WhatWas Geelong - Memorial for our ‘angels’ of WWI
By Noel Murphy – Originally publish in the Geelong Indy 26 June 2015 10:50 AM
The little-known ‘Angels of Lemnos’ tended to wounded Anzac soldiers on a bleak, windswept island as the first contingent of Australia nurses to serve in field hospitals.
Lemnos was the base for the 1915 Anzac campaign, with 148 Australians and 76 New Zealanders buried on the island.
The nurses, who author Thomas Keneally dubbed “the daughters of Mars”, included Little River’s Kitty McNaughton, who worked in hospitals at Geelong and Bairnsdale before signing on to the war.
Like numerous others from Geelong and the Western District, she found out early in the campaign that the nurses were almost as much a risk of becoming a casualty as the shot and smashed men they tried to mend.
Historian Janet Butler used Sister McNaughton’s diary to immortalise her story in the book Kitty’s War, detailing the tribulations, depredations and achievements of Gallipoli.
Sr McNaughton 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.
Sculptor Peter Corlett has created a memorial statue comprising a larger-than-life sized nurse and an injured soldier on top of a sandstone plinth to be unveiled in Port Melbourne where forces left for Gallipoli.
The Lemnos Gallipoli Commemorative Committee’s Jim Claven told the Independent the memorial commemorated the efforts of figures such Sr McNaughton, Violet Duddy and Mary de Garis as well as diggers from the wider Geelong area buried at Lemnos.
He praised their efforts, as well as those of a recent Red Cross and WW1 Nurses exhibition at Geelong’s Osborne House.
Nurses who served on Lemnos also included Victoria Wakley, Winifred Jane Smith, Edith Avice Watson, Evelyn Davies and Ida Mary Mockridge.
Nurses who served on hospital ships at Gallipoli included Hilda Samsing, Mina Alice Bromley, Bernice Loughrey and Leonora Millicent Allender.
