Hairdressing and nursing: presentation of self and professional formation in colonial Australia

When Lucy Osburn led her team of Nightingale sisters to the Sydney Infirmary in 1868 she knew that a challenge awaited her. Her goal was to transform the colony's only public hospital into a respectable, ordered environment where, according to the Sanitarian view of the universe espoused by Miss Nightingale, the patient would find the resources to heal himself (sic). The prime difficulty was not the filth and disorder of the institution, it was the calibre of the nurses. This paper offers a case study into the issues of presentation of self, institutional shaping and the professional formation of nurses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The aesthetics of bodily grooming and the class and ethnic issues embedded in the professionalisation of nursing will be discussed. The story of nursing provides an exemplar of the disaggregation of a domain of female expertise. The translation of this expertise to a mass occupation embodied significant difficulties. Not the least of these difficulties was the problem nursing leaders encountered when attempting to instil certain personal attributes and vocational values in non pious common women. It will be argued here that it was the inculcation of a specific set of attributes that created the nurse. It is this persona of the nurse, and the challenge that it presented for colonial nurses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that this paper explores.