A member of the Sea Transport Staff at work
on the transport SS Aeneas, 1916.
Image courtesy AWM.
Image C01041.
Staff Nurse May Frances Bonar was born in
Queensland in 1889. Her older brother, Lieutenant David Welbourn Bonar, a
mining engineer prior to enlistment, served with the 1st Australian
Tunnelling Company and was awarded the Military Cross in December 1918. After
the war, he settled in Colebrook Street, Brunswick. He died at Coburg in 1947
aged 59. In August 1917, his 28 year old sister May was appointed to the Sea
Transport Staff. She served mostly in English hospitals and moved backwards and
forwards between England and Australia several times, escorting wounded soldiers
home. She finally returned to Australia in January 1919. After the war, she
married clergyman William Thompson Alexander and they lived in various places
in country Victoria before settling in Coburg where her husband died in 1949.
According to historian Kirsty Harris, he had been an invalid for the previous
15 years. She remained in the area for some years. May (Bonar) Alexander died
at Glen Waverley in 1976 aged 87.
Truby King Centre, Coburg.
Image courtesy Coburg Historical Society.
During the 1920s, Sister Sarah Leatham Duff
was well known to many of Coburg’s new mothers as the Sister in charge of the
Truby King Centre. Sarah Duff was born in Oakleigh in 1886 and died in Malvern
East in 1953. She enlisted in 1916, giving her permanent address as the
Military Hospital in Glenroy, although her next of kin, her father, lived in
Camberwell and later moved to Casterton.
Sister Duff served in London and France and at the end of the war
attended a course in nursing the blind at St Dunstan’s Blind College in
Regent’s Park. She returned to Australia in March 1920 and in the early 1920s
she worked for the Plunkett Society for the Health of Women and Children in
Dunedin, New Zealand before taking up a position at the Truby King Baby Welfare
Centre in Coburg. Sister Duff died at Malvern East in 1953.
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