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Crisp white pinafores, red woollen capes, ankle-length grey dresses, nipped at the waist and buttoned to the throat.

There’s nothing more evocatively glamorous than the old-style uniform of a military nurse, complete with starched muslin headscarf and little leather boots.

It was all part of the act: a demure, elegant, ladylike costume to match the smiling, serene spirit of women who endured the worst of war, and never showed the strain.

For the first time, the extraordinary reality of military nursing is being recognised by the temple to Australia’s sacrifice, the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

The Memorial’s a very masculine place, as you’d expect: a sombre tribute to the courage of infantrymen and all-male bomber crews and the chaps of the Light Horse.

But sprinkled throughout the galleries, and collected in this exhibition, are the faces of women, always crisply uniformed, always smiling. the smiles alone are a marvel.

I’ve often thought it’s a shame modern nurses wear practical, loose-fitting scrubs or sensible trousers and blouses, instead of those swishing skirts of old.

The glamour has gone, but the spirit lives on, and I think modern women owe a great deal to the military nurses who have served with our forces abroad for 130 years.

All women, I mean. Nursing, in the early 19th century, was very much an amateur gig: a dirty, sweaty business reserved for nuns and close relatives of the patients. Nice young ladies from respectable families didn’t go anywhere near hospitals. but war, and in particular the courageous legend of British nurse Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War in the 1850s, transformed nursing into a serious profession. That, in turn, made nursing a respectable civilian occupation, and helped women advance their campaigns for equal pay, workplace rights, suffrage and financial independence.

Australian War Memorial curator Robyn Siers, who put together the exhibition Nurses: From Zululand To Afghanistan, told me they were "an adventuresome lot".

"they had a strong desire to do their bit as women, and they went to pretty remote and difficult places with often poor equipment, very poor sanitation," she said. "they rolled their sleeves up and got into it."

There’s a beautiful picture in the exhibition of three nurses recently returned from the Boer War. They’re holding the leash of a Rhodesian ridgeback named Buller; probably named in jest after the spectacularly bombastic British General Sir Redvers Henry Buller.

"Modern nursing does owe a lot to wartime nursing; the development of new techniques, the extraordinary experience. the use of penicillin, the ability to do aero-medical evacuations, triage – all of that was accelerated by war," Siers said.

For most of our history, nurses who married had to leave the service and return home to Australia – an incredibly difficult choice for those women who happened to fall in love with soldiers.

They had to give up their profession and their patriotic service.

In the 1970s, that changed – another step in the growing respect for nursing, and women’s work more generally. There’s controversy about the federal government’s recent decision to allow women to apply for the all frontline jobs, including navy clearance diving and special forces.

The truth is women have been on the frontline all along.

Like Royal Australian Air Force nurse Sharon Bown, a squadron leader. she was working in Hobart as a hospital nurse when she enlisted in 1999 – and has seen action in East Timor, Afghanistan and Bali, where she helped evacuate Australians after the 2005 bombing. in East Timor in 2004, Bown suffered a fractured spine in a helicopter crash, while trying to evacuate a patient – and found herself at the centre of the emergency, cared for by her own colleagues.

"there is nothing romantic about war, and if you listen to the true stories of the experiences of military nurses, you realise that. but often those very personal stories are never told, because they’re potentially too painful or too private to be shared," Bown says.

"Military nurses have to have a particular type of attitude to remain optimistic and positive despite what they’re seeing. part of caring for your patients is not necessarily revealing how hard it might be for you."

Smiling through the hell – what could be more glamorous?