Portraits of Angels

Seventy Five years ago in the lead up to VP (Victory in the Pacific) Day Nora Heysen painted the Nurses of a pioneer Medevac Unit.

Throughout August 1945 official war artist Captain Nora Heysen spent time with an elite group of Australian nurses of 1 and 2 Medical Air Evacuation Transport Units (MAETU).  Known as “Flying Angels” or “Meet-U” sisters the Medical Air Evacuation Transport Unit provided in flight medical care to casualties being evacuated from combat zones in New Guinea and surrounding islands from late 1944. After the hostilities ended the MAETU continued to work evacuating prisoners of war back to Australia. Pioneers in the field of military nursing the MAETU operated outside the protection of the Geneva Convention and the sisters were given significant military training. 

2 MAETU was deployed on 2 August 1945 to Morotai, Halmahera Islands, Netherlands East Indies. In Morotai Heysen accompanied sisters evacuating casualties. It seems that her fears that it would be difficult to work in a transport plane full of stretcher cases were real and she produced only one small painting Air Ambulance carrying battle casualties from Morotai to Townsville. The unit evacuated over 1,000 patients in that month alone.

The highlight of Heysen’s MAETU work is a series of portraits. In memoirs of her service Sister Betty Chandler noted Heysen’s visit to Morotai. She recalls her own reluctance to pose and of the day her friend Marie Craig sat for her portrait “One day there was only Marie, Nora and myself in the Officer’s Mess ...Again I wasn’t keen and dithered whereupon Marie said to Nora “Look Nora, you might as well paint me, I’ll pose for you. This job is going to kill me anyway and at least people will know what Marie Craig looked like”. A month later Marie Craig was killed when her plane crashed on route from Biak, New Guinea. The plane wreckage was only located in 1975 on a west Irian peak.

Sister Verdun ‘Chic’ Sheah the only other MAETU sister to be killed also allegedly predicted her fate. Nicknamed for her ability to maintain a faultless appearance even after the longest flights she was only 29 when the transport plane she was travelling in crashed into a mountain peak during a short trip from Jacquinot Bay to Rabual in Nov 1945.

Heysen also made portraits of Sisters Veronica Harbourd and Betty Stafford. Sister Harbourd was among the first group of volunteers trained for service in the MAETU. She assisted with the evacuation of wounded US servicemen back to the United States and featured in press interviews recounting her experiences in San Francisco. The “Meet-U” sisters received considerable attention in the popular media of the day and their role was glamorised in magazine features.

Heysen drew Sister Lucy Mackenzie, 1 MAETU, on the airstrip at Lae, Northern New Guinea. “Strip sitting”, often under the wing of an aircraft for shelter, was regularly endured by all the MAETU sisters due to delayed flights or waiting for a ride to the compound at the end of a shift. Sister Mackenzie trained at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne before joining the RAAFNS in 1943. She served with 1 MAETU until September 1945 when she transferred to 2 MAETU as a mentor for newer recruits assisting with the evacuation of prisoners of war back to Australia. She is portrayed by Heysen with an expression of quiet resignation surrounded by the equipment carried by all MAETU sisters in-flight.

From 1944 to September 1945 the MAETU evacuated 18,197 without a loss of life in-flight a significant contribution to Australia’s war effort in the South West Pacific Area.  Nora Heysen’s portraits of MAETU sisters are honest, gentle representations of confident young women by one of the fore most artists of her generation. Collectively they make a fitting tribute to the women and their service.

First published in Wartime Issue 58, autumn 2012