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Of Interest: This print is dedicated to all Australian nurses
who served their country in theaters of war, especially those nurses
who lost their lives in the line of duty. Half the profits from the
sale of these prints will be forwarded to the Nurses War Memorial Fund.
The print depicts not the nurses duties, but rather their environment
and locals in which they were to serve. It is intended to be suggestive,
rather than a literal representation.
It begins with Florence Nightingale, known as the "Lady with the
lamp", the driving force behind the establishment of modern military
nursing practices. Her lamp symbolically guides generations of nurses
toward future conflicts.
In the case of Australia that particular beginning was the Boer War
of 1899, shown in the upper left of the painting. It then filters down
to the Gallipoli landings of World War I, into Egypt and the tent conditions
in which they lived on Lemnos Island through to the ruination of France
and the Western Front.
In turn the scene crosses to the lower centre and right depicting two
of the more infamous incidents of World War II. The torpedoing of the
hospital ship "Centaur" and it's sole surviving nurse, Sr.
Ellen Savage, shown on a raft, tending to the injured survivors despite
serious injuries to herself.
The other incident shown is the murder of 21 shipwrecked nurses on
the shore of Banka Island near Sumatra. Although wounded, Sr. Vivian
Bullwinkel alone survived and along with fellow nurses, was to suffer
3 1/2 years in a Japanese prison camp.
The story the proceeds up to the right hand side to Korea, Vietnam
and on to the burning oil derricks of the Gulf War, where our nurses
were to serve under the authority of the United Nations and for which
the have continued to serve to the present day.
Combat is not depicted, being irrelevant to a nurses duty; it is instead
symbolized by the black hole into which the doomed "Centaur"
is about to plunge, flanked by the crumbling ruins of France on the
side, to the fall of Singapore and the ruins of Hiroshima on the other.
From the abyss of war emerge the sick and the wounded into the arms
of the ever devoted Nurse.
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