Many have told the story of Sister Rachael Pratt. All have admired her courage, her commitment, her endurance. Like many of the young men who went to war, Sister Pratt lied about her age. She was already in her forties when she volunteered for service overseas, and certainly far too old for the hardships that lay before her. Pratt sailed for the Dardanelles in May 1915. She first served on hospital ships, every cabin and even the decks crammed tight with the wounded. In August, the military authorities sent Sister Pratt to Lemnos. She found what passed for a hospital there in a state of chaos:

the wounded began to arrive . . . Dysentery was a scourge on the island . . . many of the wounded fell prey to the disease . . . cold weather brought frostbitten patients . . . It was pitiable to see gangrene feet.1

A state of chaos: This photograph was taken not far from where Australian nurses established their primitive hospital on Lemnos. It does not convey the crowded conditions of the island or the appalling circumstances in which the nursing staff found themselves. Courtesy Bruce Scates.

After Gallipoli, Rachael Pratt continued nursing in Egypt, then England, then France. At every post she worked tirelessly for the welfare of the men in her care, tending to the needs of the sick and wounded. She wrote hundreds of letters home to Britain, New Zealand and Australia, assuring grieving mothers that the sons they loved had not died alone, had not died in pain, had died bravely. It must have been hard to always sound convincing.

Rachael Pratt’s own bravery was never in question. In 1917, German aircraft bombed the casualty clearing station where she worked. It may have been a mistake – for obvious reasons, hospital facilities were located near transport lines, which were legitimate military targets. Or it may have been part of a deliberate military strategy. By 1917, this was a total war, mass mechanised slaughter with little pretence of compassion or chivalry.

Sister Pratt was severely wounded in the attack but continued to nurse her patients until she collapsed. Evacuated to England, she was presented to the King and awarded the Military Medal ‘for bravery under fire’. That made her something of a celebrity, both in London and also back home in Australia. But Rachael Pratt enjoyed little of the limelight. ‘The war is awful’, she wrote to her family in 1917, ‘and I simply cannot discuss it . . . There is no prospect of it ending.’

The first Australian woman to receive the Military Medal, and one of the few nurses to be decorated, Pratt’s war service has long been celebrated. But what came after the war is seldom mentioned.

Rachael Pratt never recovered from her injuries. A shard of shrapnel would remain lodged in her lungs for the rest of her life. She returned to Australia suffering chronic bronchitis and developed what the medical authorities called ‘war neurosis’. Had she been a man they might have called it shell shock, but women were not supposed to come under fire. For a male-dominated medical establishment, apt to regard any nervous disorder as a female malady, ‘neurosis’ seemed the right word for a woman.

Rachael was admitted to Berklea Private Hospital for the mentally ill in 1938. Initial assessments of her condition were dire: ‘depressed and melancholic’, one doctor wrote, ‘worried the whole of her waking hours’. Another noted their patient was ‘unable to face anything’. Having retired from private nursing, Rachael Pratt ‘had lost all self-confidence . . . has no companionship . . . and no practical purpose in life’.2

She was transferred to Merton Private Hospital in Melbourne, where her ‘mental outlook’ worsened. An element of desperation crept into the case notes. A Dr Godfrey noted:

[No] improvement whatever . . . [she] requires careful vigilance as she is suicidal . . . Last week she secured a pair of nail-scissors, and hid them in her clothes. They were missed . . . on her being searched, she transferred them to her vagina. She then admitted her intention was to open a vein in her wrist.3

At Merton, Rachael was treated by ‘modern methods’. In August 1939, doctors began a course of Cardizol injections, a circulatory and respiratory stimulant. Doses were high enough to create convulsions and send the body into seizures. When this therapy failed, the doctors administered Somnifaine ‘at such a frequency as to maintain a condition of narcosis for three to four weeks’.4 That treatment also failed.

Worried by the cost, efficacy and perhaps the humanity of such treatment, medical staff drew the inevitable conclusion. In October 1940, Dr Godfrey made one of his final entries in the casebook: ‘prospects of ultimate recovery must now be regarded as improbable’.5

Sister Rachael Pratt died in the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in March 1954. After her time in mental hospitals she never successfully returned to civilian life. Her war had never really ended.

In many regards, Rachael Pratt’s story is an important one. And here we face the choice of what we choose to remember and what we decide to forget in our narratives of war. No one denies Sister Pratt’s bravery, or her humanity, or her selflessness. Her photograph, wearing the medal she clearly deserved, is reproduced in newspapers every Anzac Day. But no one prints a picture of a frail and frightened woman driven mad by her nightmares. Telling the whole truth about war, and not just some of the story, requires its own kind of courage.

Wearing the medal she clearly deserved: The studio portrait often reproduced of Rachael Pratt. This appearance of composure is at odds with the story of her later life. P05664.001 courtesy Australian War Memorial.

SOURCES AND FURTHER READING: This story draws on Rachael Pratt’s service dossier NAA: B2455 PRATT R; her repatriation file NAA: B73, H5789; and Rachael’s reflections on nursing on Lemnos in Reveille, vol. 6, no. 12, Aug. 1933. For further reading on Australian nurses see Jan Bassett, Guns and Brooches: Australian Army nursing from the Boer War to the Gulf War (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992); Kirsty Harris, More than Bombs and Bandages: Australian Army Nurses at Work in World War I (Newport: Big Sky Publishing, 2011); and Alice McConnell, Women in War: Lemnos–Gallipoli 1915 (Melbourne: Artek Productions, 2015).

1 Sister Rachael Pratt, Reveille, 1 August 1933.

2 Medical case notes, 14 December 1938; 19 January 1939, NAA: B73, H5789.

3 Medical case notes, 31 July 1919, ibid.

4 Medical case notes, 3 October, 30 November 1939, ibid.

5 Medical case notes, 20 October 1940, ibid.