Page 1403 - Week 05 - Thursday, 18 June 2020
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Deidre worked night shifts at Manly hospital. As she said, it gave her more time to spend at the beach. She was eventually put in charge of what was then called the casualty department. She also studied obstetrics at the Crown Street Women’s Hospital in Sydney and qualified as a midwife in 1965.
It was clear Deidre liked to challenge herself, and one day in 1968 she announced to her family that she had joined the Army. After an initial posting at 8 camp hospital in Singleton, New South Wales, she was on her way to Vietnam. From 1970 to 1971, she was posted at a 1st Australian Field Hospital in Vung Tau, where she spent 12 months treating and caring for severely wounded soldiers.
Deidre was one of only 43 Army nurses to serve in Vietnam, and there is no doubt that her time in Vietnam had a profound impact on her life, not only through the lifelong friends that she made but in the caring quality she so openly displayed when she returned to civilian life.
In May 1971 Captain Emily Deidre Coy met Lieutenant William James Kelly, an Army pharmacist at the 2nd Military Hospital, Ingleburn. They married in August 1972 and Deidre joined her husband, Bill, at the ANZUK military hospital in Changi, Singapore where he had been posted 12 months earlier. That began a lifelong love affair for both of them with that island nation.
Bill and Deidre returned to Australia late in 1973 to military hospital postings in Sydney. Though at the time females could be married and serve in the defence force, becoming pregnant generally spelled an end to their career, and that was the case in 1974 when Bill and Deidre’s first son, Darren, was born, followed by Stuart in 1976.
Deidre continued to nurse part time through her pregnancies and her children’s early years. After various moves across Sydney, Bill was eventually posted to Canberra in 1982, where they set up the family home in Fadden, where Bill still is today. Agreeing that, with Deidre being from Manly and Bill being from Brisbane, Canberra was not a bad compromise proved to be a wise and rewarding decision even 38 years later.
Deidre’s old football loyalties went out the window when the Raiders came on the scene. While Bill pursued his Army career and the boys their schooling at Marist, Deidre not only totally supported them, looking after the family, but returned to nursing, firstly at the then Woden Valley Hospital and then at Jindalee nursing home, specialising in geriatric care and working night shifts, something she would do for the next 25 or so years. She loved her elderly and frail patients and looked after them in the same caring manner she had shown to her wounded soldiers in Vietnam.
As her son Darren said at her funeral:
She was a brilliant mum, completely dedicated to raising her two boys and looking after the family. She adored her three grandchildren: Kaitlyn, Freya and Henry. She was generous and loving of them all the time, and her caring and calm nature, along with her adventurous spirit, flows through all three of her grandchildren.
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