In May 1918, the hospital ship SS Kanowna drifted to a halt in the Indian Ocean. The ship shut down her engines, and all who could gathered on the foredeck. Kanowna’s chaplain mumbled a few words to the swelling sea beneath him. Then a sheet containing Narrelle Hobbes’ body slipped into the deep.

Narrelle was buried at sea just a few days sailing time from Australia. Her sister was beside her when she died. Elsie had been sent out to India to bring Narrelle home and had nursed her tirelessly while the ship ploughed its way through the ocean. But all to no avail. Narrelle lost her life to liver cancer. She was barely 39.

Narrelle’s war had lasted four years; she had nursed the troops of the Empire in Malta and Sicily, India and Mesopotamia. Despite disease, exhaustion, danger and injury, she had been steadfast in her service. ‘You see them brought in,’ she wrote, ‘stretcher after stretcher, in that endless procession, every man somebody’s boy. I will never give up till we are not needed.’1

Every man, somebody’s boy: Narrelle with a party of Australian soldiers at St David’s hospital in Malta. PR03708 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

Narrelle was born in Tilba Tilba, New South Wales, and in her eagerness to serve she’d enlisted in the British rather than Australian forces. That meant Narrelle received none of the benefits extended to the men and women of the First AIF. It meant her pay was a quarter less, and that she was often set apart from the company of her fellow Australians. It also meant that the young woman who died in the service of her country would never be honoured in the cloisters of the Australian War Memorial. Narrelle Hobbes was not counted as one of our nation’s 60 000 war dead. Like the names of all those who served with British units, her name was never set in bronze.

Narrelle left behind a close circle of friends, countless grateful patients and a loving family. Her letters remain, evoking memories of wattle in the wintertime, sunsets behind the mountains, wind rustling through forests of eucalypt, the scent of summer rain. Every letter Narrelle wrote home ended with her characteristic farewell, pledging ‘oceans of love’ to Australia.

Oceans of love: A photograph of Narrelle Hobbes in her nurse’s uniform. PR03708 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

In 1919, the town of Tilba Tilba raised their war memorial. An obelisk of stone, it looks out across the fields and the mountains. The tall marble pillar carries its burden of names: farmers and carpenters, labourers and graziers. All were sons, some brothers – one in every four of Tilba Tilba’s families lost someone in that war. But one name is missing: Narrelle Hobbes, a daughter of the district, whose body was committed to the deep almost within sight of the land she loved.

Looking out across the fields and the mountains: The town of Tilba Tilba dedicates their war memorial in 1919. Narrelle’s name does not appear on the obelisk, as she enlisted at Brewarrina, where she was nursing in the local hospital. Her name appears on the Honour Roll there. Sydney Mail, 21 April 1920 courtesy National Library of Australia.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on the extensive collections relating to Narrelle Hobbes at the Australian War Memorial PR3708 and 2DRL/0162; as well as Melanie Oppenheimer’s fine book, Oceans of Love (Sydney: ABC Books, 2006). Narrelle’s war service and her death just off the coast of Australia were reported on in the press and this story has drawn on these contemporary newspaper articles. For further reading on the work of nurses during war see Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches : Australian Army Nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne : Oxford University Press, 1992); and Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages : Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I (Newport: Big Sky Publishing, 2011).

1 Melanie Oppenheimer, Narrelle: Nursing for Empire, ABC Radio Hindsight Program, 28 March 2004.