Sociality, Sexuality and Race

The nurses were deeply wounded, and profoundly confused, that they had been called to answer such charges. The charge that they had been fraternising with British soldiers from the camp was not, however, especially confronting. The nonchalant responses of Laing and Kellaway particularly suggests that flirtations and friendships were not uncommon and further evidence, including a clandestine marriage between another Australian nurse and a sergeant that Davis was grudgingly forced to accept, points to a degree of romantic interaction between the nurses and the soldiers of the Deolali camp that was perhaps not only predictable, but seen as more or less acceptable by the nurses themselves.³⁴ Fetherston, too, clearly found the charges about the nurses speaking with the soldiers farcical, and concluded that British class consciousness was at the root of the problem: he posited that Seddon had been primarily offended by the Australian nurses’ willingness to acknowledge non-commissioned officers as their social equals—“in the eyes of many Imperial Officers,... an unpardonable sin”—and that a chance encounter with a sergeant at the “perfectly respectable” home of a late non-commissioned officer’s wife was “the real origin of the attack on our nurses.” ³⁵ Notwithstanding a certain hypocrisy on the part of Fetherston in failing to acknowledge his own role, in insisting the Australian nurses wear badges of rank, he seemed surprisingly obtuse to the deeper connotations of such sociality for the British military authorities.³⁶

This was more than British snobbery clashing with Australian egalitarianism. The British in India already had an exaggerated belief in the imperative that, in the eyes of those they ruled, their own women were seen to be irreproachably chaste and under white patriarchal control. Even before the war it was an “unwritten rule” that English women considered to be prostitutes—an expansive term that could cover professional sex workers through to women who had romances with men other than their husbands—should be immediately deported home. Although this was honoured more in principle than in practice, the war heightened anxieties around the impact of venereal disease on the army, and drove a renewed zeal to exert morality among the British in India.³⁷ It is probable that Seddon’s unspecified “confidential” inquiries concerned military prostitution in Nasik, given the town’s notoriety. The widow’s boarding house was undoubtedly under surveillance. Seddon had, indeed, “closed down” her lodgings, “with the object of preventing the sisters from going there and consorting with Privates, Corporals and Sergeants.”³⁸ The Australian nurses’ insouciant persistence in visiting Mrs Baye’s home, with or without men from the cantonment, would have been considered subversive enough behaviour in itself.

If the Australians seemed oblivious to the implications of the alleged familiarity with the men of the camp, the charge against McAleer struck a much deeper and painfully sensitive nerve. For Davis, the “sordid and damning” evidence against McAleer was the “trump card” in the authorities’ vengeful quest to punish the nurses.³⁹ From the British perspective the charge against McAleer represented the ultimate inversion of the prescribed passive, sheltered role for white women in India. Here, it was the nurse who was represented as pursuing her unsuitable paramour, going so far as, so it was said, to present him with a pair of white trousers to “smarten him up,” in a particularly discordant echo of the colonial man rewarding his native mistress with European finery.⁴⁰ The British looked disapprovingly upon interracial relationships between white women and black or ‘native’ men, regardless of his status, but here the transgression was doubly intense because of the caste rules in India.⁴¹ As Davis spelled out in her report, “a sweeper is the lowest cast of Indian & in hospital he is employed to keep the lavatories clean & fetch & carry urinals & B.Ps [bedpans] to patients.”⁴² Disdained by other Indians—even by the cantonment prostitutes, themselves deemed unclean through their intimate contact with foreigners—the sweeper was therefore an especially outrageous object for the affections of an Australian nurse.⁴³ For the Australian nurses and matrons, however, there was an added insult in the charge against McAleer. Carrying the complex antagonisms of white Australians towards both Indigenous and Asian people “back home,” there is no doubt the nurses were deeply and viscerally horrified by the claim that they might desire, and actively pursue, a ‘native’ man. Arguably, the sense of shame that this particular charge continues to evoke in the Australian mind explains why the Deolali story remains something of a taboo subject

even today.⁴⁴

As the nurses struggled to make sense of what had happened, the figure of the interpreter-witness Martirossi became the focus of their most intense hatred. Labelled a fawning liar and a “foreign spy,” Martirossi was a strikingly hybrid and liminal character and as such perfectly fitted to be a symbol for the collapse of the proper categories of colonial rule. It appears he was an ‘Antiochian Greek,’ an Arabic-speaking minority Christian group from the greater Syrian region whose origins went back to the time of Alexander the Great, and being Catholic, from an even smaller minority within that group, which was usually Greek Orthodox. Such complexities escaped the Australian nurses, who viewed him simply as a fraud, describing him as “a mixture of foreigner and native,” or, as Davis put it, as a “filthy Levantine Greek.. .who poses as an Italian.”⁴⁵ Martirossi’s testimony suggests that he had an ear for gossip and enjoyed a certain everyday camaraderie with the men in the camp, at least. How the nurses saw him is another matter. “This creature,” one of the nurses who had been examined wrote after the event:

was always regarded by us as objectionable, though he was ranked as an Officer and messed with them. He made many unsuccessful attempts to become friendly with Sisters whose duties brought them in contact with him.⁴⁶

And yet Martirossi had been helping Nurse Bell trace her husband, missing in action at Gallipoli. He had on her request, apparently, written to the Papal Secretary in Rome asking him to assist with enquiries about Bell’s husband to the Turkish government.⁴⁷ If this was true, it suggests a certain complexity in relations between the nurses and the interpreter.

That Martirossi should have been engaged to “spy” on the nurses was a severe affront (although his testimony suggests that he was mostly reporting on rumours, and even his stalking of McAleer appears to have predated Seddon’s request for information). But that such a suspect and transgressive character had been permitted to sit in a court as a person with civil standing equal to their own to give evidence against the nurses was even more unconscionable. The nurses clearly felt deeply betrayed by the men who sat and coolly listened to Martirossi’s testimony against them. As Fetherston and Davis both emphasised, it was the failure of any of the British men in charge to offer “one word of sympathy” to the nurses as they sat alone to hear the charges against them that was particularly galling.⁴⁸ In their chagrin, the nurses invoked a sense of racial solidarity: “how decent Britishers [sic] could resort to such low methods is beyond us.”⁴⁹