Marion Leane Smith

Marion Leane Smith (1891 to 1957), later Marion Leane Walls, was an Australian-Canadian nurse and the only Aboriginal Australian woman known to have served in the First World War. Of English and Darug descent, she was born in Liverpool, New South Wales, and moved to Canada as a child. She trained at the New England Hospital in Massachusetts, joined the Victorian Order of Nurses in Montreal, and enlisted in Queen Alexandra's Imperial Military Nursing Service in 1917, serving on No. 41 Ambulance Train in France and later in Italy and Southampton. After marrying in 1919 she lived in Trinidad, where she led the Red Cross and a nurses council in the Second World War and received a Distinguished War Service Medal.