Person

Best, Kathleen Annie Louise (1910 - 1957)

OBE RRC

Born
28 August 1910
Summer Hill, New South Wales, Australia
Died
15 November 1957
Richmond, Victoria, Australia
Occupation
Nurse

Summary

Kathleen Best undertook nursing training at the Western Suburbs Hospital, Sydney, and midwifery training at the Women's Hospital, Crown Street, Sydney. Best became a staff nurse at Wyong Hospital, acting-matron at the Rachel Forster Hospital for Women and Children, Sydney, and later deputy-matron of the Masonic Hospital, Ashfield. In 1940 she was appointed to the Australian Army Nursing Service, serving in the Middle East until 1942. Best was the founding Director of the Australian Women's Army Corps. She was appointed as Officer of the Order of the British Empire (Military) in 1956.

Details

Chronology

May 1940
Military service - Australian Army Nursing Service and posted as matron of the 2nd/5th Australian General Hospital
1941
Award - Royal Red Cross (RRC)
1942 - 1943
Career position - Controller in the Australian Army Medical Women's Service
1943 - 1944
Career position - Assistant Adjutant-General of Women's Services
1944 - 1949
Career position - Assistant Director of the Re-establishment Division of the Department of Post-War Reconstruction
1951 - 1957
Career position - Founding Director of the Australian Women's Army Corps
1956
Award - Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)

Archival resources

Australian War Memorial Research Centre

  • Lieutenant Colonel Kathleen Best, Portrait, 1944, ART22216; Australian War Memorial Research Centre. Details

National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection

  • Biographical cuttings on Colonel Kathleen Best, Director of the Women's Royal Australian Army Corps 1951-1957, Cuttings Files BIOG; National Library of Australia Manuscript Collection. Details

Published resources

Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation Exhibitions

  • McCarthy, Gavan; Morgan, Helen; Smith, Ailie; van den Bosch, Alan, Where are the Women in Australian Science?, Exhibition of the Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation, First published 2003 with lists updated regulary edn, Australian Science and Technology Heritage Centre, Melbourne, Victoria, 2003, https://eoas.info/exhibitions/wisa/wisa.html. Details

Books

  • Ollif, Lorna, Colonel Best and her soldiers: the story of the 33 years of the Women's Royal Australian Army Corps (Hornsby, New South Wales: Ollif Publishing Company, 1985), 250 pp. Details

Book Sections

Resources

Resource Sections

See also

  • Alexander, John A. ed., Who's who in Australia 1944 (Melbourne, Victoria: The Herald and Weekly Times Ltd, 1944), 906 pp. Details

Ailie Smith

EOAS ID: biogs/P004401b.htm

Except where otherwise noted, content on this site is
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
What do we mean by this?

Published by Swinburne University of Technology.
This Edition: 2024 November (Ballambar - Gariwerd calendar - early summer - season of butterflies)
Reference: http://www.bom.gov.au/iwk/calendars/gariwerd.shtml#ballambar
For earlier editions see the Internet Archive at: https://web.archive.org/web/*/www.eoas.info

The Encyclopedia of Australian Science and Innovation uses the Online Heritage Resource Manager (OHRM), a relational data curation and web publication system developed by the eScholarship Research Centre and its predecessors at the University of Melbourne 1999-2020. The OHRM has been maintained by Gavan McCarthy since 2020.

Cite this page: https://www.eoas.info/biogs/P004401b.htm

"... the rengitj, as a visible mark or imprint on the land, is characterised as a place of origin, the repository of all names, as well as a kind of mapped visual expression of the connection between people and places which is to be carried out in the temporal sequence of the journey." Fanca Tamisari (1998) 'Body, Vision and Movement: In the footprints of the ancestors'. Oceania 68(4) p260