Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip, sponsored by Shell in Australia, shows Red Cross volunteers during the Second World War making articles such as surgeons’ gowns, caps and masks, bandages and surgical stockings. Lady Gowrie, president of the Australian Red Cross Society, and Lady Duggan, president of its Victorian division, are shown visiting a group of volunteers at work. The clip cuts to women and a girl knitting articles in their homes, and then a warehouse where items are inventoried, checked, packed and delivered by trucks to hospitals and to aeroplanes and ships to be transported to Australian troops overseas. The narration is accompanied by music.

Educational value points

• The Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS), which was initially a branch of the British Red Cross, was formed just after the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The Society undertook relief activities, providing medical services for the wounded and sending food and clothing parcels to Australian troops overseas. They also helped families trace wounded and missing soldiers. During the First World War women also trained as Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs) who provided basic nursing and domestic services in hospitals and convalescent homes. ARCS continued this work during the Second World War.

• During both world wars, the Red Cross coordinated much of the civilian activity carried out at home to support the troops fighting overseas, and provided women with an opportunity to contribute directly to the war effort. Women donated hundreds of hours of their time to make items such as surgeons’ gowns and masks, surgical stockings, bandages, pyjamas and undershirts. Ships were chartered to transport the supplies to Australian troops and field hospitals in various theatres of war.

• Enormous resources were needed to support Australia’s involvement in the Second World War. In They Serve, there is an emphasis on the 'personal sacrifice’ women were making to support 'fighting men at home and abroad’. That emphasis reflected the government’s push for civilians to be 'all in’, or to work hard and make sacrifices for the War. The film’s description of the ARCS volunteers as 'another army’ echoes prime minister John Curtin’s comment that 'there can be no distinctions between soldiers and civilians. Everyone has a battle station’ (john.curtin.edu.au). This appeal to patriotism succeeded; thousands of Australians became Red Cross volunteers.

• According to Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978 (E Windschuttle, ed, Fontana, 1980), during the War voluntary work, which was taken up most enthusiastically by the middle and lower-middle classes, acquired a new social significance. The ideology of voluntarism 'was to play a crucial role in bolstering the traditional sexual division of labour’, helping 'to set the parameters in which the battles for equal pay, conditions and opportunity were waged, especially in the later years of the war’.

• The Red Cross Transport Service moved supplies to depots and from there to hospitals or to ships and aircraft to be taken overseas. The Transport Service also provided ambulances and cars to take wounded soldiers to hospitals, convalescent centres or home. The reference in this clip to the women’s expert handling of the 'great trucks’ indicates that at the time the film was made it was unusual for women to drive at all, let alone to operate a truck. Labour shortages meant that women were called upon to fill what were traditionally male occupations in both paid and voluntary capacities.

• Lady Gowrie (1879–1965), the wife of the governor-general, Lord Gowrie, was president of the ARCS and worked tirelessly to support the activities of the Red Cross. As well as touring Red Cross centres, and visiting troops and others engaged in war-related activities, she organised concerts and fetes at Government House in Canberra to raise money for the war effort. In 1941 in her annual New Year’s Day radio broadcast she urged Australian women to maintain their 'hope and courage’. She returned to England in 1944 at the end of Lord Gowrie’s term as governor-general.

• The International Committee for Relief to the Wounded, which later became the International Committee of the Red Cross, is an independent and non-aligned humanitarian organisation founded in 1863 in Geneva, Switzerland, to provide medical care to those wounded in armed conflict. It was the vision of Swiss banker Henry Dunant, who witnessed the aftermath of a battle where army medical services were poor and thousands of wounded soldiers were left to die on the battlefield. Today, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has national societies in nearly every country and provides humanitarian aid in both peacetime and war. The name Red Crescent was adopted by societies in many non-Christian countries because the cross is associated with Christianity.