Annabelle Brayley's (’72) Spirit of Service

Annabelle has worn many hats over the years and is fiercely committed to the belief that community should always have a seat at the decision-making table, particularly in relation to health and education.

Annabelle was the first community director appointed to the board of the Australian College of Rural and Remote Medicine and founding Chair of its Community Reference Group. Annabelle is founding Chair of Remote Australians Matter (RAM), a national organisation established in 2023 to address the lack of equitable access to primary health care in remote Australia. A published storyteller, Annabelle considers her most significant work to be a book that honours all the RAAF, Army and Civilian Surgical Team nurses who served in Vietnam. She is the curator of the Morven community’s Vietnam Nurses Memorial, Australia’s only memorial dedicated solely to those women.

For those who were unable to join Annabelle on the evening, below is a copy of her acceptance speech, with an additional message from Annabelle.

“As an only girl with four brothers, I have mostly deliriously happy memories of my five years boarding at St Margaret’s, creating friendships with a group of girls with whom I’ve remained friends despite the gaps created when our life choices took us in vastly different directions.

Regrettably, I was so busy sashaying around having fun, I completely squandered the excellent scholastic opportunity my parents gifted me. Lost possibilities aside, I did learn some useful logistical skills while plotting midnight raids on the kitchen and/or the tuckshop to feed the poor starving boarders.

After Sister Jean Marie departed the school, my wings were somewhat clipped by Sister Helen who clearly completely misunderstood my particular brand of creative lateral thinking. Nevertheless, I’m pretty sure the foundations of my governance experience lie in the facilitation of a meeting organised in Year 11 to negotiate better living conditions for said starving boarders, including access to telephones so we could call home. Sadly, it failed monumentally and despite a meeting with Sister Helen to explain our well-intended mission, she made it made abundantly clear that an invitation to my parents to permanently remove my lateral thinking self from her long-suffering presence was but a moment away. Lucky for me, since I had no wish to leave, her attention was diverted by some other crisis, and I remained to frolic through my Senior year.

Influenced no doubt by the dazzling popularity of Stefan, I decided in Year 12 that I really wanted to be a hairdresser. My father directed I should be a teacher or a nurse. Long story short, I had a crack at both. The best part about training as a nurse was, when I moved to Charleville in the late 1970s to finish my training, I found my heart country.

While there is no doubt that, as nurses go, I really should have been a hairdresser, there is also no doubt that the ‘to serve’ bit of Per Vola Sunata did osmose into my brain on some level. Consequently, being president of the Mulga Thumpers Ball committee in Charleville in 1979 was one of my first serious forays into volunteering.

The Ball was fabulous fun but handing over the proceeds to the local Retirement Village and to the Royal Flying Doctor Service released a much more satisfying shot of endorphins.

As luck would have it, in moving to Charleville, I also met my husband to be. Ian was a wool grower in the remote Mulgalands 80 kilometres east of Wyandra which is a tiny community between Charleville and Cunnamulla, best known as the home turf of champion racehorse trainer, Peter Moody, whose sisters are Old Girls of St Margaret’s.

Ian and I married two days after Christmas in 1980, in the middle of a blazing drought. Very quickly, I finally grew up. I learned to wear the several different hats that every wife and mother living on the land wears, often stacked one on top of the other.

I learned the one choice we all have every single day is our attitude. Choose wisely. I learned to embrace every opportunity, to say yes and work ‘the how’ out later.

Delivering and raising our two children taught me that health access is a completely different fish to health delivery and more so when you live in a remote area.

I learned that access to education for families who rely on School of Distance Education is a gift that rested – and still does rest heavily – on the willingness of families to teach their own which activated my participation in the Isolated Children’s Parents Association (ICPA).

When our own kids went to boarding school, I was drawn to help establish boarder parent support groups. While The Southport School continued my education into governance, St Hilda’s proved the catalyst for my belief that one should respect the rules but still not be dissuaded by the opinion of authority. When I heard that the Principal of St Hilda’s had nicknamed us the Bush Mafia, I was furious until I decided to view it as a sign of grudging respect. 

In fact, I view that Bush Mafia tag now with a sense of quiet satisfaction. Being considered a nuisance is so much better than not being considered at all.

Across the nation, too many policy-writers/politicians and bureaucrats in metro-based glass towers believe they have a gilt edged right to make decisions about people they’ve never met, who live in places they’ve never heard of, in circumstances they don’t understand, and it has to stop.

Launched just two years ago, Remote Australians Matter, otherwise known as RAM, was established to address the lack of equitable access to appropriate primary health care experienced by the 2.8% of Australians who currently live in the 80% of our country that is designated remote and very remote, including all of the islands and remote territories.

 RAM launched onto the health stage in September 23 with a conference in Charleville that brought together 130 people from across the country including the CEOs of two of the most successful Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations, CWATTSICH in Charleville and Wirrika Meya in Port Headland. Together with the National Rural Health Commissioner, the presidents and executive directors of the relevant leading health organisations in the country, and the CEOs of the two ACCHOs, we co-signed the Charleville Charter, a document that demands that integrated and community based and led health services are prioritised to deliver universal health coverage to remote Australia

Our health system is deteriorating and needs a complete systematic overhaul. We know that anything that works in remote will work anywhere but it doesn’t translate the other way, so it makes sense to begin the rebuild in the heart of Australia.

I am indeed deeply honoured to accept this Spirit of Service Award.”

As previously stated, one must embrace opportunity which is exactly what I am doing here in italics when I add these words to my original address because one never knows which exciting and fulfilling pathways ‘embraced opportunity’ will lead down.

For me one such opportunity led to a career as a non-fiction storyteller published by Penguin Books Australia. I’ve had the privilege of sharing stories about a wide range of people who live and work in the inland of Australia. The greatest honour, however, has been sharing stories of the RAAF, Army and Civilian Medical/Surgical Team nurses who served in Vietnam between 1964-72. Our Vietnam Nurses was published in 2016, the 50th anniversary of the Battle of Long Tan.  I knew there were Medics in Vietnam and three of them, including the Medic of Long Tan, feature in the book. But, like most Australians, until I began researching, I had no idea there were female nurses deployed to Vietnam. Worse still, I’d never thought about it. Nor had most other people.

As a result of yet another opportunity, in mid-2023, a small, repurposed building became vacant at the Historical Museum in the tiny community of Morven where we live in southwest Queensland. The chance to create a space that commemorated these nurses was irresistible. Consequently, just prior to sundown on 24 April 2024, the Morven community and four Veteran nurses celebrated the opening of Stage One of the only Memorial in Australia dedicated to all of the female nurses who served in Vietnam. The sixteen, starkly beautiful images in the permanent photographic exhibition reveal the chronology of their collective service.  

On the 24 April 2025, we opened Stage Two with Honour Boards set amongst Native Australian shrubs. The Boards carry around three hundred names of the nurses whose service we’ve been able to verify.

Stage Three is a bronze monument commemorating all of the nurses that will be created by Brisbane sculptor Mela Cooke when we’ve raised the money to fund it, just in case anyone reading this recognises that as an extraordinary opportunity to leave a legacy…