The wartime priorities for Australia shifted during the summer of 1941–42 as tensions in the Pacific increased, with Japan and the United States entering and quickly mobilising for war after the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. With the sinking of the HMAS Sydney off the West Australian coast in November 1941, Australia’s concern for the Indo-Pacific was already mounting. When Singapore then fell to the Japanese on 15 February 1942, and with it 18 000 Australian troops captured, Australia felt the situation worsening. With the first bombing of Darwin in February 1942, soon after the fall of Singapore, war had reached the nation’s shores, and the threat of invasion became immediate. Australia then withdrew its troops from the Middle East, where the majority had been serving, and the defence of its own territory dominated the nation’s consciousness. This sparked a change in attitude for Australia which caused a rapid growth in service enlistments, including with both the civilian and Army VAD organisations.

On 14 June 1943 the full strength of 84 civilian VAs were withdrawn from service at the Sydney Hospital. The Sun described their removal as owing to the ‘disagreeable attitude’ and protest arising from the trained nursing staff. Deputy Controller of the New South Wales civilian VAD, Dorothy Wilby, demanded that the voluntary service of these women ‘should be recognised by civilian nurses’, and threatened that if civil hospitals did not want the help of the VAs they would easily find work elsewhere. These women did not return to their voluntary duties as orderlies and hospital assistants for four days.

The AAMWS training school in Yeronga, Queensland, was established in November 1942. Set on a five-acre property, the location for the school was the former home of a Brisbane doctor. With an intake of just 27 students, the school’s first course was used as a trial to familiarise women with Army organisation. The AAMWS had only recently been established as a military service and so the newly enlisted women were drilled, taught to salute, and lectured on Army organisation and operations. Regarded as a successful exercise, the course would become known as ‘rookies’ and was continued in Queensland and implemented throughout the other states. Before the school was moved to Enoggera in August 1943, 642 AAMWS passed through Yeronga undertaking one of the eight three-week so-called rookies’ courses. A Toowoomba school teacher before the war, AAMWS officer, Lieutenant Florence Fuller established the Yeronga school as its first chief instructor. ‘Our ambition is to make recruits into good members of the AAMWS’, declared Fuller. Supported by other training staff, including AANS nurse, Patricia Chomley, Fuller explained that their objective was to train AAMWS so that, ‘when they get to their units, they know how to pull their weight’.

Jessie Laurie commenced her affiliation with nursing in 1939, joining the Dugan VA Detachment in Adelaide. Eager to volunteer for the Army when the opportunity came, Laurie was one of just 24 South Australian women to serve in the Middle East as a VA during the war. A clerk in her civilian life, Laurie was first allocated to general duties in the Middle East with the 2/1st AGH and then the 2/6th (shown in Figure 7.1). While with the 2/6th AGH, Laurie was assigned to the service of Major George Halliday. An ear, nose, and throat (ENT) specialist, Halliday ran a clinic for troops in the area and Laurie was selected to work as his assistant. After the Australian forces were withdrawn from the Middle East in 1942 and redirected to the Pacific Campaign, Laurie, now a Private in the AAMWS, joined Halliday as his assistant and helped staff his small mobile hearing clinic in Far North Queensland for troops camped on the Atherton Tableland.

It was a common assumption during the war that VAs and AAMWS servicewomen wanted to be nurses, and it was this desire that motivated them to join this service rather than take up one of the other available wartime opportunities. As Sheila Sibley confessed in 1943, before she began her work as an AAMWS, she was ‘dreaming dreams’ of becoming ‘an angel of mercy, the wounded man’s guide … the Rose of No-Man’s Land’. Sibley imagined that she would ‘float down the wards in my nifty blue uniform, and tender sighs would float right after this war’s Florence Nightingale’. Both Hitchcock and Sibley suggest there was some truth in the assumption that VAs and then AAMWS saw themselves as akin to, or aspired to be, nurses. Like Hitchcock, Sibley’s references show a clear association with the nurse in her understanding of the VAD and AAMWS. But Sibley admits that once she joined her first military hospital, she learnt the reality of the AAMWS’ work and conceded, ‘better leave that noble figure in my imagination.’

Writing encouragingly with the aim of providing constructive feedback in 1979 Mary Critch asked of Enid Herring, ‘Is ‘They wanted to be Nightingales’ a title for the finished book?’. Both were former members of the AAMWS working on their own separate compilations of the VAD/AAMWS in the Second World War. Critch, however, was alarmed by Herring’s choice of a title, and put the question to Herring, asking: ‘Is it not rather embarrassing to the hundreds of AAMW [sic.] who worked as General Duty and Mess Orderlies, as clerks, cooks etc and never saw the inside of a ward?’ Referencing Florence Nightingale, the woman noted for her humanitarian efforts during the Crimean War and cited by some as shaping modern nursing, Herring chose to perpetuate the stereotype of VAs and AAMWS. The First World War myth that all VAs either aspired to be nurses, or already saw themselves as nurses, was a common perception that tainted the VAD and AAMWS in the Second World War. While writing her own account of the VAD/AAMWS, Herring could have chosen to debunk this myth. However, she claimed its truth.