BONNIN, Irene Gertrude Hiller

Irene Gertrude Hiller Bonnin (1874–1971)

Irene Bonnin is commemorated on an honour board at St Peter’s Eastern Hill, East Melbourne commemorating parishioners who served overseas in the Great War.

Her connection with East Melbourne during the war itself was very fleeting  - she attended several church services while awaiting her embarkation orders -  although she subsequently returned to East Melbourne and the parish in the late 1920s. 

Bonnin was from South Australia. She had trained in Adelaide at Calvary Hospital run by the Little Company of Mary order. She was a devout Anglican of the Anglo-Catholic variety. In early June 1915 she received her orders to travel to Melbourne in readiness for embarkation.

After travelling by train from Adelaide overnight she sought out Melbourne’s well-known Anglo-Catholic parish, St Peter’s Eastern Hill, which was near where she was staying. There she met other nurses from the parish with embarkation orders on the same ship as she had, the 'Wandilla'. St Peter’s had a number of nurses in the congregation, reflecting the number of hospitals in the vicinity and the encouragement given by the parish clergy to suitable callings for devout single women: nursing, the religious life and missions. One of the parish organisations was a branch of the Church of England Guild of St Barnabas for Nurses providing social and devotional activities.

Bonnin attended high mass at St Peter's the morning she arrived in Melbourne, Sunday 13 June 1915, and returned for evensong that evening. The alert and thoughtful vicar spoke with her, as she recorded in her diary:

I went to 7 o’clock church Canon Hughes introduced me to Nurse [Muriel] Thompson and Nurse [Annie] Purcell, both members of S. Barnabas Guild & and both going with us on Wandilla. They were formerly dismissed at Evensong. Spoke to Nurse [Helen] Lawrence who was awfully nice 7 and asked me to go to breakfast with her tomorrow after early church (State Library of South Australia, PRG 621/21/1)

(Helen Lawrence was awaiting her call up for the Australian Army Nursing Service, and would soon join Bonnin, Thompson and Purcell in Egypt. Their stories are also told at emhs.org.au).

Over the next few days, Bonnin attended early morning and evening weekday services at St. Peter’s. She and her friends, old from Adelaide and new from St Peter's, left on the 'Wandilla' the following Thursday. She sailed with them and later worked and socialised with them, as her diaries and photograph albums record.

Over the next four years,Irene Bonnin served in Egypt, France and England, returning home to Adelaide in 1919.

Bonnin returned to Melbourne to nurse in the late 1920s and 1930s, and again attended nearby St Peter's Eastern Hill. She was matron of St Ives Private Hospital in Vale St, East Melbourne for at least part of that time (UNA Vol. XXVI (8), 1.8.1928, p247)

It was possibly during this time that her name was  added to the St Peter’s Honour Boards, which would explain why appears out of order as an addendum.

Irene Bonnin returned to Adelaide in retirement. She died there on 27 February 1971, aged 86, and was buried in the North Road Anglican Cemetery.