As we commemorate the 110th anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in Turkey during World War I, it is an opportunity for us to pause and reflect on the service and sacrifice of our servicemen and women, past and present.
We spoke with Dr. Susan Neuhaus AM CSC, who is a Fellow of RACS, former Colonel in the Royal Australian Army Medical Corps, and Member of Council of the Australian War Memorial, on her military career and the significance of ANZAC Day.
What has your career in the military been like?
I joined the army as a 5th year medical student, interning for a year in England before coming back to Australia and working as a doctor. In Cambodia, I worked with a UN deployment, tending to the medical needs of 350 Australian and New Zealand soldiers and grappling with everything from malaria to landmines.
To qualify as a surgeon, I had to reenter civilian life for my surgical training, starting out in Queensland and eventually completing my PhD at the University of Adelaide. I ended up putting my uniform on again and for a number of years worked in the Army Reserve. I was then asked to run a tent hospital in Bougainville, which at the time was coming out of a decade of conflict.
I was deployed as a military surgeon until 2009 and finished my time in uniform in 2011. While no longer in active service, I continue to be actively engaged in the veterans community. In the latest iteration of my career, for the first two months of 2025 I was deployed in the Central African Republic with Médecins Sans Frontières.
What have been some of the greatest challenges you've faced working in conflict zones?
Working in austere environments can be very challenging, where you're often constrained in terms of medical equipment available to you. However, you can also be privileged to work with cutting edge technology like frozen blood products which save the lives of casualties of armed conflict. Treating victims of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and children with preventable conditions like typhoid and malaria can be hard as well.
You recently published your first fiction novel The Surgeon of Royaumont, about a young Australian woman on the battlefields of World War I who finds her calling through her work as a surgeon. What was your inspiration for writing this novel?
This is actually the second book I've written. My first book was Not for Glory: A Century of Service by Medical Women to the Australian Army and Its Allies. It includes several chapters which cover Australian women who served on various battlefronts overseas in very brutal conditions. Women such as Dr Lillian Cooper, who joined a Scottish Women's Hospital unit and worked in a tent hospital near the Serbian front line from 1916. I find the stories of these remarkable women incredibly humbling, seeing how they worked courageously on the battlefront a century before I did.
The protagonist of my novel The Surgeon of Royaumont, Dr Clara Heywood, is a composite character - drawn from many of these female surgeons' experiences. Dr Heywood works at Royaumont on the Western Front, which treated over 10, 000 allied casualties during World War I.
What is the personal significance of ANZAC Day for you and how will you be commemorating ANZAC Day this year?
ANZAC Day holds many meanings to me personally. In 2018, I was honoured to be the first woman to deliver the Dawn Service Address at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, where I shared the often-overlooked role of women in recent history. Delivering this important address was an incredible moment of self-reflection. ANZAC Day continues to evolve in its meaning for me. I find increasingly as I journey through life, I see how the role of women who have served since the Boer War has often been overlooked and overshadowed by others. I've also had friends in uniform who have died, which makes ANZAC Day particularly poignant.
This ANZAC Day I will be in Canberra, attending the ANZAC Day Commemoration Service at the Australian War Memorial.
