By Jessica Anstice
All four Metro Tunnel’s tunnel boring machines (TBMs) have been named in honour of prominent Victorian women, one being Lang Lang decorated war heroine Alice Appleford (nee Ross-King).
An Australian civilian and military nurse, she took part in both World Wars.
During the First World War she served in hospitals in Egypt and France and was one of only seven Australian nurses decorated with the Military Medal for Gallantry.
Born in Ballarat, Ms Appleford was drawn to nursing at a young age.
She worked at the Austin Hospital before she undertook formal training at The Alfred.
In November of 1914, she enlisted as a staff nurse in the Australian Army Nursing Service, Australian Imperial Force, where her surname was hyphenated to Ross-King to distinguish her from another Alice King in the service.
At the start of her career, she served with first Australian General Hospital in Egypt, then at Suez to care for casualties from the Gallipoli Campaign.
After returning home at the end of 1915 where she nursed wounded returnees, Ms Ross- King went back to first Australian General Hospital in Rouen, France and nursed throughout 1916 during the Somme Offensive.
In July 1917, she was sent forward to the second Australian Casualty Clearing Station which was close to the trenches at Trois Arbres near Armentières.
However, within a few days of her arrival the station was bombed.
She was awarded the Military Medal for her bravery during the attack, but the recognition didn’t finish there.
On Christmas Day 1917 she was ‘mentioned in despatches’ and in May1918 , was awarded the Associate Royal Red Cross Medal.She met Dr Sydney Appleford on the voyage home to Australia after the First World War.
After they married, the couple settled in Lang Lang, where they raised four children and immersed themselves in the community.
In Lang Lang, the pair ran a medical practice and Ms Appleford was the driving force behind the establishment of the Lang Lang Private Hospital, during a time when outbreaks of diseases such as diphtheria and scarlet fever kept the hospital busy.
It doesn’t end there, she contributed to the community in many ways and was an honorary life member of the RSL Women’s Auxiliary, life member of the Red Cross Society, District Commissioner of the Girl Guides, President of the School Mothers’ Club and a member of the Country Women’s Association.
in 1933, Alice and her husband Sydney donated land and a building, formerly an Army Barrack, to create the first Lang Lang Scout Group. Recently the building was 100 years old and was refurbished and named in their honour. In the midst of all this, the pair found the time to be pretty good golfers, competing together in team events at Lang Lang.
Between World Wars, she trained volunteer aid detachments, (VAD’s) and in 1940 Alice and Sydney moved to Melbourne in 1940 to help with the war effort.
As a measure of the esteem in which Mr and Mrs Appleford were held, the whole Lang Lang community turned out at the railway station to farewell them when they left.
Mrs Appleford was commissioned into the Army as a Major during World War Two and appointed Assistant Controller of the Australian Army Medical Women’s Service, making her responsible for some 1900 servicewomen until 1951.
In 1949, she was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal, the highest award made by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
Her citation read: “No one who came into contact with Major Appleford could fail to recognise her as a leader of women.
“Her sense of duty, her sterling solidarity of character, her humanity, sincerity, and kindliness of heart set for others a very high example.”
Closer to home, Ms Appleford’s leadership and service was not confined to her military service.
A devoted mother and grandmother, Ms Appleford was a family-orientated woman at heart. In 1951, her daughter Marion contracted tuberculosis as a result of her war service as a nurse in New Guinea and was in hospital in quarantine for 6 months.
At the time, her granddaughter Maggie was just six months old, so Ms Appleford resigned from the Army to care for her.
Caring for others was how she lived her life.
Maggie’s daughter and Mrs Appleford’s great-granddaughter, Jacqui, said her first recollections of her great grandmother’s important history were from her grandmother Marion and from Alice’s war diaries which were “brought to life for me in the book Anzac Girls (also known as The Other Anzacs, by Peter Rees), where I started to fully appreciate Alice’s wartime achievements.
“I reflect on Alice’s resilience, to carry on doing her absolute best each day to help people, in some extraordinarily challenging circumstances.
“This is a relevant life lesson today, 100 years beyond her bravery.”
Ms Appleford died in August 1968, and is buried at Fawkner Cemetery in Melbourne.
Her remarkable service as a military nurse has been well publicised in events commemorating the centenary of the First World War, including the TV mini-series Anzac Girls.
More recently, the first eastern section of the Metro Tunnel is now complete, after a second TBM, named in honour of Mrs Appleford, broke through at the tunnel’s eastern entrance at South Yarra.
TMB Alice is the second TBM to break through at South Yarra in the past month, joining Millie, which broke through in September.
Alice and Millie have each dug 1.7 kilometres from the site of the new Anzac Station to the tunnel’s eastern entrance, while TBMs Joan and Meg have dug 2.6 kilometres from the western entrance in Kensington to the Parkville Station site.
Alice’s cutterhead will soon be lifted out by crane and trucked to the Anzac Station site. The rest of the TBM will be pulled back through the tunnel to Anzac Station, then reassembled and launched towards Town Hall Station.
“This is yet another milestone on this huge project, which will create room for more trains, more often and continues to support hundreds of jobs,” Minister for Transport Infrastructure Jacinta Allan said.
“Workers on the Metro Tunnel Project have done a fantastic job to keep this project pushing ahead while taking the greatest care with their own health and safety.”
