hands Across the Sea,” Daily Malta Chronicle, 28 January 1916.
- 20.
Ruth L. Lee, Woman War Doctor: The Life of Mary De Garis (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2014), 69.
- 21.
Susan J. Neuhaus and Sharon Mascall-Dare, “A Woman at War: The Life and Times of Dr Phoebe Chapple MM (1879–1967), An Australian Doctor on the Western Front,” Journal of Military and Veterans’ Health 21, no. 3 (2013).
- 22.
Melanie Oppenheimer, Australian Women and War (Canberra: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, 2008), 24.
- 23.
She recorded her war through the lens of her Box Brownie, now part of the ARCA.
- 24.
Oppenheimer, “Gifts for France: Australian Red Cross Nurses in France, 1916–1919,” Journal of Australian Studies 17, no. 39 (1992): 65–78.
- 25.
NSW Red Cross Record, vol. 3, no. 2, February 1917, 34.
- 26.
Oppenheimer and Kleinig, “‘There Is No Trace of Him.”
- 27.
Oppenheimer, Power of Humanity, 48–49.
- 28.
“Two Aussie Girls.”
- 29.
See Oppenheimer, The Power of Humanity, 41–42; Howard Wolfers, “Murdoch, Sir James Anderson (1867–1939),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/murdoch-sir-james-anderson-7691/text13463, published first in hardcopy 1986, accessed online 8 May 2016.
- 30.
Oppenheimer, Power of Humanity, 41.
- 31.
Interview with Peggy Murdoch, Australian Branch, BRCS, Abbeville, 25 April 1919, transcript, ARC Executive correspondence, Box no. 33, ARCA.
- 32.
“Two Aussie Girls.”
- 33.
Murdoch, interview.
- 34.
“Two Aussie Girls.” For a history of the 3rd AGH, see “Report on the Work of the Australian Army Nursing Service in France,” E.M. McCarthy, Matron-in-Chief, British Troops in France and Flanders, 31 July 1919, WO222/2134, National Archives, UK.
- 35.
“Two Aussie Girls.”
- 36.
Murdoch, interview.
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
Recommendation File for Honours and Awards, AIF, 1914–18 War, 3rd AGH, 1 March 1918 and 19 September 1918, AWM28, 2/386 and 2/387, Australian War Memorial, Canberra.
- 39.
“The British War Medal 1914–1920,” Australian Department of Defence, accessed 8 May 2016, http://www.defence.gov.au/medals/_Master/docs/Imperial/WWI/WWI-criteria-British-War-Medal-Australian-transcribed.pdf.
- 40.
Dora M. Walker, With the Lost Generations, 1915–1919 (Hull: A Brown, 1970), 1.
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Oppenheimer, M. (2017). Opportunities to Engage: The Red Cross and Australian Women’s Global War Work. In: Ariotti, K., Bennett, J. (eds) Australians and the First World War. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51520-5_6
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