Three nurses to be honoured more than 100 years after their deaths

An unmarked grave at the South Brisbane Cemetery is all that is left to remember a “crazy brave” nurse who died after volunteering during the Spanish Influenza pandemic more than a century ago.

The Royal Brisbane Women’s Hospital (RBWH) is now working to honour Alice Wyeth and two colleagues, Clara Poppel and Hannah Dufton, by building a permanent memorial and restoring their gravestones.

Alice Wyeth, who was born in Toowoomba and trained at the Mother’s Hospital, was one of 200 nurses who tended to the sick in Brisbane when the pandemic arrived on Australia’s shores in 1919.

Ms Wyeth was a senior and respected nurse who had travelled to Brisbane to volunteer her services, according to the director of the Infectious Diseases Unit at the…