Her parents were Edward Joseph Byrnes Clare Nowland, a carriage-builder from Cape Town, South Africa, and his wife Marie Louisa, née Maguire, from Mudgee.
Departing from Melbourne on June 9, she embarked on the RMS Mooltan, a mail steamer, accompanied by fellow nurses Adele Baker, Jessie Bassetti, Esther Coggins, Vida Greentree, Alice Scahill, and Annie Major-West, as well as 300 other nurses bound for Salonika, Greece.
By December, she was deemed unfit for service and was repatriated to Australia on board the Leicestershire, arriving on January 23, 1919.
By 1936,[5] a significant milestone was achieved as nurses in both public and private hospitals across the State were finally granted uniform pay and working conditions.
[6] Nowland married surveyor Lieutenant William Charles O’Toole at St. Phillip's Anglican Church, Sydney on 27 March 1920.