Joan Durdin key to first South Australian tertiary course for nurses opening in 1974 at Flinders University
Dr Joan Durdin with professor Alison Kitson, vice president and executive dean, Flinders University college of nursing and health sciences, at the 2018 celebration of 40 years of nursing graduates from the university.
Image courtesy Flinders University
Joan Durdin was fundamental to getting South Australia’s first tertiary nursing course – and Australia's third – started in 1974 at Sturt College of Advanced Education that became Flinders University.
Durdin completed her general nursing training at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 1945 and finished midwifery training at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Hospital. In 1949. she was awarded a Florence Nightingale Scholarship to study at the Royal College of Nursing, London.
Durdin returned to the Royal Adelaide Hospital and was senior sister tutor 1955-64 before six years as a nurse educator in Papua New Guinea. In 1974, Dr Durdin joined the nursing department at Sturt College of Advanced Education, later Flinders University, as a lecturer. A year later, she steered the setting up of South Australia’s first tertiary nursing diploma course. Undergraduate diploma courses in nursing also began at the South Australian College of Advanced Education in 1983. Later, these became bachelor degree courses. Hospital training for nurses was phased out by 1993.
Adelaide Nursing School at Adelaide University, with the Royal Adelaide Hospital, delivered postgraduate clinical education to registered nurses around the world from 1995. The Centre for Evidence-Based Nursing South Australia also was opened at the Royal Adelaide Hospital.
From 1979 to 1981, Joan Durdin was head of Flinders University nursing department, then head of the school of health professions before she retired in 1983.
Durdin’s work with the College of Nursing Australia (later the Australian College of Nursing) won a an honorary fellowship in 1984. She was president of the South Australian branch of the Royal Australian Nursing Federation (now the Australian Nursing Federation) 1976-80 and served on the board of management of Child and Adolescent and Family Health Service for three years, including as chair in 1983. Durdin’s contribution was recognised with a Member of the Order of Australia in 1985 and an honorary doctorate from Flinders University in 1994.
Durdin strongly believed in the value of role models for nursing students. Her own experience benefitted from two older sisters in nursing; also Primrose Mary Viner-Smith, who gained an arts degree in the United Kingdom and came back to Australia to to help with the World War II nursing effort; and Betty Westwood, matron at St Peter’s College and a conservationist/ native plant propagator who helped form Trees for Life in South Australia.
Durdin in retirement studied for a history honours degree at Adelaide University to pursue her interest on oral history. Her extensive oral history interviews provided rich resources for her books: They Became Nurses: a History of Nursing in South Australia, 1836, and Eleven Thousand Nurses: A History of Nursing Education at the Royal Adelaide Hospital 1889-1993.
