Physical description

Maroon coloured hardcover book covered with a grey dustjacket. The title is printed in black and red text across the top half of the cover, the lower half shows a photographic image of patients lying on stretchers covered in blankets and being tended to by nursing staff outside field hospital tents. The image is black and white.

Publication type

non-fiction

Inscriptions & markings

'B117' [Handwritten in pencil in the top corner of the first page]
'For Cate [?] / with special thanks and / best wishes, / Jan Bassett.' [Handwritten in black ink on the title page]

Summary

Vivian Bullwinkle - Changi - Malaria - Dysentery - Typhoid - Betty Jeffrey - War injuries and illnesses.
Guns and Brooches investigates the contradictions, paradoxes, and anomalies that have arisen because army nurses have been 'in but not of' the army. They have faced discrimination as women in a men's organisation. Guns have replaced brooches as part of their uniforms as 'total war' has increasingly made a mockery of the distinction between non-combatants and combatants, a meaningless distinction for the nurses machine-gunned on Banka Island during the Second World War. Those sent to 'outpost of the empire', such as India during the First World War, have also had to cope with difficulties caused by deep-seated imperial tensions. [From Trove]