Aileen Palmer 1915-88

Caption:

Aileen Palmer (extreme right) in the Plaza de Catalunya, Barcelona, in December 1936, with volunteers including Australian nurses Agnes Hodgson, May Macfarlane, Mary Lowson and Una Wilson.

Poet and peace activist

As a 19-year-old student at Melbourne University Aileen Yvonne Palmer joined the Australian Communist Party in 1934 and the following year graduated with Honours in French and German. The elder daughter of Australian writers Vance and Nettie Palmer, Aileen served as an interpreter and secretary for the British Medical Aid Unit during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1938).

A brilliant linguist, Aileen was staying with her parents in a small village near Barcelona when war broke out in Spain in July 1936. Against her wishes, she returned to London with them and immediately joined the first medical unit that left for Spain in August of that year.

Along with other activists from many countries who volunteered their services - and sometimes their lives - to fight the fascists, Aileen became one of the International Brigaders who worked on the frontlines of the conflict. She quickly added Spanish and Italian to her fluency in English, French and German and so was able to assist the doctors and ambulance drivers in several languages as the field hospital to which she was attached moved to the various battle sites attending to the wounded, sometimes hundreds in a day. Living under appalling conditions and in constant danger, she maintained a cheerful outlook in letters to her family. A constant supply of cigarettes was her main request.

Despite the dedication of volunteers like Aileen Palmer, the Republic of Spain was defeated in March 1939, heralding the onset of the Second World War which was declared the following September. Back in London, Aileen became an ambulance driver during the blitz and then worked for Australia House until the war was over. In 1945, at the age of thirty, she somewhat reluctantly returned to Australia after more than a decade in Europe.

Aileen Palmer’s life was blighted by mental illness from the age of thirty-three and in her later years she moved between mental institutions, rehabilitation clinics and the family home in Melbourne. However, she continued her political activities, travelling on peace missions to Vietnam and China and publishing translations of Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Diary and the work of Vietnamese poet, To Huu. She published articles and poems in journals such as The Realist, Overland and Meanjin, and a volume of her own poetry, World Without Strangers?, was brought out by Overland in 1964.

Aileen Palmer died in a psychiatric institution in 1988.

Contributed by Dr Sylvia Martin, whose biography of Aileen Palmer is forthcoming

Source:

Photo courtesy Noel Butlin Archives, Australian National University

Themes: Diplomats & international activists, Gallery WHM 2008: Women with a Mission , Writers , War & Defence

This image appears in WHM 2008 - Women with a Mission