Sister Sybil Fletcher, army nurse

This portrait of Sister Sybil Fletcher, 2/1st Australian General Hospital, was taken shortly after she arrived in the Middle East in 1940. Fletcher was one of more than 4,000 Australian nurses who served in the Second World War.
The image was taken by Damien Parer, one of Australia’s most famous war photographers. Parer was the first official Australian photographer appointed during the Second World War. Working for the Department of Information (DOI), he sailed to the Middle East with the first contingent of the Second AIF in January 1940. He spent the next year photographing Australians training for service and then in action across North Africa and the Middle East. He photographed and filmed the early victories in Libya, and the fighting in Greece and Syria and at the siege of Tobruk.
After Japan entered the war, Parer returned to Australia to cover the fighting in the Pacific. He arrived in New Guinea in June 1942, and later filmed Australians fighting along the Kokoda Trail. It was here he completed his most significant work, including his Academy Award–winning newsreel Kokoda Front Line. Parer resigned from the DOI in August 1943 and began working for Paramount News. He went on to cover American operations, and was killed by a Japanese machine-gunner at Peleiu in the Palau archipelago on 17 September 1944. It is said that at the time he was shot he was walking backwards trying to capture the expressions on the faces of the advancing American soldiers.