Neither in ink nor in stone: Memorials to Australian Great War Nurses

This article analyses The Maryborough War Memorial (1922) as an example of how one Queensland community memorialised the contribution of Australian nurses during the Great War. Eileen O’Neill used the term, ‘disappearing ink’, to characterise the erasure of women from the philosophical canon and it is a valuable metaphor for the absence of the war-time experience of Australian nurses from the popular ‘imagining’ of the conflict. For though writing during and after the war, nurses’ experiences had largely remained invisible over history, except for a handful of texts which have subsequently exerted an exaggerated influence on professional and popular opinion, until the influence of more recent scholarship. Their story was ignored when communicated in ink; it was no more widely disseminated in stone, as this article explores. This erasure will be contextualised within the broader framework of Australian war memorials, the absence of nurses in written histories, and the focus on the battlefield and subsequent veneration of the front-line soldier. Despite the domination of the Australian commemorative landscape by war memorials, there is limited research on the use of memorials and monuments in educational settings, particularly at the tertiary level