“I kept hearing these stories about my husband Ralph’s four great aunties, the Lowrey sisters, who lived in Stroud. All four of them enlisted as nurses in World War I.  That’s unique and remarkable! I’ve got a great passion for history, particularly that era, but there was no substantial information about them.  Nobody knew anything,” Julia said. 

It wasn’t until a trip to Newcastle Museum in 2002, when Ralph drew her attention to an Australian nurse’s uniform in a glass cabinet labelled ‘Matron Bessie Lowrey served in India 1916 – 1918 in WWI’ that Julia decided to do something about it.

“The uniform belonged to one of the aunts,” she exclaimed.

“I told Ralph that someone needed to write a book about them. He said he knew just the person. Me. I was dumbfounded.”

And the rest, so to speak, is history. Including a five year hiatus, it’s been a journey that has taken Julia 13 years and next Monday she will finally launch her book ‘To Nurse in a War a World Away’ at the Gloucester Book Shop.

“I knew it would be a big, all encompassing, adventure,” she laughed.

 “I wanted to know, who were these women who became nurses? The fact that at this time in history these women stepped forward out of their comfort zone is amazing. Until then it had been a small world for them but they went out and were enriched. Imagine how Bessie and Violet Hazel felt, serving in India...” she said, adding the youngest sister Joyce enlisted on the day of the Armistice and so never saw active duty.

Trips to Normandy in France, Canberra, Sydney, Newcastle have filled in the missing gaps, along with the official documentation from Scotland Yard. 

“I had all this information, but I needed proof and Olivia’s was the hardest to get. Everything else was available from the Australian War Memorial.”

It confirmed Olivia Annie had been assigned to the “elite corps of the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve” in England after she was the first of the four sisters to enlist with the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1915.

With the help of local Paula Blanche, Julia sorted through her mountains of research to mix fiction with facts in ‘To Nurse in a War a World Away’, a narrative told through imagined letters and text. 

“How was I going to create a narrative when I had nothing but cold hard facts? Letters! And then it flowed and flowed.”

The books arrived fresh from the printers in November. Dedicating the book to the man who started it all, “my husband Ralph, my favourite non-reader of books”, she surmised that ‘if one person reads it, it will have been worthwhile.’

'To Nurse in a War a World Away' is on sale from Gloucester Bookshop or through Zeus Publications.