By Luke Voogt
Helen Casey’s grandmother Ethel never forgot her service, even as she grew blind and deaf towards the end of her life.
“She always knew when it was Anzac Day,” the Ocean Grove local said.
“She would always say to mum ‘is my uniform ready?’
“She was very proud of what she did.”
Ethel’s medals and memoirs feature in the Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience, the largest travelling exhibition in Australia in decades.
“I’m very, very proud,” Helen said. “We used to love looking at them when we were children.”
While Ethel didn’t “really talk much about the war when we were children,” Helen said, her story came to life through her memoirs.
Ethel Biggs was born at St Kilda in 1891 and relocated with her family to Portarlington, where her father worked as a bootmaker.
She began her nursing career after she completed her training at the Geelong Infirmary and Benevolent Asylum.
Ethel was a hero before she joined the war effort.
In March 1916 the papers reported her rescuing and reviving a boy who fell face down in water near Portarlington Pier.
In May 1917, aged 26, Ethel enlisted as a Staff Nurse in the Australian Army Nursing Service, embarking for Cairo on 12 June.
She served five years in Greece and England, nursing British soldiers or “Tommies” back to health and earning the British War and Victory medals.
In her diaries Ethel wrote of the tragedy of watching young men die.
“We saw some very pathetic deaths,” it reads. “Some of the boys were conscious up to the last and tried so hard to get better.”
On 7 April, 1920, Ethel married Captain Henry Elvins, a WWI medical officer from Geelong, and gave up her nursing job.
“They actually had a romance before she went away,” Helen said.
“Back in that day once they were married they had to give up nursing.”
Instead Ethel worked with her husband and together they ran a surgery from their La Trobe Terrace home, now heritage-listed, for decades.
Ethel died on 3 December, 1988, in Geelong at the age of 97.
Helen remembers her as determined, strong and proper.
“You didn’t misbehave with grandma but she was also very warm and loving.”
She is named on the Peace Memorial Foyer War Service Honour and the Geelong Hospital Doctors and Nurses Honour rolls.
Ethel’s story one is of several Geelong stories featuring in the exhibition, which runs at the Geelong Arena from this week to 27 February.
Department of Veterans Affairs’ Mike Wightman many Geelong archives and individuals had donated items.
“There was not a single town anywhere in Australia that was untouched by World War I and Geelong has a rich association with it.”
Organisers have confirmed 13,000 tickets to the Spirit of Anzac Centenary Experience in Geelong to date, with the capacity for thousands more to attend the free event.
“We hope Geelong breaks the record for the exhibition,” Mike said.
