By XAVIER SMERDON
AN UNSUNG Australian war hero from Wyndham will finally have her story told with the release of a book on her remarkable life.
Sister Kit McNaughton was born in Little River in 1884 and later settled in Werribee with her husband Joseph Ryan.
In 1915 she travelled to Egypt as a nurse in World War I. Over the next four years she helped save the lives of countless soldiers in France, Greece and England.
Perhaps the most remarkable time of her service came when she was tasked with caring for severely injured German soldiers.
At one time she was the only nurse looking after an entire ward of 40 wounded Germans.
Later she was moved to a clearing station just over 6000 metres from the Western Front where she ran the operating theatre.
Kit finished the war as Australia’s first plastic surgery nurse, assisting medical pioneers in the field as they repaired the shattered faces of Australian soldiers.
Her war diaries were officially published for the first time last week with the launch of Kitty’s War, a memoir written by Dr Janet Butler.
Ms Butler, who grew up around the corner from Kit in Lara many decades later, said she was inspired to find out more about her after finding her name on a war memorial.
“My father and I were riding bicycles around Lara and we stopped to look at the war memorial. Looking at it we found the names of two nurses right down the very bottom and not in the correct order,” Ms Butler said.
“We’d looked at that memorial thousands of times and never noticed those names.
“I wanted to know what had happened to Kit and what it was like to travel the world and return to a tiny place like Little River.”
After getting in touch with Kit’s family Ms Butler was given her war diaries which she studied and eventually decided needed to be published.
“She was a remarkable woman,” she said.
“She stands for all those nurses and everything they were about but there were certain things that made her very special.”
Kit was awarded the Royal Red Cross, the highest honour for military nursing bestowed by the Commonwealth.
Ms Butler said if Kit was alive today she would have enjoyed the thought of people reading her story.
“Her actions at war were certainly heroic and everything she did she did in very poor conditions,” she said.
“I have two hopes for this book; one that her family is happy and two that her community find out about her story, because she belonged to them.”
Kitty’s War has been published by the University of Queensland Press and it was officially launched last week at a function at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne.
For more information visit www.uqp.com.au
