Margaret Turner Clarke

Margaret Turner Clarke (; 1836-8 – August 1887) was an Australian nurse and philanthropist. She was a pioneer within nursing in Australia. A student of the Florence Nightingale School for Nurses, she was the founder of the Visiting Relief Society (for health care in the gold fields) in 1865, and a co-founder of the pioneer nursing education Home and Training School for Nurses in Sydney.

Early life and education Clarke was born in Tasmania, one of eight children of Charles McLachlan, Charles McLachlan's work took him to Britain during Margaret's childhood, on 22 April 1856, at St David's Cathedral, Hobart. They had three daughters, one still-born in Hobart in 1857, one born in London in 1859, who did not survive infancy, and the third still-born in Sydney in 1861. In 1861, the regiment was sent to Lambing Flat, after falling from his horse,

She returned to Australia, and to Lambing Flat (renamed Young in 1863), by 1865. In November 1865, after a season of famine there, she established a Visiting Relief Society in Young. she married George O'Malley Clarke, a magistrate and gold commissioner at Young,

Clarke also gave a great deal of support to the Church of England in the Young area. She donated £500 of building St. John's Church in Young as a memorial to her first husband, The Home and Training School for Nurses, situated in Phillip Street, Sydney, as well as having more than twenty nurses available for paid employment, also provided nurses to "seek out and relieve, with food and proper attendance, the sick whose poverty would otherwise place such relief beyond their reach."

Clarke died at her home in Woollahra, Sydney, on 8 August 1887, of heart failure. She was buried at Waverley Cemetery, with the service conducted by the Rev. Henry Wallace Mort, rector of All Saints Anglican Church, Woollahra. She left bequests to the Sydney City Mission and the Church Society of the Anglican Diocese of Goulburn, among others.