On Sunday the 12th of May, we celebrated International Nurses Day. mecwacare’s 548 nurses care for an amazing 20,000 clients each week. The enthusiasm, effort, and kindness shown by nurses at mecwacare and around Australia is deeply valued, and their sacrifices are never overlooked. On behalf of mecwacare, we warmly thank all the nurses out there and express our most sincere appreciation for everything they do.
To celebrate International Nurses Day, we spoke with Mary and Barb, former nurses and current residents of mecwacare’s Malvern Centre. Mary Adamson and Barb ‘Lil’ Cooper first met in 1956. Mary, born and raised in Hobart, Tasmania, was 17 years old. After finishing school, like many others, Mary was unsure of her future career path. Feeling panicked, Mary decided on nursing. She moved to Melbourne after her father secured her a spot in the Alfred Hospital’s competitive nursing program. Having never lived out of the family home before, let alone an entire state away from them, Mary felt somewhat overwhelmed. Luckily, a young lady called Lil was starting the nursing program alongside Mary. The same age as Mary, Lil had grown up around the inner eastern suburbs of Melbourne—Kew, Balwyn, and Camberwell.
In those days, the pair explained, nurses lived in shared accommodation very close to the hospital to ensure easy access to their charges. Lil and Mary were assigned to share a room together, thus beginning their long-enduring friendship. Six months into their three-year course, the girls were exposed to one very raw reality of the job.
“One day, we were taken into the wards to see what a bedsore was,” Mary explained, as she patted Lil’s knee while the two women smiled at each other. “Do you remember that day, Barb? The poor man had a festering wound full of gauze that the matron pulled out like a ribbon,” she chuckled. “We just about had to leave the room. We were distressed and thought, ‘oh no, this job isn’t for us,’ but we kept going.”
Lil and Mary laugh as they reflect on some pivotal moments in their early lives as nurses. The girls were paid three pounds per week for their work, in addition to receiving free onsite housing. In a group alongside Mary and Lil were more of their nurse friends. Now, almost 70 years later, they still enjoy yearly reunions.
Shortly after completing their course and while working as a nurse, Lil met her future husband, Barry. The couple married shortly after, welcoming two sons and a daughter together. Having left her nursing role, Lil helped care for others in a different way—by opening a women’s fashion store, Eva’s, on Glenferrie Road in Malvern. Having only sold the shop in the 2000s, Lil spent decades pouring her heart and soul into Eva’s, and her children look back on it fondly.
“We used to get the tram from school and stop in at the shop on the way,” smiled Gus, one of Lil’s sons. The shop was more kind to Lil, who had polio as a child and experiences the aftereffects to this day. Lil helped women to feel confident, equipped, and secure in themselves and their identities through her fashion at Eva’s.
Mary married her husband Mick at around 26, and the pair moved to London, where Mary worked as a district nurse, personal carer, and nanny. Mary also worked as a nurse in Papua New Guinea and Hong Kong. Despite a few somewhat stressful experiences, including a pirate waving a dagger under the door of her room, as the only female onboard a cargo ship to Hong Kong, Mary enjoyed her adventures.
Despite the different roads they took, the friends kept in touch throughout the years before being reunited at mecwacare’s Malvern Centre. It is at this residential aged care facility where Mary’s daughter-in-law, Bec, is also a much-loved team member. Lil now faces some speech challenges, but Mary knows just what she means, and Lil will always reach out to grab Mary when they meet. Despite this boundary, the women are as close as ever, nearly 70 years after first becoming friends.
“My favourite thing about our friendship is that we understand each other,” Mary grinned. As two young women in a big new world, Lil and Mary clung to each other as trainee nurses. They forged a timeless friendship in the face of fear, uncertainty, and ghastly bedsores. These nurse friends will undoubtedly be part of each other’s lives forever.
