The Anzac Girls: The extraordinary story of our World War I nurses

Description

By the end of the Great War, forty-five Australian and New Zealand nurses had died on overseas service and over two hundred had been decorated. These were the women who left for war looking for adventure and romance but were soon confronted with challenges for which their civilian lives could never have prepared them. Their strength and dignity were remarkable. Using diaries and letters, Peter Rees takes us into the hospital camps and the wards, and the tent surgeries on the edge of some of the most horrific battlefronts of human history. But he also allows the friendships and loves of these courageous and compassionate women to shine through and enrich our experience. Profoundly moving, Anzac Girls is a story of extraordinary courage and humanity shown by a group of women whose contribution to the Anzac legend has barely been recognised in our history. Peter Rees has changed that understanding forever.

Peter Rees has been a journalist for forty years, working as federal political correspondent for the Melbourne Sun, the West Australian and the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author of The Boy from Boree Creek: The Tim Fischer Story (2001), Tim Fischer's Outback Heroes (2002), and Killing Juanita: A true story of murder and corruption (2004), which was a winner of the 2004 Ned Kelly Award for Australian crime writing, as well as Desert Boys: Australians at war from Beersheba to Tobruk and El Alamein and Lancaster Men: The Aussie heroes of Bomber Command (2013). He lives in Canberra and is currently writing a biography of Charles Bean.