ACT Book of the Year

Shortlisted 2009

Peter Rees The Other Anzacs: Nurses at War, 1914 - 1918 Allen & Unwin

SYNOPSIS

The harrowing and dramatic stories of the Australian and New Zealand nurses who served in the Great War.

By the end of The Great War, forty-five Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over two hundred had been decorated. These were women who left for war on an adventure, but were soon confronted with remarkable challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them.

They were there for the horrors of Gallipoli and they were there for the savagery the Western Front. Within twelve hours of the slaughter at Anzac Cove they had over 500 horrifically injured patients to tend on one crammed hospital ship, and scores of deaths on each of the harrowing days that followed. Every night was a nightmare. Their strength and humanity were remarkable.

Using diaries and letters, Peter Rees takes us into the hospital camps, and the wards and the tent surgeries on the edge of some of the most horrific battlefronts of human history. But he also allows the friendships and loves of these courageous and compassionate women to enrich their experiences, and ours.

This is a very human story from a different era, when women had not long begun their quest for equality and won the vote. They were on the frontline of social change as well as war, and the hurdles they had to overcome and the price they paid, personally and professionally, make them a unique group in Anzac history.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Peter Rees is a journalist. He worked in the Canberra Press Gallery for many years, before leaving to write books fulltime. He is author of Killing Juanita , The Boy from Boree Creek , the biography of Tim Fischer, and is co-author of Tim Fischer's Outback Heroes

Find more books by this author in the ACT Public Libraries.

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