Evelyn Davies
‘We are enjoying life on this boat although still in the [Mudros] Harbour, the food is just lovely ... it will spoil us for rough living once more but we’ll settle down I suppose ... anyhow we can’t have worse times than we had the first two months on Lemnos. Still I never regret going there, it must be awfully ‘flat’ to settle in England and live a humdrum life, one could do that any time.’
–Evelyn Davies, 15 Jan. 1916
Born in 1884 in Healesville, Victoria, Evelyn Davies was 31 years old when she enlisted in the AIF on 5 May 1915. She had trained for three years at Geelong Hospital and had been a sister at the Infectious Diseases Hospital in Fairfield for two years before enlisting. Assigned to No. 3 Australian General Hospital (3AGH), she boarded SS Mooltan on 18 May, bound for England.
Evelyn served with 3AGH on Lemnos until the unit left in January 1916. Her frank letters home suggest an observant and curious-minded woman who thrived on Lemnos, despite the physical and psychological challenges. ‘Am not enamoured of tent life, any old place will do me after this, still it must be healthy we all look and feel so well.’ She paints an evocative picture of her experience on the island, which she also recorded with her camera.
After leaving Lemnos, Evelyn served in 3AGH in Abbassia, Egypt, until July 1916. She then joined the Indian Medical Service, and in pre-Partition Britian-administered India, she was posted to Peshawar (in present-day Pakistan) and then to the Victory War Hospital in Bombay (Mumbai). Staff Nurse Davies was promoted to sister in May 1917, and in July she boarded the Mooltan for England. She initially served in Southall at No. 2 Australian Auxiliary Hospital; she joined various other units in France during 1918.
Evelyn was repatriated in May 1919. Healesville welcomed her home with a huge community celebration. Discharged from the AIF on 23 January 1920, she had moved to New Zealand by August 1923.
Evelyn died in New Zealand in 1965, aged 81.
