‘A Humane and Intimate Administration’: The Red Cross’ World War Two Wounded, Missing and Prisoner of War Cards

Fiona Ross

Senior Archivist, University of Melbourne Archives

Private Rawson’s mother first contacted the Red Cross in early April 1942, six weeks after her son was captured by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore. For her, and thousands of other Australian mothers, fathers, wives, sisters and brothers, this began three and half years of longing and fear, and above all, silence. For the duration of the war, Mrs Rawson’s only news of her son’s fate were the snippets received and sent on to her by the Red Cross Bureau for Wounded, Missing and Prisoners of War.

In the Spring Street premises made available to the Red Cross by the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, volunteers received Mrs Rawson’s enquiry, made a file for her son and added a card to a rapidly growing system:

Surname: RAWSON

Rank: PTE.

Reg No. VX43216

Unit: 2/29th. Btn. H.Q. COY.

9/4/42 Enq. From Vic. – Unof. Msg. [unofficially missing] MALAYA

Over the next eighteen months they retrieved and updated the card as further news of Private Rawson was received:

19-8-42: Cas. List V.319 rep. Missing.

27-5-43: List AC 494 adv. Tokio cables interned Malai Camp.

21-6-43: Cas list V467 prev. rept. Missing now rpt. P.O.W.

10-9-43: List WC 13 adv. Card rec. Washington POW Jap. Hands.

28-10-43: List JB. 213 adv. Singapore Radio Allege POW.

Then the reports cease. Nothing more, for two years.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Private Rawson’s card is now the first one in box 45 of the archival records series ‘Missing, Wounded and Prisoner of War Enquiry Cards’ This series was transferred to the University of Melbourne Archives in 2016 as part of the Red Cross’ ‘Gift to the Nation’ – the records of its first one hundred years in Australia. Digitised copies of cards from World War Two are now available to researchers online.[1]

In an era before vision statements and key performance indicators, the Red Cross Enquiry Bureau expressed its ethos as a ‘Golden Rule’:

No definite information that would be of solace to relatives should be allowed to remain in the office over-night.

Speed and accuracy were the essence of this “humane and intimate administration” which during World War Two helped over 58,000 Australian families to learn the fate of loved ones displaced by the war.[2] The vast majority of these enquiries concerned AIF personnel. Typically families received missing, wounded, killed or captured notification from the armed services then turned to the Red Cross to learn more about their loved one’s fate. However the Red Cross also attempted to trace the whereabouts of civilians – both Australian and foreign citizens – living overseas who were caught up in the war in Europe or the Pacific.

Enquiry cards
Soldiers and civilians, Australian nationals and foreigners. In keeping with its charter of neutrality and its global focus, the Enquiry Bureau endeavoured to respond to all enquiries, although Australian armed services personnel accounted for over ninety percent of its activity. MISSING, WOUNDED AND PRISONER OF WAR ENQUIRY CARDS, Australian Red Cross Society, National Office, 2916.0049, University of Melbourne Archives

The index cards were the administrative cornerstone of the Bureau’s enquiry service.[3] For such a harrowing and solemn business, the cards are a marvel of clerical efficiency and precision. Entries are heavily abbreviated and the volunteer typists rarely missed a capital letter or full stop. There are no back-stories, no narrative, in most cases not even first names, just the barest facts about a missing person’s fate, ultimately summarised in one word at the top of each card; ‘repatriated’, ‘safe’, ‘recovered’, ‘liberated’, ‘located’, ‘missing’, ‘POW’, ‘deceased’.

Yet the staccato shorthand belies both the complexity and compassion of this wartime service.  Most of the Bureau volunteers were themselves next-of-kin of POWs who somehow managed to channel their anxiety into the myriad of clerical tasks which enabled information to flow between state, national and overseas Red Cross bureaux, searchers in military hospitals and the armed services. Cards, files, lists, letters and cables in the face of fearful waiting.

Bureaucracy and heartbreak often make for peculiar companions in the Red Cross archive. Within the Red Cross’ administrative file titled ‘Bureau 1943’ we find a few stray copies of letters to family members, laden with sympathy and sadness:

Dear Mrs Bould

We have, as you know, been making enquiries to try and obtain news of your son…and we have now had an unofficial report from a member of the Battalion who has returned to Australia.

His account of what happened when the Japanese attacked Kokoda toward the end of July is a sad one… According to our witness, Pte Bould was busy on a job, ahead of the Unit’s defence position, when he was hit by a bullet which killed him instantly. The witness spoke as though he had known your son well… and added: “He was a particularly well-liked chap and a game soldier”. This is a tribute of which any soldier might be very proud, and we trust that it may bring you some slight comfort in your distress.

Please believe that our heartfelt sympathy goes out to you and that we will continue to do our utmost to find further witnesses who may be able to confirm or deny what we have so far learned.[4]

Geneva Bureau
This glass lantern slide is of the Central Prisoners of War Agency, Geneva, Switzerland, c. 1940. We hope to unearth a photograph of the Melbourne Bureau in operation as the transfer of records from the Red Cross to the University of Melbourne Archives continues. Australian Red Cross National Office Photographs Series, 2016.0081.00004. University of Melbourne Archives

Only a few pages further into the same file, however, we read of the protracted battle of wills between the New South Wales Divisional Bureau and Melbourne headquarters over the design of Form B5, the Bureau’s message service form. From the Honorary Director of the Sydney Bureau:

I was astonished to read today that the Bureau Committee had decided on 27th May “that in any further printing of B.5 it be reduced to the same size as B6.”……. What astonishes me is not that Form B5 is considered needlessly large, but that anyone experienced in its utilisation could have been found to support the idea that no greater amount of space is required by the majority of senders for their sprawling handwriting and block lettering than is needed by us for our neatly type-written reproductions.

Indignant correspondence on this topic continues for several months in 1942 and 1943, with the Sydney office refusing to accept that their locally printed alternative should not prevail over Form B5.

Also from this file is evidence of the challenge for the Red Cross of building good relations with the armed services – crucial to the Bureau’s information gathering task – whilst maintaining its impartiality. More than once in 1943 Army Records threatened to withdraw cooperation with the Bureau when, in the Army’s opinion, the Bureau was too hasty in providing information to next of kin. From the Army:

It is not the policy of this Department to declare the death of a soldier as the result of hearsay information…

_ _ _ _ _ _ _

Rachel Buchanan, Curator of the Germaine Greer Archive at the University of Melbourne Archives, has written about the index cards Greer created whilst preparing to write The Female Eunuch in 1969. She describes Greer’s ‘anti-system’ use of cards to capture not only her research but also the ‘explosion of radical ideas’ which became The Female Eunuch. Cards – and ideas – rearranged, discarded, revised and expanded. “…they are evidence of speed, fervour, the reckless stunt. Energy still fizzes from them”. Greer’s index cards come in several colours. Some are typed and some are handwritten. There are languages other than English and annotations of outrage and humour. They occupy only half an archive box; so little for a work of such significance.[5]

Fifty-nine archive boxes each containing around one thousand cards
Fifty-nine archive boxes each containing around one thousand cards. MISSING, WOUNDED AND PRISONER OF WAR ENQUIRY CARDS, Australian Red Cross Society, National Office, 2916.0049, University of Melbourne Archives

What a contrast to these Red Cross Enquiry Cards. The sheer volume of them is hard to fathom; fifty-nine archive boxes each containing around one thousand cards, each card bearing witness to a family’s trauma and tragedy. They are uniform, ordered and monochrome. The lack of colour suits them. Emotions are supressed beneath precision and procedure. There is no nuance or commentary, just the cold, hard, abbreviated facts of war. Seventy years on, the sombre silence of these cards is a testament to the lives of those who went to war, and those who waited at home, longing for their return.

For Mrs Rawson, the silence about her son ended in October 1945 after the Red Cross volunteers updated her son’s card one more time:

Army Cas. 5231 adv. a/n [above named] died of disease whilst POW Siam Dysentry 31-10-43.

[1] University of Melbourne Archives Series 2016.0049: Missing, Wounded and Prisoner of War Enquiry Cards will be available online to researchers from May 2017. Further information, and a name-based search option is available from the University of Melbourne’s digitised items catalogue accessible from archives.unimelb.edu.au. Private Rawson’s card is item 2016.0049.44698.

[2] See the Red Cross’ own account of Bureau operations within item 2016.0054.00004: ‘Outline of War Service During World War II’, held by the University of Melbourne Archives.

[3] The Bureau also generated a file for each missing person, continuing the practice established by the Red Cross during World War One. Enquiry files from World War One are held by the Australian War Memorial. Red Cross Central Bureau missing person files from World War Two are no longer extant.

[4] This and following extracts are from item 2015.0033.00657 ‘Bureau 1943’, part of the Red Cross National Office Correspondence Series, held by the University of Melbourne Archives.

[5] Rachel Buchanan’s blog post: Mindswap: The Female Eunuch Index Cards, is accessible from http://blogs.unimelb.edu.au/archives/mindswap-the-female-eunuch-index-cards/

Unexpected journeys through POW records

Dr Seumas Spark

Dean of Arts Research Fellow, Monash University

My first encounter with the Australian Red Cross (ARC) archive was in 2012. The return home of Australian prisoners of war (POWs) during the Second World War interested me, and I wanted to write an article on the subject. From 1942 to 1945, the Allies exchanged prisoners with Germany and Italy. The exchanges were governed by articles in the Geneva Conventions, overseen by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), and resulted in the return of about 900 Australian POWs before the end of the war. I read hundreds of files at the North Melbourne office of the National Archives of Australia and began to piece together the story of these men. In so doing, I wondered if the ARC held relevant papers. A phone call established that it maintained an archive, and that its collection was open to the public. I made an appointment with the archivist, Moira Drew.

The archive was packed into a small room in the basement of the ARC office in North Melbourne. Moira told me that Melanie Oppenheimer had drawn on the collection in writing the official history of the ARC, and a historian friend told me that the late Hank Nelson, the scholar who drew the attention of Australians to the experiences of POWs, may have visited at some point. Otherwise there seemed to be few people in or beyond the ARC who knew of the archive. This was thrilling. I revelled in the possibility that I could be the first person to learn the secrets held in a tattered old document or to see faces peering out from a faded sepia photograph. Rarely do historians have the chance to delve into an archive that is all but unknown.

Stalag XX A, prisoners of war camp. Peeling vegetables. Visit of the delegate ICRC Dr. Descoeudres. Thorn, Poland, 1940, University of Melbourne Archives, Australian Red Cross – Photographs, 2016.0081.00052

Sitting alone in the crowded basement, surrounded by archive boxes and free to sift through precious relics, I thought of Stephen Poliakoff’s wonderful film ‘Shooting the Past’. The film tells of a time when people had the luxury of lingering in archives, unpicking mysteries slowly and carefully: knowledge for knowledge’s sake, rather than research for the next publication.

Over the next few months I spent long days at the ARC archive, researching the POW article and more. There were always tangents to explore and distractions to delight in. I learned of Sir John Nimmo (1909-1997), eminent barrister and judge. Nimmo worked with the Australian and international Red Cross during the Second World War and served the ARC in various capacities in the decades that followed. He believed in practical morality, in doing good rather than speaking of it, and he saw this manifested in the work of the Red Cross. His passion for the organisation and its principles remained undimmed through his long and remarkable life.

Some days my reading drifted to Rockingham, an ARC convalescent home for servicemen who had come home from the war burdened by mental and physical struggles. One reason for my interest in Rockingham was that the site on which it stood is near my mother’s home in the Melbourne suburb of Kew. When curiosity prompted me to go exploring, I found streets packed with swanky houses. While the buildings did not match those I had seen in photos, the street names were a nod to ARC history: Rockingham Street, Rockingham Close, and Newman-Morris Place. Was Newman-Morris Place named for Sir John or Sir Geoffrey? Both father and son were loyal servants of the ARC.

I was disappointed when I heard that the ARC archive was to be moved to a new home at the University of Melbourne. The ARC called the transfer a ‘gift to the nation’, which sounded like a euphemism to disguise cost cutting. Whether or not I was right about this I was wrong to be disappointed: the existence of the archive was not my secret to keep. At the university more researchers have access to the ARC archive, which is a good thing. If an Australian history postgraduate student asked me to suggest a thesis topic, I know where I would send him or her to find inspiration. There can be few archival collections in Australia in which so much remains to be discovered.

Civil internees with Red Cross care packages. Sanitorium Liebenau, Germany, c.1940, University of Melbourne Archives, Australian Red Cross – Photographs, 2016.0081.00023

The ARC archive has brought me much. I have found rich material for publications, some already written and some to be written. It brought me the pleasure of working with Moira. As with all the best archivists, her approach is to share rather than guard the treasures in her keeping. Moira introduced me to Bill Rudd, friend of the Red Cross and former POW. He is the only POW I have met. We shared tea and biscuits in his home and chatted about the war, truly a memorable experience. And there is another reason I think warmly of the ARC archive. It was through my visits to the ARC that I met my partner, Rhiannon.

The Red Cross Collection is open to all researchers and can be discovered through the UMA website and, once ordered, is accessed in the Reading Room, Baillieu Library, University of Melbourne.

All images are reproduced for study and research purposes only.

Plotting a course for object-based learning with exhibitions

Object-based learning classes where students engage directly with cultural materials may take many varied formats either in a class room, a collection store or an exhibition space. When I prepare the works of art from the Print Collection for a class in the Leigh Scott Room in the Baillieu Library, I often experience the unexpected problem of chairs. This utilitarian item is usually the first physical object students encounter in the room before they engage with the rare prints. With such capable students at the university, I will indicate the stack of chairs with a ‘please help yourself.’ This immediately raises a problem for students who ask, ‘where do I put it; which orientation does it face; how is it to be arranged? These are also the kinds of questions I have also asked myself in relation to the preparation of the university’s cultural collections. To avoid this vexing class challenge I have also laid out the chairs prior, only to have the students stand up amongst the chairs reverentially, being careful not to touch them. If the same chair were to be placed in say, a café, the student’s relationship with it might be quite different to that of the chair-of-the-cultural-institution. There are many suppositions to be read into ‘the problem of chairs’ example, but powerful for me is the influence of the physical environment, our preconceptions and those  of our peers, on our interaction with cultural objects.

 

Fortunately in exhibitions, students are able to move around in the space and interact with objects; therefore they are less likely to sag to the ground and are able to forego the ubiquitous class chair. Object-based learning with exhibitions is a powerful experience, offering an environment of evocative objects which have been carefully arranged into a context, ready for diverse responses and interpretations.

Students from such disparate disciplines as Astronomy in World History, Australian Art, Global Literature and Postcolonialism have all engaged with the latest exhibition in the Noel Shaw Gallery, Plotting the island: dreams, discovery and disaster. Asking an object a question, even a simple one, such as, ‘which orientation does it face?’ is a very effective means of revealing the secrets of its materials, purpose and history and hence how it speaks to our society.

After a tour of the exhibition to briefly hear key themes, the students from Global Literature and Postcolonialism broke into groups, looked at and discussed objects in relation to two very broad questions. One group looked at objects in terms of their authenticity, and this all depended on how they interpreted the term ‘authentic.’ The other group examined the objects to consider a narrative from another perspective; a narrative that was ‘missing’ from what was presented. They came up with very considered and thought-provoking observations.

An object which very obviously challenges ideas of authenticity is the book, My secret log boke. This volume claims to be the lost journal of Christopher Columbus found in a chest on the coast of Pembrokeshire 400 years after his death. The students immediately noted that the appearance of the book was odd, and looked deeper to see that the materials had been manipulated. The paper and writing on the cover did not ring true, nor did the sea shells that were glued on. The students then began to question whether the tone and expression of the language used were authentic to the era and stature of Columbus.

Yet the students grappled with other aspects of authenticity, almost shocked that an authoritative document like a map could contain information that was not absolutely accurate, such as a landmass that did not exist or a coastline that was incorrectly drawn. Or similarly, that a contemporary artist had changed the meaning of a historic portrait of Joseph Banks with the addition of villainous Big Bad Banksia Men. The accuracy of the information presented became a key approach to validity, but they came to recognise that authenticity is relevant to particular times in history and modes of thinking and there were no absolutes in its application.

The group investigating alternate narratives were drawn to the navigational instruments. To them these Western artefacts did not acknowledge the skilled reading of stars and navigation history of Indigenous peoples. The chronometer for example, represents a breakthrough in the development of Western navigation in the way it enables the calculation of longitude.  The students said that the development of Indigenous knowledge was not shown and that the objects, by their physicality, did not recognise the long oral and ephemeral expert traditions of non-Westerners.

Another object these students gravitated to was the scene depicting the massacre of members of the La Pérouse expedition. Jean-Francois de Galaup La Pérouse quite literally went missing in 1788 after his departure from Australia. Previously, in 1787, after stopping for water on Tutuila, Samoa, a party from the expedition were attacked and killed by the islanders.  The students thought this image implied the explanation of La Pérouse’s fate; that he had likewise been violently attacked in the Solomon Islands, the location of his ship’s wreck.  One student noticed the women in this etching, placed on the margins. The women’s role or even their nationality was not apparent; their presence had been rendered ambiguously in the narratives.

 

The skill of looking is fundamental to object-based learning. With my background in visual arts, I had to learn how to read a historic map; while they utilise precisely the same materials and technology as a more familiar print, the ideas they communicate are radically different. Object-based learning is also a lesson in looking and of not allowing what you see to fall within a frame of expectations and preconceptions.

 

Kerrianne Stone (Curator, Prints)

The AIF Malayan Nursing Scholarship

Professor Christina Twomey,

Monash University

Nurse Ooi Soh Im (left) and Nurse Alice Chia
Photograph of Alice Chia and Ooi Soh Im, 1947. AIF MALAYAN MEMORIAL NURSING SCHOLARSHIP. Australian Red Cross Society – National Office, 2016.0061.00052, University of Melbourne Archives

Alice Chia and Ooi Soh Im arrived in Australia in 1947, the first recipients of the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) Malayan Nursing Scholarship. Australian prisoners of war (POWs) from the 8th Division of the AIF devised the scholarship scheme in honour of the assistance given to them during the Second World War by Chinese people in Malaya and Singapore. In 2017, the nursing scholarship is still in operation. We can learn a great deal about the history of the scheme, successful applicants to it and the changing nature of Australia-Asia relationships by examining its records, which form part of the Australian Red Cross Society, National Office Collection at the University of Melbourne Archives.

Australian POWs were keen to honour ethnic Chinese people from Malaya and Singapore with a gesture that would benefit their community as a whole. Members of the 8th Division developed an abiding appreciation of the Chinese community for their support during the battle against Japan, and especially as a consequence of the risks they took to assist POWs during their captivity on Singapore. The scholarship, designed to ‘improve the lot of all Chinese and other Asiatics in Malaya’, would be limited to ‘Chinese and Chinese-Eurasian nurses who could speak English, as the Chinese were the community to whom gratitude was felt’.[1]

Connections with the Red Cross were present from the beginning of the scholarship scheme, with an offer of financial support and its facilities hosting meetings of the Scholarship Board. Although the scholarship was a private initiative of former POWs, their extensive links with government, the military and private charities ensured high-level state support. Former POWs subscribed £11,000 and the Red Cross donated £5000 from the unspent money it had raised within Australia during the war for POWs. In the longer term, the Scholarship Board recognised that the aging population of 8th Division members and former POWs meant that they would be unable to administer their scheme in perpetuity. In 1982 an agreement was made with the Australian Red Cross to take over responsibility for the scholarships.

Once Malaya achieved independence in 1957 and after uniting with Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore in 1963, local health authorities became increasingly wary of participating in a scheme that still bore some colonial overtones. Apart from the restrictive nature of the scheme to ethnic Chinese rather than all Malaysians or Singaporeans regardless of racial background, selection of the nurses remained in the hands of expatriates, rather than Malaysians and Singaporeans themselves. Consequently, by the early 1960s the scheme was in abeyance, for the want of cooperation of local authorities. No longer were the heads of Malaysian and Singaporean medical services expatriate British and Australians; they were university-educated people from the region itself.  In 1966, the Malaysian Red Cross wrote to the Scholarship Fund and made clear that: ‘The Malaysian government does not like to support any scheme whereby all benefits are to be conferred on a particular nationality. It prefers that the offer be made to Malaysians irrespective of race.’[2] By 1967, the Australian High Commissioner in Malaysia also refused to sit on the selection committee, in light of the sensitivity in Malaysia and Singapore to the restrictive nature of the scheme.

Participation in the scheme taught the former POWs who administered it about the changing political realities of contemporary Asia. The Melbourne-based Board was ultimately forced to alter its constitution in 1968 to allow nurses of any ethnicity to apply and handed over selection to the local authorities in order to keep its scheme alive. The Malaysian and Singaporean Health Ministries had firm views on appropriate candidates, training courses and postgraduate qualifications. With their cooperation, scholarship nurses were coming to Australia again by the 1970s. Survival of the scheme was given a further fillip in the late 1980s, when the Scholarship Board entered into an agreement with Curtin University of Technology and the Malaysian Ministry of Health.[3]

Initiatives like the AIF Malayan Nursing Scholarship led to ongoing connections with the Asian region, and a need to rethink some assumptions in the light of the colonial logic that had structured them. The former POWs who administered the Scholarship ultimately realised that their own preference for a particular ethnic group could no longer be imposed on the medical profession in independent, multi-racial, nation states. The scholarship attests to the active involvement of war veterans in general, and former POWs in particular, in promoting connections and relationships between Australia and Asia in the post-war period. The ambition to create a ‘novel’ form of war memorial, designed to train ethnic Chinese nurses, ultimately provided an education for the scheme’s administrators about the contemporary realities of a postcolonial region.

For a fuller account of the scholarship, please see Christina Twomey, ‘”A Novel Form of War Memorial”: the AIF Malayan Nursing Scholarship and Australia-Asia Relations’, History Australia, 2017.

[1] ‘History of Establishment of AIF Nursing Scholarship’ in ‘AIF Malayan Nursing Scholarship Minute Book’, AIF MALAYAN MEMORIAL NURSING SCHOLARSHIP (2016.0061). Australian Red Cross Society – National Office, University of Melbourne Archives

[2] AIF MALAYAN MEMORIAL NURSING SCHOLARSHIP (2016.0061). Australian Red Cross Society – National Office, University of Melbourne Archives

[3] D.W. Watts, Vice Chancellor, Curtin University to Sir R. Swartz, Chairman of the AIF Nursing Scholarship Board, 10 June 1987, AIF MALAYAN MEMORIAL NURSING SCHOLARSHIP (2016.0061). Australian Red Cross Society – National Office, University of Melbourne Archives

War and Peace: Stories of endeavour from the Australian Red Cross Collection

Chelsea Harris
Public Programs and Audience Engagement, University of Melbourne Archives

Australian Red Cross Cape Size 8 Years, Junior Red Cross, 2016.0051.00027

Within the University of Melbourne Archives’ 20 kilometres of records sits a relatively new acquisition, some 347 linear meters of records of the Australia Red Cross. Comprising 1,405 boxes across 36 series, these records relate to both the National Office as well as the Victorian Division (1914-2015) and include: Annual Reports and Financial Statements published by the National Office, Minutes of Annual General Meetings, Missing Prisoner of War cards, volumes of correspondence, newsletters and other publications, media releases and press clippings among other items. For much of the twentieth century the state Divisions of the Red Cross held primary responsibility for the delivery of Red Cross services, especially during peacetime, including blood transfusion services, tracing missing persons, hospital and convalescence, fundraising, disaster relief and a wide range of other community services.

Among the bureaucratic records of a large organisation there lie the small but selfless feats of ordinary men, and in this case more often women, in the face of overwhelmingly difficult circumstances. One such item comes in the form of a large leather book: the Influenza Temporary Hospitals Staffing Register. This register served as a bureaucratic tool to record the temporary hospitals established across Melbourne to cope with the city’s Influenza epidemic from January – March 1919, introduced to the country by large numbers of returning soldiers. Within its pages a long list of hospitals can be found, (Camberwell Temporary Hospital, Oakleigh Temporary, Prahran Temporary, St Vincent de Paul Orphanage, Sandringham Temporary, Studley Hall Kew) among which I recognise the name of my own suburb, Brunswick, which was staffed by 23 Voluntary Aid Detachments (VAD’s), trained nurses and volunteers. Among these women were several who “did not report for duty”, “declined to carry out instructions” and the case of one woman whose service was “withdrawn by mother”, perhaps because she was badly needed at home.

Accounts of the actual death toll differ, however most sources agree that around 10,000 people died in Australia during the Influenza Epidemic in 1919. In January, Victoria was declared infected and the state placed in quarantine with theatres and schools forced to close. Masked residents went about their daily business of shopping, attending church and using public transport while the New South Wales government closed the border with Victoria, prohibiting traffic between the states. The tiny cursive handwriting of the Influenza Temporary Hospitals Staffing Register’s author reveals somber details of quarantined houses, to which VADs and trained nurses were dispatched: “father came to office in a desperate way saying the doctor refused to go near the patients (his wife and two children)”, “father, mother and two children taken to the hospital – 4 of 5 children left in the care of a boy of 17 years”, “mother and four children ill, no food in the house, things in a deplorable condition”.

With their own health at risk, the VAD’s and others, including University medical students who assisted with the epidemic, showed tremendous fortitude, particularly those who had served at the front during the First World War. A Red Cross Record Knitting Booklet (New South Wales) represents another huge civilian effort coordinated by the Red Cross: to produce enough warm clothing for men and women serving at the front in the second world war. Within the booklet a wistful and well groomed man models a Waistcoat Muffler, an item that would have been knitted by some of the large numbers of women who became members of the Red Cross. Knitting was an activity that could be done alone or in groups (and not only by women) and this very useful task contributed to a staggering volume of garments put to good use in the days before synthetic fabrics.

Tucked in manila folders within the pale grey boxes of Junior Red Cross records are colourful booklets which served to educate children on healthy eating, providing basic first aid, how to knit their own Australian Red Cross Cape and even create their own library. Shaping productive, selfless and active citizens of the future was one of the primary aims of the Australian Junior Red Cross. Founded in New South Wales in August 1914, the organisation originally aimed at involving children in supporting recuperating soldiers. The first movements in Canada and Australia moved from a focus on improving health, preventing disease and mitigating suffering, to one on personal health, citizenship and service, and international friendship. The Junior Red Cross Health Game (1947) with its simply drawn figures brushing their teeth, drinking their recommended 3 cups of milk a day and breathing through their nose (!) is one such instructive example of this focus on health, particularly after a period of wartime deprivations. Similarly, a Junior Red Cross First Aid booklet full of quirky illustrations shows children how to help heal a toothache, deal with a burn or stem the flow of a bloody nose.

First Aid Booklet, Junior Red Cross, University of Melbourne Archives, Publications – Junior Red Cross and Australian Red Cross Youth, 2016.0051.00040

The thread that runs through and connects these stories within the Australian Red Cross Collection is one of community-minded individual endeavour; whether knitting socks for the front, playing a game of good health, or risking your own to care for others infected with a deadly virus. The bureaucratic records speak to the massive scale of its operations as one of the oldest and most respected voluntary organisations in Australia, yet for me the items that highlight individual feats, quietly undertaken, speak the loudest as to the humanity that the Red Cross seeks to celebrate.

The Collection is open to all researchers and can be accessed through our website.

All images are reproduced for study and research purposes only.

Many thanks to my colleague Stella Marr for her assistance in sourcing content for this blog post and her insights and knowledge into this collection.

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