Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Lorna Laffer (1909-1995)

Summary

Lorna Laffer (SFX 26124) served in the Australian Army Nursing Service from 1941 until 1946. She was one of two sisters on ‘Leaping Lena’, a well known hospital train that transported sick and wounded troops from Darwin south to the large 119 Australian General Hospital at Adelaide River.  

Before the war

Lorna Laffer was born in Adelaide in 1909, one of the three children (2d, 1s) of Norman Salisbury Laffer (1872-1948), an accountant with large pastoral companies, and his wife Amelia Marie (nee Thomas) (1878-1970), daughter of a journalist.

Her upbringing appears comfortable. The three siblings all attended private school, Lorna at St Peter’s Girls’ and Wilderness, her sister Constance at Presbyterian Ladies College and brother Peter at Prince Alfred College. Constance and Peter were active in the Adelaide Riding Club in the 1920s and 30s. Their father was grand master of a Freemasons lodge and was on at least one occasion left a bequest by grateful well-to-do client.[1]

Lorna followed her sister Constance into nursing, first at Mareeba Babies Home and then at the Adelaide Hospital from 1928. She then followed Constance into the baby health/mothercraft nursing field with further training in New South Wales. Between 1938 and 1941, she was the sister at a country baby health centre in the Muswellbrook area in NSW with a brief interruption at the Broken Hill District Hospital, again where Constance had nursed until her marriage in 1938 and where there were family connections.

Their only brother Peter enlisted in the Royal Australian Navy in 1940. He was an able seaman on HMAS Sydney when the cruiser was sunk with all hands lost by the German ship Kormoran off Western Australian on 18 November 1941. Perhaps inspired by his enlistment or the enlistment of nursing friends, Lorna applied to join the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). She received her call up papers almost at the same time as she received notification of his death at sea.[2]

War Service

Lorna returned to South Australia and went into camp for training in early 1942. Malaya and Singapore had fallen to the Japanese and the troops and nurses of the AIF were being brought back to Australia from the Middle East. Australia’s focus was on its troops’ campaigns in south east Asia and New Guinea. Nurses who had served overseas with the AANS now found themselves working in hospitals in Queensland and the Northern Territory, on the home front. Opportunities for service and travel overseas evaporated.

Around May 1942, Lorna was appointed one of two AANS sisters on ‘Leaping Lena’, a specially designated train that carried sick and wounded troops from Darwin inland to hospitals in Adelaide River (120 kilometres south) and Katherine (a further 205 kilometres). ’Leaping Lena’ was one of a number of hospital trains in Northern Australia, but Lorna Laffer’s enthusiasm for recounting its quirks and adventures gave the train almost legendary status. Rupert Goodman in his history of the AANS elevated it to ‘one of the most extraordinary examples of Australian improvisation and ingenuity’[3].

Those who knew Laffer from her days at Muswellbrook would have been intrigued at the account of her ‘Life on a Hospital Train’.[4] The train’s carriages (seven in number including four ‘wards’) were converted cattle trucks with wooden windowless sides and iron roofs. They carried the patients in bunks, 48 per carriage. The carriages had air vents, canvas blinds for the wet season, a cold shower, and room for medical stores. Each carriage was self-contained to accommodate the problem of frequent unhitchings. A separate kitchen carriage was equipped to prepare full meals served on crockery.

Laffer’s nursing colleague on the train was Eileen Quinlan, an old friend from Adelaide. The train’s medical officer, Captain Alexander Thomson, also came from Adelaide. Medical orderlies assisted, although Laffer’s photo album indicated they were unable to master making beds with ‘mitred’ or hospital corners. Generally their patients were not critically ill or wounded, but suffering from tropical diseases such as skins infections and dysentery.

Laffer’s accounts of nursing on ‘Leaping Lena’ include perils related to this distinctive train running on a very narrow gauge line with steep inclines in both directions.[5] It was hazardous stepping between carriages, difficult to nurse on a rocking train, hard and time-consuming to right uncouplings and derailments which were frequent. There was also the fear of enemy action. The Adelaide River destination was a large military base for Australian and American activity, including air activity. Japanese planes flew over from time to time, creating a good deal of apprehension despite the large Red Cross signs painted on ‘Leaping Lena’. The train was hit in a Japanese air raid on Darwin on one of its trips in June 1942, and a medical orderly killed.[6]  

In an interview many years later, Laffer recalled the sense of danger and threat of attack, despite the Red Cross signs.[7] However, she was undaunted. Her father had predicted she would be home in a week; ‘that’, she said, ‘was enough to make me stay.’

Laffer never lost her desire to serve overseas. In 1944, she was still ‘suffering from “itchy feet” – the longing she has always felt: to get overseas.’[8] When discharged in 1946, she was still a member of the Northern Territory Ambulance Unit.

Laffer photographed her various experiences in the Northern Territory and collected photographs by others. In this way she recorded the impact of the Japanese bombing of Darwin in 1942, ‘Leaping Lena’ and life in Adelaide River. She donated photographs to the National Library of Australia (http://nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au/%3E/Treasures/item/nla.int-ex10-s8) and the Australian War Memorial (awm.gov.au). A selection is available online at the NLA and AWM websites.

After the war

Lorna Laffer enjoyed life as an army nurse: the sisters and sometimes patients were close associates, like family. She was saddened when, at war’s end, the units were broken up and their members returned to their home state. ‘It was like being deprived of your family,’ she said.[9]

It was not surprising then that she was worked for a time at Daw Park Repatriation Hospital, and that she enthusiastically joined the newly formed voluntary Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps when it was established in 1954. She also worked for a time as the nursing sister in John Martins Department Store on North Terrace, Adelaide.

Lorna was a long-time benefactor of the South Australian Postgraduate Medical Education Association. She left the organisation a substantial bequest in her will which has supported the position of SAPMEA Director.

Lorna Laffer died in Adelaide on 16 January 1995. Her remains are located in Centennial Park Cemetery, RSL Section, Wall 127 Niche G005. She is commemorated in the World War Two Honour Board at St Peter’s Girls’ School, Stonyfell, SA.  

[1] Register, 30 May 1922, p7; Advertiser, 18 June 1937, p28.
[2] Muswellbrook Chronicle, 2 December 1941, p3, 9 December 1941, p5.
[3] Rupert Goodman, Our War Nurses: The History of the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps 1902-1988, Queensland, Boolarong Publications, 1988, p176.
[4] Muswellbrook Chronicle, 16 October 1942, p1. See a longer article, Daily Advertiser (Wagga), 16 October 1942, 6. Versions of this article appeared in numerous newspapers around the country.
[5] ‘I work on an ambulance train,’ by Sister Lorna Laffer, N T Forces, reprinted from The Australasian Nurses’ Journal, in Nursing in South Australia: first hundred years 1837-1937, 2nd ed. 1946, South Australian Trained Nurses’ Centenary Committee, Part 2, pp70-73.
[6] ‘I work on an ambulance train’, p71.
[7] Interview with Lorna Laffer [sound recording] Interviewer: Sarah Cugley, State Library of South Australia, Oral History Collection, OH268/2, 1994.
[8] Barrier Daily Truth, 22 May 1944, p4.
[9] Interview with Lorna Laffer [sound recording] Interviewer: Sarah Cugley, State Library of South Australia, Oral History Collection, OH268/2, 1994.