Ellen Kettle's Biography
Ellen Kettle (1922 -1999)
Nursing sister, author and historian, was born on 21 April 1922 in Colac, Victoria to Thomas Kettle and Mary Kettle, nee Bicket. She was second eldest of five children; her siblings were Mathew (1921) who died as a Prisoner of War in Burma 1944; Thomas (1923) farmer; David (1930) farmer and Rosemary (1937) housewife. Ellen completed seven years of her primary education in a small country school and continued the next two years of her secondary education riding a horse eight miles each way to Colac High School.
Ellen Kettle commenced her general nursing training at the Geelong District Hospital and on completion of her training in 1945 she went to work at the Bairnsdale District Hospital in country Victoria for a few years. Ellen continued her studies finishing her Midwifery training and certificate in 1951 spending the next six months on Thursday Island caring for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders. This experience reawakened a childhood ambition to work among aboriginal people which prompted her to write to the Director of Health in Canberra asking about the opportunities of employment as a nurse in the Northern Territory. A few weeks later she was interviewed and commenced nursing on a Government Aboriginal settlement about 185 miles from Alice Springs.
When Ellen Kettle first arrived in Alice Springs on 2 February 1952 to begin work at her first clinic she described her impression of Yuendumu as “there were about 400 desert people, few of whom knew any English and I didn’t their language. Both the hospital and my living quarters were of unlined war-time camouflaged iron with no electricity or reticulated water.”
In 1954 Nurse Kettle was appointed the Commonwealth Department of Health’s first Rural Survey Sister pioneering mobile health work in isolated areas of the Northern Territory. Over the next five decades she almost single-handedly revolutionised Aboriginal health in the Northern Territory by creating medical records for thousands of patients and drawing attention to their plight, particularly in regard to high infant mortality.
Her approach and calls for change were usually met with indifference and even opposition. However the medical records that she gathered amounted to a body of evidence that the authorities could not deny. Gradually, Aboriginal health in the Northern Territory began to improve.
Her personal papers which include diaries kept from 1959 to 1997 and her autobiography, Gone Bush, provides a remarkable insight into the work of this dedicated and courageous woman. Sister Ellen Kettle died in Darwin on 2 August 1999, aged 77.
Sources : Northern Territory Library, Personal Papers Collection, Ellen Kettle Collection, Biographical Profile; National Treasures URL: http://nationaltreasures.nla.gov.au/%3E/Treasures/item/nla.int-ex10-s6 [accessed: 1 October 2008]; Kettte, Ellen S. Gone Bush, Sydney ; F.P. Leonard, 1967. NTC 610.73099 KETT