Florence Elizabeth (Betha) McMillan
‘The wounded men were being brought in motor ambulances from a mine sweeper & put at my feet. I could weep hysterically now it is over. I got them in the shade & rushed to my tent for my cup & pillow & two sheets a sister had given me out of her 6 she had brought with her – & got them tea from our billy tea & tried to keep the flies from their wounds.’
– Betha McMillan, letter, 23 Aug. 1915.
Born in Sydney in 1882, Florence Elizabeth (Betha) McMillan was an adventurous woman who travelled and lived overseas before the war. She had studied art in Paris at the turn of the century, and had visited the USA, Ireland and South Africa. She was 33 when she arrived on Lemnos in August 1915 to serve with No. 3 Australian General Hospital (3AGH).
Betha began her training in 1909 at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, a hospital to which returned after the war. She qualified as a sister in 1914, and when war broke out was among the first Australian nurses to serve overseas. She served aboard the Australian hospital ship Grantala, which supported the Australian Naval and Military Expeditionary Force in German New Guinea between September and December 1914.
On Lemnos, Betha managed an officer’s ward in a 3AGH open marquee. Before the medical equipment arrived, she knelt beside patients on mattresses on the ground for hours at a time, and she and other medical staff raided their kits to improvise supplies. Staff Nurse Anne Donnell described her as ‘the essence of Sweetness and lack[ing] any red tape’.
When she was not nursing, Betha spent time with the soldiers on Lemnos, taking trips in boats on the harbour and attending or hosting afternoon teas. She knew these social engagements were important for morale. While noting how busy this emotional labour kept her, she considered it ‘a wonderful honour to be allowed to have the chance of cheering these men or just being a listener to their trials or scowls’.
Betha left Lemnos in January 1916, going on to serve in Egypt, England and on the Western Front. After the war and before being repatriated, she trained in London at the Babies of the Empire Society in 1919, in Truby King’s Plunket Motherhood Method. Later that year, she returned to Sydney civilian life and in 1922 she became the director of the Tresillian Mothercraft Training Centre.
In 1929, she married British pilot Dudley Percy Davidson, who was killed in an air accident a year later. Among her mothercraft roles, Betha contributed regular columns for the Sunday edition of Sydney’s Sun newspaper. She died in February 1943 and was buried in Waverley Cemetery.
