Grammar Gazette- Issue 1, 2015

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Third Australian General Hospital Staff with old girl Grace Wilson 1925 (centre).

community as a whole. Indeed, our own school magazine records the contribution Grammar girls made to the BGS War Memorial Library: We still give willingly each week to the fund for establishing a Memorial Library in honour of the old Grammar School boys who fell at the front … for it is only right that the deeds of our fallen heroes should live in the memory of succeeding generations. Women have largely been ignored in the ANZAC narrative despite the fact that they played a highly significant role. According to historian Susanna de Vries (2013), old girl Grace Wilson (1899) was one of two women who ’stand out in the history of World War One’ as ’dedicated nurses and inspiring leaders’. Grace Wilson (1879-1957), whose career as a nurse at Gallipoli was dramatically recreated in the recent ABC mini-series ANZAC Girls , was Principal Matron of No.3 Australian General Hospital serving in Egypt, Lemnos and France. During the war, she was mentioned in dispatches five times, awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal, the Florence Nightingale Medal and was appointed a Commander (Military) of the Order of the British Empire for army nursing service in France. She was the first woman to receive life membership of the Returned Services League. The culmination of our visit to the Gallipoli peninsula was a formal commemoration for those who died there. Each girl found the grave of her chosen soldier and laid a poppy in memory of him. As a group we laid a wreath on behalf of Brisbane Girls Grammar School for all of the Australians and Turks who died at Gallipoli.

Gallipoli is to first understand the campaign itself, where it was, and why it was strategically so important for the allies to gain access to the Dardanelles. Importantly, we also examine, and to some extent challenge, the mythology that has grown around Gallipoli, seeking to understand why this campaign has become so central to our national identity. Preparations for the trip began in early 2014 in the form of lunch time meetings with students and information evenings with parents and their daughters. These sessions dealt not only with the practicalities of travelling to a foreign country but have also sought to provide a cultural and historical context for the places we visited. We wanted our students to approach the various historical sites with some pre- existing understanding so that their experience was a meaningful one. To personalise their experience we asked our girls to ‘adopt a soldier’ from Gallipoli, to find out all they could about this man, where he came from, how old he was and when and how he died. While there are a number of fantastic online databases such as the World War One Pictorial Honour Roll, Trove and the Commonwealth Graves Commission, we also paid a visit to Brisbane Grammar School’s own War Memorial Library which was built to honour the School’s old boys who fought, and in many cases died, in the war. Of the 370 boys from Brisbane Grammar School who fought at Gallipoli, twenty-seven students and two Masters died — six of these on the first day, 25 April. Mr Chris Price, Head of the History Department at Brisbane Grammar School, shared his detailed knowledge of the School’s involvement in World War One with our students in a visit last year to the War Memorial Library. While there, our girls were able to study the various artifacts such as diaries, items of clothing and letters that the library holds, bringing home to them in a very poignant way the reality of war and the effects that it must have had on the Grammar

REFERENCES de Vries, S (2013). Australian Heroines of World War One . Chapel Hill, Australia: Pirgos Press.

Editorial (December 1921). BGGS School Magazine. 2. Brisbane, Australia.

AUTUMN ISSUE / 2015