Design and Art Australia Online

illustrator and author, wrote and illustrated 'The War Wanderings of an Aussie Girl’ published Aussie 15 February 1921, 38. The sketches are slight and lack the drama of the text. Ussher, who 'had been drawing illustrations for B.D. Berry and Co.'s writing books’ in Chicago when war broke out, left for England early in 1915 in order to help the war effort in some way. In London, she spent some time 'minding the office of the Aussie Navy’ and doing volunteer work in the evenings with the Green Cross – 'a Corps which supplied women orderlies to hospitals, supply depots and soldiers’ accommodation houses’. She then volunteered for Endell Street Military Hospital, after which she left for Macedonia with a group of Scottish women and 'a fellow-Aussie, Miles Franklin’. Two sketches of her Salonika adventures accompany her story. One is set in the ward where she was looking after seven French patients and eleven Serbs – 'and it took all my tact and ingenuity to keep the peace between the nations’. One drawing shows a Serb orderly about to stab a Greek patient.

Ussher returned to England in February 1918, joined the 'Wrens’ and was shipped to Gibraltar: 'A few days later I left the Rock on the American transport Minnesota , bound for New York, where I was considerately demobbed by the Admiralty to enable me to meet my family on the way from England to Australia.’

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

1992