Descendants and historians are calling for recognition for thousands of Australian nurses who served overseas in World War I but were not part of the official nursing deployment.
About 5,000 Australian nurses are thought to have taken themselves to war, even though the official number is just over 2,000.
Professor Melanie Oppenheimer from Flinders University says there were two distinct groups of Australian nurses in WWI – members of the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) who left “officially” and the rest.
The AANS nurses – as part of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF) – were initially sent to Egypt, then moved on to France and Belgium.
But others were already in London and made their own way to the theatres of war.
