Anna Rogers, While you're away: New Zealand nurses at war 1899–1948, Auckland University Press, 2003, pp. x, 352, illus., NZ$39.99 (paperback 1-86940-301-0).

Abstract

In 1899 Britain's army nursing service had fewer than eighty staff but when the Anglo-Boer War ended in 1902 there were around 1,700 British, Australian and New Zealand nurses in South Africa. New Zealand contributed approximately thirty nurses to this endeavour, a number small enough to permit Anna Rogers to profile each individual. This attention to detail is one of the strengths of While you're away. Following the outbreak of the First World War, the recently constituted Dominion sent six nurses to the former German colony of Samoa as a prelude to the formation of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service. In April 1915 the first dozen nurses sailed for Egypt; others served on hospital ships, at the Western Front and in New Zealand's war hospitals in England. Each of these spheres is allocated a separate chapter, as is the work of the 100 or so New Zealand girls who served the Red Cross or other British and French organizations. One recurring theme in the sections dealing with conflicts to 1918 is the struggle of the more relaxed and informal New Zealand and Australian nurses to come to terms with British class distinctions, anti-colonial prejudice, and “hide-bound British military tradition” (p. 151). This discomfort also affected the colonial soldier patients, many of whom were delighted to be under the care of their own countrywomen. Two chapters are devoted to the interwar years. The first explores the problems faced by these military nurses in the aftermath of the the First World War and the second summarizes the efforts of the handful of New Zealanders who nursed in the Spanish Civil War. The last seven chapters are devoted to New Zealand nurses during the Second World War, arranged according to the different spheres where New Zealand troops played a significant part—North Africa, Greece and Crete, Italy, the Pacific and Japan. There are also case studies of nursing aboard hospital ships, and of the voluntary aids who complemented the fully trained staff. ‘Faraway Places’ recounts the experiences of nurses and voluntary aids serving with British units, including some who had the misfortune to become prisoners of war. One of the strengths of this book is the liberal use of diaries, personal correspondence and interviews conducted by the author and others. These vividly illuminate the hopes and fears of three generations of military nurses, and the arduous conditions under which many of them worked. Some of these vignettes are poignant in the extreme while others reveal a rich vein of humour; I especially liked the account of the shrinking uniforms of the first group of voluntary aids sent overseas in 1941. Rogers is also to be commended for her use of primary sources when retelling relatively familiar events, such as the 1915 sinking of the Marquette in which ten New Zealand nurses perished. One disappointing feature is the failure at times to locate nursing in the wider historical context. Isobel Dodds, for example, who tended International Brigade members during the Spanish Civil War, is described as the daughter of a “politically active pacifist father who was a friend of Peter Fraser and knew Bob Semple and Paddy Webb” (p. 189). We are not told, however, that all three were MPs in New Zealand's first Labour government of 1935–49. By the same token, the text would have been enriched by a fuller explanation of the tantalizing references to the introduction of penicillin (pp. 222, 246, 306). Overall, however, this is a valuable addition to the story of New Zealand nursing, and to the historiography of the changing relationship between Mother England and its colonial offspring. As Rogers notes in her final paragraph, those New Zealanders who served overseas learned “what it meant not to be British”.