Apprentice In Black Stockings is Norma Sim’s intriguing account of training as a ward nurse in the Sydney Hospital from 1949 to 1953.
Norma draws you into her professional and private adventures, describing the daily routine of an apprentice ward nurse alongside her descriptions of her social life and romantic flirtations.
The story of Norma and other trainee nurses is also interspersed with historical flashbacks to the life of Lucy Osburn and her five Florence Nightingale nurses, who came to Sydney in 1868 to set up a revolutionary nursing practice in the same hospital. Norma also discusses how little nursing and society had changed, when compared to her training more than 80 years later.