She was a smoking, swearing, rev-head and a rule-breaking lesbian. Lilian Cooper also happened to be Queensland’s first female doctor and Australia’s first female surgeon.
And she was a Banana Bender. What’s not to like? There’s enough material there for a musical, right?
And there just happens to be one – a Matilda Award-winning musical at that – A Girl’s Guide to World War. It had a short run on the Sunshine Coast some years back and was fleetingly at Brisbane Powerhouse and now it returns to celebrate pioneering Aussie women doctors.
It actually features two remarkable but scarcely known pioneering Australian women doctors.
A Girl’s Guide to World War opens at Redlands Performing Arts Centre on March 8 before touring the state (Caloundra, Gladstone, Maryborough, Bundaberg) and finishing with a short season in the Cremorne Theatre at QPAC from April 8 to 12.
You might like
A Girl’s Guide to World War reveals the true story of the two Australian women who ran a WWI frontline tent hospital and came home as war heroes.
Matilda Award-winning actress Susie French plays Dr Lilian Cooper, who tried to enlist with the armed forces in WWI, as did Sydney-born medico Dr Agnes Bennett – but only female nurses were accepted.
Undaunted, they made their own way to the action, where Dr Bennett ran a suffragette-funded all-women hospital near the Serbian border, with Dr Cooper as her chief surgeon. Their frontline tent hospital was so close to the fighting that it was under constant threat of air raids. Yet it became a model for other army hospitals, with wounded soldiers known to bribe ambulance drivers to take them to the women’s hospital.
Written and composed by Sunshine Coast couple Katy Forde and Aleathea Monsour, the show features stirring live music from the all-girl band, Vix and the Slick Chix. Forde says it also has plenty of humour and fun, and even a love story – that of Dr Cooper and her life partner Miss Josephine Bedford, who tagged along to the Serbian frontline and ended up running the hospital’s ambulance service.
Subscribe for updates
‘resourceful, resilient, kick-ass, history-making women’
Dr Cooper was also Queensland’s first registered female driver and was one of the founders of the automobile club that became today’s RACQ (although she was fined for speeding several times, including a three pound fine for racing a work colleague down Queen Street at over twice the legal speed limit).
Miss Bedford created the first kindergarten in Queensland and also the first park with playground equipment.
They were just as amazing on the home front as they were in the war, obviously.
The musical is “a real celebration of some resourceful, resilient, kick-ass, history-making women,” says Katy Forde. “They went to war, even when the army didn’t want them, and they came back decorated war heroes. All of us – and particularly women and girls – should know their story.”
After its first run on the Sunshine Coast, A Girl’s Guide to World War won two Matilda Awards. Along with French’s Best Supporting Actress award, the show was the first ever regional musical to win the Matilda for Best New Australian Work.
On the back of that success, Forde and Monsour secured funding to take the show on a Queensland tour, beginning – appropriately – on International Women’s Day, with the show at RPAC followed by the tour and QPAC season.
It’s one of the most fascinating stories you have never heard.