The State Library of Victoria has put together a magnificent exhibition of posters, photographs, diaries and ephemera from WW1. Get along to see it if you can.
One of the features is a display regarding Nurse Alice Kitchen who served in Egypt (treating the wounded sent from Gallipoli and Lemnos), France and England.
Of her time in Egypt, Alice wrote famously:
"It is all too dreadful and every day we hear of someone we knew being killed or wounded."
The display includes her diary, medals and photographs. Well worth a visit.
As the AWM website story about Australia's WW1 nurses records on the situation in Egypt during the Gallipoli campaign:
"By the end of 1914, around 300 AANS nurses had left Australia for Egypt. On the long sea voyage, they were kept busy assisting with vaccinations and operations, and training male orderlies. The nurses were posted either to the 1st Australian General Hospital (1AGH), established in the grand Heliopolis Palace Hotel in Cairo, or to 2AGH in Mena House, a former royal hunting lodge. With the rapid influx of patients from Gallipoli in April 1915, the facilities were soon overcrowded, and equipment and supplies inadequate. Nursing staff worked around the clock. 1AGH took over a nearby amusement park, turning the ticket office into an operating theatre and the skating rink, scenic railway, and skeleton house into wards. Within three months it was operating as a 1,500-bed hospital. Some of the badly wounded were returned to Australia on hospital ships, accompanied by nurses."
Some of the WW1 posters displayed at the exhibition are worth seeing too:
Jim Claven
Secretary
Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee
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