The Australian War Memorial Collection. Test site
The subject of this portrait is Muriel Knox Doherty (1896–1988) who served as a nurse in both the First and Second World Wars. In the Second World War she served in the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service as principal nursing officer for New South Wales and Queensland. She was demobilised at her own request on 22 May 1945 so she could join the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and was awarded the Royal Red Cross for exceptional services in military nursing.
Appointed matron to the recently liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany, she was instrumental in the care of survivors who remained dangerously ill months after the liberation. She wrote, “UNRRA’s work now is to transform an acute emergency & improvised Hospital into a well organised, hygienic institution and I am in my element.”
The artist had known Doherty since her schooldays, when the latter was an untrained teacher at Abbotsleigh Girls School, Sydney. After she left school the then Alfreda Goninan studied under artist Antonio Dattilo-Rubbo in Sydney and then in Paris in the 1920s. She married Radoje Marcovitch, a prominent Yugoslav diplomat and journalist, and lived in Yugoslavia for 20 years. Alfreda Marocvitch escaped Europe with her two children just prior to the 1941 bombing of Belgrade by the Nazis; her husband is presumed to have died during the blitz.
Painted in 1948, Doherty is wearing the Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service uniform that she had worn during the war. The painting was selected as a finalist in the 1948 Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
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Dark brown leatherette medal case with brass hinge and clasp to hold a Royal Red Cross. The inside base is indented with the shape of the medal with ribbon bow and lined with dark blue velvet. The lid
George VI Coronation Medal. Unnamed as issued. Christense Sorensen was born at Sandgate, Brisbane on 5 September 1885 to a Norwegian mother and Danish father. The second of eleven children she took