Apprentice in Black Stockings is a personal and gentle memoir of nursing training in the 1950s.
It opens with Norma Sim’s nervous arrival in the city arriving at the thriving Sydney Hospital to begin her nursing training. She draws us into the daily routine of the ward apprentice nurses as they learn to care for their sick patients, clean and maintain the wards, are introduced to the mysteries of the operating theatre and understand the protocol of dealing with male doctors.
Meanwhile the growing camaraderie amongst the apprentices is revealed as these women, who came from all walks of life to learn the skills for one of the few careers open to women at the time, master their roles. It reveals the social life of the city and the little pleasures the nurses find on their days off, set against the backdrop of the 1950s. There is even a touch of romance.
The story of Norma and the other trainee nurses is interspersed with historical flashbacks to the life of Lucy Osburn and her five Florence Nightingale nurses who came to Sydney in 1868 to set up what at the time was a revolutionary nursing practice in the same hospital. As she imagines the experiences of these trailblazing women, we see the comparison with her training more than 80 years later, to reveal not only how much, but also how little, nursing and society has changed.
