By NOEL MURPHY
A DAUGHTER of Mars will be honoured as namesake of Bell Post Hill’s McNaughton St.
Nursing sister Kit McNaughton’s surname will be assumed along the southern stretch of Beauford Ave to mark her work with Australia’s wounded soldiers at Gallipoli and The Western Front in World War I.
The renaming is part of City Hall’s push to acknowledge local wartime achievements as Australia moves to commemorate the century of Anzac Day in 2015.
Sr McNaughton tended to Gallipoli’s wounded on the nearby isle of Lemnos in appalling cold, facing hunger, disease and discrimination by senior officers.
The nurse’s depredations at Lemnos were immortalised in recent Thomas Keneally novel The Daughters of Mars.
Author Katrina Hedditch, in her Lemnos 1915: A Nursing Odyssey to Gallipoli, described appalling conditions for nurses without food, water or supplies to treat soldiers’ maggot-riddled, gangrenous wounds.
Sr McNaughton described the nurses as “the funniest-looking crowd of weather-beaten and toil-worn women one could imagine – hats of various shapes, coats ditto. And boots and gloves beyond description”.
Author Janet Butler also recounted Sr McNaughton’s struggles in a recently-released and critically-acclaimed book Kitty’s War.
Sr McNaughton saw childhood friends killed in The Somme’s bloody conflict, became ill and was transferred to England before returning to the front.
Born in Geelong and raised at Little River, she trained at Geelong Infirmary and Benevolent Asylum before enlisting in 1915.
She worked at Cairo, Lemnos and the Western Front before assisting pioneer plastic surgery at London’s Queen Mary Hospital.
She was the first theatre nurse to work for celebrated Australian surgeon Colonel Sir Henry Newland.
Sr McNaughton was awarded nursing’s highest decoration, the Royal Red Cross, first class.
After her return to Australia she married Joe Ryan. The couple had three children.
Sr Naughton died in 1953, aged 69.
