Hundreds of spectators gathered at the Canberra site on Tuesday to hear about May Hennessy’s experience in the mosquito-infested summers and freezing winters of Salonika, Greece, during the First World War. 

Hennessy was born in Castlemaine in 1893 to parents James and Ellen, and was educated at Longlea State School in Bendigo. 

After three years of nursing school in Sale, she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service in 1917.

She arrived in Greece on a boat named Mooltan, which days later would be torpedoed near Malta. She worked in the Mediterranean country’s tent hospitals until she herself fell ill with malaria and dysentery.

The Weekly Times wrote after her death the conditions of war “played havoc with [her] constitution”. 

Despite arriving at a Geelong hospital in March, 1919, she was never well enough to return to Bendigo and died just one month later.   

The nurse was 25 years old at the time of her death.

“This is but one of the many stories of service and sacrifice told here at the Australian War Memorial,” an Australian Defence Force spokeswoman said to those assembled at the war memorial for the event. 

Hennessy was buried in a military funeral in Bendigo, which the Argus newspaper remembered as “one of the largest seen in Bendigo”.

More than 300 returned soldiers attended her farewell, some carrying her coffin and others firing a volley over her grave at the city’s cemetery.

“A band playing the Dead March preceded the salvage wagon of the Bendigo Fire Bridage, on which was the coffin,” the newspaper wrote on April 15 that year.

A Bendigo Advertiser article remembered how a woman called to the Hennessy family’s McIvor Road house to ask permission for a piece of worn khaki on the coffin.

“She had lost a son at the war, and this was her tribute to the memory of one who had tended wounded soldiers in the hospital wards,” the article read. 

The memorial holds a Last Post ceremony every day at 4.55pm, commemorating those Australians whose names are listed on the Roll of Honour.

Ceremonies can take place at the request of the deceased’s loved ones, but Hennessy’s was arranged by the memorial itself.

The events have proved so popular that the memorial is already scheduling into 2018.