Tribute to Marjorie Alice Somerville
Today I pay tribute to Marjorie Somerville, founder of the Methodist Nursing Service, who died on 30 September 2009 at the age of 89 years. Marjorie Wilkinson was born in 1920 to Cecelia and George Wilkinson. She grew up in Tamworth, New South Wales, where her father owned a sawmill. She was a champion tennis player at high school, and later went into nursing, training for her general certificate at Tamworth Base Hospital.
She then gained her Nursing Certificate in Obstetrics at Crown Street Women’s Hospital, Surry Hills. Her dream was to be a woman whose life was one of faithful Christian service, and she studied at Leigh Theological College in Enfield to become the first Methodist Deaconess in the State in 1945. Deaconesses were authorised to carry out all the usual responsibilities of a male minister, including the administration of the sacraments, marriage and baptism.
Marjorie went on to pioneer the Methodist Nursing Service’s No. 1 unit and, with her fellow deaconess Ethel Helyer, was deployed, with an ambulance named Augustus to patrol 35,000 square kilometres of central Australia in the outback of New South Wales and Queensland from 1946 to 1949. They were expected to live a very strict and moral lifestyle but at the same time to be tolerant and broadminded in their acceptance of the wide cross-section of people they would encounter and serve. Their motto was to deliver health and pastoral service to all people of every colour, class and creed. They were beloved by the people of the outback, of whose lives they became a part. Nicknamed the Golden Girls, these two deaconess nurses delivered babies and the sacraments throughout the bush.
During the last years of a terrible drought they ran the first free mobile health care the region had ever seen. After that Marjorie returned to Sydney, and was responsible for establishing the first Methodist Mission Aged Peoples’ District Nursing Service in Newtown, which is now run by Uniting Care.
In that era the work of the ministry by women and the marriage of women were not allowed to mix, and marriage meant having to resign. Marjorie Wilkinson became Marjorie Somerville, a clergyman’s wife, in 1951, and she energetically supported her husband’s church and bible ministry. The couple had three children, a son and two daughters. She was later to return to nursing as a night duty charge sister in Methodist nursing homes in Sydney’s inner west. In the 1970s Marjorie joined the Christian Writers’ Program connected with the Billy Graham Crusades, of which I was a proud lecturer, and hoped that one day she could write the story of her unique experiences during those years as the co-founding deaconess-nurse for the Methodist Nursing Services in the outback.
In 1977 she was made a Life Governor of the Bible Society in Australia, and in 2000 she was nominated for the Senior Australian of the Year. It was in 2006 that Marjorie’s daughter, Stephanie Somerville, wrote and published Marjorie’s fascinating biography—I was pleased to be part of that preparation—entitled “Angels of Augustus: Pioneers of the Living Inland”. At that time Marjorie returned to public speaking, this time from her wheelchair, with the book being launched at New South Wales Parliament House to a very large and appreciative audience. The book is a wonderful true account of the early days of the pioneering nursing adventures in parts of Central Australia and of the outback that even the Flying Doctor Service had not yet reached. It offers a valuable insight into the rugged lives of our forebears just several generations ago.
Furthermore Marjorie Somerville’s life represents an inspiring example of a heroic lifestyle that is rarely glimpsed by young people today—a passionate, courageous and full life given in service to the Christian faith, to the larger Australian community, and to an ideal more noble and more meaningful than any mere financial success. I am pleased to place on the historical record of Australia the worth and significance of the life of Marjorie Alice Somerville, nee Wilkinson.