Changing Displays - Centenary of Anzac

Our Vice-President Ashley Reid is continuing with her program of changing displays at our Country Hospital Museum at the Rockhampton Heritage Village.

The focus since 2014 has very much been tied to the commemoration of the centenary of World War 1. After a concentrated period of research in 2014, Ashley has continued to seek out information about nurses from our local area (Rockhampton, Gladstone, Calliope, Raglan, Mt Morgan and Yaamba) who trained locally and served in World War 1. Thirty-three such nurses have been been identified and their stories summarised. In addition, Ashley found a further 18 nurses who had pre-war links to the local area but trained elsewhere and another eight with no known pre-war links but who worked in the local area after the war.

In 2015, Ashley set up a special display at our museum which was viewed by many visitors. This photograph shows a partial view of that display.

Portion of a display at the Country Hospital Museum commemorating the role of nurses in World War 1.

Subsets of this display were taken to other events such as Rockhampton International Nurses Day in 2015, a senior staff forum at the Rockhampton Hospital and to a commemoration function held by the CQ Family History Association. The project has also forged links with the State Library of Queensland. This has included the sharing of information on a State Library blog and an invitation in 2016 to Ashley to present a paper about the research at a 2-day workshop in Brisbane.

You may read more about Ashley's project in our April Newsletter.

In October 2016, Ashley finalised a major update of her research which has now been loaded to this website. You may read the stories of individual nurses with links to Central Queensland who served in the Australian Army Nursing Service in World War 1 by following this link on our website.