Women who served in the military but were invisible to those who commemorated the military are finally getting their rightful place at the nation's site of remembrance.
One of the members of the ruling council of the Australian War Memorial said that "the narrative had changed". Brave women who had served and been forgotten would be given prominence as the Memorial expands.
"There are so many, and those galleries provide a space to be able to much more deeply and richly explore the stories that shine a light on women's contribution," AWM council member and army veteran Susan Neuhaus said.
In 1993, she was a pioneer as the first female doctor to be posted overseas from Australia as a regimental medical officer when she spent nine months with United Nations forces in Cambodia.
In 2009, she was the clinical director of the NATO hospital in Uruzgan Province in Afghanistan where she dealt with the immediate aftermath of a suicide bombing, a day she called her longest day.
She became intrigued by her unsung predecessors as Australian women medics. As she researched, she discovered tales of great bravery - but also invisibility at the Memorial in Canberra.
"As I came here to the Hall of Valour, as I walked through the Medals of Gallantry, as I wandered through the galleries, I found no trace of these women. No trace of the Croix-de-Guerres, the military medals, the OBEs, the mentioned-in-dispatches of fewer than a dozen women who had served in the First World War", she said.
While there was the Australian Army Nursing Service in the First World War, female doctors were not allowed to enlist as doctors - so they enlisted in the armies of other countries.
"I found stories that dated back more than a century, of women who had been willing to put on the uniform; not the uniform of this country, because this country denied them that opportunity, but nonetheless to put on a uniform to serve, to treat our allies, under conditions that I found unimaginable.
"Women like the surgeon Lillian Violet Cooper from Brisbane, who was treating our allies in Serbia in the First World War, who in a six-week period before the Christmas of 1916 and the bitter winter, in the space of only six weeks, treated 1843 casualties.
"She did amputations, removed shrapnel and sent her patients down the mountains with no pain relief on the backs of mules, all the while operating in mittens to stave off the cold and having to thaw blocks of snow to use as irrigation fluids - within six kilometres of the guns and in constant danger."
But those stories weren't commemorated in the way the bravery of men were.
"There's a prevailing narrative of war, which we've held as a country for such a long time. It is the narrative of the bronze ANZAC soldier standing next to a horse with a dusty hat in his hand."
She accepts that this narrative is important - but it's not the whole story.
"There are so many other stories, and those galleries (in the War Memorial) provide a space to be able to, much more deeply and richly, explore the stories that shine a light on women's contribution.
"When I joined the Army, we had about a 17 per cent female participation rate. Now every single role in the Australian army is open to women, and women participate in those roles.
"So the stories of our involvement in war now, in current generations, is a very different narrative to the story of women's involvement in World War One."
She contrasted the way she was once ignored at the Memorial with a later visit.
On the first visit, the people at reception didn't think she might be in the army. "That was the expression I had become so used to: the expression of incredulity, the faint raising an eyebrow, the look of question."
But when she returned more recently, she had an epiphany. Nobody raised an eyebrow.
"In that moment, I no longer felt just like a girl, just like a doctor, just like an ex-army officer, just like a special service officer. I felt just like an Australian. An Australian that like so many had signed the paperwork and put on the uniform to do whatever my country asked, and not knowing where that journey would lead."
When she said that this week to a group of women working at the War Memorial, there wasn't a dry eye in the house.
