Under such circumstances, it is not surprising that in 1870, just two and a half years after Osburn and the nurses arrived in Sydney, religious tensions resulted in a public inquiry. ^[33] The inquiry was not a small matter. Osburn was correct in judging it had the potential to destroy her work and result in her dismissal. Government-supported charities such as the Sydney Infirmary needed to demonstrate that they were unsectarian. If the charges against Osburn were proven, the government could be effectively accused of supporting sectarian practices. The inquiry was chaired by the highly respected clergyman, Alfred Stephen, and reported extensively in the papers. It took evidence for six weeks and investigated eighteen allegations made over almost one year by the Evangelical newspaper, the Protestant Standard . The allegations focused on favouritism by Lucy Osburn towards the hiring and treatment of Catholic staff and of alleged anti-Protestant activities, most notably an order to burn some Bibles. ^[34] The Protestant Standard’s call for an inquiry was given greater resonance by being in the name of ‘religious freedom’. ^[35]

The seriousness of the inquiry and the mutual suspicion and fear fuelled by religious conflict is well illustrated in a letter from Lucy Osburn to Florence Nightingale, written on 7 September 1870. ^[36] Lucy Osburn wrote that she initially dismissed the matter as yet another attempt at trouble-making by her staff: ‘Blundell [one of the English Sisters] & the [Infirmary] Chaplain had written the statements [for the Protestant Standard] I knew’. She made clear her disdain for the press: ‘I looked upon the papers much in the same light as one looks upon mosquitoes on a hot day annoying but beneath notice’. She was to learn, however, that some mosquitoes carry a deadly bite. So too could those she considered beneath her. She had grown up in a world with people sharply delineated by status and class. Her world had taught her that as a Christian she was above a Jew; as an English daughter of a wine merchant, she was above publicans and colonial merchants; as a liberal she was above a radical; and as a ‘lady’ belonging to the Church of England, she was above vulgar dissenters. Then her fate, and the fate of nursing at Sydney Infirmary and all it involved, was in the hands of those very people. Her prejudices were clear in her descriptions, without naming them, of the inquiry members. Joseph Raphael dismissed as ‘A violent loud spoken Jew’; another simply categorised as ‘a retired publican’ and William Alderson, the protectionist and wealthy employer, dismissed as ‘a leather merchant goodnatured [sic] & ignorant & always on the side  of  the  people  against  the authorities’. ^[37] Then there was the man Osburn considered ‘worst of all a sour-faced bigoted, harsh cruel-looking Presbyterian minister who appeared all the time as if he w[oul]d. like to flay me before burning me’, Robert Lewers. ^[38] Osburn believed that Lewers had been deliberately elected Secretary to the Infirmary Board ‘by the Orange clubs … to persecute me’. ^[39] Osburn did not view all the nine members of the inquiry as enemies, some she thought were indifferent and a few ‘most sincere friends’. ^[40]

In her letter to Nightingale about the inquiry, Osburn ‘tried to laugh at the thing as an absurd farce but as I saw all my work of 3 years destroyed by it my laughing was often near to crying’. ^[41] She had previously faced dismissal when members of the Nightingale Fund heard that she had written an indiscreet, gossipy letter about her conversations alone with the convalescent and handsome young Prince Alfred. Now for the second time in two years she faced disgrace, partly through her own actions. ^[42]

Although the inquiry was so serious, Osburn found it hard not to be contemptuous of the proceedings when, as she wrote, ‘I was called in myself … the first thing I was treated to, [was] a fight between the Chairman & the Jew’. ^[43] She tried to explain why she had ordered Bibles to be burnt. The Chaplain had told her about old papers and books which he had found in one of the underground rooms of the Nightingale Wing, and that he had had the intact ones cleaned. He suggested that the rest, including portions of Bibles, be put in a box and ‘must be destroyed as they were full of vermin’. ^[44] The justification for, and the effectiveness of, the new Nightingale nurses were their moral purity and physical cleanliness. As the embodiment of the new, cleaner Nightingale nurse, Osburn fought a never-ending fight against vermin in the badly built, decaying old building that housed the patients. She had slept in the building her first night in Sydney, when as she wrote, she ‘never closed my eyes’, the bugs were in such numbers ‘that I dare[d] not’. ^[45] She had described the paper on her bedroom wall moving with the numbers of bugs scuttling behind it. The only vermin-free building on the site was the freestanding Nightingale Wing, completed some months after she arrived, and home to her and the female staff. Her statement to Nightingale was surely a major understatement: ‘I was horrified at the thought of bugs in the new house’. ^[46]

She knew the religious politics of the day; her father had published a book about his fear of insidious Catholic influences. ^[47] It is improbable that as a child she had not learnt about Protestant martyrs who died in agony for printing and distributing bibles. It is equally likely that she knew that burning as opposed to burying books had a historic, symbolic horror. Most of those who gave evidence at the inquiry, including the Yardman asked to burn the material, the Chaplain and the Superintendent of the hospital all revealed their horror at burning rather than burying religious texts. ^[48] Yet, as she wrote, ‘I told the yardman to burn the rest although the Chaplain had said torn spoilt portions of the Bible were among them’. She added that these portions were ‘so full of bugs’ but she must have known that was besides the point. ^[49] Why burn and not bury? She could only respond by complaining that her order to the yardman ‘has now been magnified into a systematic & determined burning of Bibles on my part’. ^[50] Lucy Osburn had acted impulsively and thoughtlessly, as she would too many times, underestimating the reaction of others and the virulence of religious fears and suspicion.

In her letter to Nightingale she was determined to rise above the nuisance, the mosquito bites of the press, the inquiry and the sectarian turmoil she had created, so her final comments stressed the farcical aspect of the inquiry. When they were hearing her evidence, she wrote, a dispute occurred between Father M. Dwyer and the Reverend Lewers: ‘something turned up wh[ich]. set the R[oman]. Cath[olic]. priest on to the Presbyterian minister & the bickering fighting sparring & temper shown were quite amusing, that about ended the séance nobody c[oul]d. calm down after the excitement to ask anything – so away I went’. ^[51]

Away she went but the cause of reformed nursing, and thus effective health care and a redefined occupation for women, was irrevocably tarnished with sectarian suspicion. Eventually the inquiry vindicated her: ‘there has been no sectarian predilections manifested by the Lady Superintendent to affect the interests of the Institution’. ^[52] The Protestant Standard consequently rejected the process as reflecting the ‘very essence of Popery’. ^[53] The issues therefore lingered on and were partly resurrected in the 1873–4 Commission into Public Charities whose first report was on the Sydney Infirmary, and which again vindicated Osburn. ^[54] The issue again died down but simmered beneath the surface.

The sectarian passions evidenced during the inquiry are revealed by the stereotypical images that each side evoked. Osburn tried to keep her letter to Nightingale light but still her opponents appeared to her as in a nightmare of religious bigotry, with medieval images of flaying and burning. ^[55] In general, especially when writing to the august Florence Nightingale, Osburn’s supporters were more moderate but still blamed evangelical nastiness. Judge William Windeyer, who was a less than impartial chair of the 1873–4 Commission into Public Charities which inquired into Osburn’s role at the Sydney Infirmary, informed Nightingale that Osburn’s opponents were a ‘clique of ignorant fanatics’. ^[56] Henry Bonham Carter quickly passed on the opinion of his wife’s cousin, Elizabeth [Macarthur-] Onslow, who wrote that Osburn’s problems came  from  ‘ill  natured  attacks  of  the  evangelical  party’. ^[57]

The Freeman’s Journal , a Catholic paper, drew upon images of wronged, defenceless womanhood:

The victim is a lady – unmarried - and as far as we know without any other kind of protection from ruffianism than her sweet life and virtues afford. She can invoke no marital or fraternal horsewhip to vindicate … has no support save that of a good generous public sympathy with a brave gentle life - and that feeling of scorn of libelers of women. As Catholics we can admire virtue wherever it is to be found, and as men we abominate the people who slander women. ^[58]

One can almost hear the background violins and imagine the reporter’s regret that Osburn was not also a poor Irish mother. Such writing, while typical of the Freeman’s Journal, did Osburn few favours in her attempts to establish a public role for employed, middle-class women.

Neither Osburn nor her supporters, however, could match her opponents for hyperbole. Religious conflict, although played out in a remote Australian colony in 1870, relied on emotional images drawn largely from medieval Europe. The Protestant Standard and Sydney Punch lead the religious charge against Lucy Osburn. There were a number of stock phrases used when describing Osburn and her nurses. The nurses’ home was the ‘Nightingale nunnery’; Osburn was the ‘lady Abbess’; her policies were that of ‘High Churchism and semi Popery’ and the nursing students were referred to as ‘novitiates’. ^[59] Osburn was criticised as ‘aping the dress style and manners’ of a head of a convent. ^[60] A nurse in uniform was described as being ‘in all the splendour of the Gamp nunnery livery’ and the nurses as living in a ‘Misses Gamp nunnery’. ^[61] The latter phrases were wonderfully economical insults inferring that the nurses were actually like Charles Dickens’s stereotype of the pre-Nightingale nurse, Sairey Gamp, but dressed as nuns. The Sydney Punch claimed that the Nightingale wing had twenty rooms and was solely for four British nurses’ accommodation. ^[62] In reality there were six British nurses and the Nightingale wing accommodated all the other female staff as well as Osburn and her team. There was particular stress on the youthfulness of the nursing students with the Sydney Punch recommending that the Infirmary should ‘return each silly would-be Nightingale to her mother, with a birch rod as a present’. ^[63] The following year it described Sydney Infirmary: ‘a seminary of empty-headed girls … so called “probationers” … accepts as novitiates hysterical chits of eighteen, and inducts them under the specious film of maudlin sentimentality into a region in which indecency and pruriency may sate an unhealthy appetite’. ^[64] When the above was written, Osburn’s Nurses’ Register indicates that only one probationer entered when she was eighteen years old, and the entry age of the rest ranged from nineteen to thirty-eight years old. ^[65]

The opposition to Osburn was not just posed in terms of individual abuse but also of national pride and the defense of traditional Protestant values. The issue quickly transcended parochial issues such as nursing, patient care or women’s work. Osburn’s opponents, especially the Scottish Haldane Turriff, one of the Nightingale-trained Sisters who had accompanied Osburn to Sydney, defined themselves as stout-hearted defenders of Protestant independence against convent discipline and Catholic submission. The Scottish theme was picked up in the colonial parliament by another Scot, David Buchanan, a firebrand whose invective matched that of Joseph Raphael. Buchanan was reported as claiming, in one of his famed tirades, that the issue was religious liberty, the same issue that had caused the ‘whole covenanting war in Scotland’. He warned ‘when Scotland rose up’, other nations had better beware.Osburn was guilty, he accused, of ‘vulgar, insolent tyranny … foul and gross tyranny’. ^[66]

How easy it was to exploit religious emotions was revealed by the actions of another of the Nightingale-trained British Sisters, the English Annie Miller, who accused Osburn of not allowing her to attend her Congregational church. Annie Miller’s complaint too became an issue of religious liberty and was raised in the colonial parliament and in the press. ^[67] Miller’s case was finally discredited at the 1870 inquiry by her own minister and by the claim that it was she, not Osburn, who had placed a crucifix in one of the hospital’s public rooms. ^[68] The extent to which religious issues were management issues is also revealed by Osburn’s insistence that all the Sisters and Nurses attend church service in the Infirmary’s Boardroom on Sunday mornings rather than go to their own churches. Osburn was reported as stating the reason was that if they did go to church on Sunday mornings she would not know ‘when I should see their faces again’. ^[69]

Nightingale nursing with its emphasis on cleanliness, working from a vocation, and creating a female community, was a new concept in the colony. Religion complicated almost every attempt of Osburn to establish a stable foundation for the new nursing. How difficult any one issue could be is illustrated by the problems Osburn encountered over what to call her staff and herself. At both the 1870 inquiry and the 1873 Public Commission, there were objections to the ‘Head Nurses’, as the objectors called them, being called ‘Sisters’. Although the title Sister was traditionally used in a number of English hospitals, many people in Sydney assumed it meant membership of a religious order. Osburn made it worse by using the Sisters’ Christian names, for example, Sister Mary or Sister Annie, a practice that reminded her critics of convents. Then there was the vexed problem of Osburn’s title. Nightingale fussed over trivial details regarding Osburn’s coming to Australia and, for example, spent an enormous amount of energy deciding what books to present to each nurse, but she left important details to chance. ^[70] One of these details was Osburn’s title—Nightingale referred to both Matron and Lady Superintendent. When Osburn arrived in Sydney, she discovered practical objections to both titles. ^[71] So she unwisely adopted the title common to heads of religious sisterhoods, that of ‘Lady Superior’. Osburn’s title became a matter of political bickering so that in 1870 a question and answer in the Legislative Assembly referred to her as ‘the Head Nurse’, ‘the Superintending Nurse’, and ‘the Lady Superintendent’. ^[72] Osburn’s critics, such as the Protestant Standard , alleged that she also insisted on being called ‘Your Ladyship’. This was denied and was probably a corruption of the habit of some on her staff to refer to her as ‘the Lady’. ^[73] Eventually the virulence of opposition, and presumably Nightingale’s warning, caused Osburn to abandon the title Lady Superior. She claimed indifference and that she then called herself by no title other than ‘the nurse from England’. ^[74] Osburn’s successors, less able to demand such high status, were called ‘Matron’.

The impact of religious conflict on the attempt to reform the health care system of the colony by provided trained nursing, however, went far beyond short-term squabbles about titles. Two longer-term influences were on recruitment and management style. The controversy, and the belief that Osburn favoured Catholics, not surprisingly appears to have adversely affected recruitment especially of those stalwarts of Sydney philanthropy, Evangelical women. ^[75] No members of Sydney’s leading Evangelical families put themselves forward to be trained by Lucy Osburn as a Sister. This lack of such committed, energetic women was a major loss for modern nursing’s foundation years.

The issue of management style is more complex and needs to be shorn of the emotionalism and bigotry that motivated Osburn’s opponents. It was with some justice that the Protestant Standard described Osburn as one who ‘loves convent style, convent look, convent discipline and convent subserviency’. ^[76] The subsequent management style of ‘Nightingale’ nursing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was quite unusual in terms of labour relations. It was a style that leaves historians so uncomfortable that even general surveys of women’s and labour history can ignore nurses, one of the largest categories of women workers. ^[77] Nursing’s management style owed much to domestic service but was justified by the need for a vocation. It was a highly personal style which could lead both to the warm memories many nurses have of the Nurses’ Homes and to the endemic bullying which is a major problem in contemporary Australian nursing. ^[78] One example of just how different nursing was to other forms of work is revealed when we read that it was the duty of the night nurses at the end of their shift at Wollongong Hospital in the 1930s to report to the Matron while she was still in bed—‘the last nurse had to prepare her bath’. ^[79] Similarly, the anxiety expressed even in the 1960s that Nurses’ Homes resulted in ‘a convent-like existence’ can be too easily dismissed as mere homophobia or Protestant angst. ^[80] It may also have been an aspect of the enduring legacy of Nightingale-style nursing, and the religious prejudices of its founder in the Australian colonies, Lucy Osburn.