Ernestine Mabel Edwards, like other members of her family, was known by several variations of her name, most commonly Nesta. 

Nesta was born in 1883 in the mining hamlet of Snake Valley, near Carngham, some 30 kilometres from Ballarat. She was the first of two surviving children born to Ernest George Edwards (c1845-1917) and his wife Marion (Maria, Mary, Mary Ann) nee Mark. Her parents' families had come to the goldfields in the 1850s, Ernest in 1855 as a 9 year old with his family and siblings from Ipswich, England, and Marion as a 5 year old in 1859, with her parents and siblings from Providence Rhode Island via Liverpool.

Ernest's father was a successful businessman in England (at 29 a staymaker employing 40 women according to the 1851 census) and continued his success as a shop- and hotel-keeper in Ballarat and Geelong. Ernest's wife's family were far less successful as mining waxed and waned. Marion's father Edward Mark was a small miner and unsuccessful inventor who appeared regularly in the courts in Clunes and Geelong for insolvency and failure to pay accounts in the 1860s. He and his wife had 12 children. According to the application for administration of his estate on his death in 1886, the family lived in a very old weatherboard cottage and he owed just over £100.

The Edwards and the Mark families illustrate the vagaries of life in the gold rushes.

Nesta's parents married in 1882, but the family moved after her birth in 1883. Mining around Snake Valley and Carngham had been declining for a decade and with that the population. The Edwards family seem to have moved first to Geelong where Charles Frederick (registered as Frederick Charles) was born in 1885, and then to Melbourne where the third child Arthur Lionel was born and died in 1885. Ernest George was employed by the Broken Hill South Silver Mining Company whose offices were in Collins Street. 

Marion Edwards died in 1891 aged 36, leaving Nesta aged 8 and Charles aged 7. She died in Fitzroy South, in inner Melbourne where the family presumably lived. Nesta attended the Girls High School in Fitzroy where she won prizes in Form 5 in 1896.

In 1898, Nesta's father Edward remarried. His second wife, Emily Ursula Power (c1879-1919) was only four years older than Nesta. Emily's background included time in an orphanage as a child and a vagrant father (Austin James Power).

Nesta's reaction to the marriage might be surmised from the fact that in 1914 after training as a nurse at the Melbourne Hospital in Carlton and midwifery study at the Queen Victoria Home in Adelaide, she lived not with her father in nearby Parkville but in Northcote with her uncle, Charles Frederick Edwards whose wife Bessie Jukes was a well known Melbourne soprano and music teacher. 

War service

Nesta formally enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) in April 1917, listing as her next of kin her father Ernest George of 67 Grey St, East Melbourne. She had already done three months home service in militaty hospitals as required. Her brother Charles, a labourer from Goongerah via Orbost in East Gippsland, had enlisted in January and embarked for overseas in February. The attestation form gave her age as 32, her permanent address as Northcote and her religion as Methodist, but had no details regarding her nursing training or experience.

Staff Nurse Nesta Edwards left Melbourne on the No 1 Hospital Ship 'Karoola' on 21 April 1917, and disembarked in England on 17 June. Three weeks later she was in war-torn France, working at the newly established  25th [British] General Hospital at Hardelot, between Boulogne-sur-mer and Etaples. She was attached to that unit until it closed in early 1919.

The matron (Adelaide Kellett) and nursing staff were Australian, the medical officers English. Most of the hospital was tented.

25 BGH was large (2,400 beds) and specialised in treating skin diseases such as scabies, psoriasis and excema, though there were also medical and surgical cases. During an Allied offensive in August and September 1918, the hospital functioned as a casualty clearing station, its operating theatres in constant use day and night (throughthelines.com.au.au/research/nellie-morrice).

Matron Kellett painted a rosy picture of living and working conditions at 25 BGH. The beach provided relaxation and the nearby forest gave the nurses flowers and foliage for decorating the wards. Nurses had ample opportunity for tennis and year round badminton. They lived in comfortable furnished villas (though some distance from the hospital, admittedly a disadvantage in rain and snow). The work did not have 'the glamour of dressing the large wounds' but should be a cause of pride and accomplishment (throughthelines.com.au.au/research/hardelot-plage).

By contrast, one of Nesta's nursing colleagues Sister Leila Brown described a 'dreary tented hospital' buffeted by wind and sand in summer, then sandstorms and snow from autumn onwards. The nursing she considered 'absolutely uninteresting' (throughthelines.com.au.au/research/hardelot-plage).

Nesta may well have met up with her brother Charles in June 1918 when he was admitted to 83 General Hospital in Boulogne with a severe gun shot wound to his right eye. He was sent to England. The first leave recorded on her service record (more than a year after her arrival in France) was  two weeks in England in August 1918. By then, Charles was well enough to be transferred from 1 Australian Auxiliary Hopsital to the convalescent depot at Weymouth in readiness for return to Australia in October.

Nesta nursed with that hospital until late October 1918 until she was attached to the 3rd Australian Casualty Clearing Station (3 ACCS) near Menin which was severely short of staff. A week later she contracted the virulent form of influenza affecting some patients and with another sister was evacuated to the 3rd Canadian Stationary Hospital. This was her second bout of serious illness - she had spent almost two months away from her unit from November 1917 with severe asthma, first in hospital (14th [British] General Hospital, Wimereux, which had a Sick Sisters Hospital) and then a convalescent home.

While she was recovering from influenza, hostilities ceased and the armistice was declared on 11 November 1918. 

As patients, nurses and equipment were progressively transferred to England, she spent a week's leave in Paris in February 1919, shortly before 25 BGH left France for England.

Nesta was finally and briefly attached for duty in March 1919 to the 2nd Australian Auxiliary Hospital in Southall, which specialised in amputees. 

In June 1919 she was promoted to Sister and left England for Australia. Like thousands of other demobbed personnel she travelled on a former German liner commandeered after the armistice, in her case the steamer 'Lucie Woermann'.  Her fellow passengers on the seven week voyage via Colombo included returning munitions workers and their families, and some medical personnel. She disembarked in Melbourne on 25 July, and was discharged from the AANS on 15 October 1919.

After the war

Nesta's father Ernest had died four months after she embarked in April 1917. Her step-mother Emily (to whom she did not entrust her affairs on his death) died in 1919 and her surviving brother Charles returned home to remote East Gippsland after he was demobbed.

Nesta was free of family responsibilities, aged 36 and single, with a profession that enabled her to travel. She was soon nursing overseas again. The Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association Register for 1922 lists Nesta Ernestine Mabel Edwards as living in Durban, South Africa. 

The precise attraction of South Africa can only be surmised. Perhaps travel appealed to the woman born in Snake Valley whose father was English and whose mother was Amercian. Perhaps during her training she encountered nurses who had served in the Boer War. Perhaps she had met army nurses from South Africa in British hospitals in France. Perhaps the climate improved her respiratory health. Whatever the reason, she was to spend the remainder of her professional life in South Africa returning to Melbourne only in 1947 at the age of 64 to retire.

In 1922 Nesta Edwards was appointed matron of Kearnsey College, a Methodist boys' school in Natal, South Africa. (I am indebted to David Goldhawk of Kearsney College for the information about her work in South Africa, and latter days in Melbourne. See his article, 'Sister E M Edwards - Kearsney College Matron 1922 to 1930' at www.kearsney.com). She provided medical attention for rugby injuries and common ailments, and was known as a liberal dispenser of Epsom salts and cod liver oil. College historian David Goldhawk wrote: 'She was remembered as a delightful but somewhat formidable personality who did not tolerate malingerers ... One former pupil [commented]: "Sister had been in the First World War and was therefore prepared to do things which some nurses wouldn't do."'

A series of health problems struck Edwards at Kearsney. In 1924 and 1926, she had major breast surgery. Too ill to work, faced with hospital costs and without a Repatriation pension, she applied to the Edith Cavell Trust which assisted sick and needy Victorian army nurses. The Trust, which emphasised Victorian rather than in Victoria, granted her £20. Two years later, in 1928, she was hospitalised again and the Trust provided her with £30 towards her 'heavy expenses for nursing and paying a substitute to do my work' (Edwards, Ernestine M, File, Edith Cavell Trust Fund, M290 National Archives of Australia). 

In fact she had maintained her professional contacts in Victoria. She provided news from to UNA, the journal of the Royal Victorian Trained Nurses Association, particularly mentioning her enjoyment of her work and sightseeing. Former army nursing friends visited and she in turn visited old AANS friends in Victoria (e.g. UNA, Vol XXI (4), 1.6.1923, p6, XXIII(4), 1.6.1925, p102, XXVI(1), 2.1.1928, p18). 

Edwards resigned from the college in 1930, but after a brief period in Johannesburg in charge of a children's home she returned to Kearsney, this time as matron of the local hospital. She held that post for 14 years before retiring in 1946.

After a period in Durban, she sailed for Australia on the 'Empire Star'. The newspaper notice announcing her arrival commented 'her many Melbourne friends will be delighted' (Argus 14 March 1947). 

The Kearsney Chronicle noted in 1958 she was living in Melbourne 'in frail health and not very affluent circumstances.' 

Nesta died in Ivanhoe, Victoria on 21 May 1959. 

Nest Edwards featured in the East Melbourne Historical Society's 2015 exhibition, 'Gone to War as Sister: East Melbourne Nurses in the Great War'. Her panel can be seen at Gone to War as Sister - exhibition panel 16