DAVID ADAMS looks back to where it all began for the Australian Red Cross…
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Celebrating the 100th anniversary on the Red Cross website |
The Australian Red Cross is this month celebrating its 100th anniversary and it’s no coincidence the commemoration comes at the same time as we mark the outbreak of World War I.
The organisation was founded on 13th August, 1914, as the Australian branch of the British Red Cross Society at Government House in Melbourne, just nine days after the outbreak of the war.
It was Lady Helen Munro Ferguson, wife of Australia’s sixth Governor-General, Sir Ronald Munro Ferguson, who was the driving force behind the founding of the organisation in Australia.
Having come to the country with an extensive knowledge of how the organisation had been run in Scotland, she formed the initial national body and encouraged the wives of Australia’s governors to establish divisions in each of their states.
Hundreds of thousands signed up as volunteers during World War I and in 1927 the organisation was recognised as a national society in its own right by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
By the end of World War II, the organisation had become the largest charity in Australia with nearly half a million members out of a population of just seven million.
The Australian Red Cross, which now has a billion dollar budget, has since moved into a range of different areas including social welfare, emergency and disaster response, first aid programs and the Blood Bank and says its members, volunteers, donors, staff, recipients and supporters number more than a million people.
The local organisation is part of an international network of Red Cross bodies. The organisation was first founded in the 19th century by Swiss businessman Henry Dunant with its symbol, the red cross, an inverse interpretation of the Swiss flag rather than a representation, as has been commonly thought, of a Christian cross. Some of the national Red Cross organisations have since adopted the symbol of the Red Crescent in place of the Red Cross and a third emblem, a Red Crystal, has also been approved.
Red Cross Australia is celebrating its 100th anniversary with the release of a new book, The Power of Humanity: 100 Years of Red Cross in Australia, which can be purchased at centenaryshop.redcross.org.au.
For more on the Red Cross centenary, see http://centenary.redcross.org.au.
If you have something you’d like to know the origins of, simply send an email to [email protected].
