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Sister Anzac singing among the wreckage

On a sunny Saturday earlier this year I was sipping coffee in a Lyttelton park when I glanced up at the names on the nearby war memorial.

Leading the list of Herberts, Arthurs and Georges was a woman’s name: Nona Mildred Hildyard (Nursing Sister).  I couldn’t recall ever seeing a woman’s name on a war memorial before and snapped a photo, intending to find out more.

When I did, I realised that Nona was one of 10 New Zealand nurses tragically lost when a torpedo sank the troop ship Marquette a century ago this year. She and two other Christchurch nursing victims are commemorated in the historic, quake-damaged Nurses Memorial Chapel.

I’ve now seen a photo of the 27-year-old nurse and a portrait (painted posthumously and funded by the people of Lyttelton) that both show an intelligent young woman with a quizzical look.

I’ve also read how Nona was injured during the bungled lowering of a lifeboat as the disaster unfolded off the coast of Greece. But despite her injury, surviving nursing sisters recall her singing “wonderfully merry and bright” to keep up the spirits of the nurses, medics and troops who for nearly eight hours clung to wreckage or struggled to keep overloaded and damaged lifeboats from continually upturning. Hours in the water eventually took its toll and Nona reportedly died of exhaustion and heart failure before the rescue boats arrived. Her body was never recovered.

Twenty-six of the 36 nurses survived and most went on to serve as nurses for the remainder of the war – some on hospital ships passing over the very same waters that had become their colleagues’ gravesite. 

This International Nurses Day edition of Nursing Review commemorates the nurses who clamoured for the right to be there to care when New Zealand troops fell in foreign fields all those years ago.

Fiona Cassie
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