Dr Ruth Rae
Ruth Rae (1957-) is an Australian historian and biographer. She completed her nurse education under the hospital training system in 1978 and became an advocate for aged care rights as well as rural and remote health issues which led to an interest in social history and politics. She left Sydney in the early 1980s with her young family and while working on health policy in rural NSW she completed a BA (Human Bio-science and Politics) and and the following year a M Litt (politics) at UNE.
As a child Ruth was aware that her grandfather, Fred Tomlins, joined the First Australian Light Horse when war was declared in 1914. Fred wrote a diary entry from the moment he enlisted until he returned home when the armistice was declared more than four years later. Fred's diaries, letters, photographs and postcards were given to Ruth by her mother, Gretta. When her mother died unexpectedly, Ruth decided the collection of fourteen diaries, twenty letters and more than two hundred postcards and photographs had to be collated and considered. Firstly, Ruth commissioned the diaries be copied onto a microfiche reel and she typed the contents over a period of five years. She had the photographs professionally rephotographed in order to protect the originals. While retaining the copyright to all documents, Ruth Rae donated the collection to the State Library of NSW (Fred Tomlins Collection, ML SLNSW).
During this process Ruth was surprised to learn that Fred's sister, Jessie, a qualified nurse, served in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) and cared for the light horsemen at the 14th Australian General Hospital, Egypt.
She found a dearth of information about Australian nurses who served in the First World War, and every war since. Emeritus Professor R Lynette Russell offered to supervise Ruth's PhD which provided an analysis of why women continue to be missing from military history. The PhD thesis (University of Sydney, 2001) focused on the experiences of one nurse, Jessie Tomlins, who trained under the Nightingale system, which was not dissimilar to the author's own training, and then donned the AANS uniform to nurse in one of history's most brutal wars; her brother's experiences were lauded while hers were ignored.
On completion of her PhD Ruth wrote a number of journal articles and made numerous presentations before deciding to attack the lack of information about women and war head on. This has resulted in a trilogy of World War One books plus a comprehensive nominal roll of Australian nurses who served in the 1914-18 war (Australian College of Nursing, 2015). Recently she published the biography of Rose Creal who was a remarkable nurse leader in war and in peace (Amazon, 2023).
Ruth 's interest in politics, as well as social history, prompted her to write a biography of Tony Windsor which incorporated a history of the rise of Independents in Australia (Allen & Unwin, 2014).
Ruth has recently re-edited Fred's biography (Amazon, 2023) and his diaries (Amazon, 2023).
