A Peter Mac Anzac hero: Nancie Kinsella MBE ARRC
2 min read 25 April 2023
She dedicated her later life to caring for cancer patients, but Peter Mac Matron Nancie Kinsella’s nursing story began on the battlefields of World War II.
On April 15, 1945, British forces entered Belsen Concentration Camp in northern Germany and discovered the horrors that had been taking place there. They found thousands of prisoners close to death.
Nancie Kinsella was one of an enormous team who worked tirelessly around the clock to provide medical care, food, and water to the 1700 survivors. They faced an uphill battle against disease, with dysentery, tuberculosis, typhus, diphtheria, heart and kidney problems, and the devastating effects of starvation.
An estimated 50,000 people had died there.
Fifteen years earlier, a fresh-faced Kinsella was completing her nursing training in Melbourne, working first as a nurse and then a midwife.
In 1936 she took a voyage across the world to work in Rhodesia and South Africa before making her way to the United Kingdom.
She was nursing in England when the Second World War broke out and she would soon be catapulted into horrors she could have never imagined.
She enlisted in the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service, her first posting was the Middle East before being sent to Normandy where she looked after D-Day casualties.
She was then sent to Belsen. In the weeks following the liberation, the British army arrested and tried the camp’s administrators and guards, many of whom were sentenced to death for their crimes.
Nancie was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in North West Europe and was awarded the Associate Royal Red Cross (ARRC) for acts of bravery or exceptional devotion to duty.
She remained in the service and completed her time in the Reserve of Officers in 1956 before returning to Australia and then Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre.
She was the matron of Peter Mac from 1956 to 1967 and was responsible for establishing Australia’s post grad Radiotherapy Nursing Course.
The Nancie Kinsella Patients’ Library was created in her honour by her fellow nursing staff, opening in 1968.
The library is celebrating its 55th anniversary in 2023.
Nancie Kinsella was a war hero and a practice-changing nurse who built the foundations of oncology nursing in Australia. Lest we forget.