Objects of Substance – OGA Honour Board

Another complicating factor was that Australian women were also known to have enlisted in the forces or services overseas. One such Grammar girl was Dr Nellie Bourne (1896). Because female doctors were not permitted to enlist in the Australian Defence Forc e, Eleanor ‘Nellie’ Bourne, the first Queensland-born doctor to practice medicine in Queensland, paid for her passage to Britain where she obtained a position in the Endell Street Military Hospital, in London, until the end of the World War I.

1900 Eleanor Bourne (1896)

By 1946, the OGA committee felt it had gathered enough names to warrant erecting an Honour Board at the School. Jessie Stephenson, (President of the OGA during the Jubilee Year) emphasised that it was the Jubilee of the Association and so she proposed that the Honour Board would be their presentation to the School. It would be unveiled on the annual Old Girls Day — Saturday 7 May 1949 — to be renamed Jubilee Day.