Peter Rees’s The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War, 1914–1918 is an important contribution to the literature of Australian involvement in the First World War, principally because it examines a group whose experiences have frequently been overshadowed by the familiar narratives of the infantryman, the Light Horse and the battles that have come to dominate the national memory of the conflict. By concentrating upon Australian military nurses, Rees broadens our understanding of what constituted wartime service and challenges the tendency to regard the experience of the Anzacs as an almost exclusively masculine undertaking. His account is both a history of nursing during the war and an examination of the personal experiences of women who found themselves confronting its consequences at remarkably close quarters.
The Australian Army Nursing Service occupied an unusual position within the military establishment. Its members were indispensable to the treatment and recovery of wounded and sick servicemen, yet their professional responsibilities did not necessarily translate into the recognition or authority enjoyed by their male counterparts. Rees explores this contradiction through the experiences of individual nurses, demonstrating that their contribution extended considerably beyond the comforting image of women tending wounded soldiers. They were trained professionals working under conditions that demanded considerable medical knowledge, physical endurance and emotional resilience, frequently in circumstances where the available resources were inadequate for the demands placed upon them.
One of the book’s strengths is its geographical scope, which takes the reader beyond the familiar Australian battlefields to the hospitals, casualty clearing stations and medical facilities in which the consequences of military operations became painfully apparent. Egypt, Lemnos, France and other locations emerge as important parts of the Australian wartime experience, reminding us that the history of a campaign cannot be understood solely through the movements of fighting formations. The wounded did not simply disappear from the battlefield once they had been evacuated, and the medical services constituted an enormous organisation whose effectiveness had a direct bearing upon the capacity of armies to continue fighting.
Rees is particularly effective when examining the circumstances in which nurses worked during the Gallipoli campaign. The inadequacies of medical preparation, the difficulties of evacuation and the enormous numbers of casualties placed extraordinary demands upon the medical services. The experiences of nurses on Lemnos provide a useful corrective to accounts that concentrate almost entirely upon events on the peninsula itself, demonstrating that the consequences of operational decisions were frequently borne by those who had little opportunity to influence them. The shortages of equipment, difficulties of maintaining sanitary conditions and relentless arrival of casualties illustrate the extent to which medical arrangements struggled to keep pace with the realities of modern warfare.
The book also succeeds in demonstrating that the hardships experienced by nurses were not confined to their professional responsibilities. Disease, exhaustion, uncomfortable living conditions and the psychological consequences of treating severely wounded men were persistent features of their service. Rees makes effective use of personal accounts to illustrate these experiences, allowing the reader to appreciate the cumulative burden of nursing without reducing the women concerned to passive witnesses of suffering. Their determination to continue working, often under conditions that would have overwhelmed less experienced personnel, emerges as one of the defining characteristics of the narrative.
An especially significant aspect of the narrative is its treatment of the nurses’ exposure to danger. The sinking of the transport Marquette in October 1915, with the loss of New Zealand nurses among the casualties, demonstrates that medical personnel were not necessarily protected from the violence of war simply because they were not combatants. Similarly, the experiences of nurses serving near the Western Front illustrate the vulnerability of medical establishments to artillery fire and aerial bombardment. Rees uses these episodes to challenge conventional distinctions between the dangers encountered by fighting soldiers and those faced by the women responsible for their treatment. The distinction between combatant and noncombatant remained important in military organisation, but it did not always correspond to the realities of wartime service.
The principal strength of Rees’s historical method lies in his extensive use of diaries, correspondence and personal recollections. These sources provide an immediacy that would be difficult to reproduce through official records alone, while allowing individual personalities to emerge from what might otherwise have become a rather impersonal account of military medical administration. The nurses were not an undifferentiated collection of selfless women, but individuals possessing their own ambitions, frustrations, prejudices and expectations. Their relationships with one another, their patients and the military authorities reveal a professional community attempting to maintain its standards within an institution that did not always appreciate the difficulties of its work.
Nevertheless, this reliance upon personal testimony also presents certain historiographical difficulties. Diaries and letters are invaluable sources, but they are not necessarily representative of the experiences of an entire organisation, and their survival often reflects circumstances unrelated to the historical significance of the individuals who produced them. Those nurses who maintained detailed records, possessed the opportunity to correspond regularly or subsequently preserved their papers inevitably receive greater attention than women whose experiences left a less substantial documentary record. Consequently, the reader should distinguish between the experiences of the particular nurses whose lives Rees reconstructs and the wider history of Australian and New Zealand military nursing.
There is also a tendency for the accumulation of personal experiences to take precedence over sustained analysis of the institutions within which the nurses operated. Rees provides considerable information about the conditions encountered by his subjects, but a more systematic examination of the military medical establishment would have strengthened the relationship between individual experiences and the broader history of wartime medical administration. Questions concerning the allocation of personnel, the distribution of medical resources, professional hierarchies and the relationship between nursing authorities and military commanders warrant consideration beyond their immediate consequences for particular individuals.
This is particularly relevant when examining the recurring shortages and administrative difficulties encountered by the medical services. It is relatively straightforward to establish that nurses were frequently required to work under inadequate conditions, but considerably more difficult to determine whether those circumstances resulted from failures of planning, shortages of transport, operational necessity or the inherent limitations of contemporary medical practice. A more sustained examination of these distinctions would have provided a stronger analytical framework for understanding the relationship between military operations and the medical organisations responsible for dealing with their consequences.
Another limitation concerns the book’s position within the wider historiography of Australian military nursing. Rees was not the first historian to recognise the importance of these women, and the subject had already received substantial attention from writers such as Jan Bassett and Ruth Rae. His contribution is therefore better understood as bringing an important body of historical experience to a wider readership rather than recovering a subject that had previously escaped historical investigation altogether. This distinction matters because the development of military nursing history forms part of a broader reassessment of women’s participation in war, including their professional status, their relationship with military authority and the consequences of service for their subsequent lives.
The book might also have benefited from a more sustained comparative approach. Although the Australian and New Zealand experience provides its principal focus, the nurses operated within a much larger imperial medical organisation, and their professional circumstances cannot be entirely separated from those of their British and other Commonwealth counterparts. A closer examination of similarities and differences in recruitment, training, working conditions and professional recognition would have helped establish which aspects of their experiences were distinctive and which reflected the wider organisation of military nursing during the First World War.
The question of gender is particularly important in this respect. The nurses entered an institution whose authority structures were overwhelmingly masculine, and their professional expertise did not necessarily protect them from restrictions imposed by prevailing assumptions about women’s proper place within military society. Rees provides material from which these tensions can be identified, although a more explicit examination of gender and institutional power would have added considerable depth to the narrative. The nurses were not simply women performing difficult work under exceptional circumstances, but members of a developing profession whose wartime responsibilities exposed contradictions between their recognised competence and their limited institutional authority.
There is, moreover, an important distinction between recognising the courage of military nurses and understanding the historical significance of their professional work. Accounts of military nursing can sometimes become dominated by the language of sacrifice, compassion and endurance, with the unintended consequence that the women concerned are celebrated principally for their personal virtues rather than their medical expertise. Rees generally avoids this difficulty through his attention to the practical demands of nursing, although the emotional force of his narrative occasionally threatens to overshadow the more technical and organisational dimensions of their contribution.
The experiences of the nurses after the Armistice provide another important dimension to the book. Returning to civilian life did not necessarily bring an immediate end to the consequences of wartime service, and the physical and emotional demands of military nursing could continue to influence their lives long after the fighting had ceased. Questions concerning official recognition, employment opportunities and access to the benefits available to returned servicemen demonstrate that the inequalities experienced during the war did not simply disappear with demobilisation. The difficulties encountered by some nurses during the subsequent decades also suggest that the public celebration of wartime service was not always accompanied by adequate material support for those who had performed it.
From the perspective of military history, the book makes an important contribution by directing attention towards the consequences of battle rather than concentrating exclusively upon its conduct. The traditional operational narrative generally follows the decisions of commanders, the movements of formations and the immediate results of engagements, whereas the medical perspective reveals another dimension of military activity in which the consequences of those decisions continued to unfold long after the fighting had ended. The casualties recorded in an operational history represented individual human beings whose survival, recovery or death depended upon an extensive medical organisation, and Rees provides a valuable reminder that the effectiveness of that organisation deserves consideration alongside the performance of the fighting troops.
Ultimately, The Other Anzacs is more successful as a work of narrative and social history than as a comprehensive institutional study of military nursing. Its considerable achievement lies in reconstructing the experiences of Australian and New Zealand women whose wartime responsibilities were demanding, frequently dangerous and essential to the functioning of the military forces they served. Its limitations arise principally from the emphasis placed upon personal testimony and the comparatively restricted attention given to the broader administrative, professional and comparative questions that those experiences raise.
These reservations do not diminish the importance of the subject or the value of Rees’s contribution. Rather, they establish the distinction between a history designed to recover individual experiences and one intended to provide a systematic explanation of the organisation within which those experiences occurred. Rees has produced an accessible and substantial account that places military nurses within the wider history of the First World War, while providing ample material for readers interested in the relationship between warfare, medicine and Australian society.
For those accustomed to reading operational histories of Gallipoli and the Western Front, the book offers a different perspective upon familiar campaigns, one in which the immediate consequences of battle assume greater prominence than the tactical decisions that produced them. It also serves as a reminder that the history of the Australian and New Zealand contribution to the First World War cannot be adequately reconstructed through the experiences of combat troops alone.
The value of The Other Anzacs lies not simply in acknowledging the courage of the nurses, but in demonstrating that their experiences form an integral part of the military history of the First World War rather than a supplementary chapter in its social history. Rees provides a substantial foundation for that understanding, even if a more rigorous examination of military medical administration and professional nursing would have strengthened the analytical dimensions of his work.