Home PageContradictory Stories
This is a story of growing up in nursing. It captures the homesickness, excitement and disorientation of the early days and moves on to describe how this particular group of students grew in confidence and ability and began to spread their wings. It then moves on to examine how the experience affected some areas of their later lives.
This book grew from a project in which 28 women who were nurses in a large Melbourne hospital between 1964 and 1967 took part.
Contradictory Stories Reviews:
1. Assoc. Prof. Denise FassettAs Sheryl Brennan so eloquently portrays it is very difficult for students of nursing and recent graduates of nursing to understand the apprenticeship system of nurse training. Yet the history of this apprenticeship has not only significantly shaped and moulded nursing culture, including the lives of many nurses but also the illness experiences of generations of those who have been recipients of health care. This book is a compelling and insightful oral history that will assist students of nursing and newly registered nurses to understand how the culture and complexity of nursing practice has evolved.
Associate Professor Denise Fassett
Head of School of Nursing and Midwifery
University of Tasmania
2. Dr. Kim Walker
What a delightful and engaging read this compact but rich and rewarding text offers. Oral history is the perfect vehicle for assembling, tracing and telling (again) the narratives of life once lived by a cohort of Australian women who one day in 1964 found themselves beginning life as indentured students of nursing. As has been well established by many scholars, nursing is deeply and properly, an oral culture. ’Contradictory Stories’ beautifully exemplifies this truth.
Gathering together a now well-dispersed but surprisingly sizable cohort from her original mid-sixties sorority, Brennan crafts from their ‘narrative rememberings’ a scrupulously referenced and detailed yet never overwrought collection of vignettes, recollections, shared memories and disparate analyses of life in ‘PTS’, ‘on the wards’, ‘in the home’ and, finally, somewhere well beyond. As I turned the pages those spaces/places of my training days were gently resuscitated so easy was it to resonate with these women’s nuanced descriptions and vivid recounting of individual and collective journeys to registered nurse. As the story-telling draws to a close one cannot but be impressed by the ways their experiences as novice nurses insinuated themselves deep into the fabric of their lives as women, wives and mothers.
This charming exemplar of oral history at work is a must for anyone wanting to connect with another time and set of challenges and imperatives. I will certainly add ’Contradictory Stories’ to my list of readings for any student who needs or wants to better understand the traditions and shibboleths of the nursing profession. But for the lay reader too, there is much to be mined from this volume so specific, yet universal, are many of the themes it embodies.
Dr Kim Walker RN, PhD
Adjunct Professor, University of Technology, Sydney
Clinical Associate Professor, University of Tasmania
Practice Development & Research Coordinator, St Vincent’s Private Hospital, Sydney