By NOEL MURPHY
GALLIPOLI nurse Kitty McNaughton’s name will be honoured at Bell Post Hill as part of City Hall’s push to commemorate the Anzac Day century in 2015.
Sr McNaughton name will grace the southern stretch of Beauford Avenue as a nod to her life-saving care of Australia’s wounded at Gallipoli and The Western Front in World War I.
Dubbed “Daughters of Mars” in Tom Keneally’s recent book of the same name, the Gallipoli nurses worked under atrocious conditions on the nearby island of Lemnos. They faced hunger, disease, appalling cold and discrimination by army officers.
Sr McNaughton, born in Geelong and raised at Little River, trained at the Geelong Infirmary and Benevolent Asylum before enlisting in 1915.
She worked at Cairo, Lemnos and The Somme, where she saw childhood friends killed in the bloody conflict, became ill herself and was transferred to England – before returning to the front.
She was the first theatre nurse to work for the renowned Australian surgeon Colonel Sir Henry Newland and was awarded nursing’s highest decoration, the Royal Red Cross, first class.
Sr McNaughton’s exploits have been extolled in at least two recent books: Katrina Hedditch’s Lemnos 1915: A Nursing Odyssey to Gallipoli and Janet Butler’s Kitty’s War.
She described nurses she worked with at Gallipoli as “the funniest-looking crowd of weather-beaten and toil-worn women one could imagine – hats of various shapes, coats ditto. And boots and glove beyond description”.
Sr McNaughton married Joe Ryan on her return to Australia and had three children. She died in 1953, aged 69.
