Rebekah Herron – RSL Victoria ANZAC Day RAAF Ambassador
The 2026 RSL Victoria Anzac Day march will be focused on peacekeeping operations in the Middle East, including Iraq and Afghanistan. Six Ambassadors have been appointed to represent each branch of the defence forces as well as one for families and locally employed workers, such as interpreters.
Rebekah Herron has been appointed as an RAAF veteran Ambassador for the Anzac Day march. She will be joining the other Ambassadors in leading the march down St. Kilda Road to the Shrine of Remembrance. She will also recite the Anzac Requiem at the mid-day service.
Rebekah Herron grew up in the care of a woman who became the greatest inspiration in her life, her mother Dianne Braid.
Following the separation of her parents when she was very young her mother raised her as a single parent, working odd jobs to support the children, but determined to make a better life for them. When Rebekah was still in school Dianne enrolled in TAFE as a mature age student to study nursing, setting an example that her daughter would soon follow.
“My mother is an awesome human being,” Rebekah said.
Rebekah shared her mother’s work ethic. She took dancing classes as a child with the other girls in the neighbourhood, but when she was fourteen a friend told her about the Air Force cadets. She was hooked.
“We didn’t have cadets at my school,” Rebekah said. “So, I went home and opened the White Pages and looked up the nearest Air Force Cadets in my area and told mum you need to take me there next Friday.”
With a spirit for adventure the cadets were everything Rebekah had been looking for. They taught her how to handle weapons and even gave her the opportunity to fly planes as a teenager.
“My family were a bit aghast when I joined up,” Rebekah said. “We didn’t have a family history in the military so they couldn’t understand why I wanted to be a cadet. But I was pretty determined as a kid and always looking for adventure.”
Rebekah initially enrolled in university to study science but realised almost straight away that it was not for her. She decided to drop out of the course and have six months off to work out what she wanted to do with her life.
“My mother was terrified,” Rebekah said. “She was really worried I wouldn’t go back after the six months was up.”
But as with the cadets Rebekah knew she wanted a job with some adventure in it but also something that helped people.
“My mother was always my inspiration. She did everything for me and my sister as children but also realised her own dream of becoming a nurse. Mum instilled in me that nursing was more than curing illness or injury, it was seeing the person’s needs and providing comfort through their experience of illness or injury.”
Rebekah followed her mother into nursing, feeling it would give her the opportunity to travel and would be a role in which she could really make a difference to people at their most vulnerable. A few months into the course she started exploring the options of nursing within the Air Force.
“I came to realise that if I was a nurse in the services I could travel and not be locked into one ward or hospital, while also still helping people.”
Her mother was worried when Rebekah raised it with her as Australia had only recently entered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and there was a real risk that Rebekah could find herself in a war zone.
“I told her that I was going to travel anyway and if I would be at risk doing that, at least this way I would have the whole Defence Force behind me,” Rebekah said.
The Air Force sponsored the last year of her degree, paying her tuition as part of a program that saw her work in the Royal Melbourne Hospital and Canberra Hospital while doing some placements with the RAAF. Qualifying with a nursing degree and with clinical experience behind her, Rebekah attended the Officer Training School in 2006 at Point Cook in Melbourne.
After graduation, Rebekah was posted to the RAAF base in Richmond NSW where she began to develop the skills of a military nurse.
“Being a nurse in a civilian hospital is a lot different to being a nurse in the military. Not only are the patients different, mostly young fit people with injuries and illnesses, but there are also differences in how we relate to them, with issues of rank also coming into it. I had to relearn some things – an elderly patient in the emergency department with a broken hip might really appreciate a brief hand hold but an 18 year old infantry soldier would have given me a look of confusion or panic.”
But the greatest difference from civilian nursing was the training she received in the field. She would provide medical support in field operations where explosives were in use, or for the parachute units engaging in training.
“There was a lot of time spent training in aero-medical evacuations, where we trained in providing medical assistance to personnel on aircraft.”
Following a posting to Amberley Air Force base in Brisbane Rebekah began to put this training into practice. She deployed with a US hospital ship in Southeast Asia and began providing logistical support to Australia’s involvement in the Middle East.
As a member of the RAAF nursing service, she was also heavily involved in other major incidents, including the rescue of refugees from a sinking boat off Ashmore Reef in 2009. The mass casualty event saw refugees injured when their boat was set on fire, leaving dozens badly burnt including those who needed intensive care by Rebekah and her team as they were evacuated by air across the country.
Through 2008 and 2009 Australian casualties in Afghanistan continued to mount. Troops injured in the region were first flown to a base in Kuwait before being transferred to a long-haul flight where Rebekah and the medical team would provide care for often very seriously injured soldiers on the return journey to Australia.
“There was always media coverage when we lost an Australian life in the Middle East” Rebekah said. “But what often went unspoken was that there were almost always other injuries from the same incident, many serious and life changing. Our job was to bring those soldiers home, provide them with the best care on what was almost certainly the worst day of their life.”
In 2011 she was deployed to the Middle East for six months and would fly in and out of war zones to evacuate soldiers after they were injured, providing care while they were taken on short haul flights to the allied base in Dubai. She worked with British, Australian and Dutch medical personnel to support allied forces injured in the fighting in Afghanistan.
“My time supporting injured soldiers had a lasting impact on me,” Rebekah said. “Injured soldiers are not counted in the same way as those that have died and for every death there were other life changing injuries. I never really got to hear what happened to a lot of the people I cared for while supporting Middle East operations. But I think about them a lot.”
Rebekah had her first child in 2013 and another in 2015. Being a mother was challenging as a service person, and she felt a real struggle in balancing her sense of duty to the service with motherhood. She didn’t feel that her command really understood the challenges for parents.
“When my daughter was only five months old, I worked in a very high tempo role,” Rebekah said. “As a military person we are trained to do what we are told, when we are told. But in the first year of my daughter’s life, I was away 60 or 70 percent of the time. She is 11 now and a beautiful child but I still struggle with a lot of guilt and anger about how I should have prioritised her.”
Rebekah collected a lot of trauma in her time in the military. There was the direct trauma of being in war zones and caring for people with devastating injuries and a secondary type of trauma based on the experiences of those around her and the stories they told her. She remembers being told of the experiences of other women in the military who did not want to go back to their unit because of incidents that occurred.
“I always felt a strong sense of justice. Junior ranking personnel sometimes need someone to stand up for them, to give them a voice or to help navigate the system. If I didn’t, who would?”
She left the military in 2024 and, like many others on discharge, felt isolated and a genuine sense of loss.
“I really loved being a part of the Defence Force,” Rebekah said. “Being discharged left me cut off from that life and from my sense of purpose as a person.”
Struggling to adapt to civilian life, and process everything that had happened during her service, Rebekah undertook a program at the Australian National Veterans Arts Museum (ANVAM) who deliver art programs to support veterans and champion veteran artists.
“I remember going into my cupboard to find something to draw and seeing my old Air Force uniform hanging up,” Rebekah said. “It looked ready to put on – as if I was going to go into work like any other day. This was a year after I had discharged and it truly hit me, I couldn’t do that anymore.”
Rebekah decided to make the uniform part of her art and began drawing her boots every day in artwork that spoke of her experience in the military as a woman and as a mother.
She exhibited an oil painting, ‘Boot Baby’, at The Art Room in Footscray last year. A related series of pastel drawings will feature alongside other veteran art during the lead up to ANZAC Day in the annual ‘March to Art Exhibition’, showcased at ANVAM in St. Kilda Road Melbourne.
Typically, Rebekah says she is hoping to use her time as an Ambassador for the 2026 ANZAC Day march to help other veterans.
“The charity work of the RSL is vital to so many veterans who find themselves in need after leaving the services. I want my time as Ambassador not to be about my service, but about those I served with. There are many who carry untold stories, unspoken grief and unseen wounds. ANZAC Day is about them – they are seen and heard, and we are proud of them.”
