I hate to upset you Kiwi Chaps but she became a Aussie Citezen a long time ago.
After the war, Britain awarded Wake the George medal, the United States gave her the Medal of Freedom and France honoured her with the Médaille de la Résistance, the Croix de Guerre – three times – and the Légion d'Honneur. In 1957, Wake married John Melvin Forward, a former RAF fighter pilot.
She returned several times to live in Australia, making unsuccessful attempts to get elected to parliament, but had an uneasy relationship with the country of her childhood, feeling unrecognised and underappreciated. This led her to refuse decorations from the Australian government; with characteristic bluntness, she said they could "stick their medals where the monkey stuck his nuts". In February 2004, she relented and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia.
Wake found post-war life uneventful. "It's all been so exciting … and then it all fizzled out. I had a very happy war," she said. FitzSimons told Australian radio: "She was a woman who was always a hair-trigger from being in a rage … and that rage within her was wonderful during the war, [but] it could be problematic when the war was over. She was a force of nature."
Her husband died in 1997 and Wake settled for a final time in London. She died on Sunday after being taken to hospital with a chest infection.
In an interview a decade ago, at the age of 89, Wake appeared to have lost none of her fighting spirit. "Somebody once asked me: 'Have you ever been afraid?' Hah! I've never been afraid in my life," she said.
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Topic: Death of "the white mouse" (Read 2402 times)
