Nurses’ Badge

The Spanish Relief Committee that had decided to send a group of nurses to Spain named it the Australian-Spanish Nursing Unit. It also had a distinctive oval aluminium badge designed to display a Red Cross at the centre within an etched outline of Australia. The whole was encircled by the unit’s name. The same insignia was stitched on the nurses’ arm bands.  

Before departure, it was agreed that the nurses’ uniforms for service in Spain would be exactly as those worn in Australian hospitals, including with the starched veil. The nurses’ additional kit, however, included heavy boots and jodhpurs. Once in Spain, the pressure of the work in mobile theatre settings meant that the veils and starched uniforms were impossible. In any event, by the end of the first year the personal luggage of all four nurses had been lost or misplaced in the often-chaotic process of packing and unpacking the trucks as the mobile medical transport fleet kept up with the pace of the battlefield action.