Table of Contents
There was only one woman among the 17 students who graduated in medicine in 1938 and became resident medical officers in the Adelaide Hospital in February 1939. All of us, except for her and two of the men, enlisted in the Army or Air Force when they finished their year of residence. I was not a pacifist and I thought that there was no alternative to war with Hitler. With hindsight, I realise that I would have faced serious problems of conscience if I had been in any service other than the medical corps and had had to kill another person. Of course, I would not have been alone in that, it was just so much easier to serve as a medico.
As early as December 1939, it had been decided that Australian troops would initially be sent to Palestine, and the advance party had arrived there in early January. I knew that a number of unusual infectious diseases that occurred in tropical and semitropical countries were found in the Middle East, and I wanted to have the chance to be something other than a regimental or field ambulance medical officer. In 1939, resident medical officers at Adelaide Hospital received board and lodging and about £5 a week, plus a bonus of £200 if they stayed on for the full year, i.e., until February. I used the bonus to go to Sydney and study for the Diploma of Tropical Medicine (DTM), a three-month course available in Australia only at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at the University of Sydney. I stayed at St Andrew's College, which was on the University grounds. My best friend there was Edgar Mercer, who had been at Adelaide High School a couple of years ahead of me. He had a flat in King's Cross and we used to go there most weekends. Coming from Adelaide, which has hot but dry nights, I found Sydney's humid nights during February hard to take. I worked for three months at the School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine, where, amongst others, I met Ted (later Sir Edward) Ford, who was lecturer in bacteriology. He had been a close personal friend and admirer of my mentor in physical anthropology, Wood Jones, and Ted and I were later to work as colleagues in malaria control in New Guinea. While there I also played for the Sydney University hockey team. Altogether, I greatly enjoyed my time there. Returning home to Adelaide in April, I finally enlisted as a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps on 9 May, 1940, commencing duty with the 2/6 Australian Field Ambulance on 12 June, 1940.