Four Australian Nurses before their departure to serve in Spain

Here we see four Australian nurses before they left for Spain in October 1936. Agnes Hodgson and May McFarlane are standing; Una Wilson is in the middle; and Mary Lowson is at the front.  

The first meeting called by a concerned group of friends and associates to discuss the political significance of the generals’ uprising in Spain agreed that their most achievable, finance-wise, and practical contribution --as previously had happened in World War One -- was to send a team of Australian trained nurses to assist in battlefield medicine. The Spanish Relief Committee that was set up from the same initial gathering advertised and selected four trained and experienced nurses to go to Spain and support the Spanish government army.  

The departure of the nursing volunteers attracted a good deal of press coverage. The four photogenic young women were apparently unfazed by the prospect of risking their own lives in order to care for the wounded in a country about which they knew very little. There were questions asked in parliament about how to prevent their obtaining passports but since they were non-combatants and with return fares guaranteed, their travel was not illegal. 

Mary Lowson, the designated leader, was small in stature, energetic and forthright, and at 41 years of age was the oldest of the group. She had grown up on a remote farm in Tasmania with plenty of hard work but little formal schooling. After training at Hobart General Hospital, she moved to Sydney. It was at a Communist Party meeting there that Mary first heard about the Spanish Civil War and the call for trained local nurses willing to serve in Spanish battlefields. In Spain, Mary avoided theatre nursing and patient care for an involvement in the management of foreign medical services.  

May MacFarlane, twenty-seven years of age and the youngest of the four, was a triple-certificated nurse. She had trained in midwifery at Crown Street women’s hospital Sydney delivering babies from the slums of the inner city where families lived in desperate poverty and unemployment was the norm. Along with Una Wilson, she was attached to an international surgical team providing urgent frontline surgery for those wounded in battle.  29 years of age and a statuesque blond from New Zealand, Wilson 

was a highly qualified nursing specialist in surgery and theatre management. The three nurses met while working at Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney where the pay was low and the working conditions very poor. When Mary announced that she was volunteering for Spain, the other two went with her.  

The last to join up was Agnes Hodgson from Melbourne. A registered nurse with a speciality in theatre and paediatrics, she already had travelled widely and spoke fluent Italian learnt while she was nursing in a clinic in Rome. When she heard the news about the possibility of volunteering for Spain, she immediately applied and was accepted. In Barcelona, her Italian fluency was suspect and led to her assignment to Aragon, where she served in a Spanish mobile medical unit on the Aragon front.