Died 10 January 1921 | ||
Eileen Rosaline O'Connor is a 20th-century Australian woman who co-founded a community of nurses – Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor (OLNP) – also known as the Brown Nurses – to provide free nursing services to the poor in Sydney in 1913.
She was born 19 February 1892 in Richmond, Victoria a working class suburb of Melbourne, and sustained serious back injury in her childhood.
Despite living with a damaged spine, Eileen O’Connor was an indefatigable organiser, healer and teacher, whose love of useful community inspired her own and later generations of nurses. Sydney’s Brown Nurses have quietly served the sick poor and destitute in their homes and on the streets of Sydney for over one hundred years.
She claimed to have had a Marian visitation in her teens. and in 1913 founded the Society of Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, in Coogee, a suburb of Sydney, where she worked for the remainder of her life.
She died 10 January 1921 in Coogee, New South Wales.
Today she is counted Servant of God.