South Australian Women's Responses to the First World War

Kathleen Waterhouse, the daughter of a mounted policeman, was just beginning to train as a nurse at the Adelaide Children's Hospital at the outbreak of the First World War. She enlisted as soon as she finished in 1917 and was posted to Kolaphur in India where the patients were predominantly British soldiers. Miss Waterhouse describes the voyage on the hospital ship and the unusual conditions under which the nurses worked in India. She continued to serve there after the Armistice, returning to Adelaide on New Year's Day in 1920. She then did her midwifery training and in 1923 left Australia again to travel extensively in North America and Europe. The interview can be regarded as being in two sections, with the second exploring in further detail some of the topics introduced in the first.