Susie Cone hoped her service as a nurse in The Great War would take her to Europe, but it was on a sandy beach in Perth that she would make her biggest wartime contribution and find herself most exposed to death and peril.
Susie, from Gippsland in Victoria, was one of a handful of nurses who volunteered to care for Australian soldiers returning from home with the deadly Spanish Flu at the Woodman Point quarantine station in Western Australia.
Dozens of soldiers and four of Susie's own colleagues would die of the disease at the quarantine station, a place Susie herself described as "hell".
Her diaries which have recently been digitised for the first time by the Public Records Office of Victoria, are believed to the only primary source in existence of what life — and death — was like in that place.
The two small diaries covering her time at Woodman Point were held in the Royal Melbourne Hospital Archives until recently.
Her entries describe the constant battle to keep desperately ill men alive while dealing with shortages of medicine and clean clothing and watching her fellow nurses succumb to illness and, in some cases, die.
It was a far cry from the adventure Susie had envisioned when she set sail for Europe just weeks before.
Eager to see the world as a wartime nurse
Susie Cone and a contingent of her fellow nurses left Australia onboard the recently requisitioned passenger ship the Wyrema in October 1918.
"Edgecombe and I are in a cabin together. there are 46 sisters and a matron, some hundreds of troops and officers on board," she wrote in her diary.
In November they reached Cape Town in South Africa, which was to be a waypoint in their journey to Europe, but the ship's arrival coincided with the signing of the Armistice which ended the war.
Susie and her shipmates were told they would not be sailing on to Europe, but would instead be heading back home.
"This old tub and her load are bound for old Aussie once more," she wrote.
"What a terrible disappointment for everybody. We all expected at least to get to England."
Disappointed, Susie and her fellow nurses headed for home onboard the Wyrema, not anticipating that a rather unwelcome visitor was also on its way to Australian shores — the Spanish Flu.
Deadly influenza outbreak reaches Australia
HMAT Boonah, which had also docked in South Africa as the Armistice was signed, headed for home with 3,000 troops onboard. By the time the ship reached Western Australia, 300 men were sick with influenza.
Susie Cone and 20 of her colleagues volunteered to care for the men at the Woodman Point quarantine centre in Perth.
"About 10am the boys began to come up from the jetty. Our tents and hut were soon full. Poor lads were in a terrible plight. Filth and dirt all over them, terribly sick," she wrote in her diary.
"We had no drugs, no clean shirts or pyjamas to put on them. All we could do was to wash them and get them as comfortable as possible. Three died the first day."
Over the coming day, more men would die as the nurses did what they could with little food and medicine in a place Susie described as "nothing but dust, sand and flies and sickness".
"This place is HELL," she wrote on December 12.
"No letters from home. Very miserable and lonely."
Days later, her fellow nurse Sister Rosa O'Kane succumbed to influenza and died.
"Poor old O'Kane died early this morning," Susie Cone wrote in her diary.
"One can hardly realise that she is gone. Everybody very depressed about it. We gave her a military funeral today at 4pm.
"It's sad to see how we old Wyremians have decreased. Only nine of us on duty now."
As 1918 drew to a close, the entries in Susie's diary make mention of more nurses becoming ill, including Ada Thompson and Hilda Williams.
The last entry in her diary for 1918 consists of just two words: "Tommy died."
Ada Thompson was the second nurse to die at the camp and was followed three days later by Hilda Williams. A fourth nurse, Doris Ridgway died a day later after being on duty at the camp for just a few days.
"Ridgway died this evening. Such a dear little girl," Susie wrote.
Susie herself came down with influenza a week later but, despite feeling "rotten" and "weak", recovered and resumed her duties. She was the last of the original contingent of nurses from the Wyrema on duty at the camp.
On January 25 her nursing stint at Woodman Point came to an end and she was cleared to travel back home to Victoria, which was news that came as a welcome relief to the young nurse.
"Packed up this evening ready for Fremantle in the morning. Too good to be true," she wrote.
Susie left the quarantine station and returned home but two of the nurses who died — Rosa O'Kane and Hilda Williams — remain buried at Woodman Point.
A memorial marks Rosa O'Kane's grave, with the words "For Valour" inscribed at the top.
