Australian Dictionary of Biography

Gwen Burbidge, 1947

Fairfield Hospital archives

Gwendolen Norah Burbidge (1904–2000), nurse, was born on 6 January 1904 at Solihull, Warwickshire, England, second of four children of Blanche Burbidge, née Heard, and her husband Thomas Charles Burbidge, manager of a leather goods works. By 1912 the family had emigrated to Sydney, where Thomas worked as a commercial traveller. Blanche died of tuberculosis in October 1913 and Thomas remarried the following year. Gwen gained entry to the selective Sydney Girls’ High School in 1917, but after only four months the family moved to Melbourne, where she attended Gardiner Central School for two years and completed her Merit certificate.

In December 1925 Burbidge began nurse training at the (Royal) Melbourne Hospital under Lady Superintendent Jane Bell. Despite ill-health, including frequent migraines and chronic pain likely caused by endometriosis, she was an exceptional student, topping her exams in ten of twelve subjects and winning the Madge Kelly memorial prize (1929) as the best nurse trainee in Victoria. She was registered as a general nurse that year and, after further training at the (Royal) Women’s Hospital, qualified as a midwife.

Burbidge returned to the Melbourne Hospital as ward sister in April 1930. Bell soon appointed her tutor sister in the Preliminary Training School (PTS), a role Burbidge found deadening because of Bell’s rigid control of the teaching. In 1931 she completed two nursing certificate courses through the London-based Royal Sanitary Institute and joined the reserve Australian Army Nursing Service under Matron-in-Chief Grace Wilson. When Wilson became matron of the Alfred Hospital in 1933, she recruited Burbidge as tutor sister in the hospital’s new PTS. Burbidge faced outrage from Bell for leaving and hostility from the Alfred’s nurses, who resisted her reforms to teaching practices. Focusing on work, she wrote one of the first Australian nursing textbooks, Lectures for Nurses, which was published in six editions between 1935 and 1958.

In 1936 Burbidge travelled to England where she gained experience in several hospitals and studied for two years at King’s College of Household and Social Science, University of London, qualifying for a sister tutor certificate (first class) and a diploma in nursing (with distinction) majoring in hospital administration. She returned to Melbourne in January 1939 with the highest qualifications of any nurse in Australia.

Within two months, Burbidge had been appointed matron of the Queen’s Memorial Infectious Diseases Hospital, Fairfield (from 1948 the Fairfield Hospital), a post she held until 1960. A strict disciplinarian, she implemented wide-ranging reforms, a task made more difficult during World War II. In 1940 she began a successful school of nursing at the hospital, which later welcomed male trainees. After the war she took a leading role in opening the hospital to family visits for infectious patients, and in diversifying the hospital’s operations beyond infectious diseases.

Undeterred by her continuing chronic ill-health, Burbidge was prominent in most major Victorian and Federal nursing organisations. She was an efficient chair of meetings and became an accomplished public speaker. In February 1939 she had joined the Council of the Royal Victorian College of Nursing, which at the time was dominated by Jane Bell’s ‘old guard.’ As the leader of a new generation of nurses, Burbidge urged reforms to address the severe shortage of nurses and to break down nursing’s internally focused culture. These reforms were fiercely opposed by Bell and her allies, who feared they would mean a lowering of standards.

A member of Victoria’s Nurses Board and Hospital Matrons’ Association, Burbidge supported the use of partly trained nurses as assistants in hospitals. Her influence was evident in her appointment by the Federal Labor government to wartime positions: she was seconded to the Manpower Directorate in 1943, to establish a nursing control division in Victoria, and appointed in 1945 to a committee of inquiry into the shortage of civilian nurses. The bitterest opposition to Burbidge’s reforms focused on her advocacy of trained nurses’ aides: from 1950 to 1952 she chaired Australia’s first Nurses’ Aide School and in 1961 she helped edit the Hospital and Charities Commission’s Handbook for Nursing Aides. She also cooperated with the Australian Red Cross Society by drafting its 1949 Manual of Home Nursing.

Burbidge was nonetheless committed to properly regulated higher education for Australian nurses. For eight months in 1949, as a recipient of a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, she studied nursing and nurse education in North America. She returned committed to transforming nurse training into nurse education, including through the Melbourne School of Nursing (1951–63). As founding president (1946–49) of the Florence Nightingale Memorial Committee of Australia, she was a strong advocate for the establishment in 1949 of the (Royal) College of Nursing, Australia, based in Melbourne, serving as its first censor-in-chief and later as president (1960–61). Her hopes for a truly national college were dashed, however, by the formation, also in 1949, of the rival New South Wales College of Nursing. She was eventually elected a fellow of both colleges.

In 1949 the Florence Nightingale committee awarded Burbidge its award for outstanding service to nursing in Australia. Appointed OBE in 1955, she was a member (1955–63) of the nursing committee of the National Health and Medical Research Council and served as president of the Airdrie Home for Aged and Incapacitated Nurses until 1961. In December 1960 she resigned as matron of Fairfield Hospital and from most of her professional positions. By then, financial constraints limited her reforms at Fairfield, while conservative hospital politics ended her hopes for a more influential role for nurses in hospital administration. The library in the hospital’s school of nursing was named after her.

A dedicated Methodist, Burbidge was diminutive and loved fashionable hats. In retirement she travelled extensively and created a native garden at her holiday cottage at Warrandyte. She died of a heart attack on 9 July 2000 in Vaucluse Private Hospital, Brunswick, and was cremated.