Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

"After being overseas together from 1939 to 1943 in the same Australian Army unit—in the Middle East, New Guinea, and the Solomons—two former Army Nurses, Sister M. Prosser and Sister Phyllis Simpkins, are still soldiering on together Outback, in an unusual post-War plan.

They have responded to an S.O.S. from the Outback—for fully qualified nurses for mothercraft work in country districts of New South Wales where, because of the scarcity of doctors, hospitals, ambulance services, and properly qualified nurses, anxious mothers face heart breaking problems in bringing up their families.

Realising the urgent need for reinforcements in that field, these two war veterans decided on their plan of campaign, strengthened their defences, and launched their offensive.

Sister Simpkins completed a mothercraft training course at Karitane, in Sydney, and, in February of this year, had stormed the Far West Children's Health Scheme, gained her objective, and entrenched herself in one of the Scheme's well-equipped rail clinic cars, covering the Walgett-to-Mungindi areas of the North-west, determined to patrol her newly won territory with all the efficiency she had given in field dressing stations or base hospital.

Three months later, Sister Prosser won her strategic advantage—she had succeeded in an assault on the adjacent Moree-to-Wallangarra district and occupation of a similar rail clinic car covering that particular terrain for the Far West Scheme.

So, after the sands of the desert and the swamps of New Guinea, and all the strains and stress of war-time nursing, these two good Australian nurses are still doing a vital job. Each lives her own life, often a lonely one, moving around in her rail clinic car, hauled along by mixed or goods trains, holding clinics at various stopping places along the route, and often making odd trips away from the clinic car to visit sick mothers or see new-born babes—and each has to use her own initiative and self-confidence in countless ways.

But, like good Middle East campaigners, these two nurses still manage to "wangle" week-end leave together—in Moree, on the dividing line between their territories—for satisfying re-unions; and they never have to worry about A.W.L. consequences!

Floods . . . the vagaries of Out-back transport ... constant make-shifts—they cheerfully take them all in their stride, and like their new life, and both are making hosts of new friends.

But Sister Simpkins admits to feeling a bit at a loss on one occasion recently, when she had billeted on her in her clinic car for a few days a Czech mother and child, evacuated from a tent during the recent floods—for neither could speak a word of English!"

Source: Trove-Macleay Argus (Kempsey, NSW) Tues 31 Oct 1950, p. 8