Captain Marium Hamimi was toiling away in a suburban Melbourne pharmacy when she felt compelled to try "something different". That impulse drove her to enlist in the Australian army.
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Born to Afghan parents while they were taking refuge in Pakistan, Ms Hamimi later came to Australia at age three with her mother and father under a family reunification program.
The 31-year-old says she is yet to meet another Afghan in the army. But that may change as the Australian Defence Force pursues greater diversity and tries to update its image for the modern era.
Ms Hamimi is one of 46 serving and former defence force personnel whose photographs are featured in an exhibition, Thank you for your service, which opens at the Anzac Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park on Friday.
A joint initiative between the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Australian Defence Force, the NSW government, and The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, the exhibition showcases the diverse nature of Australia's modern armed forces.
Last year, defence chief General Angus Campbell said women made up about 40 per cent of new recruits to the air force, 30 per cent to the navy and 20 per cent to the army.
Ms Hamimi signed up in 2012 and spent the second half of last year on assignment in Iraq, where she worked as a pharmacist in the coalition forces' health facilities. She speaks Farsi and has learnt Arabic - skills she was able to use while working with Iraqi soldiers.
There was "naturally a bit of interest" from locals who were surprised to see an Afghan woman in the Australian army.
"People I met day to day, the cleaners or other linguists I would come across, would usually recognise [my] surname and be like 'where are you from, what’s your background'," she says.
"Iraqis love getting to know you. They don’t really question how you got into it [the army], they just want to know how old you are, where you're from – they love building that rapport with people."
Ms Hamimi is now based at the 1st Close Health Battalion in Darwin and is keen to be part of another international deployment where she can utilise her language skills. "I think that’s a really unique contribution," she says.
All 46 portraits were taken by The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald's award-winning photographer Alex Ellinghausen, the current Press Gallery Journalist of the Year.
Veterans' Affairs Minister Darren Chester said the exhibition he will launch today was "a reminder that as a nation we should be immensely grateful for what our current and former ADF personnel have done and are doing, and the sacrifices made by their families".
"Alex has done a remarkable job capturing the images on display and I congratulate him on the quality of his work."
"Thank you for your service" opens at the Anzac Memorial in Sydney's Hyde Park at 1pm.
