- Title
- Australian nurses and the 1918 Deolali Inquiry: transcolonial racial and gendered anxieties in a British Indian war hospital
- Creator
- Haskins, Victoria K.
- Relation
- Australians and the First World War: Local-Global Connections and Contexts p. 67-83
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51520-5_5
- Publisher
- Springer
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2017
- Description
- In May 1918 an inquiry was held into the conduct of several Australian Army nurses based at a hospital at Deolali, India. An English doctor had charged that the women had been engaged in inappropriate familiarities with British officers and, in the case of one, in intimate relations with both patients and an Indian orderly. The ensuing investigation found the charges to be mostly false, but the Deolali Inquiry reflected the ways in which anxieties about Australian women’s intimate contact with non-white men were intensified during the Great War. Young unmarried single women travelled as nurses to far-flung places, including India, where the nurses of the Australian Army were not only brought into close contact with Indian people but were required to nurse Turkish prisoners of war. Exploring the complexities of the this curious (and, at the time, suppressed) case highlights how such volatile wartime international cross-cultural encounters served to both threaten colonial hierarchies, and to strengthen the Australian identification with the privileges of global whiteness, played out as a struggle over the honour and respect due to the nurses as white women.
- Subject
- First World War; Australian nurses; Deolali Inquiry; cross-cultural encounters
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1386256
- Identifier
- uon:32387
- Identifier
- ISBN:9783319515199
- Language
- eng
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