The girl who wanted to go to war: MAUD BUTLER
Maud had an independent spirit from the beginning. As a bright-eyed, fresh-faced girl just short of her 16th birthday, she left her coalminer father’s home in Kurri Kurri in the Hunter, and made her way down to Sydney. The year was 1915. The war was entering its second year, and calls were going out across Australia for men to enlist to fight. ‘I had a terrible desire to help in some way,’ Maud explained later, ‘but I was only a girl.’
Like other keen young women of the time, Maud’s original idea was to become a Red
