Public health nursing in Australia--historically invisible

Public health nursing in Australia is not written into the history of Australian nursing, yet there have been public health nurses in Australia since about 1902. Nor is there a shortage of historical material--regular articles were published in nursing and medical journals about public health nursing during the early decades of the twentieth century. Why then, is public health nursing so invisible to historians in Australia? This paper will argue that public health nursing has been neglected in Australia because of excessive hospital centrism in nursing and nursing organisations. Hospital centrism provided public hospital Matrons with considerable power, and they not only controlled the various state based nursing organisations but also the curriculum of nurse training programs. Hospital doctors, who were permitted to become members of nursing organisations, were able to exert a great deal of influence over nursing ensuring biomedical influence over nurse training. Matrons and doctors developed a symbiotic relationship through which they organised nursing around the provision of a nursing workforce for hospital medicine and this focus has perpetuated until the present day. The concentration in nursing histories on hospital nursing and nursing organisations is reflective of the superior status accorded historically to hospital nursing over any other form of nursing practice so public health and community health nursing have long been neglected in Australia.