Born in 1891, Vera grew up with her two older sisters Stella and Ivy in the two-storey house ‘Llanarth’, South Yarra.

At both ‘Llanarth’ and her school Melbourne Church of England Girls Grammar, Vera acquired a strong sense of social responsibility and the leadership skills necessary to implement her goals.

At home Vera had the models of her father, Alfred Deakin, three times Australian prime minister, and her mother, Pattie, who was a leader in social welfare.

Vera studied singing and cello in Budapest in 1913‒14. On returning home following the outbreak of war, she was frustrated by the Australian government’s refusal to employ women except as nurses for the war effort.

She joined the fledgling Australian Red Cross Society which, under the presidency of Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, provided opportunities for women to serve overseas albeit in a volunteer capacity.

News of efforts by the British Red Cross Society to trace missing soldiers in France motivated Vera to do similar work in Egypt.

Vera cabled to her relative Norman Brookes, former Wimbledon tennis champion, who was a Red Cross commissioner in Cairo. Encouraged by Brookes, Vera sailed on the Arabia accompanied by her friend Winifred Johnson. A member of the Syme family of The Age newspaper fame, Winifred did not want to languish at home while three of her four brothers enlisted.

The Australian Red Cross had cooperated with its British counterpart since July 1915 in providing a central enquiry bureau in Egypt. Enquiries on behalf of families were sent from information bureaux managed and financed by members of the legal profession in each Australian state. Lady Barker of the British Red Cross took charge of this joint bureau at Gresham House, Cairo, in about early October; she was soon overwhelmed with Australian enquiries.

On 21 October 1915, fresh off the Arabia, Vera as secretary and Winifred as assistant secretary, were asked to open the independent Australian Red Cross Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau next to the British bureau. Lady Barker mentored the newcomers, and later intervened to prevent the Australian Red Cross from replacing Vera with a man.

The Australian bureau, like the British service, had the threefold aims of obtaining information about the missing, ascertaining details of the death and burial of those killed or who had died of wounds, and keeping relatives informed about sick and wounded soldiers.

The London headquarters of the British enquiry bureau issued a monthly printed Enquiry List which contained the names of missing men and the names of men killed, of whom members of the public wanted more information than could be obtained from the War Office.

These lists, which became horrifically long, were given to volunteers known as searchers who fanned out to hospitals and army camps to enquire about the missing. The Australian bureau attached its Enquiry List to the British List to ensure the widest possible circulation through both the British and Australian searcher networks.

Whereas men and women worked as searchers for the British Red Cross, the Australian bureau used men only but, after moving to England in 1916, relied heavily on British Red Cross searchers to cover the large number of hospitals caring for wounded Australians in England and France. Two of Vera’s most reliable searchers were William Isbister, a lawyer, and Stanley Addison, a science graduate, both from Adelaide.

After the transfer of Australian troops from Egypt to France in 1916, Vera moved her staff to London, first to 54 Victoria Street and then to a mansion at 36 Grosvenor Place. The magnitude of enquiry work was reflected in statistics for 1917; the bureau received almost 27,000 cabled enquiries from Australia and searchers’ reports numbered nearly 33,000.

Vera demonstrated impressive leadership, welding volunteers from disparate backgrounds into an effective team. Staff at the bureau numbered about 30. Marjorie Syme, a cousin of Winifred, supervised assessment of thousands of searchers’ reports while Lilian Whybrow managed the group that wrote sympathetic letters. This was the beginning of Vera’s long collegial leadership service with Lilian (later Mrs Scantlebury) in the Australian Red Cross.

In 1918 Vera received the OBE for her humanitarian work. After the Armistice she met Captain Thomas White, an Australian military pilot who had been a Turkish prisoner of war.

They married in 1920, lived in South Yarra, and had four daughters. Vera supported Tom’s career as a cabinet minister in Australia and later high commissioner in London; when he was knighted she became Lady White. She also pursued social welfare at a senior level, especially in the fields of helping ill and disabled children and incapacitated soldiers.

Vera’s dedicated work for the Australian Red Cross continued until two years before her death in 1978 aged 86.

During the Second World War, she and Lilian Scantlebury revived their enquiry work for the Victorian Division of the Red Cross, and later Vera twice became vice chairman of the national society. In Victoria she pioneered music therapy in psychiatric hospitals.

The search for the missing by Vera and the enquiry bureau during the First World War led to the Australian Red Cross tracing services. The 32,000 enquiry bureau case files digitized by the Australian War Memorial form part of the bedrock of the war archive, and are an invaluable source for the thousands of descendants who continue to honour the missing today.