Connection to the Hunter Valley – Sister Ellen Mulheron graduated from Newastle Hospital in 1915.

Service – Australian  Army Nursing Service (AANS).  Nellie is not on the Nominal Roll of the First AIF and there is no record of her military service in the National Archives of Australia.  However she is known to have joined the AANS in 1917 (see references).

Service location – served at the Sydney Quarantine Station during the epidemic of pneumonic influenza in 1919.

Nellie Mulheron was the aunt of Ellen Savage, the only nurse to survive when the hospital ship Centaur was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Second World War.  Ellen is said to have been inspired to join the army nursing service by her aunt’s experiences in the First World War.

        References

Australasian Nurses’ Journal, Vol XIII No 1 January 1915, p.14, Vol XIV No 4 April 1916, p.151

Audrey Armitage, A Golden Age of Nursing, Royal Newcastle Hospital Graduate Nurses’ Association Book Committee, Newcastle, 1991, pp.96 & 195

Sydney Morning Herald, 24 December 1914, p.8, retrieved from Trove 3 September 2011; 7 December 1918, p.13 retrieved from Trove 25 July 2010

Notes provided by Betty Capper, author of Profile Ellen Savage: A George Medal for Sister Savage, Heroine of the “Centaur”, unpublished monograph, 1999

Do you know more?

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© Christine Bramble 2013