Australian Dictionary of Biography

Hilda Zinner talking to Private Graeme Davis, 1966

Australian War Memorial, CUN/66/0716A/VN

Hilda Georgina Zinner (1926–2000), Red Cross Field Force member and welfare worker, was born on 11 March 1926, at Hamburg, Germany, only child of Czech-born Anna Zinner, née Lefevre, and her German-born husband Edgar Max Zinner, grocer. Fleeing Germany, the family arrived in Sydney aboard the Nestor on 11 May 1939, where their relatives included the merchant Leopold Zinner, an uncle of Edgar’s who was the family’s guarantor of settlement support.

As German nationals of Jewish faith, the Zinners were refugees but were categorised as enemy aliens by the authorities until January 1944, when they were reclassified as refugee aliens. Initially settling at Bondi, the family was assisted by the Australian Jewish Welfare Society to find work and accommodation. Edgar spent three months at Chelsea Park Training Farm, before finding employment on a rural property at Spring Ridge near Tamworth in northern New South Wales. There he milked cows, sheared sheep, and worked around the yards, while Anne was a cook. Hilda, meanwhile, had been placed into the Isabella Lazarus Home for Children, a Jewish institution at Hunters Hill. As they set about establishing themselves and in response to enemy alien restrictions, Zinner’s parents moved from Spring Ridge to Breadalbane, then to Darlinghurst, Pymble, North Sydney, and Petersham. The family finally settled at Ashfield in January 1942.

As an only child, the bespectacled and strongly built Hilda loved her two years in the Lazarus Home, finding that ‘I like regimentation and enjoyed the institutional atmosphere’ (Toltz 1989, 18). A naturally caring and compassionate person, she became a mother figure to the younger children. After leaving the home she attended the secular Riverside Domestic Science School, Gladesville, at which she came first in a class of forty-six in September 1941 and won the Nathan Jacobs memorial prize from the New South Wales Board of Jewish Education. At the end of the school year, Zinner commenced employment as a dressmaker’s finisher, but in 1944 entered nursing training at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. She did not complete the course, leaving to help with her parents’ business, one of the first continental delicatessens in inner Sydney.

In 1957, after the death of her father, Zinner joined the Australian Red Cross Society (ARCS) as a welfare officer at the Repatriation General Hospital, Concord, where the society ran a social welfare program for ex-servicemen and women. Two years later, she was appointed assistant superintendent of the ARCS Field Force and deployed for overseas duty in Malaya (Malaysia) as part of the Australian Army Force, Far East Land Forces assisting the British fighting the communist insurgency during the Malayan Emergency. She spent twelve months in the British Military Hospital, Kamunting, and following appointment as commandant in October 1960 served for nearly two years at the British Military Hospital, Singapore. Her work included providing emotional support for hospitalised Australian and New Zealand servicemen and their families, along with such recreational and educational assistance as library services, sporting equipment, concerts, and picnics. After taking compassionate leave to care for her ageing mother, Zinner was demobilised in September 1962. In June 1964 she was appointed MBE for her work with the Far East Land Forces.

Zinner’s second tour of duty with the ARCS Field Force commenced in June 1965 when she was sent to Singapore as commandant. In January the following year she was posted to Vietnam where, as chief of the Field Force, she worked in the United States Army’s 3rd Field Hospital at Bien Hoa, Saigon, and later for fifteen months at its 36th Evacuation Hospital, Vung Tau. Her job was arduous and dangerous as she moved between Vung Tau and Bien Hoa, often under fire. ‘Our wounded, as well as being badly shocked, require a lot of attention and one is kept busy writing letters, attending to their shopping and being generally sympathetic,’ she wrote (SLNSW MS9995).

After returning to Australia in February 1967, Zinner left the ARCS to give her more opportunity look after her sick mother, who lived until 1998. For twenty years she worked with the Department of Immigration as a welfare officer helping new immigrants adjust to life in Australia, something that was part of her own lived experience. She was also an active member of the Sydney Jewish community. As a teenager, she had joined the Shomrim Zionist Youth Organisation, affiliated with the Zionist Federation, whose members came under the scrutiny of the security services: the family home in Ashfield was searched in May 1942, with ‘nothing of a subversive nature’ found. In adult life she was an active member of the National Council of Jewish Women, and in November 1967 was the first woman speaker at a Remembrance Night dinner of the New South Wales Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. She was also involved in the Australian Women’s Vietnam Veterans Association. An inveterate traveller, her adventures extended from hitch-hiking around Tasmania in 1957 to travelling to Japan, Eastern Europe, and the United States of America in the 1990s. She rarely missed a daily swim at Bondi Beach.

In her later years Zinner, who did not marry, waged a long battle with lung cancer with characteristic courage and determination. She died at Bellevue Hill on 7 February 2000, and was buried in Rookwood cemetery. Strong-willed and feisty, this ‘big, boisterous and brusque’ woman (Lamensdorf 2006, 21), had many friends who valued her no-nonsense and positive approach to life.