Biography

Sadie Macdonald (1886-1966)

Sadie Murn was born at Gulgong, New South Wales, Australia on 3 July 1886. Her parents were Sarah Jane Stuart and John Murn, a miner. She trained as a nurse at the Balmain and District and Royal Alfred hospitals in Sydney. She came to nurse in New Zealand in 1912. She met William Marshall Macdonald, a prominent Dunedin doctor. They were married on 26 February 1913. Their first son was born in December in the same year.

Sadie went with William to France in 1915. She joined the American Field Service in Paris, transferring to the United States Army Nurse Corps later in the war. She returned to New Zealand with her husband in 1919. In November she gave birth to her second son. She served on the Otago Hospital Board (1921-27 and 1929-33), for two years as the provincial commissioner of the Otago Girl Guides Provincial Association, as patron of the New Zealand Junior Red Cross Society, vice-president of the Otago Basketball Association, and a member of the Plunket Society. She was an executive member of the women’s section of the 1925-26 New Zealand and South Seas International Exhibition.

She established the Waikouaiti children’s health camp (for which she gained an OBE in 1938) and served on the health camp movement’s Dunedin central council. She shifted with her family to Wellington in 1933 but in 1956 returned to Dunedin where she died on 12 May 1966.

— See: Tennant, Margaret. ‘Macdonald, Sadie 1886 – 1966’. Dictionary of New Zealand Biography

— Other burials recorded at this site:
William MACDONALD d. 1890,
Christina MACDONALD d. 1899,
Mary JONES d. 1906,
and William MACDONALD d. 1956 (husband of Sadie).