CHAPTER 1
OFFICER TRAINING SCHOOL
January 1999

Australian military service had always interested me. Possessing a fairly conservative nature, though, I never thought I would be suited to the nomadic and potentially dangerous lifestyle of the Australian military. At high school I listened eagerly to the recruiters as they explained the financial benefits of having the Australian Defence Force, the ADF, fund your university degree. I daydreamed about serving my country in the long-revered tradition of the ANZACs but, alas, at seventeen years of age I did not yet have the spirit of adventure, or the courage that had spurred those fine young Australians into action some 75 years earlier.

I was the third of four daughters born to happily married parents. My father was a police officer and my mother stayed at home to care for us until my later primary school years, when she returned to work as a nursing aide caring for the elderly and infirm. We had a humble and happy childhood and my parents worked hard to give us every opportunity they could afford.

Unlike many female students of my generation I loved science and math and the physicality of team sports, such as hockey and netball. So it might have seemed out of character for me to pursue nursing, a career in the female-dominated ‘helping’ profession. But I wanted to make a difference in the lives of others and I watched in awe as my mother showed how compassionately this could be done. In choosing nursing, I became the first person in my family to attend university. By the age of 23 I had completed my Bachelor of Nursing and was living a comfortable life in Tasmania with my boyfriend of five years.

Ironically, given my comfortable existence, my eventual decision to join the Royal Australian Air Force, the RAAF, arose from the very conservatism that had earlier held me back. I had been working as a Registered Nurse for three years and was enjoying the challenge of perioperative work in the operating theatre — providing nursing care to patients before, during and immediately after surgery. I loved the nursing specialty I had chosen yet began to feel that, even though I was still a very junior clinician, I already possessed the knowledge, skills and experience that could assist those less fortunate than myself. I also realized that I was working in the hospital where I had been born and might end up being groomed to take over from my baby boomer colleagues. So I started to look for adventure.

At work I listened to the plastic surgeons and some of the more senior nurses talk of their humanitarian work overseas and I felt that it would be many years before I would be ready to accompany such an elite team. At the same time, I sensed a growing urge within me to provide humanitarian assistance to those in need, to travel overseas and discover other cultures, and to find an existen