Joice NanKivell Loch

Joice NanKivell Loch MBE (24 January 1887 – 8 October 1982) was an Australian author, journalist and humanitarian worker who worked with refugees in Poland, Greece and Romania after World War I and World War II.

Joice Mary NanKivell was born at Farnham sugar cane plantation in Ingham in far north Queensland in 1887. Her father acted as manager of the plantation for Fanning, NanKivell, a company run by the Fanning brothers and her wealthy grandfather, Thomas NanKivell. The family fortune was lost however when Kanaka labour was abolished and Joice and her parents walked off the property virtually penniless. Her father, George NanKivell, took a job as manager on a run-down property in Gippsland where Joice grew up. She had wanted to become a doctor but the family was unable to pay university fees and so she helped on the property until she was 26 years old. After the death of her brother during World War I, her father abandoned the farm and Joice went to Melbourne where she worked for the Professor of Classics at the University of Melbourne and reviewed books for the Melbourne Herald.

She met her husband, Gallipoli veteran Sydney Loch when she reviewed his anti-war book To Hell and Back, the banned story of Gallipoli, which told of the horrors of that campaign. The book had been banned by the military censor fearful that if the truth about the slaughter at Gallipoli were revealed young men would stop enlisting to fight in France.

Joice and Sydney Loch went to Poland as aid workers for the Quaker Relief Movement with the aim of writing a book about the damage that Lenin's troops had inflicted on Poland and were awarded medals by the President of Poland for their humanitarian work. In 1922 they went to Greece as aid workers following the burning of Smyrna. The Lochs worked in a Quaker-run refugee camp on the outskirts of Thessaloniki for two years before being given a peppercorn rent on a Byzantine tower by the sea in the refugee village of Ouranoupoli, the last settlement before Mount Athos.

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