Louise Alexa McNie (15 July 1879- 9 May 1942) (also known as Louie or Louise Alexa Buchanan) was a nurse in the New Zealand Army Nursing Service Corps and the Samoan Expeditionary Forces in 1914.
McNie was born in Christchurch on 15 July 1879 to Mother Lizzie and father Alexander Raymond McNie. She passed her Nurses' Registration in 1909 and trained in the Christchurch Hospital.
On the outbreak of WWI, a small fleet of New Zealand nurses left for Apia, Samoa. McNie was one of these seven nurses, that in mid-August 1914, travelled alongside troops to German occupied Samoa to replace German nurses working at the Apia hospital. All the nurses came from Wellington, apart from Christchurch's McNie who was called upon on her day off. McNie was given just one day to prepare, pack and say goodbye to her family before ferrying to Wellington to meet with the rest of the nurses and set sail for Apia. McNie travelled on HMNZS Monowai alongside Bertha Nurse and Vida MacLean while the rest of the nursing team, Evelyn Brooke, Fanny Wilson and Louise Brandon sailed on the Moeraki. As they set sail, McNie and the other nurses made history as the first New Zealand nurses sent offshore as members of the WWI New Zealand Defence Force.
The ships made stops in Nouméa, New Caledonia then Suva, Fiji before arriving at their destination, Apia, Samoa. The working conditions in Apia were unlike anything the McNie and the other New Zealand nurses were used to. The heat posed the biggest barrier as McNie noted her experiences in Samoa:
McNie worked at the Apia hospital for nine months before returning home to New Zealand on the SS Atua in May, 1915.
Later during WWI McNie was selected in a contingent of nurses that worked as a theatre-sisters on New Zealand hospital ships headed for the front. These ships hosted cramped living conditions and nurses, like McNie, often worked long hours from 6:30am till midnight.
McNie sailed to Gallipoli on the SS Maheno as one of 13 nurses, alongside Brooke, who she had worked with in Samoa. The SS Maheno made six trips from Anzac Cove to the Greek Island of Lemnos where the military hospitals were located.
After her service on the Maheno, McNie went on as matron at the Featherston Military Hospital for several months. She also worked on the SS Marama. It is also recorded that McNie was matron at the No. 3 New Zealand General Hospital in Codford, England for a period.
McNie was a recipient of both the Associate Red Cross in 1917 and the Royal Red Cross in 1919, which only 14 other New Zealand nurses were awarded.
On 4 February 1920 McNie married Henry Meredith Buchanan, a doctor originally from Edinburgh, who was the Auckland Mental Hospital Medical Superintendent from 1929 to his retirement in 1952.
McNie died on May 9, 1941, in Auckland.