Kitty’s War

Kitty’s War is based upon the previously unpublished war diaries of Great War army nurse Sister Kit McNaughton. Kit and historian Janet Butler grew up in the same Victorian district of drystone walls, wheatfields and meandering creeks, except many decades apart. The idea of this young nurse setting out on a journey in July 1915 which would take her across the world and into the First World War took hold of Janet Butler and inspired her to research and share Kit’s story.

This decisive and dryly humorous woman embarked upon the troopship Orsova, bound for Egypt in 1915. Kit’s absorbing diaries follow her journey through war, from Egypt, where she cared for the Gallipoli sick and wounded, to the harsh conditions of Lemnos Island, off the coast of the Dardanelles, and then on to France and the Somme and Passchendaele where she worked near the front line. Kit finished the war as Australia’s first plastic surgery nurse, assisting medical pioneers in this field as they repaired the shattered faces of Australian soldiers.

Through Kitty’s diaries and Janet’s thoughtful narration, we see the war through the eyes of a young Australian nurse as she is transformed by what she witnesses. Kitty’s War is an intimate and rare story of one woman’s remarkable experience of war.

Dr Janet Butler is an Honorary Research Associate in the History Program at La Trobe University. Her research explores the personal accounts of Australians at war to shine new light on – and ask different questions about - this aspect of our nation’s history. Her book Kitty’s War, based on the diaries of First World War army nurse Kitty McNaughton, was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2013. It was awarded the New South Wales Premier’s History Prize for Australian history, and the WK Hancock Prize for a first work in Australian history, and was short listed for the Magarey Medal for Biography and the National Biography Award.

Janet was recently awarded an Australia Council for the Arts Literature Grant to support the writing of her next book, Writing the Desert War - a history of the Australians in the Imperial Camel Corps.