Ms Fisher, 88, had a tough act to follow.

Kerry Cattell had just spent 20 minutes speaking about his time working in counter-intelligence in the Duc Thanh district of Vietnam in 1970-71.

Mr Cattell finished his address with a summation of the last few weeks before he flew home.

"I would wake up in the night with the machine-guns firing at the edge of the compound and I would roll over in my little bed and think, not now, not now,'' he said.

Ms Fisher's address about her time with the Australian Army Women's Medical Service promised to be worthy but a little less exciting by comparison.

Thirty minutes later she was the crowd favourite, ushered back to her seat with a round of applause that sub-branch president Warren Barnes finally had to quell.

This year's symposium was the 31st consecutive one, which gave students from Jannali, Sylvania, Gymea Technology and Port Hacking high schools the chance to hear about life in the armed services from people who had lived the experience.

Ms Fisher volunteered to work with the Red Cross in 1939, aged just 19.

She spent time in hospitals in Australia and on a Dutch cruise liner offered to the Allies for a hospital ship. It was nicknamed Mae West because ``she had anti-roll sides and was very curvaceous,'' she said.

"Holland had fallen to the Germans so the Germans felt they had a right to her.

"Now and then we'd be followed but Mae was one of the fastest hospital ships in the world and we'd pour on the speed, zig-zagging to avoid them. "That was when you'd see the best of young people.''

If the applause she received at the end of her address was any guide, there were a hundred or so young people who felt they'd seen the best of Ms Fisher as well.