ANMC

Vivian Bullwinkel - VFX61330
	Rank Lieutenant Colonel Service Number VFX61330 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Natural Causes Place of Death - Date of Death 3 July 2000 Age 84

18/12/1915 – 3/7/2000

Sole Survivor of a Massacre

After a bullet from a Japanese machine gun tore through her body, Australian nurse Vivian Bullwinkel floated face down in the sea and feigned death. She was the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island Massacre, in which 22 nurses were forced to wade into the ocean at gunpoint and then shot in the back.

Early Years

Vivian was born on 18 December 1915 at Kapunda, South Australia. After her family moved to Broken Hill, in New South Wales, Vivian attended Broken Hill High School and was school captain in 1933. After completing school, Vivian trained as a nurse at Broken Hill Hospital and then continued her career in Victoria. She volunteered for service in 1941, joining the Australian Army Nursing Service.

“I felt if my friends were willing to go and fight for their country, then they deserved the best care we could give them,” she said in a later interview.

War Service

Assigned to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital, Vivian set sail for Singapore on the AHS Wanganella. After a few weeks with the 2/10th AGH, Vivian rejoined the 2/13th in Johore Baharu, where she remained until Japanese troops began to work their way down the Malayan peninsula, at which time the 2/13th was evacuated to the relative safety of Singapore. As it became likely that Singapore too would fall into Japanese hands, the nurses were ordered to leave. Vivian was in the last group of 65 Australian nurses to leave Singapore bound for Australia on the SS Vyner Brooke.

Evacuation from Singapore

The Vyner Brooke was a small ship designed to carry only 12 passengers; however, when it left Singapore 265 passengers were aboard. The Vyner Brooke travelled along, hugging the coast of the islands. On 14 February 1942 Japanese aircraft bombed the ship. It began to sink. The nurses assisted passengers to evacuate. Over the next three days, some would drown, some would drift ashore on life rafts and others would make it to shore in various locations on Bangka Island. Vivian joined the group on Radji Beach. There were men, women and children on the beach. The nurses cared for the sick and injured and remained with them. A decision was made to give themselves up, so a group of men walked into Muntok to do just that.

The Massacre

When the men returned with Japanese soldiers they could not have know what would happen next. All the men were ordered around a bluff where they were bayoneted and shot. The Japanese soldiers returned and ordered the nurses to walk into the water whereupon they were machine-gunned. As they marched into the sea, Irene Drummond called to her sisters “Chin up girls, I am proud of you. I love you all.” All of them fell, but one would not die. Vivian Bullwinkel would survive the massacre. She recalled that being shot was like being kicked by a mule and that she thought that being shot meant that you were dead. Floating in the water amidst the bodies of her friends she discovered that she was still alive. She feigned death until the Japanese had left the beach, then dragged herself up the beach, tended the gunshot wound as best she could, then took shelter in the jungle near a stream, where she fell asleep. Vivian was woken by a voice. It was Private Cecil Gordon Kinsley, a severely injured British soldier.

Twelve Days in the Jungle

Vivian found a water canteen, filled it with water from the stream for Private Kinsley. She dressed his wounds with what she could find. Finally she decided to seek help from the nearby villagers. The men of the village declined to assist her for fear of recrimination. The women of the village were more helpful and left her food on more than one occasion. Several days passed and they both decided to give themselves up to the Japanese. Private Kinsley requested one more day of freedom. When asked why, he told Vivian that it was his birthday and he wanted to spend the day in freedom. She agreed to his wishes. Vivian and Private Kinsley spent 12 days in the jungle.

Surrender

Vivian used the water canteen, slung over her shoulder to hide the bloodstained bullet hole in her uniform. They were walking towards Muntok, they were met by a car carrying a Japanese Naval officer, who drove them into Muntok where Vivian was reunited with 31 of her fellow nurses. Private Kinsley would die from his wounds a few days later.

Prisoner of War

Initially Vivian and the nurses were held in the Coolie Lines near the prison in Muntok. They then travelled to Palembang under horrendous conditions. After eighteen months in Irenelaan they would be sent by boat again back to Camp Menjelang in Muntok. The nurses lived under awful conditions. They had little food to eat and coupled with Beri-Beri, malaria, TB and Bangka fever, four more nurses would die in Muntok. The nurses were then sent back to Sumatra to Loebok Lingau to a camp called Belalau. A boat journey followed by a long train journey. Four more nurses would succumb to disease during their time in this camp.

Liberation

On the 16th of September 1945 the nurses would be liberated. On hearing this news, Matron Annie Sage and Sister Jean Floyd flew to Lahat, to greet the surviving Australian nurses, at the camp that was hidden in the jungle. Matron Annie Sage had lipsticks for all of the girls as she expected to find 65 nurses. Instead she was confronted with 24 painfully thin and unwell nurses. 24 women whose suffering had been unimaginable.

Return to Singapore and Home

The nurses returned to Singapore where they were treated for illnesses, and given time to recuperate from their malnutrition.

Having put on some weight, they were ready to be seen by the Australian public. They left Singapore on the 5th October 1945 on the AHS Manunda.

On their arrival back in Australia, they were greeted by many well-wishers offering fruit and bouquets. They still had so much to recover from though.

Home Again

Vivian and the other prisoner of war nurses were at home at last. What would the next chapter of their lives be like?

For Vivian it was letters and visits to the family of the murdered girls on Bangka Island. This was an amazing testimony to the woman that she was.

She was discharged from the Army in 1947, and was awarded the Royal Red Cross (2nd Class). She took some time to recover from the ordeal through which she had been as a prisoner of war. Vivian then commenced work at the Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne for a time.

In 1947, Vivian travelled to Tokyo for the War Crimes Tribunal and stated her recollections of the massacre and subsequent treatment by the Japanese in the prisoner-of-war camps.

Conception of the Nurses Memorial Centre

Betty Jeffrey and Vivian Bullwinkel travelled around the state of Victoria talking about their experiences as POWs and how they were fundraising to support the establishment of a nurses’ memorial centre in memory of their fallen comrades. They didn’t want just a stone edifice to memorialise their fallen friends: they wanted a living memorial that would offer nurses a place to meet and a place that would support continuing education. They had thought about this concept when they were prisoners in Sumatra. On the 19th of February 1950 the establishment of the War Nurses Memorial Centre would become a reality.

Civilian Life

Vivian was appointed Matron of Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in 1959. She was involved with many nursing related ventures that included the positions of President of the College of Nursing Australia and member of Council for the Australian War Memorial. She was an instrumental player in Operation Babylift where Vietnamese orphans we brought to Australia in 1975 by Australian nurses who cared for them in flight.

In September 1977 she married Colonel Francis (Frank) Statham and moved to Perth. She remained in touch with all of the ex-POW friends.

She continued to be an active voice for veterans throughout her life. Here she is on the left, marching with other military nurses in the 1955 Anzac Day parade in Melbourne.

Vivian was awarded both the Order of Australia and the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her bravery.

Honours

Over the years Vivian received many awards. In 1947 she was awarded an ARRC (Associate of the Royal Red Cross), in 1973 an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) and in 1993 an AO (Officer of the Order of Australia). She was also awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal and an Efficiency Decoration.

In 1993 she, along with seven of the other POW nurses, would travel back to Bangka Island, Indonesia to unveil the memorial to the nurses who had died there during the war and to those who had been prisoners of war.

Vivian died on the 3rd of July 2000 aged 84 years. Her service to Australia and to the nurses who died and were prisoners of war during World War II and to the nursing profession will never be forgotten.

This portrait in the Australian War Memorial depicts her wearing her grey nurse’s uniform, red cape and sister’s veil. Among her medals, she is wearing the Florence Nightingale Medal, the world’s highest honour available to nurses.

Vivian Bullwinkel AO MBE ARRC ED FNM FRCNA

On the 75th anniversary of the tragedy in February 2017, a commemorative coin bearing an image of the SS Vyner Brooke was struck by the Royal Australian Mint.

At that time, the director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, paid tribute to this outstanding heroine by saying this: “From a generation that produced so many remarkable Australians, Vivian Bullwinkel was a giant among them.”

In February 2023, the drill hall at Broken Hill High School was named in Vivian's honour. The Vivian Bullwinkel Drill Hall is emblazoned with the year of Vivian's captaincy of the school, 1933, and with a picture of Vivian in her AANS uniform.

Ada Joyce Bridge - NFX76284
	Rank Lieutenant Service Number NFX76284 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 34

Ada Joyce Bridge (known as Joyce) was born on 6 July 1907 in Scone, NSW. She had an older brother and was the daughter of William Thomas Bridge and Ada Matilda Bridge (née Thurlow). William was a descendant of Joseph Bridge, a convict from Lancashire, England who arrived in NSW in 1806 on the Fortune. Joyce's family home was ‘Stoney Creek’ in Belltrees, about 30 km from Scone.

As a young girl, Joyce loved the country life at Stoney Creek. She and her brother rode their horses about 5km to the public school at Belltrees until they reached 6th class. The outdoor life tanned her skin and emphasised her brown eyes and short brown hair. Those who knew Joyce at this time described her as a happy girl, who enjoyed her life to the full.

She had a ready smile which often turned into an infectious chuckle…… She was not very tall, but her figure was slim; her arms were strong and her hands were gentle……Joyce was socially very popular, and being an excellent dancer, she enjoyed the local dances.’ ‘. (p5 One Life is Ours….)

She applied to St Luke's Hospital at Darlinghurst Sydney, was accepted as a trainee nurse and commenced on 1 February 1930 and graduated in 1934. She sat for her Nurses Registration Exam on 23 May 1934 and passed all subjects.

A friend who graduated with Joyce remembered her “as a very pleasant companion, very bright with a great sense of humour. She was a genuine friend, a typical country girl who took pride in her work and was very good nurse.” (p8 One Life is Ours….)

She left St Luke's some time after graduation and joined the Toshack’s Nursing Club based in Kings Cross Sydney and undertook private nursing. During this time she shared flats in the area with a number of her colleagues from St Luke’s.

Joyce came from a very patriotic family and enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on 8 April 1941 and was called up 19 August 1941. She was posted to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital (AGH) and travelled to Singapore aboard the Australian Hospital ship Wanganella arriving on the 15 September 1941.

Initially, Joyce and nine other sisters were attached to 2/10 AGH at Malacca in Malaya, where they stayed for three weeks. But life was not all nursing and hard work. ‘Joyce and her friends found new and enjoyable off-duty activities; shopping in the village, sampan picnics, golf, swimming and tennis, as well as the usual social activities in the sister’s mess. She enjoyed her work in the wards, gaining experience of nursing in the tropics and becoming acclimatised’. (p15 One Life is Ours….)

All ten sisters then returned to Singapore to commence work at 2/13 AGH, which was located at St Patrick's School. Between 21-23 November 1941 the entire hospital was moved across the Strait to Tampoi Hill on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. However, due to the swift progress of the Japanese invasion force, most of the hospital staff was evacuated back to Singapore in late January 1942.

She survived the sinking of the “SS. Vyner Brooke" but tragically was amongst the nurses massacred on Radji Beach (On Radji Beach p. 218).

A small book was written in 1989 by Joan Crouch entitled “One Life is Ours: the story of Ada Joyce Bridge”. The local newspaper in 1954 described her as “ … a popular and brave district servicewoman …” and on 27 May 1954 The Scone Advocate published an article about the dedication by the Scone & District Country Women's Institute of its new Baby Health Centre and Assembly Hall, “ … with all conveniences in Kelly Street, part of the land on which the Cottage stands ( facing Kingdon Street) …”, to Joyce Bridge with a most warm description of her “ … To those who knew her in private life there remains the memory of a lovely girl with laughing brown eyes, unafraid to face the horrors of war in her eagerness to help nurse the wounded and suffering …”.

In the Forward to One Life is ours…. Vivian Stratham (Bullwinkel) wrote “When approached to write a Forward…., I felt very privileged.

‘I met Joyce, as we knew her, for the first time when our Unit… formed in 1941 and posted overseas to Malaya. The Unit had a short but intensive life during which the weaknesses and strengths of individuals were quickly recognised.

It was during this time that our respect, esteem and affection grew daily for Joyce’s commitment, skills and dedication. Joyce faced every crisis with cheerfulness and fortitude.’

‘One cannot but feel resentment and so very sorry that such a young, lovely and defenceless Australian Nurse, wearing a Red Cross Armband, was murdered in such a cruel and calculated way. A young woman who had so much to give the community and humanity….”.

A very fitting tribute to a lovely Australian country girl.

Today the baby centre has been absorbed into the wider medical facilities of the town of Scone, but the Country Women's building remains where a portrait hangs of Joyce Bridge. Sadly the original medals issued to her posthumously which hung in the Assembly Hall were stolen some years ago, but have been replaced with miniatures .

Florence Casson - SFX13418
	Rank Lieutenant Service Number SFX13418 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered by Japanese troops on Bangka Island Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 38

6/3/1903 – 16/2/1942

Sister Florence ‘Flo’ Rebecca Casson, SFX 13418, was the daughter of Henry and Mary Casson of Willaston, South Australia. She was born in Warracknabeal, Victoria on 6 March 1903. Flo trained as a nurse, and the first record of her nursing career is at the Royal Adelaide Hospital in 1935 in a group photo titled 'Matron Draw with Night Nurses'.

Soon after she must have moved up in her career, as she became the Matron at a number of small country hospitals, including those at Jamestown and Port Pirie, and the Soldiers' Memorial Hospital in Pinaroo, a small South Australian country town near the South Australian–Victorian border.

On 7 February 1941 Flo Casson enlisted at Keswick, South Australia with the Australian Army Nursing Service and travelled to Malaya with the 2/13th Australian General Hospital.

After service in Malaya and Singapore she boarded the SS Vyner Brooke, and at the time of the bombing attack on the ship she was located in the saloon with other nurses where she was hit with a bomb blast, along with Rosetta Wright and Clare Halligan (On Radji Beach, p.153). The blast caused severe damage to her legs, one of which was possibly fractured, and she had to be assisted up to the main deck. Somehow her friends managed to get her into the second lifeboat that was launched with severely wounded nurses on board.

This lifeboat drifted ashore at Radji Beach later that night. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel and Sub-Lt Jimmy Miller, Royal Naval Reserve (Engineer Officer on the Vyner Brooke) walked along the beach to where a large bonfire had already been lit by survivors in order to obtain assistance with carrying the wounded nurses to the main camp.

Flo Casson and Rosetta Wright were the most seriously wounded. As described in Ian W. Shaw's On Radji Beach (p. 200), “They were both strong and brave women, but their wounds were severe. Again, shell splinters had caused the damage, with both women suffering deep wounds to the buttocks and upper thighs. They were unable to walk, and had to be fed and helped with their toilet functions. The wounds appeared to have caused nerve damage, perhaps fractures, and they needed more specialised treatment than any that could be provided on the beach. […] Miller eventually put together a rescue party and set off. The journey to the second lifeboat and back with its survivors took over two hours, and the wounded nurses were in agony on the return journey, having to be half-dragged, half carried for most of the distance. Their pain was obvious and it, in turn, increased the distress of the other survivors.”

When dawn broke on Sunday 15 February 1942, Flo was probably lying on a makeshift stretcher in the shade of the jungle on Radji Beach with the other wounded. They were being cared for by Matron Drummond and her nurses and a Chinese doctor who had also survived the sinking (possibly a Dr Chan), plus a group of survivors numbering about 70.

It seems that Flo and a few other more seriously wounded were later that day transferred to a fisherman’s uninhabited hut further down the beach towards the headland. Flo spent another night on the beach being cared for by her companions with what little they had in the way of medical supplies.

At dawn on Monday 16 February the survivors were joined by another lifeboat and rafts with many wounded people from ships that sank in the Bangka Strait during the night. The sheer volume of wounded seems to have tipped those in authority to sending the women and children and a few walking-wounded men on a trek towards the nearest town. The nurses were also invited to join that group but declined.

The nurses knew that it was their duty to stay with and look after the wounded, regardless of their difficulties.

So Flo was amongst the group of nurses destined to be executed by the Japanese. Once the Japanese had executed firstly the officers and then the second group of other ranks and civilian men they turned their attention to the nurses. Forming the nurses into a line facing the sea, with Flo and her wounded friends being supported at the righthand end of the line by other sisters (On Radji Beach, p. 216), the Japanese carried out one of their most abhorrent war crimes against Allied women on record.

On Radji Beach (p. 217) states that “Flo and Rosetta and Clare and the sisters supporting them fell under the gun, grouped together in death as in life."

So life was taken from Flo at the age of 39 years after several decades of unselfishly caring for others in need.

Flo Casson is memorialised by a plaque at Pinaroo Soldiers Memorial Hospital, where the Health Promotion Room is also named after her. There is also a plaque at the Royal Adelaide Hospital and at Moonta cemetery in South Australia. At the grave of her parents, Flo is remembered by a plaque inscribed with her name and that of her brother, himself a former POW.

Mary Elizabeth (Beth) Cuthbertson - VFX38746
	Rank Sister Service Number VFX38746 Unit 2/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 31

5/3/1910 – 16/2/1942

Sister Mary Elizabeth (Beth) Cuthbertson, daughter of William Melville Cuthbertson and Lilian Beatrice Cuthbertson (née Hooper), of Ballarat, Victoria. 2/13th Australian General Hospital, Australian Army Nursing Service. Sr Cuthbertson, along with 64 other Australian nurses and over 250 civilian men, women and children, was evacuated from Singapore, three days before the fall of Malaya, aboard the SS Vyner Brooke. On 14 February 1942 the Vyner Brooke was bombed by Japanese aircraft and sunk in Bangka Strait, off the coast of Sumatra. Twelve Australian nurses were killed, and 31 of the nurses who survived the sinking were captured as prisoners of war, eight of whom later died during captivity. The remaining 22 nurses, including Sr Cuthbertson, aged 31, were washed ashore on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, where they, along with 25 British soldiers, surrendered to the Japanese. On 16 February 1942 the Japanese bayoneted the soldiers and ordered the nurses to march into the sea, where they were shot. The only survivors of the massacre were Sister Vivian Bullwinkel and a British soldier. Both were taken as prisoners of war, but only Sr Bullwinkel survived the war.

Irene Melville Drummond - SFX10594
	Rank Matron Service Number SFX10594 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered by Japanese troops at Bangka Island Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 36

26/7/1905 – 16/2/1942

Matron Irene Drummond SFX10594 was the senior Australian on the beach on that fateful day and her extraordinary courage will always be remembered.

''Chin up, girls. I'm proud of you all and I love you all.'' So Matron Drummond called out as she walked into the water to her death on Radji Beach.

Irene Melville Drummond was born on 26 July 1905 at Ashfield, Sydney, daughter of Cedric Drummond, marine engineer, and his wife Katherine, née Melville, both Queensland born. Educated at Catholic schools in Adelaide and in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Irene returned to Adelaide, trained as a nurse at Miss Laurence's Private Hospital, qualified in obstetrics at the Queen's Home and worked at Angaston Hospital.

In 1933 she moved to the Broken Hill and District Hospital where she proved to be a compassionate and extremely competent nurse, well liked and respected by her superiors and colleagues. She served as a surgical sister, assistant matron and acting matron. In Ian W. Shaw's book On Radji Beach (p. 14), Irene is described as being “like a mother hen fussing over her chicks and greeting all with a cheery smile and a friendly squeeze of the shoulder.”

Irene Drummond joined the Australian Army Nursing Service at Keswick, South Australian on 23 July 1940, although her Oath of Enlistment in the Australian Imperial Force is dated 8 November 1940. She was called up for full-time duty with the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station in January 1941. Next month she sailed for Singapore to join the 2/9th Field Ambulance. Briefly back with the 2/4th CCS, she was promoted to Matron on 5 August and posted to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital in September.

When the Japanese invaded Malaya on 8 December, the hospital was situated near Johor Bahru. In January 1942 it was hurriedly moved to St Patrick's School, Singapore. Despite chaotic conditions brought on by the hasty retreat, enemy air raids and increasing admissions of battle casualties, Drummond's quiet efficiency helped to ensure that the wards were operational within 48 hours.

By early February 1942 surrender to the Japanese appeared likely. Throughout January, Major General Gordon Bennett had repeatedly refused to allow the evacuation of AANS personnel. It was not until 10 February that they began leaving, five days before the capitulation. By 12 February only Drummond, Matron Olive Paschke of the 2/10 AGH, and 63 members of their staffs remained in Singapore. Although the nurses had begged to be allowed to stay with their patients, they were put on board the small ship SS Vyner Brooke for the perilous voyage to Australia.

It is now well known history that on 14 February in Bangka Strait off Sumatra the ship was hit by bombs. The nurses helped other passengers to abandon ship. Scooping up a small Chinese boy as the Vyner Brooke sank, Drummond escaped in a lifeboat.

A group of survivors, including Drummond and 21 fellow nurses, came ashore at Radji Beach, Bangka Island. They were joined by civilians and servicemen from other sunken ships. Having discovered that the island was already in the hands of the Japanese and that no help could be expected from the local population, on 16 February the party resolved to surrender. One of the Vyner Brooke’s officers was sent to nearby Muntok to negotiate with the Japanese.

While he was away Drummond suggested that the civilian women and children should leave for Muntok. Her suggestion undoubtedly saved many lives. Shortly after the civilians departed, a Japanese officer and about 20 soldiers arrived at the beach.

Ignoring pleas that the remaining group was surrendering, the Japanese separated the men from the women. The men were marched in two groups around a small rocky headland to another area where they were shot and bayoneted. The Japanese returned to the nurses who had been left sitting on the beach and ordered them to walk into the sea.

All knew their fate as they entered the water in silence. The Japanese soldiers opened fire with a machine-gun. Irene Drummond was one of the first to die.

Matron Drummond was posthumously promoted to the rank of Major on 23 March 1943 and later to Lieutenant Colonel and was mentioned in dispatches in 1946. The citation read “The King has been graciously pleased to approve that the following be Mentioned in recognition of gallant and distinguished services in Malaya in 1942” (Supplement to the London Gazette, no. 37671, p. 3919, 1 August 1946).

At the Australian War Memorial in Canberra are two original letters written by Matron Drummond to her sister in Australia. The letters are handwritten and dated 17 December 1941 and 5 February 1942. They describe the war conditions in Malaya following the outbreak of war with the Japanese.

Dorothy Gwendoline (Buddy) Elmes - NFX70526
	Rank Sister Nursing Corps Service Number NFX70526 Unit 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station Australian Army Medical Services Cause of Death Died as Prisoner of War Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 28

27/4/1914- 16/2/1942

Dorothy Gwendoline Elmes was born at Armadale, Victoria to Robert and Dorothy Jean Elmes on 27 April 1914. She would grow up in Melbourne and Cheshunt in Victoria’s King Valley.

She would train at Corowa Community Hospital and would graduate in May 1939. By all accounts she was a very popular girl.

She enlisted in Paddington, NSW on 17 December 1940. Embarkation was on the Queen Mary in early February with other members of the 10th Australian General Hospital. She disembarked in Singapore on 18 February. On 10 January 1942 she was attached to the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station of the AANS. Eventually she was to travel to Singapore to await evacuation. She was evacuated on the SS Vyner Brooke. Eventually she would make land at Radji Beach on Bangka Island. On 16 February she would be killed with 20 other nurses by the Japanese on Radji Beach with only Vivian Bullwinkel surviving the massacre.

Her mother wrote, “My Darling little Bud, Oh dear I wish I knew where you are in the world...” on 2 March 1942, but Dorothy had already died on Radji Beach.

Lorna Florence Fairweather - SFX13431
	Rank Staff Nurse Service Number SX13431 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Executed by Japanese in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 29

Lorna Florence Fairweather was born in Stirling West, South Australia, on 31 January 1913, the daughter of Percival Sidney Howard Fairweather and Florence Annie Fairweather.

Lorna worked as a paediatric nurse at the Somerton Crippled Children's Home and lived with her parents in Broadview, Adelaide. On 2 July 1941 she was called up for duty in the Australian Army Nursing Service and on 28 August left Adelaide for Melbourne. On 2 September Sister Lorna Fairweather embarked with the 2/13th Australian General Hospital on the Wanganella, bound for Singapore.

On 12 February 1942, three days before the fall of Malaya, Lorna, along with 64 other Australian nurses and over 250 civilian men, women and children, was evacuated from Singapore on the SS Vyner Brooke. The Vyner Brooke was bombed by Japanese aircraft and sunk in Bangka Strait on 14 February 1942.

Of the 65 nurses on board, 12 were lost as sea while 32 survived the sinking and were captured as prisoners of war, of whom eight later died during captivity. Sister Fairweather, aged 30, was one of the remaining 22 nurses who also survived the sinking and were washed ashore on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, where they surrendered to the Japanese, along with 25 British soldiers.

On 16 February 1942 the group was massacred. The soldiers were bayoneted and the nurses were ordered to march into the sea where they were shot. Only Sister Vivian Bullwinkel and a British soldier, Private Cecil Gordon Kinsley, survived the massacre. Both were taken as prisoners of war, but only Sister Bullwinkel survived the war.

Source: Virtual War Memorial Australia.

Peggy Everett Farmaner - WFX3438
	Rank Sister Service Number WFX3438 Unit 2nd/4th Casualty Clearing Station Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Banka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 28

8/3/1913 -16/2/1942

"Don’t worry about me mother” wrote Peggy Farmaner on 2 February 1942. Two weeks later she was cruelly executed by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach, Bangka Island.

Sister Peggy Everett Farmaner, WFX 3438, born in 1912 was a member of the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station.

A newspaper article records that she” … was the daughter of George Frederick Farmaner and Flora Susan Farmaner of 9 Lapsley Place, Claremont, Western Australia and part of an old pioneer family well known in that area. She was educated at Methodist Ladies College and St Mary’s Church of England Grammar School, from where she matriculated. She did her nursing training at Perth Hospital.

“When war was declared she was in Sydney but immediately returned to her home State to enlist. In August 1940 she left on the ‘Queen Mary’ for Malaya. She worked with four other nurses at a Clearing Station in the most forward area of North Johore. The Nurses then moved to Kluang where they established a hospital on a rubber estate. On January 20, 1942 they were again evacuated at two hours notice, were moved to another place, which within 12 hours was found to be the wrong place. From here they moved to Singapore…

“The last letter her parents received from her was written on February 9, 1942. She was killed a week later, ’God knows the position is desperate but I am strangely unperturbed. Don’t worry about me, mother’ she wrote …”.

"Her death was absolutely devastating for everyone," says Peggy's grandniece, Susan Thomson. Peggy completed her primary school education at MLC, and then attended St Mary's Anglican Girl's School for her senior years. After leaving school Peggy trained as a nurse, and when war broke out signed up to the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station in Malaysia.

Tom Hamilton, the doctor who headed the 2/4th CCS, described her as "a pretty little Western Australian, who was full of fun."

When war was declared on the Japanese on December 8, 1941, after the attack on Pearl Harbour, the 2/4th CCS was relocated to the Oldham Hall School.

After the ship sank Peggy reached the lifeboat with Matron Drummond and grabbed a trailing rope (p.169, On Radji Beach) and so reached Radji beach. She was one of the Australian nurses forced into a line facing the sea and murdered by Japanese troops at the beach.

Peggy Farmaner is included in the memorial to all the nurses unveiled in 1999 by Mrs Vivian Statham (nee Bullwinkel) and Wilma Young at Honour Avenue (at the lake near the tennis court of the Botanical Gardens), Kings Park, Bicton, WA. Her plaque is number M264.

Perhaps the best memorial to Peggy is reported to have occurred when the surviving nurses returned to Australia on the ‘Manunda’, “When the nurses spent the night at Hollywood Military Hospital, in Perth, the reception-rooms were banked with flowers.

“For each nurse was a special gift of a posy from the garden of the late Sister P. Farmaner, one of those who died on Bank Beach.

Her mother brought the flowers to her daughter’s comrades …

Clarice Isobel Halligan - VX47776
	Rank Sister Service Number VX61329 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Banka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 37

17/10/1904 – 16/2/1942

Sister Clarice ‘Clare’ Isobel Halligan, VX 47776, 2/13th Australian General Hospital was born in Ballarat, Victoria on 17 September 1904, the third daughter of Joseph Patrick Halligan and Emily Watson Chalmers, who were married in Ballarat in 1898. They had eight children, the first in 1899 and the eighth in 1918. Clarice was the first of the siblings to die on 16th February 1942 at the age of 37 years.

Clarice’s father Joseph Patrick Halligan, started work at Ballarat Brewery and left to join Abbotsford Brewery, in Melbourne. The family at that time lived in a lovely Victorian House in the grounds of the Brewery in Abbotsford. Later on, they all moved to Kew.

Joseph rented stables in a back block, where a horse and jinker (2 wheeled cart) were kept for travel around Melbourne and for Joseph to travel to work. The children had a carefree childhood and played down at the Yarra River in Kew where they swam and bought ice cream from a punt on the River. They all went to school in Kew. They also went for escapades into the expansive grounds of the Kew Mental Asylum.

Clarice was a member of the Church of England. She had very strong faith as shown by a life committed to helping others and her work as missionary in New Guinea. She was Confirmed at the Holy Trinity Church in Kew Melbourne on the 5th August 1917 and her Confirmation Certificate is in the possession of her family.

Her family are very fortunate to have many Certificates of her very extensive training as a Nurse, but the oldest record dates to when Clarice was very young; nearly 12 years old. It is a Victorian Education Department Pupil’s Cookery Certificate dated 30th June, 1916. This is for a Six Month Course of Instruction in the Theory and Practice of Elementary Cookery, Richmond, Vic.

Another Certificate is the Australian Nursing Federation Certificate of Registration dated 3 October 1929 Certifying that Clarice Isobel Halligan, has been admitted to Membership of the Australian Nursing Federation as a General Nurse.

Clarice trained at the The Melbourne Hospital and Women’s Hospital Melbourne (combined training school for Nurses). The family have a Certificate dated 3rd October, 1927 certifying that Clarice Isobel Halligan had been trained at these Hospitals for three and a half years in Medical, Surgical and Nursing and six months in Midwifery.

There is also a Record of Service dated 5th June 1928 from the Lady Superintendent of Royal Melbourne Hospital recording that Clarice worked for three and a half years at this hospital in various men’s and women’s, medical, surgical, isolation, eye, ear, nose and throat wards, on day and night duty, in the casualty and out-patient department and in the operating theatres. She also worked in the gynaecological wards at the Women’s hospital. Clarice clearly had much experience.

Other qualifications included

(1) Training in Mothercraft and Infant Welfare required by the Victorian Baby Health Centres Association, qualifying her to take charge of a Baby Health Centre.

(2) Special course of training in Infant Welfare Nursing.

(3) Registration as a Midwife by the Nurses’ Board of South Australia

In 1934 Clarice went to Papua New Guinea as a Missionary and kept a diary but unfortunately only one now remains in the possession of the family. Paper was obviously in short supply in New Guinea and this diary was written in pencil on her brother’s school work book. It is assumed by her family that she may have written many diaries that were mistakenly thrown out by relatives who did not know that diaries were hidden in between school work. The diary starts with DOGURA, PAPUA NEW GUINEA - 31.07.1934 (DIARY and says

“As you probably know I am one of the newer missionaries, having landed in Papua on the last day of July, 1934……”

From stories related by relatives, Clarice worked in Melbourne for the Grey Sisters, an Order of Anglican Sisters who looked after poor people in Abbotsford. She then went to Neerim South as the Matron of the local hospital, where her parents went to meet the Doctor who was thinking of marrying Clarice. But for one reason or another Clarice’s parents deemed him unsuitable for marriage to their daughter. Something was wrong with his foot; maybe what used to be called a “club foot”!

According to her Record of Service Clarice joined the Australian General Hospital on 20 December 1940 and was allocated to the 7 AGH. She immediately went on leave without pay and returned to duty on 31 January 1941 and was the attached to the Camp Hospital at Seymour Victoria.

On the 11 July 1940 she enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service at the Australian Army Medical Corp Depot in William St Melbourne. She sailed on the 30 July 1941 and disembarked at Singapore on the 14 August 19/41. Clarice had wanted to go to the Middle East but ended up in Malaya. Initially Clarice was seconded with 10 other Nurse to the 2/10th Australian General Hospital at Malacca in Malaya.

Clarice returned to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital that was initially located at St Patrick's School on Singapore Island. Between 21-23 November 1941 the entire hospital was moved across the Straits to Tampoi Hill on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Due however, to the swift progress of the Japanese invasion force, most of the hospital staff was evacuated back to Singapore in late January 1942.

With the 65 other Australian Nurses Clarice was on board the SS Vyner Brooke when it was bombed by the Japanese and sunk on 14 February 1942. Clarice was badly injured by a bomb blast at the same time as Rosetta Wight and both

“ … suffered deep shrapnel wounds to the back of their thighs and buttocks, wounds that penetrated to the bone …. Partially in shock and bleeding profusely, both women were unable to move …”(p.153, On Radji Beach).

Fellow nurses helped her up to the deck and into what would be the second lifeboat to be launched. This lifeboat however overturned as it hit the sea and throwing out most of its passengers out ( p.160, On Radji Beach). Nevertheless, Clarice managed to hold onto the upturned craft. She must have been in excruciating pain for many hours before the sea currents eventually washed the upturned lifeboat and its survivors ashore at one end of Radji.

Clarice's wounds, whilst bad, were apparently not quite as severe as those of the other two wounded nurses and she was “… able to walk and simply needed some stitching and some medication to be guaranteed a full recovery …” ( p.199-200, On Radji Beach). But there is no doubt that she would have been in agony as she managed to make the journey along the coast to where the first lifeboat had lit a bonfire.

Clarice would have been in real pain during the next two days until the time the Japanese troops arrived at Radji beach. The soldiers proceeded to execute firstly the officers and serviceman and then the crew and civilian men on the beach before in an unbelievable act of totally senseless brutality they lined up the nurses near the waters edge. Clare and the other wounded nurses were on the left of the line facing out to sea. The soldiers opened fire with their machine gun.

Thus ended the life of a woman in the prime of life who had been dedicated to caring for others in pain and suffering.

One the final entries on Clarice’s Offical Record states

“Deceased whilst POW. Executed by Japanese”

An example of the impact on families of the uncertainty of their loved one’s fate can be seen in letters on Clarice’s file and her Officiers Record of Service at the Australian War Memorial Canberra. Clarice died in February 1942 and it was not until September/October 1945 that her death could be really confirmed, following the release of the surviving 24 Nurses from captivity as POWs. Prior to that the Nurses were ‘presumed killed’ which still gave their families some hope that they were alive.

On 2 September 1944 Clarice’s mother wrote to the Army for “a Certificate, or otherwise a statement of authortity” to enable her to sell Clarice’s car. Further correspondance followed and the Army thought her mother wanted a Death Certificate. But her mother wrote on 28 September that

“We don’t wish to apply for a Certificate of Death ……..as we still have some hope that our daughter may still be alive.”

How sad are those words and any slender hope would be shattered 12 months later.

Undoubtedly, similar sentiments were being experienced by the families of the other 41 Nurses from the SS Vyner Brooke who died during or after the sinking, were executed on Radji Beach, or died whilst a Prisoner of War of the Japanese. And we should not forget the anguish and uncertainty of the familes of the Nurses who did return home.

Nancy Harris - NFX76285
	Rank Staff Nurse/Lieutenant Service Number NFX76285, NX76285 (N108167) Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Shot by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 29

Nancy (also known as Nance) Harris was born on 15 January 1913 in Guyra, NSW, the daughter of Florence Cecily Cumming and Dr John Solomon Harris. She had an elder sister, Hannah (known as Jean, her middle name), who was born in 1910.

As a child, Nancy was a pupil of the Ursuline Convent in Guyra. When she was a little older, Dr Harris sold his practice in Guyra and the family moved to North Sydney. They received a warm farewell before they left.

In Sydney, Nancy attended Presbyterian Ladies’ College in Pymble. Upon finishing school, she decided to take up nursing and trained at Royal North Shore Hospital. She passed her nurses’ final examination in May 1935 and became registered in general nursing on 14 November of the same year.

Nancy Harris in nursing uniform. Courtesy Presbyterian Ladies' College

In 1941 Nancy enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) and was called up for duty on 19 August. She was attached to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital (AGH) as a Staff Nurse and 10 days later embarked for Malaya aboard the Wanganella.
The Wanganella arrived in Singapore on 15 September. However, instead of travelling with her unit to its temporary base at St. Patrick's Boys’ School in Katong, on the south coast of Singapore Island, Nancy and nine other 2/13th AGH nursing colleagues were detached to the 2/10th AGH in Malacca. The 2/10th AGH had travelled to Malaya in February aboard the Queen Mary, along with the third Australian unit with AANS staff attached, the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS).

In Malacca, Nancy learned tropical nursing from her more experienced colleagues, and when she returned to St. Patrick’s on 6 October, she was able to pass on her new knowledge to other 2/13th staff. In the meantime, another rotation of 2/13th nurses travelled to Malacca.

During their time at St. Patrick’s, Nancy and the other nurses enjoyed the attention of wealthy British expats resident in Singapore and were often invited to dinners, dances and excursions. One evening, Nancy and her colleague Vivian Bullwinkel were invited by Peg and Richard Hanson to dinner on a ship in Keppel Harbour. They were taken out to a luxury yacht owned by the so-called White Rajah of Sarawak. It was named the Vyner Brooke.

Nancy was detached again to the 2/10th AGH on 30 October, and by the time she rejoined her unit on 13 December, the 2/13th AGH had moved across Johor Strait to a site in Tampoi, and the Imperial Japanese Army had invaded Malaya.

Faced with minimal resistance from overwhelmed British and Indian troops, the Japanese invasion force moved swiftly southwards. The entry of Australian soldiers into active combat in mid-January did little to stop them, and by the end of January they had reached the northern side of Johor Strait. Across the water lay Singapore Island.

By 25 January the two Australian General Hospitals had been evacuated to Singapore. The 2/13th AGH returned to St. Patrick’s and the 2/10th had moved into Oldham Hall. The 2/4th CCS was not far behind.

Despite strong opposition from Australian troops, on 8 February Japanese forces crossed Johor Strait and established a bridgehead on the island. Singapore was doomed.

By now, St. Patrick’s was so overcrowded with wounded combatants that outbuildings and even tents were used as wards. Casualties lay closely packed on mattresses on floors or even outside on the lawns. From outside the school came the constant noise of artillery fire. Nancy and her colleagues worked under enormous strain but were magnificent.

On 9 February, in response to Japanese atrocities in Hong Kong, Major General Gordon Bennett ordered the evacuation of the 130 AANS nurses now in Singapore. Unsurprisingly, the nurses did not want to leave hundreds of wounded patients in the lurch and refused to volunteer. In the end, Nance and the others had to be ordered to leave by the senior matron in Malaya, Olive Paschke of the 2/10th AGH. Many nurses wept as they went about their work on these final days in Singapore. On 10 February, with Japanese forces closing in, six nurses left aboard the Wah Sui. The following day 59 more departed on the Empire Star. Then, on Thursday 12 February, the final 65 nurses, among whom was Nance, were evacuated aboard Vyner Brooke.

In the gathering dusk the Vyner Brooke steamed slowly out of Keppel Harbour. As the ship departed, several of the nurses looked back at the waterfront to see a city ablaze. For the next 36 hours, the ship made its way slowly and without incident through the many islands that line the passage between Singapore and Jakarta, its destination.
Then, in the early afternoon of Saturday 14 February, the Vyner Brooke was bombed by Japanese aircraft as it was entering Bangka Strait. In a short period of time, some 27 bombs were released. Most missed but eventually one entered through the ship’s funnel and exploded in the engine room. The ship lifted and rocked with a vast roar. Then another struck the ship, and another, and the Vyner Brooke was doomed. It began to sink and within 30 minutes was beneath the waves.

After treating the wounded as best they could, and helping women, children, the elderly and the wounded into the available lifeboats, Nancy and her colleagues abandoned ship wearing the life jackets they had been issued with. Some found their way onto lifeboats – or just as likely trailed behind – while others clung to rafts and debris. Those who could swim made for nearby Bangka Island.

Nancy made it to shore late on Saturday night in the vicinity of Radji Beach, where she joined a large group of AANS nurses and civilians around a bonfire. Later, more survivors of ships bombed by Japanese forces came ashore and joined the group. Among them were many wounded.

Sunday passed by, and on Monday it was decided that the group should surrender en masse to Japanese authorities. A deputation left for the nearest large town, Muntok, to negotiate this. A short while later most of the civilian women and children of the group followed behind.

The Australian nurses were duty-bound to remain with the wounded on the beach.
Around mid-morning the deputation returned with Japanese soldiers. The soldiers separated the survivors into groups. They took the men around a bluff in two groups and proceeded to shoot and bayonet them.

The Sun (Sydney, 23 Jan 1945, p. 3), ‘Father Believes Nurse Is Alive’

They returned to the nurses and the remaining civilians. They ordered the nurses and one, perhaps two, civilian women to advance into the water and form a line, facing the sea. They shot them as they stood there, looking out to sea, knowing their fate.

Nancy and 20 colleagues died on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, on 16 February 1942. One colleague, Vivian Bullwinkel of the 2/13th AGH, miraculously survived.

On 12 January 1945, nearly three years after Nancy’s death, the Australian Army’s NSW Echelon and Records section issued a notice to her mother and father. “I regret to inform you,” the notice states, “that following intensive examination of the evidence in hand regarding the fate of certain members of the A.A.N.S. who were serving in Malaya, and the absence of any communication from them, the decision has been reached that it must be presumed they lost their lives during or as a result of the aerial attack on the transport on which they were travelling near Sumatra. The personal documents of your daughter … have therefore been endorsed as follows: ‘Previously reported missing believed killed on or after 11 February now reported became missing on 14 February 1942 and is for official purposes presumed to be dead’. With the deepest sympathy of the Minister for the Army and Commander in Chief.”

Despite this, the 24 January 1945 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald reports that her parents had refused to give up hope that their daughter might be still alive. “Of the 66 nurses who were on the ship that was bombed, it is known that 33 were killed and 33 were saved,” Florence Harris is quoted as saying. “Relatives of some of the girls who were saved had letters saying that they were living in a Dutch bungalow in Kalambang [sic] and were being treated as civilian internees. We feel that until those girls are repatriated we will never know what really happened.”

In September that year Florence and John Harris finally learned the truth of their daughter’s tragic fate. When the 24 surviving nurses were freed from captivity deep in the jungle of Sumatra and flew to Singapore, they brought with them news of those who had died on Radji Beach, of those who had drowned when the Vyner Brooke was bombed, and of those who had perished in the internment camps. In time, the national outrage and mourning that followed gave way to  memorialisation and commemoration, which continues to this very day.

Nancy's name is honoured in Australia, Singapore and England. It is recorded on panel 96 in the Commemorative Area of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. It is recorded on the Singapore Memorial at Kranji War Cemetery in Singapore. And it is recorded in the roll of honour in the Nurses' Memorial Chapel in Westminster Abbey in London.

Lest we forget.

Ellen Louisa (Nell) Keats - SFX11647
	Rank Nursing Sister Service Number SFX11647 Unit 2nd/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Banka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 26

1/7/1915-16/2/1942

Sister Ellen Louisa ‘Nell’ Keats, SX 11647 was member of the 2/10th Australian General Hospital. Nell was born on 1 July 1915 at ‘Gunyah’, a private nursing home at North Unley a suburb of Adelaide. She was the daughter of Mr and Mrs C. C. Keats of Dulwich, South Australia.  She had twin younger brothers and one was later listed as ‘Missing’ during the War.

Nell attended St Peters Collegiate Girls School, Adelaide. In 1927 she is listed as passing her pianoforte exam for the School Exams and in 1932 she passed the ‘Invalid Cookery Examination’ conducted by the School of Mines; by then she would have been about 16-17 years of age.

Nell commenced her training at Parkwynd Private Hospital in 1933, transferring to Adelaide Hospital to complete the course, and it is reported that Nell was an excellent nurse. In 1937 she passed her final exam for the Nurses Board of South Australia and was employed at the Adelaide Hospital as a staff sister (Health Museum of South Australia).

Nell enlisted with the Australian Army Nursing Service on 18 December 1940 and was called up for service on 3 February 1941. A studio portrait of Nell in her nursing military uniform taken in 1941 prior to her departure with the AANS shows a serious, pleasant faced young woman of 5 foot 3 inches in height. A similar impression is given in her paybook photo at the Australian War Memorial.

On 19 May 1941 Nell embarked on HMAT Zealandia arriving in Singapore on 9 June 1941. She immediately traveled to Malacca in Malaya where the 2/10th AGH was located. From time to time Nell and other nurses from the 2/10th AGH were seconded for duty with the 2/13th AGH. Nell was with this unit when due to the swift progress of the Japanese invasion force in Malaya, most of the hospital staff was evacuated back to Singapore in late January 1942. On 25 January she rejoined her fellow nurses of the 2/10th AGH who were also back on Singapore Island.

According to the documents in the Australian War Memorial lodged by Mavis Hannah, Nell’s letters home from Malaya to her mother “… were positively upbeat …” (On Radji Beach p.80). ‘Writing to her mother in Adelaide on 20 December 1941, she said “Each night we have community singing in the Mess, which I enjoy very much, and tonight I am going to the pictures to see Waterloo Bridge…….We are still not very busy as we haven’t started receiving casualties”.

On the back of the studio mounted portrait of Nell in her nurse’s uniform is a nice and succinct but sad synopsis of Nell’s life . After outlining her nursing career it says:

“ ………..In February, 1942, she was amongst the group of sixty-five nurses evacuated from Singapore on the “Vyner Brooke”. The ship foundered off the coast of Sumatra as the result of enemy action. Sister Nell Keats was one of the number posted as “missing”. It is now known that she lost her life, after being taken prisoner”.

It is not known how Nell came to be on Radji Beach after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke on that fateful day in 1942. Perhaps she was in one of the lifeboats or just floated in her life jacket with the currents. We know for certain that Nell Keats was one of the group of fine, brave and noble women murdered by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach on 16 February 1942 after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke.

One of the final notations on Nell’s Record of Service says

“Deceased while POW. Executed by Japanese”

Along with seven other nurses from the ‘Vyner Brooke’ who lost their lives at sea and on Radji beach, Nell Keats is memorialised on a brass plaque in the Royal Adelaide Hospital Chapel and on other Memorials around Australia and overseas.

Janet (Jenny) Kerr - NFX76279
	Rank Sister Service Number NFX76279 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 31

8/8/1910 – 16/2/1942

Sister Janet ‘Jenny’ Kerr, NX 76279 was a member of the 2/13th Australian General Hospital. Jenny was born in 1910, the daughter of John James Kerr and Ida Maud Kerr (née Ellwood) of Woodstock, near Cowra in NSW. Most records show either one or the other of Mr and Mrs Kerr as Jenny’s parents and the reason for this is that they were divorced in 1930.

Jenny followed her mother’s footsteps into the nursing profession and graduated as a nurse from St George Hospital in Kogarah, Sydney. Her mother was the matron of Woodstock Hospital in Central West NSW. As reported in the Queensland Times on 11 May 1946, Jenny was a theatre sister at St George Hospital for many years, and in 1946 a plaque to the memory of ‘Sister Janet Kerr’ was unveiled at the hospital.

Sister Janet Kerr enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on 21 August 1941, and her paybook photo shows a serious-looking woman with brown hair and brown eyes. As with other nurses in her unit, she left Australia in August 1941 and sailed for Malaya and Singapore on the Hospital Ship Wanganella, arriving on 15 September 1941.

She was part of the 2/13th Australian General Hospital that was initially located at St Patrick's School on Singapore Island. Between 21–23 November 1941 the entire hospital was moved across the Johor Strait to Tampoi Hill on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Due, however, to the swift progress of the Japanese invasion force, most of the hospital staff was evacuated back to Singapore in late January 1942.

There is little on public record of Jenny’s life but it is well known that she was on the SS Vyner Brooke and made it to Radji Beach, presumably on one of the two lifeboats which arrived there and further along the coast. Jenny, aged 31 years, was among the group of nurses murdered by Japanese troops on Radji beach on 16 February 1942.

‘Jenny Kerr, a no-nonsense girl from near Young in NSW was sitting alongside Vivian, and turned to her and said “Bully, they have murdered them all…….” (On Radji Beach p214). Shortly after, the nurses and one civilian lady Mrs Betteridge walked into the sea and were callously slaughtered by the Japanese.

The newspaper record of the time, Cootamundra Herald 5 October 1945) states “STOCKINBINGAL [this is in the same area as Woodstock] Janet Kerr … was well known and highly esteemed by everyone here. She is a sister of Mrs Ken Kerr and a niece to Mrs T. Ellwood and Mr and Mrs J. Ellwood senior. She trained at St. George’s Hospital. Kogarah, and enlisted at the beginning of the War. She spent many holiday periods here at the hotel with her brother. Her mother, Mrs Kerr, lives at Woodstock…”.

Jenny is also commemorated on the Roll Of Honour at Woodstock, near Young in NSW where there is a beautiful memorial to her in the town’s main street. The memorial was unveiled by Sir John Northcote, the Governor of NSW on 19 November 1954.

Plans for this Memorial were first announced in The Lyndhurst The Shire Chronicle (NSW) on 2 April 1952 that reported

‘A memorial park is to be established at Woodstock in honour of the late Sister Jenny Kerr who was killed by the Japanese during the last war. Already an amount of 136 pounds has been donated towards the project. A public meeting was held at Woodstock recently to initiate the appeal. The meeting was largely attended. A committee was elected to raise funds for the memorial. Mr. Reg Hailstone was voted President of this committee. The Memorial will take the form of a children's park and playground and will be called the Jenny Kerr Memorial Park. It is to be built on a vacant land adjacent to the Post Office’.

Also in Woodstock is a Memorial Park and playground; the Jenny Kerr Memorial Park with a permanent ‘sign’ which was installed and unveiled on ANZAC Day 2015. There is a photo of Jenny Kerr, what is said to be the wreck of the ‘Vyner Brooke’, and the story of her war service and the massacre on Radji Beach.

Interestingly, during the late 1950s and early 1960s there was a photo of Jenny Kerr above the door to the Matron’s office at St George’s Hospital because she was held in great respect and affection by the nurses of that era (ex nurse Mrs. Jan Hodgson nee McDonald). Sadly this photo appears to have been lost over the years.

Undoubtedly, the memory of a wonderful Australian nurse, Sister Jenny Kerr, and the massacre of the nurses will live on through these lovely memorials.

Mary Eleanor (Ellie) McGlade - NX76275
	Rank Sister Service Number SFX11647 Unit 2nd/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Banka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 39

2/7/1902 16/2/1942

Sister Mary Eleanor ‘Ellie’ McGlade, NX 76275 2/13th Australian General Hospital overcame a very difficult childhood to lead a fulfilling and meaningful life in caring for others.

Ellie was born on 2 July 1902 in Armidale in the New England area of country NSW, to Francis Aloysius and Agnes Beatrice McGlade. Soon after her birth her mother passed away. It seems that she died for post natal reasons as in later life Ellie “… specialised in an area that would perhaps allow her to help young mothers in a way that her mother had not been helped …” (On Radji Beach, p.45).

Ellie was orphaned when only 3 after her father passed away in 1905. She went to live with her aunt Mrs Walter Scott of Wallalong near Maitland in the Hunter Valley area of NSW and Mrs Scott became her guardian. From her pre-school years Ellie “… attended St Ursula’s Convent in Armidale NSW as a boarder, at first sleeping in a cot beside Mother Berchman’s bed”.

St Ursula’s was founded in 1882 by a group of exiled Usuline nuns from Daderstadt in Germany. Operating as a boarding and day school for girls, St Ursula’s was owned and operated by the Usuline nuns until the mid 1970s. The magnificent Convent Chapel, for which Ellie donated the Crucifix was opened in 1930.

As she grew older St Ursula’s became a beloved childhood home for Ellie with which she stayed strongly connected for the rest of her life. When completing her Intermediate Certificate in 1920 she won prizes for singing, violin, piano, and Christian doctrine and had already begun to care for girls who fell ill.

The School report of 1921 noted that ‘owing to the kind solicitude of their College Infirmarian no one has a chance to get seriously ill before she is reported and nursed back to normal by the indefatigable Ellie’. On leaving school Ellie visited relatives in Scotland and Ireland, returning to begin training as a nurse at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney.

Ellie graduated in 1927 with Certificates in General Nursing, Cooking and Dispensing and became a Mothercraft nurse in the Hunter Valley. McGlade often visited St Ursula’s Convent in Armidale and was well remembered there even after she left school. The 1927 School magazine remembered Ellie as a’ winsome toddler… playing about with Rex, the collie, or her family of dolls’ and later ‘as a girl of amiable disposition, still loved by those who surround her … untiring and unselfish in her care of the sick…”.

Ellie appears in the 1927 and 1929 NSW Register of Nurses as Mary Eleanor McGlade of Wallalong, Hinton, so it seems that after her graduation she returned to base herself in the small town of Wallalong in the Hunter Region of NSW.

In 1930 as a young nurse Miss Ellie McGlade donated the Crucifix for the new Ursuline Convent Chapel when it was being built at Armidale. A decade later as a mature woman, good fortune at last came Ellie’s way. The Newcastle Sun on 22 February 1940 reported that a nursing sister Mrs [sic] E. McGlade “… who gave her address as Wallalong a small township north of Morpeth, where she was at the time attending one of her many cases…” won fourth prize of 300 pounds in the State Lottery.

In January 1941 McGlade enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service. Called up on the 8 August Ellie was posted to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital and she embarked for Singapore and Malaya on the Hospital Ship Wanganella, arriving in September 1941. Ellie’s her Paybook photo shows a lovely woman with an intelligent, attractive face and it also says that she had brown hair and grey eyes.

In Malaya she worked with the 2/13th AGH in Tampoi, near Johore. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the fall of Singapore became inevitable, most Australian personnel were evacuated from the island, but the 2/13th AGH remained until 12 February when they too were evacuated.

Ellie McGlade was one of 65 Australian nurses who left Singapore aboard the Vyner Brooke, but two days later the ship was bombed by the Japanese and many lives were lost. Those who could swim, or on rafts or in lifeboats made for the nearby Banka Island. It is not known how Ellie made it to Radji Beach, but there she was with her 21 other nursing friends on that fateful day on 16 February 1942.

The fact that she was brutally murdered by the Japanese troops who captured Ellie and the other AANS nurses on Radji Beach is incomprehensible to the civilised mind. With her other Nursing friends and Mrs Betteridge, a civilian women, Ellie was ordered to walk into the water where all the ladies were so cruelly executed, except for Vivian Bullwinkel, the one survivor.

Sister Ellie McGlade is commemorated on the War Memorial on the high Street, Wallalong and also on the Roll of honour at the Australian War Memorial. At the Last Post Ceremony on 12 February 2016 her photograph was displayed at the Pool of Reflection at the AWM.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra has a collection of biographical notes relating to Ellie. The notes cover her early years at Armidale, her training at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital at Camperdown Sydney, her service with the 2/13th AGH and the events surrounding the “SS Vyner Brooke” sinking and the Radji Beach killings. There is also a newspaper cutting of a Memorial Service for Ellie whose memory continues to live on; a truly remarkable woman whose loss was widely felt.

Kathleen Margaret Neuss - NFX70527
	Rank Sister Service Number NFX70527 Unit 2nd/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered by Japanese troops at Bangka Island Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 30

16/10/2011 – 16/2/1942

When Australian Army nurse Kathleen Neuss sat down to write a letter home from Singapore on 6 February 1942 she couldn’t have known it would be her last. “Guess you will be thinking I’ve gone up in smoke,” she quipped. “There is plenty of it about.”

Ten days later she was dead, one of 22 Australian nurses who were ordered into the sea at Radji Beach and shot by Japanese soldiers during the infamous Bangka Island massacre.

Sister Kathleen ‘Kath’ Margaret Neuss NFX 70527, was born on 16 October 1911 at Mollongghip, near Ballarat in Victoria. Kath was the second daughter of John Henry Neuss and Mary Catherine Neuss (née Perry). Kath’s paternal grandfather was George Neuss, a German immigrant, and her maternal grandfather was Samuel Perry, a veteran of the Eureka Stockade in 1854.

In 1913, when Kath was 18 months old, her parents packed all their possessions, travelled to Sydney by boat, then train to Glen Innes in northern NSW and finally by Cobb & Co coach to uncleared land her father had selected for farming about 32 kms northwest of Inverell.

Life was very hard for the young family. Her father had to clear the land and build their first ‘house’ of three rooms with an iron roof and walls lined with hessian and papered with wallpaper. The ceilings were also of hessian. Their only water tank was a 500 hundred gallon tank at the side of the house. Kath’s parents called their new home 'Kalimna' after the Victorian coastal town where they spent their honeymoon. All water for washing and cooking had to be carried by bucket. Kath’s elder sister Jessie ('Jess') had also been born in Mollongghip, and over the next decade another four siblings were born at Inverell.

Kath Neuss was initially educated at Bannockburn Public School. Her father would take Jess and Kath on a horse to school and each afternoon the girls would walk the four miles home. During a severe drought in 1915–16 Jess and Kath returned to Victoria for about 18 months and went schools at Mollongghip and Rocky Lead where their respective grandparents lived.

Back at 'Kalimna', as the family increased a sulky was acquired which, driven by the eldest child, then took the kids to school. Often the children travelled to school by horse; two to each horse with the youngest in front.

In 1926 Kath sat and passed an examination that enabled her to go to Inverell High School in 1927 and 1928. She would board with an Inverell family during the week and then return home each weekend, travelling by horse and sulky – very tiring for a young teenager. Kath initially wanted to be a school teacher but did not pass the teachers entrance examination, a big disappointment to her. After leaving school she trained as a private nurse in Inverell and then at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, graduating as a Registered Nurse in 1939.

Kath Neuss enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service on the 6 January 1941 and was posted to the 2/10th Australian General Hospital. On 4 February the SS Queen Mary sailed from Sydney, destination Singapore. On board were elements of the 8th Division AIF and 51 Australian nurses, including Kath who served in Malaya and Singapore. For part of her time Kath was seconded to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital.

In a strange coincidence, as part of the 2/13th Battalion 9th Division AIF her younger brother Bill had sailed on the Queen Mary for the Middle East on 20 October 1940. The 9th Division disembarked at Bombay in India and the Queen Mary returned to Sydney to take the nurses to Singapore. Bill's pre-embarkation leave in Sydney on 18 October was the last time Kath saw her brother, but letters from Kath in Malaya and Singapore to Bill remain. The last letter to Bill was dated 16 January 1942, exactly one month before Kath died.

Kath was a tall, fun-loving and gregarious woman with brown eyes and dark hair. She had a wicked sense of humour, was full of life, and her letters home from Malaya and Singapore tell of young woman enjoying her experiences overseas. The nurses had a very good social life and in many of her letters Kath talks about a very close friend, Lieutenant Jock Pringle of the 2/18th Battalion. In a letter dated 2 January 1941 Kath wrote:

Jock is still at the Convalescent Depot and hating it still. He too had a move on Monday. I spoke to him on Sunday evening and he was very miserable. Said the medical unit were worse than the police to get out of their clutches. Said they were acting as though it was a concentration camp.

In a very sad and tragic irony, both Kath and Jock were executed by the Japanese, exactly one week apart: Jock on Singapore Island after he surrendered to the Japanese when his composite unit was overrun on 9t February and Kath at Radji Beach on 16 February.

Kath wrote many letters and about 20 remain; these give a terrific insight into Kath. They almost ‘bring her alive’. In a letter dated 5 October 1941 Kath compared the airforce people with the slog of the soldiers:

"The RAAF are entirely different to the AIF. Most of them have been here over 12 months and most of the time in Singapore which is certainly a very artificial city. And naturally they adopt some of its atmosphere and some of its eastern flourish. The right wine with right soup and the right soup with the right fish and at the right time, to say nothing of a spray of flowers to act as a guide to your place. And their ability to guide you onto the rarest dishes is as though they have been used to it for years. Their conversation is rare though as they want to live very much for every moment. One lad I met was being instructed to fly a Hudson and his instructor was in the party. The instructor said that when you flew with ‘Jeep the learner’ he always felt that the “Grim Reaper” was in the cockpit. “No” said Jeep “there's Lady Luck there too, ready to seduce the Grim Reaper”.

‘Rather a naughty story, but subtle I thought. They are bright lads and never let the show have a dull moment. One lad, I’ll never forget him, ordered an Emu for dinner. The poor waiter unabashed said “We haven't one Sir”. “Well” said Jacko “you should have one”. He said “Sorry sir we did have one but it's all used” and went on with his job.”

She was missing out on a lot of weddings of her friends in Australia and on 2 November 1941 she wrote

“Can’t bear to think of many more weddings over there without me being present. You had better wait or there will be a fuss”.

In the same letter Kath wrote

“Had a very gay weekend. The Air Force lads who passed through here the previous weekend on the way to Frasers Hill arrived back on Thursday. Bleating that it was too lonely up there. So Pat and I had the job of comforting them.”

At the time of boarding the “SS Vyner Brooke” Kath was aged 31. Along with Winnie May Davis and her very close friend Pat Gunther, she was ordered amongst the various duties of the Australian Army nurses on board, to be responsible for the forward part of the ship (On Radji Beach P148). When the ship was bombed she “… received a nasty shrapnel wound from the bomb that hit aft. Struck in the left hip, she struggled to walk and had to be helped onto the deck by Wilma and Mona…” (ORB, p.154).

When the time came for evacuating the ship and the second lifeboat was being filled with the elderly, mothers and children and the more seriously wounded nurses, Kath Neuss had to be practically carried all the way into the lifeboat (ORB P159). Pat Gunther gave her tin hat to Kath ‘in case she needed to bail water from the lifeboat, saying, ‘we’ll see you on shore’. (Portrait of a Nurse P21) Kath gave her life jacket to Pat. The rest is history; Pat survived as a POW.

Presumably landing on Radji Beach in the lifeboat, Kath was definitely executed by the Japanese on the beach along with the other Australian Army Nurses. Whether she was amongst those told to walk into the water and killed or whether she was amongst the wounded on stretchers brutally bayoneted to death is unclear. She is remembered on the Inverell Roll of Honour and a tree is planted at the RSL branch in Inverell in her memory.

Florence Aubin Salmon - NFX70991
	Rank Lieutenant Service Number NFX70991 Unit 2/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Shot by Japanese soldiers in the Bangka Island Massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 26

Florence Aubin Salmon was born on 20 October 1915, the daughter of Florence Alexandria Aubin and John Henry Salmon of Punchbowl, Sydney. Florence had two brothers, Leonard John Salmon (b. 1912) and Garnet Cyril Noel Salmon (b. 1919), and two sisters, Joyce (b. 1921) and Dorothy (b. after 1923).

Florence and Winnie May Davis at the opening of a new wing at Waverley Memorial Hospital in 1935

In 1934 Florence began training in general nursing at the War Memorial Hospital in Waverley, an eastern suburb of Sydney. The private hospital, owned by the Methodist Church of New South Wales, was dedicated to men and women of the eastern suburbs of Sydney who died in service during World War One. Training alongside Florence was Winifred (Winnie) May Davis. Seven years later, Florence and Winnie would serve in the same medical unit in Malaya.

In mid-1938, Florence and Winnie passed their Nurses' Registration Board examinations and became General Nurses. In November that year they were each presented with a graduate brooch at the hospital’s annual Armistice Day Awards ceremony.

In a 1990 history of the War Memorial Hospital, Florence is remembered as a “bright and breezy lass, known to her contemporaries as ‘Sam’. She was given to calling her friends flippant and inappropriate nicknames. [She] was untiring in the care of her patients, spreading good cheer as she bustled about her duties” (Green, p. 60).

Not content to stop at general nursing, on 30 Jan 1940 Florence became a Registered Midwife after completing the requisite training at Royal North Shore Hospital.

By then, war had broken out in Europe, and by 1941 all three branches of Australia’s armed forces were engaged in North Africa, the Mediterranean, the Middle East – and increasingly southeast Asia and the southwest Pacific. More than one million Australian men and women ended up serving in World War Two.

Florence was one of them. She enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) on 8 January 1941, was attached to the Emergency Unit, and posted to the army camp dressing station at Bathurst, 200 kilometres west of Sydney. On 20 February 1941 this appointment was terminated upon her transfer to the AANS’s Home Service the next day. She continued her posting at Bathurst.

Florence in her AANS indoor uniform. Photo courtesy Waverley War Memorial Hospital

Florence’s younger brother, Garnet, had already served for a period in 1940, and upon reenlistment in 1941 served in the Middle East. Florence’s elder brother, Leonard, enlisted on 24 March 1941. He was killed on 14 May 1943 when the Centaur sank off the Queensland coast near Brisbane after being torpedoed by a Japanese submarine. The siblings’ uncle Walter J. Salmon was a petty officer serving on HMAS Perth and was killed when the ship was sunk on 1 March 1942 by the Japanese fleet in the Battle of the Sunda Strait.

By 1941 Australian authorities had recognised the threat that Japan posed, and therefore the prime importance of an arc of territory, stretching eastwards from the Malay peninsula, through the Netherlands East Indies (Indonesia) and into the southwest Pacific, in the defence of Australia. In view of this, and following discussions with British authorities, the Australian War Cabinet decided to send Australian personnel to certain strategic points in the region, among which the most important was considered British Malaya. Accordingly, in January 1941, part of the recently raised 8th Division of the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) was assigned to the British colonial possession, initially on garrison and other non-combat duty (Walker, p. 492). The force included three medical units to which AANS nurses were attached – initially the 2/10th Australian General Hospital (AGH) and the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), and later the 2/13th AGH.

When Florence transferred once again – this time to the 2nd AIF – on 9 May 1941, she was attached to the first of these units, the 2/10th AGH, which had been established in Malacca in February. Florence remained at the Bathurst camp dressing station while she waited to ship out.

After taking pre-embarkation leave, Florence sailed from Sydney on 29 July on the Dutch liner turned troopship Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, travelling as part of Convoy US11B. On board were two other nurses of the 2/10th AGH, one of whom was fellow Sydneysider Lavinia Jean Russell.

Another Dutch liner, Marnix Van St. Aldegonde, which had also been converted to a troopship, sailed from Melbourne on 30 July and met up with Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt and the other ships of the convoy in Bass Strait. Over 2,000 personnel from the 2nd AIF’s 8th Division were aboard the Marnix, including fellow 2/10th AGH members Clarice Halligan and Ada Syer.

Florence boarding Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt, 29 July, Sydney

On the morning of 15 August, the ships arrived at Keppel Harbour in Singapore and the Johan Van Oldenbarnevelt berthed at Wharf No. 10. Florence, together with Lavinia, Clarice and Ada, disembarked and on 17 August took a train to Malacca – “a pleasant little town on the west coast of Malaya,” according to Pat Gunther, who had been with the 2/10th AGH from the beginning. Here the unit had been established in a section of the Colonial Service Hospital, a “large, light and airy complex containing several blocks for surgical and medical procedures, general hospital wards and staff accommodation” (Shaw, p. 28). The unit occupied 200 beds of the hospital but had the capacity to expand to 1,600 if necessary (Crouch, p. 15). The nurses’ quarters in the accommodation block were comfortable, with amenities such as sewing machines, and came complete with the services of amahs – house servants (Shaw, p. 31).

With several thousand Australian troops to care for, Florence and the other 2/10th AGH nurses were kept busy treating an average of 400 patients a month, often those with climate-induced infections, such as ‘Singapore Ear’ and tinea; broken bones and lacerations from training and other accidents; routine operations such as tonsillectomies; and occasionally diseases (Arthurson, p. 3; Shaw, pp. 29–30).

Despite this, there was plenty of time for relaxation, leisure and society. Florence and the others had occasion to attend sampan parties, chicken suppers, and tennis parties. There were dances and dinners, and parties at pools and mansions (Shaw, p. 31). While on leave the nurses visited Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Fraser’s Hill, a colonial cool-climate hill station. Florence took at least two periods of leave between August and December.

Nonetheless, when Florence wrote a beautiful letter home to her niece on 27 August 1941, she foreshadowed the danger that lay just over the horizon.

To Baby Ruth

This little pewter cup and saucer is meant to be a loving cup.

Not really an orthodox one but nevertheless the same loving thought is conveyed with it.

You were such a tiny sweet thing when I last peeped at you and I guess, when I next see you, you will be as big and as cheeky as your big brother Keith.

The Dragon engraved on the cup is truly symbolic of the monster from whom we have been sent here to defend the country and our nation.

But we are ready and waiting just as St. George of old and it is woe betide the Dragon who comes too close.

Lots of love Baby Ruth & grow up to be a sweet girl just as Keith is a sweet boy.

Poppy.

When the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Malaya on 8 December 1941, the nurses of the AANS were indeed ready and waiting. Even so, as Japanese forces pressed rapidly southwards, life for Florence and the others changed dramatically.

On 1 January 1942, when Japanese forces landed on the west coast, the position of the 2/10th AGH in Malacca became untenable. It was now virtually in the front line. By 10 January all patients had been relocated to the 2/13th AGH and staff detached to either the 2/4th CCS or the 2/13th AGH – including Florence, who was detached on 6 January to the 2/4th CCS, at that time based at the Mengkibol rubber plantation near Kluang, about halfway between Malacca and Singapore (Walker, p. 501).

Florence's letter to her niece, 27 Aug 1941, p. 1

Florence's letter to her niece, 27 Aug 1941, p. 2

On 14 January, while Florence was with the 2/4th CCS, Australian troops engaged for the first time in direct combat, near Gemas, northeast of Malacca. The following day a deadlier engagement took place, and many Australian casualties were taken along 150 kilometres of narrow winding roads to the 2/4th CCS. For the first time in Malaya an Australian medical unit received convoys of surgical cases (Walker, pp. 504–05).

When Florence rejoined the 2/10th AGH on 17 January it had completed its relocation to Oldham Hall on Singapore Island. Conditions for nursing were becoming increasingly difficult as casualties began to arrive at such a rate that nearby houses had to be commandeered to accommodate the overflow (Walker et al, p. 442).

With Japanese forces continuing their relentless march south, on 20 January, and again on 30 January, Colonel Alfred P. Derham, Assistant Director of Medical Forces in Malaya, recommended to Major General Gordon Bennett, General Officer Commanding 8th Division, that AANS nurses be evacuated from Malaya. General Bennett refused on both occasions, citing the effect of such a move on civilian morale (Walker et al, p. 443).

On the night of 8 February, the Japanese army landed on Singapore Island. The 2/10th AGH nurses were now working under near-impossible conditions. There were continual air raids, and occasionally shells fell in and around the hospital area. All travel on roads was hazardous, owing to shelling, dive-bombing and machine-gunning. The water supply was threatened, and at night there were blackouts. As heavy casualties poured in, operating theatres worked around the clock, and the wards became so overcrowded that men were lying on mattresses on the floor while others waited outside (Walker et al, p. 443).

Finally, on 9 February, General Bennett approved the nurses’ evacuation, but unsurprisingly, given their ethos of selfless service, they didn’t want to leave. Arthurson (p. 98) tells us, in respect of the nurses of the 2/13th AGH – and their 2/10th colleagues will be no different – that “many nurses wept openly as they went about their work during the 9th, 10th and 11th of February, 1942. The girls worked tirelessly among their patients arriving in the wards after a long wait for a vacant operating table. They understood the pain and suffering being endured by these heroic Australian and British fighting men. Farewells were exchanged and some messages for home were stored away among the sisters’ personal gear. The parting was the saddest day in the history of the 13th Australian General Hospital.”

Evacuations began on 10 February, when six members of the AANS embarked on the hospital ship Wah Sui with wounded Allied soldiers, and on 11 February, 60 or more AANS nurses from the 2/10th and 2/13th AGHs were embarked on the Empire Star.

Picture of Florence published in The Daily Telegraph, Sun 23 Sept 1945, page 5

On Thursday 12 February Florence and 64 other AANS nurses left Singapore aboard the SS Vyner Brooke. They were the last ones out. The small ship steamed south towards Jakarta, seeking the cover of islands, avoiding open water. On Saturday 14 February the ship was located by a Japanese aircraft, and soon dive-bombers appeared on the horizon. Captain Borton engaged evasive manoeuvres, but to no avail. Within an hour or so the ship Vyner Brooke had received three direct hits and began to sink close to Bangka Island.

Putting into effect a plan devised the previous day, the AANS nurses helped passengers to evacuate the stricken craft before endeavouring to save themselves through any means possible. Of six lifeboats deployed, only two were viable; both reached shore within the vicinity of Radji Beach on Bangka Island. A number of rafts had also slid into the water from the deck of the Vyner Brooke, as well as all manner of other floating items. The nurses and many of the passengers had also been issued with lifejackets.

One way or another Florence made it to shore on Bangka Island and ended up in the company of a large group of AANS nurses, soldiers, sailors and civilians gathered around a bonfire on the beach. The group grew in number during Saturday night and Sunday as it was joined by survivors of other ships sunk in Bangka Strait by Japanese forces, which were at that very moment invading Sumatra.

On Monday the group decided to surrender en masse to Japanese authorities, and a deputation left for the nearest large town – Muntok – to negotiate this. A short while later all the civilian women and children of the group followed behind – save one, Mrs Betteridge, a British woman whose husband lay among the injured on the beach.

Around mid-morning the deputation returned with a number of Japanese soldiers. The soldiers separated the survivors into three groups and proceeded to shoot or bayonet them in cold blood.

Florence died on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, on 16 February 1942, alongside 20 AANS colleagues. They were shot while standing in the sea. One colleague, Vivian Bullwinkel, survived.

Definitive word of the murdered nurses’ fate did not reach Australia until the liberation in September 1945 of the surviving 24 AANS nurses from Japanese internment camps on Sumatra. Thereafter the Australian public heard about what became known as the Bangka Island Massacre through print and broadcast media (Fletcher, p. 421).

Memorial stained-glass windows at Waverley Memorial Hospital in honour of Florence (left) and Winnie May Davis (right)

Newspapers sought interviews with bereaved parents. On 23 September 1945 the Daily Telegraph published an interview with Florence’s mother, Mrs Florence Salmon, who was reported as saying that the last letter she had received from her daughter was written on 8 February 1942. “The letter was very happy,” the Telegraph writes, “and did not mention any worry about the Japanese, although it did say everyone knew they were closing in on them.” The Telegraph quotes Mrs Salmon as saying that “Sammy [as Florence was known in her family] was always a very happy girl, and lived for her nursing … The last three years of suspense, wondering what had happened to her, were dreadful, but now that I know I cannot hate anyone.”

On Sunday 28 October 1945, a memorial service was held in the grounds of the War Memorial Hospital, Waverley, in honour of Florence and her friend and colleague Winnie May Davis, who had died on 19 July 1945 as a prisoner of war in Sumatra following the sinking of the Vyner Brooke. Four hundred mourners were in attendance.

Some years later, stained-glass windows were installed in the Jeanie Morgan Wing of the hospital in memory of Florence and Winnie, who were among 18 graduates to serve in World War Two. Florence’s and Winnie’s names are also inscribed on the Roll of Honour in the Nurses’ Chapel at Westminster Abbey in London.

A small park in Punchbowl, Florence’s home suburb, is officially designated Salmon Reserve in honour of the service and sacrifice of Florence and her brother Leonard. They had grown up in Gowrie Avenue, just one street over from the park.

In memoriam Florence. Lest we forget.

Sources

2/30th Battalion A.I.F. Association, ‘Convoy US11B’.

2/30th Battalion A.I.F. Association, ‘Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (HMT FF)’.

2/30th Battalion A.I.F. Association, ‘Marnix Van St. Aldegonde (HMT EE)’.

Arthurson, L, ‘The Story of the 13th Australian General Hospital, 8th Division AIF, Malaya’, in Winstanley, P (ed., 2009), Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945.

Crouch, J (1989), ‘One Life is Ours: The Story of Ada Joyce Bridge’, Nightingale Committee, St Luke’s Hospital.

Fletcher, A (2011), ‘Sisters Behind the Wire: Reappraising Australian Military Nursing and Internment in the Pacific during World War II’, Medical History (Jul 2011, vol 55, no 3, pp. 419–424).

Goossens, R, ‘HMT Johan van Oldenbarnevelt’, SS Maritime.

Green, B (1990), ‘To Minister: The Story of War Memorial Hospital Waverley 1918–1988’, War Memorial Hospital.

Museums of History New South Wales, ‘Nurses index 1926–1954’.

Private correspondence from Florence’s great nephew.

RSL NSW, ‘The Second World War’.

Trove, Government Gazette of the State of New South Wales (29 Aug 1939, p.4281), ‘Register of Nurses as at 31st December, 1938’.

Trove, The Daily Telegraph (23 Sep 1945, p. 5), ‘Memorial for murdered nurses – Club to honour dead heroines of Singapore’.

Trove, The Methodist (9 Jul 1938, p. 9), ‘Personal and General’.

Trove, The Methodist (26 Nov 1938, p. 1), ‘Armistice Day at the War Memorial Hospital’.

Trove, The Sydney Morning Herald (24 Jun 1938, p. 6), ‘Examinations for Nurses’.

Trove, The Daily Telegraph (23 Sep 1945, p. 5), ‘Memorial for Murdered Nurses’.

Trove, The Sydney Morning Herald (29 Oct 1945, p. 5), ‘Memorial Service for Nurses’.

University of NSW, Canberra, Australians at War Film Archive, Pat Darling (née Gunther) interviewed on 2 May 2003, audio and transcript.

Walker, A S (1953), Second World War Official Histories, Australia in the War of 1939–1945. Series 5 – Medical, Volume II – Middle East and Far East, Chapter 23 – Malayan Campaign.

Walker, A S et al (1961), Second World War Official Histories, Australia in the War of 1939–1945. Series 5 – Medical, Volume IV – Medical Services of the Royal Australian Navy and Royal Australian Air Force with a section on women in the Army Medical Services, Part III – Women in the Army Medical Services, Chapter 36 – The Australian Army Nursing Service.

Esther Sarah Jean (Stewie) Stewart - NX70936
	Rank Sister Service Number NX70936 (N104880, NX70501) Unit 2nd/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 37

8/3/1913 -16/2/1942

Sister Esther Sarah Jean Stewart (more commonly Jean or Stewie), NX 70936 was a member of the 2/10th Australian General Hospital. Jean was born in Terrace Street Spring Hill Brisbane on 15 October 1904 to Charles Lloyd Stewart and Sarah May Jean Stewart (nee Mann).

Some sources say Jean came from Coolangatta and her mother certainly lived there in later years. Jean moved to Sydney when she was older and worked as a nurse. Jean had a very strong Christian faith and was a devout Presbyterian

At the time of her enlistment in the Australian Army Nursing Service Jean was living at “Greenholme” 209 Victoria St Darlinghurst Sydney.

One summary of Jean’s life, which seems to be a little at odds with other research, is that “…Unfortunately, she did not have any close relatives as her next of kin was a solicitor whom she had no relationship with named Andrew Muir. Jean had nothing holding her back from going on an adventure like travelling to Asia to work. She had no partner, no immediate family, she seemed like a very independent woman who was determined to make a change in her life and use her skills as a trained nurse to help injured soldiers. However, the adventure was tragically short-lived……”
(“Soldiers Story/Eulogy prepared by Alex White).

This interpretation of Jean’s life seems to have been partially influenced by information in her Record of Service, the digitised copy of which is now available. But as can be seen from the newspaper reports, Jean was in fact greatly loved by her mother Sarah.

Her father had died in 1938 and with Jean the only child now working as a nurse in Sydney, her mother seemed to be all alone at Coolangatta in Queensland. Perhaps Jean may have been estranged, for whatever reason, from her mother and that could be why she noted on her Attestation Form when she enlisted that her next-of-kin was Andrew Purdie Muir a Solicitor in Brisbane.

Jean enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service at Victoria Barracks, Sydney 25 April 1941 and was posted to the 2/10 Australian General Hospital which had earlier arrived in Singapore on the Queen Mary in February 1941. Jean’s pay book photo shows a cheery, smiling, open faced woman with light brown hair and hazel eyes. There is also a photo from ancestry.com of Jean as a younger woman, perhaps about 20 years of age, showing a sweet faced young woman.

On 19 May 1941 Jean embarked on HMAT Zealandia arriving in Singapore on 9 June 1941. She immediately travelled to Malacca in Malaya where the 2/10th AGH was located. Jean must have quite ‘run down’ and working very hard as on 30 July she was admitted to hospital suffering from Herpes Simplex. She was back with her unit in a week.

How Jean came to be on Radji Beach after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke on that fateful day in 1942 is not known. Perhaps she was in one of the lifeboats or just floated in her life jacket with the currents. We know for certain that Jean Stewart was one of the group of fine, noble women murdered by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach on 16 February 1942 after the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke. One of the final notations on Jean’s Record of Service says

“Deceased while POW. Executed by Japanese”.

Soon after the surviving nurses were repatriated to Australia in late 1945 there appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 6 October 1945 this insertion in their “Roll of Honour” column

“… STEWART – A tribute of love to NX 70936 Sister Jean Stewart, dear friend of Mrs. Cathro (Urana) , Mrs Cheek, and Mrs Edwards (Newcastle)……..”

This suggests that if Jean was short on family she certainly had good friends. Also interestingly, in contrast to the earlier summary of her life indicating that Jean was some sort of orphan, there appeared in several newspapers after the War evidence of clear actions by Jean’s mother to ensure her daughter was remembered and which give us a much clearer picture of the progression of Jean’s life.

The Courier Mail newspaper in Brisbane on 29 January 1946 says “… Mother perpetuates memory of Heroic Army nurse Shot by Japs … Coolangatta and Tweed heads are perpetuating the memory of Matron Esther Stewart, of Brisbane whose last words when she and 20 other Army Nursing sisters were being slaughtered by Japanese machine guns on the beach at Banka Island, off Sumatra, four years ago were: “Girls take it, don’t squeal!”…

“Her mother, Mrs Jean Stewart of Dixon Street, Coolangatta, has presented a memorial electric clock to the local sub-branch of the Returned Soldier’s league. At the unveiling service the President (Mr. A. Thomas) said that the only survivor of the massacre (Sister Vivien Bullwinkel) of Adelaide had told Mrs Stewart of her daughter’s last words as she and other nurses were being shot down…..

"The late Matron Stewart was born at New Farm, Brisbane and was educated at the New Farm and Roma Schools. She entered the nursing profession at Toowoomba, and subsequently trained at the Diamantina Hospital Brisbane and the Royal Prince Alfred and Crown Street Women’s Hospital, Sydney…..”

As outlined in another post, in the Tweed Daily newspaper on 20 February 1946 in the “Roll Of Honour” classified listings the following was written

“STEWART – In loving memory of NX 70956 Sister Esther Sarah Jean Stewart, only child of Mrs Jean Stewart (nee Mann), who was murdered by the Japanese at Banka Island, February 1942.”Lest We Forget“

If I could have my dearest wish,
And all earth’s treasures too;
And pick from Heaven what I may,
Dear Jean, I would ask for you
Many a lonely heartache, many a silent tear,
But always a beautiful memory,
Of a daughter I loved so dear.
I keep forever in my heart. Mother”

There is a further report in the Tweed Daily newspaper of the Coolangatta War Memorial being built in front of the Council Chambers – the memorial to stand 11 feet high in the form of a cross and containing two drinking fountains and to be lit by electricity. Jean ‘Stewie’ Stewart is also memorialised on the memorial to AANS nurses who gave their lives in the Second World War at Kapunda memorial Gardens, Dutton park, South Australia; the ‘Memorial garden for Nurses’ at Augusta Western Australia and, as with all the nurse at the Kranji War Memorial in Singapore .

Jean was most certainly never forgotten by her mother who died in 1959. Attached to her Record of Service is a letter dated 12 July 1951 from the Manager of the Commercial Bank of Australia Limited, Coolangatta branch to the Records Officer at Army Headquarters. The letter says

“We have been requested to contact you at the request of the abovementioned’s Mother Mrs S. M. J. Stewart, Coolangatta, as she is anxious to obtain as a Keep-sake The King’s Letter which she understands is forwarded to all Next-of-Kin..

“The Late Sister Stewart’s War Medals have been received by our customer, but it would be appreciated if you could obtain and forward for delivery to Mrs Stewart the Letter referred to.”

Perhaps the original of The King’s Letter had been already sent to Andrew Muir her nominated next-of-kin. The Army did, however, on 24 July 1951 very promptly reply to the Bank Manager attaching a “copy of the Royal message of condolence, which was forwarded to the next-of-kin of members of the Australian Military Forces who gave their lives for their country”.

The Australian War Memorial in Canberra holds a Bible owned by Sister Jean Stewart. The Bible was presented to her on 1 May 1916 on the occasion of departing Kent Street Congregational Sabbath School in Brisbane. In the Bible are personal inscriptions by Jean, a newspaper cutting from the Sydney “Daily Telegraph” dated 17 September 1945, giving details including Jean’s name in the casualty list, of the Bangka Island massacre in February 1942.

Mona Margaret Anderson Tait - NFX76281
	Rank Nursing Sister Service Number NFX76281 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Murdered as a POW of Japan in the Bangka Island massacre Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 27

6/2/1915 – 16/2/1942

Sister Mona Margaret Anderson Tait NX 76281 2/13th Australian General Hospital, was born on 6 February 1915 in Booval Queensland and was the daughter of Robert Tait and Maggie Alexandria Tait (nee Ripley). Her father had been born in Scotland and immigrated to Australia as a young man. She had one sister Auriel Ripley Tait who was born in 1917 and only died in 2005. Sometime after her sister was born the Tait family of four moved to Newcastle.

Mona Tait trained as a nurse at Cessnock District Hospital which is close to Newcastle. Later, she was the Sister in charge of the X-ray department at Canberra Hospital for three years prior to enlisting in the Australian Army Nursing Service on the 13 January 1941. For eight months she was attached to Victoria Barracks in Sydney before being sent to Malaya.

As with other nurses in her Unit she left Australia in August 1941 and sailed for Malaya and Singapore on the Hospital Ship Wanganella, arriving on 15 September 1941. She was part of the 2/13th Australian General Hospital that was initially located at St Patrick's School on Singapore Island. Between 21-23 November 1941 the entire hospital was moved across the Straits to Tampoi Hill on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula. Due however, to the swift progress of the Japanese invasion force, most of the hospital staff was evacuated back to Singapore in late January 1942

There is little on the public record about Mona’s life. But it is well known that she was on the SS Vyner Brooke and made it to Radji Beach, presumably on one of the two lifeboats which arrived on the beach and further along the coast. Mona, aged just 27 years, was murdered by Japanese troops with the other Australian Army nurses at Radji Beach on 16 February 1942.

A memorial to Mona was installed at the Cessnock District Hospital where she trained. The Cessnock Eagle and South Maitland Recorder newspaper wrote on 11 October 1946

‘”The Secretary (Mr J Brown) informed the Hospital Board that he had received information to the effect that Sister Mona Tait had lost her life in the war against the Japanese. Although Sister Tait was not a member of the hospital staff at the time of her enlistment, she had received her training at the institution. Mr. Brown said that from the information he had received, Sister Tait, together with…… other nursing Sisters, had been shot by the Japanese………. Because of the fact that Sister Tait had received her training at the Cessnock Hospital, the Board decided that it would be fitting to pay a tribute to her memory, and towards this end a memorial bed and plaque will be installed in the new maternity ward as a token of remembrance.”

Mona is also remembered through the RSL Mona Tait and May Hayman Memorial Fund. Income from the fund’s investments is donated to the University of Canberra to purchase books for its nurses Library.

‘This Fund commemorates the bravery of two Nursing Sisters, formerly of the Canberra Community Hospital, both of whom were murdered by Japanese troops during World War II. Sister Mona Tait was killed on the shores of Banka Island whilst attached to the 8th Australian Division and May Hayman was killed when she was attached to an Anglican Mission in Papua New Guinea. The Fund was initiated by staff of the old Canberra Hospital but after some time they requested it be transferred to the RSL National Trustees’.

Sisters Tait and Hayman were also commemorated by a plaque at Royal Canberra Hospital. When the hospital closed in 1991 the plaque was removed to the RSL Headquarters in Campbell ACT.

The Australian War Memorial has in its collection a letter written by Mona Tait to Anne Burrows in Canberra in February 1942, just before she was killed on Radji Beach. In the letter she mentions meeting Frank Burrows, Anne's brother, who died tragically as a POW on the Burma-Thai railroad.

Like all the victims of Japanese brutality on that terrible day in February 1942, the memory of Mona Tait, a lovely, brave, smiling Australian women, lives on.

Rosetta Joan Wight - VX61329
	Rank Staff Nurse Service Number VX61329 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Executed as a POW of Japan on Radji Beach, Bangka Island Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 16 February 1942 Age 33

Rosetta Joan Wight (known as Joan) was born on 3 Dec 1908 in Fish Creek, a small town near the coast in South Gippsland, Victoria. She was the daughter of Rosetta Frances Brown (1884–1964) and Leslie Rivers Wight (1869–1959), who had moved to Fish Creek only 10 months or so before Joan was born. Previously the family had lived in Melbourne, where Joan’s brother, Leslie (1906–1999), was born. Her sisters, Violet (1910–1999) and Dorothy (1913–1986), were both born in Foster, near Fish Creek.

Joan’s father Leslie was born in Kensington, London, and moved with his family to Australia as a child. His father died in Melbourne when Leslie was 14. In 1905 he married Rosetta Frances Brown.

In Fish Creek the family lived on a farm called ‘Carlisle’. The Wight children attended Doomburrim State School, no. 3428.

Leslie Wight must have been doing well, for in 1929 it was reported in Melbourne’s Table Talk newspaper that “Mr. Leslie Wight, of Fish Creek, runs a Durant tourer,” a moderately expensive car.

In 1931 Joan was living at ‘Statenboro’, a private nursing home at 2 Robertson St, Toorak, and working as a nurse. At some point she undertook nurses’ training at Bendigo Hospital and in March 1935 passed her Nurses’ Board Examination. Joan appears never to have become registered.

By 1937 Joan had returned to South Gippsland and was living and nursing at ‘Carinya’, a private nursing home in Meeniyan.

When war broke out in Europe, Joan volunteered, and on 14 January 1941 enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) as a Staff Nurse. She was not the first in her family to serve. Her maternal uncle William Brown joined the Australian Imperial Force in 1916, shipped off to France and was killed in Belgium in 1917. In April 1942, Joan’s brother, Leslie, followed his sister’s lead and enlisted too.

Two weeks after Joan’s enlistment, on 30 January, she was posted to the hospital at Dandenong Camp (also known as Rosehill Camp) in Melbourne’s outer east. On 10 March Joan was transferred to the 107th Australian General Hospital (AGH) at Puckapunyal, in country Victoria.

Joan in her AANS uniform. Image courtesy of South Gippsland Secondary College

Joan was called up for overseas service with the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF) on 8 August. She remained at Puckapunyal until 12 August, at which time she was granted five days’ pre-embarkation leave. Joan’s home service appointment was terminated on 31 August and the following day she was attached to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital (AGH) for deployment to Malaya as part of the 8th Division.

On 2 September, at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, Joan boarded the ship that would carry her to Singapore, HMAHS Wanganella. The ship was looking immaculate. It was painted all in white with large Red Crosses on its hull (Arthurson, p. 6).

The Wanganella had begun life as the MS Achimota in 1929. In 1932 it was sold to Melbourne-based coastal-shipping company Huddart Parker Ltd and renamed TSMV Wanganella. With the outbreak of the Second World War, the Wanganella was commissioned in July 1941 by the Australian Government to serve as a hospital ship. It officially became HMAHS Wanganella and served in this capacity from May 1941 to 1946.

Embarking with Joan in Melbourne were 22 Victorian, South Australian and Tasmanian 2/13th AGH colleagues. Already aboard were 19 others from New South Wales and Queensland. They had embarked in Sydney four days earlier, on 29 August.

At 5.00 pm on 2 September, the Wanganella, with 42 AANS nurses and around 170 other 2/13th AGH staff aboard, pulled away from Station Pier and headed out through the Port Phillip Heads into Bass Strait. On 8 February the ship reached Fremantle. Here the unit’s staff were granted 14 hours’ shore leave. When they sailed again the following day, seven more nurses had joined the others. They were now 49 (Arthurson, pp. 6–7).

When the Wanganella arrived at Victoria Dock on Singapore Island on 15 September, the AANS nurses were met by Col. Wilfrid Kent-Hughes, Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General of the 2nd AIF 8th Division. Col. Kent-Hughes, who was an Australian politician when not a soldier, had organised buses to transport Joan and 38 colleagues the 11 kilometres to their billets in St. Patrick’s School, on the East Coast Road in Katong in the island’s southeast (Arthurson, p. 95).

The remaining 10 nurses were detached to the 2/10th AGH and entrained for Malacca, on the west coast of the Malay peninsula around 200 kilometres northwest of Singapore Island, where the unit was based. Over the next two months the nurses of the 2/13th AGH would be detached here on a rotating basis both to relieve their 2/10th AGH colleagues, who had been in Malaya since February and learn tropical nursing from them. Then when the 2/13th AGH nurses returned to St. Patrick’s they in turn instructed the nursing orderlies and stretcher bearers (Arthurson, p. 95).

Late in the day, Joan and her colleagues travelled in sweltering heat to St. Patrick’s School. The unit would be based here until a section of a psychiatric hospital in Tampoi, near Johore Bahru in the southern Malay peninsula, could be got ready for it. Currently the site was occupied by the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), which had arrived in Malaya with the 2/10th AGH and was the third of the AANS-staffed medical units in Malaya (Arthurson, p. 9).

A.C. (Lex) Arthurson, an Orderly Corporal in the 2/13th AGH, provides an insight into what Joan encountered when she and the others first arrived at Katong. “St. Patrick’s School occupies 15 acres on the island’s southern coastline. The place looked smart and clean. It consisted of 3 large buildings with many outhouses. Two main buildings were three-storied, built of brick, and containing modern conveniences. Officers, nurses, Sergeants and O.Rs [Other Ranks] were allocated their areas of living, sleeping and eating. Blackout conditions were to be in force for 2 nights. Sleep was difficult the first night under a mosquito net on a charpoy in very humid heat. Perspiration just poured out from us and frequent showering was necessary. In the morning, some compensation was the beauty of the grounds – the beautiful hibiscus, the many coloured bouvardia and the heady frangipani. Drains everywhere are 3 to 4 feet deep and care must be taken when moving about during blackouts. There were some with abrasions on their legs after the first night as they misjudged” (Arthurson, p. 9).

According to Arthurson (p. 95), Joan and her fellow nurses “were entertained like royalty” due to the “scarcity of unmarried ladies among the island’s population of 9,000 Europeans, and also because of their charm.” There were sightseeing tours of Singapore, “truly a beautiful tropical jewel.” There were invitations to tennis at the many lovely private homes. The entertainment at the houses of Dr. John and Mr. Howl, the Attorney-General, was reportedly memorable. “The beauty of their green grass courts surrounded by albrizzia trees, bougainvillea, hibiscus, orchids and frangipani was really something,” Arthurson notes. Then there were dinners and dances at the Airport Hotel “with its extensive menus.” But the most popular spot in Singapore for the nurses was the renowned Swimming Club, where each nurse was made an honorary member.

However, it was not all recreation for Joan and her colleagues. Arthurson (p. 95) writes that visits were arranged to the Alexandra Military Hospital “to view the malarial films [i.e., microscope slides] and, then, at Tan Tock Sang hospital, on Friday afternoons, there were clinics conducted by Professor Ransom and Dr. Wallace. Others visited Singapore General Hospital and were acquainted with beri-beri and typhoid patients, mostly Chinese.”

On 19 September Matron Irene Melville Drummond joined the unit from the 2/4th CCS. “Wearing spectacles and most often a smile,” Lex Arthurson writes, “Matron Drummond very soon won the respect and good-will of the newly arrived nursing staff” (Arthurson, p. 95).

On 10 October, another 24 nurses were detached to the 2/10th AGH for training. Then on 29 October 10 more travelled to Malacca, including Joan (Arthurson, p. 12–3).

Joan (on right) with two other AANS nurses. Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

Joan spent around six weeks in Malacca with the 2/10th AGH. The unit was based in part of the Colonial Service Hospital, a modern complex with full facilities for all medical and surgical work set in beautifully lush, landscaped grounds. Originally equipped with 400 beds, by the time Joan arrived the unit was able to cope with up to 1,600 patients (Walker 1962, p. 495; Shaw, p. 28). The light and airy nurses’ quarters on the top storey of one of the wings received sea breezes and enjoyed an outlook over the picturesque surrounds, and the nurses’ domestic chores were taken care of by maids (Shaw, pp. 28–31). Nevertheless, according to Jessie Simons, Joan’s 2/13th AGH colleague who was detached to the 2/10th AGH on the same day as Joan, “it was, like most hospitals, vastly inconvenient to work in. We walked many unnecessary miles every day and often longed to knock out a couple of doors in odd walls” (Simons, p. 3).

As in Singapore, Joan had many opportunities for recreation. During time off she could play golf and tennis and had access to a swimming pool. There were invitations to parties and dances. There was shopping in Malacca. When on leave she could visit Kuala Lumpur (Walker 1961, p. 442). Jessie Simons noted later that during her time in Malacca she “felt more like a tourist than a member of an army unit. The picturesque old town, the ships offshore … and the feeling of history about the place all helped to make our first months in Malaya a queer interlude.” Joan may have been among those nurses who visited Kuala Lumpur with Jessie, “where we behaved like ordinary globe trotters” (Simons, p. 2).

With thousands of garrisoned Australian troops to look after, there was nevertheless plenty of work for Joan. From April to December, the 2/10th AGH received an average of 400 patients a month (Arthurson, p. 5). The nurses treated tropical maladies such as malaria, tinea, prickly heat and infected ear (also known as ‘Singapore ear’). They attended to numerous accidental injuries, including broken bones and lacerations from training, and assisted with routine operations, such as tonsillectomies.

Meanwhile, the 2/13th AGH had finally moved over the Johore Strait and into the psychiatric hospital at Tampoi. The rambling, single-story complex of concrete buildings had been leased from the Sultan of Johore and was situated around 10 kilometres from Johore Bahru, the capital of Johore state. One hundred tons of equipment had been transported from Katong to Tampoi between 21 and 23 November, and the nurses and ward staff of the unit had worked tirelessly for days to make the wards suitable for casualty patients, in the event that they were needed. This was to prove the case in only a matter of weeks. The 2/4th CCS, for their part, had transferred to a site at Kluang, 100 kilometres north of Johore Bahru (Arthurson, p. 15).

In the early hours of 8 December, five days before Joan returned to the 2/13th AGH, Japanese troops landed on the north coast of Malaya at Kota Baruh. Later, at 4.30 am, 17 Japanese planes bombed Singapore. Arthurson paints a vivid picture of the attack. “Suddenly the bubble burst when all [at Tampoi] were awakened at 0430 hours on 8/12/41 by the sound of shells being fired at aeroplanes, in formation, silvery looking in the full moon heading south towards Singapore. Search-lights crossed the sky – tracer bullets and ak-ak shells tried their hardest. Then the sound of bombs hitting earth – most likely Singapore’s strategic positions, airfields and oil installations” (Arthurson, p. 16).

On the same morning, Hawaii and the Philippines were bombed. The Pacific War had begun.

On 12 December, one day before Joan rejoined the unit at Tampoi, the 2/13th AGH received a memo a from Lieutenant Colonel John George Glyn White, Deputy Assistant Director of Medical Services of the 8th Division, ordering the hospital to expand from 600 to 1,200 beds. The memo also ordered that Red Cross brassards from then on be worn by all ranks on the left arm. By 15 December two new wards had been set up and the number of available beds had grown to 643. On the same day ten more 2/13th AGH nurses returned from detachment to the 2/10th AGH (Arthurson, p. 16).

Soon Christmas Day arrived. The cooks of the 2/13th AGH provided a splendid menu. Church services were held. Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennett, commanding officer of the AIF in Malaya, sent Christmas wishes. The unit even received a visit from the Sultan of Johore. Two days later a lively party was held, organised by the nurses. Half the unit’s personnel attended in the afternoon and half in the evening. Food, alcohol and cigarettes were provided, and reportedly everyone had a most enjoyable time (Arthurson, p. 17).

All the while Japanese forces were pressing relentlessly southwards and meeting little meaningful resistance from British and Indian troops. It was only with the entry into combat of Australian troops of the 2/30th Battalion on 14–15 January 1942 at Gemas that the Japanese received a check, and then only a minor one.

Following this engagement, convoys of Australian casualties were sent via the 2/4 CCS to the 2/13th AGH, which by now had 1,165 beds ready and had worked hard to prepare operating theatres to receive the anticipated casualties. Arthurson tells how, on the evening of 16 January, “the war hit us right between the eyes. Men, on stretchers with tickets pinned to them showing the most urgent injuries, were delivered in rapid succession from transports of all types … The admission room quickly established identity, rank, injury of the admitted. Stretcher bearers ran the battle casualty to either ward or theatre. Matron Drummond had her staff fine-tuned and expert attention was provided at all times.” As more and more casualties arrived, between 16 and 21 January some 200 medical and minor surgical cases were transferred to 2/10th AGH, which had by 15 January transferred to Oldham Hall on Singapore Island (Arthurson, p. 18–19).

Nurses of the 2/13th AGH at a concert party at St. Patrick's School, Katong, Singapore Island. Joan is in the back row. Image courtesy of the Australian War Memorial

Soon the 2/13th AGH itself was compelled to relocate, and a decision was made on 21 January to return to St. Patrick’s School at Katong. The move, over the two days of 24–25 January, was a spectacular feat of logistics. It is worth quoting Arthurson at some length. “The movement of the hospital equipment was an enormous exercise,” he writes. “Indians and Malays drove the transports to Singapore and convoys of 20–30 trucks would set off. The drivers were a constant headache – couldn’t follow closely enough – didn’t know the way. The fact of the matter was that Singapore was being bombed and trucks had to be re-routed as roads disappeared in front of them … Dismantling the wards was hard work and the sound of guns and bombs could be plainly heard as the task went on. When, finally, the 13th Australian General Hospital settled back in St. Patrick’s school, all were dog-tired but the work of caring for patients had to be carried on.” Three days later, the number of patients, mainly battle casualties, had risen to nearly 700, and more wards needed to be found and opened (Arthurson, p. 20).

With the Japanese battalions nearing Singapore itself, the causeway between the Malay peninsula and the island was blown up on the night of 31 January. Meanwhile, the day before, Joan had been promoted to Sister Group 1, the nursing rank equivalent of Captain.

On 8 January Japanese forces crossed onto Singapore Island, despite being strongly opposed by Australian troops. Casualties were heavy, and convoys of ambulances arrived at Katong carrying hundreds of wounded soldiers, mainly with gunshot and shrapnel wounds. The surgeons and nurses carried out 65 operations in 24 hours, and no-one sought rest or sleep. When, on the following day, General Bennett approved the evacuation from Singapore of the AANS nurses, which had been a topic of discussion for some time, Joan and the others refused to countenance the idea (Arthurson, pp. 21, 98). How could they leave so many wounded Australian soldiers – their ‘boys’?

Ultimately, however, they had no choice, and on 10 February six AANS nurses left at very short notice on the makeshift hospital ship Wah Sui along with many wounded. The following day the Empire Star departed with another 59 AANS nurses and as many as 2,000 wounded.

The remaining nurses, Joan and 26 others of the 2/13th, and 38 of the 2/10th AGH and 2/4th CCS, continued their hospital work until the afternoon of 12 February, when they were taken in ambulances to Keppel Harbour via St. Andrew’s Cathedral, their rendezvous point. When they reached the harbour, they were taken out in launches to the waiting SS Vyner Brooke.

The Vyner Brooke slid out of Keppel Harbour at dusk on Thursday 12 February, leaving behind a city in ruins. The ship stalled in the minefields outside the harbour, but eventually got going, and made slow progress through the islands that dotted the passage between Singapore and Batavia (Jakarta), its destination. There were between 200 and 300 people on board.

Two days, on Saturday 14 February, at around 2.00 pm, the Vyner Brooke was attacked by Japanese dive-bombers. Three bombs fell directly on the ship, and a fourth ripped out part of the starboard side towards the rear. The ship was doomed and began to list.

Joan and fellow Victorian Clare Halligan of the 2/10th AGH were in the rear of the saloon near the passageway when one of the bombs struck close by. They sustained deep shrapnel wounds to their thighs and buttocks. Unable to move, they were treated on the spot by colleagues who then helped them up to the deck and into the second of three lifeboats launched. Joan’s 2/13th AGH colleague Florence Casson, also badly injured, appears to have been helped into this boat too, as apparently was Kath Neuss of the 2/10th AGH. Also in the lifeboat were elderly passengers and mothers with children. Unfortunately, the boat flipped over upon entry into the water and the passengers spilled out. Some managed to hold on to the boat’s grabropes, while others swam away (Shaw, pp. 153–60).

Sometime later Vivian Bullwinkel, also of the 2/13th AGH and among the last to leave the Vyner Brooke, swam over and joined Joan’s group around the upturned lifeboat, as had a number of other nurses and civilians. Jimmy Miller, second officer of the Vyner Brooke, had also managed to reach the lifeboat. The upturned boat drifted with the current, which gradually pulled it towards Bangka Island. At around 10.00 pm on Saturday night, the boat reached the shallows, and the group came ashore. Joan and the other injured nurses were helped onto the beach. Earlier, while still in the water, they had seen a bonfire on a beach some distance away from where they had landed, and now Vivian, Second Officer Miller, and two others set off to investigate (Shaw, pp. 163–77).

The small party reached the bonfire and found the passengers from the first lifeboat to leave the Vyner Brooke. Among these were seriously injured civilians; the Vyner Brooke’s first officer, Lieutenant Bill Sedgeman; Matron Irene Drummond of the 2/13th AGH; and several other nurses. Vivian and Jimmy organised a small rescue party to help bring the wounded of their group back to the bonfire (Shaw, pp. 197–9).

Rosetta Joan Wight, The Star, Tues 24 Apr 2007, p. 3

In the early hours of Sunday 15 February, Joan, badly injured, was helped along the shore with the others to join the group around the bonfire. Before dawn a lifeboat washed up carrying survivors of another sunken evacuation ship, and the newly risen sun revealed more than 70 people, of whom 22 were Joan and her AANS colleagues (Shaw, p. 201).

During the day the survivors learned that Bangka Island had come under Japanese occupation. Lieutenant Sedgeman floated the idea of surrender to Japanese authorities as a viable option but agreed to wait until the following morning before deciding. The rest of the day passed uneventfully (Shaw, pp. 204–6).

Early in the morning of Monday 16 February, another lifeboat and several life rafts came ashore carrying British soldiers and sailors. There were now more than 100 on the beach. It was agreed unanimously to surrender to Japanese authorities, and a deputation left for the nearest large town to negotiate this. A short while later most of the group’s civilian women and children followed behind (Shaw, pp. 207–9).

Around mid-morning the deputation returned with perhaps 20 Japanese soldiers. The soldiers separated the survivors into three groups: the officers and NCOs, the servicemen and male civilians, and the AANS nurses and a lone civilian woman. They took the first two groups in turn around a nearby headland and murdered them, bayoneting the first and machine-gunning the second (Shaw, pp. 211–4).

The Japanese soldiers returned to the 22 Australian nurses and lone civilian woman and ordered them to line up on the beach, facing the water. Joan and the other injured nurses were made to line up too. Then the women began to walk into the sea, and Matron Drummond was heard to say, “Chin up, girls. I’m proud of you and I love you all.”

The machine-gunner opened fire, and only Vivian Bullwinkel survived.

Joan died on Radji Beach, Bangka Island, on 16 February 1942, alongside 20 AANS colleagues. She was 33 years old.

Joan and the other nurses murdered on Radji Beach have no known graves. Instead, they are memorialised at the Singapore Memorial, which sits on the highest point of the Kranji War Cemetery on Woodlands Road in Singapore. Joan’s name is inscribed on Column 142. The cemetery and memorial are administered by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. Joan is also memorialised on the Roll of Honour at Bendigo Base Hospital and on the Second World War Roll of Honour at the Australian War Memorial.

In memoriam Joan. Lest we forget.

Sources

Arthurson, L., ‘The Story of the 13th Australian General Hospital, 8th Division AIF, Malaya’, as reproduced by Winstanley, P. on the website Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945.

Australian War Memorial (Christina Zissis, ed., Military History Section), ‘The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (VX61329) Sister Rosetta Joan Wight, 13th Australian General Hospital, Australian Army Nursing Service, Second World War’.

Commonwealth War Graves Commission, ‘Sister Rosetta Joan Wight’.

Goossens, R., ‘TSMV Wanganella’.

National Archives, ‘Wight Rosetta Joan: Service Number – VX61329: Date of Birth – 03 Dec 1908: Place of Birth – Fish Creek VIC: Place of Enlistment – AAMC Drill Hall VIC: Next of Kin – Wight L’.

Shaw, I. W. (2010), On Radji Beach, Pan Macmillan Australia.

Simons, J. E. (1956), ‘While History Passed’, William Heinemann Ltd.

State Library of Victoria, Electoral Roll, Commonwealth Division of Fawkner, State District of Toorak, Victoria, 1931.

State Library of Victoria, Electoral Roll, Commonwealth Division of Gippsland, State District of Wonthaggi, Victoria, 1937.

State Library of Victoria, Electoral Roll, Commonwealth Division of Gippsland, State District of Gippsland South, Victoria, 1943.

Trove, The Herald (Melbourne, 29 Mar 1935, p. 5), ‘Nurses' Exams Results’.

Trove, Table Talk (Melbourne, 24 Jan 1929, p. 48), ‘Cars and Their Owners’.

Walker, A. B. (1962), Second World War Official Histories, ‘Australia in the War of 1939–1945: Series 5 – Medical’, ‘Volume II – Middle East and Far East (1962 reprint)’, ‘Part II, Chapter 23 – Malayan Campaign’ (pp. 492–522), Australian War Memorial.
WikiTree, ‘Rosetta Joan Wight (1908–1942)’.

Sister Louvima (Vima) Bates - WFX11169
Sister Louvima (Vima) Bates	Rank Sister Service Number WFX11169 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Lost at Sea, Presumed Drowned Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 14 February 1942 Age 32

Paybook photograph, taken on enlistment, of Sister Louvima (Vima) Mary Isabella Bates, courtesy Australian War Memorial P02783.008.

Louvima Mary Isabella Bates, known as Vima, was born on 1 Jan 1910 in Fremantle, Western Australia. She was the daughter of Mary Jane Wilson (1877–1954), born in Millicent, South Australia, and Anthony Edward Bates (1875–1947), born in Gateshead, England. They were married in 1909. Vima had a brother, Kenneth E. Bates, who was born in 1915.

It seems likely that Vima was named after (Alexandra) Louvima Elizabeth Knollys, daughter of Ardyn Mary Tyrwhitt and Francis Knollys, who was secretary to King Edward VII for 40 years. Louvima’s name was a composite of the king’s daughters' names, Louise, Victoria and Maud. She was 21 years old when Vima was born and had been much in the celebrity columns of the newspapers.

In the early 1930s Vima trained as a nurse at Fremantle Hospital. She completed her training in December 1934 and became registered in general nursing on 30 August 1935. At the time she was living at 5 Holdsworth Street, Fremantle. She then undertook midwifery training, and on 10 July 1936 became a registered midwife.

Vima then moved to Kalgoorlie, in Western Australia’s goldfields district, where she spent more than two years at the Infant Health Centre. When she left in early October 1938, her colleague Sister M. O'Loughlin organised a farewell dinner party for her at the Recreation Hotel in Boulder, a suburb of Kalgoorlie.

Vima moved back to Perth, and in early February 1939 she and her friends Daph Steer and Vera Sellenger hosted a party at the Waldorf Tearooms on Hay Street in honour of their friend Lorna Ross, who was getting married. Five years later, Lorna Williams, as she had become, published a brief tribute to Vima in The West Australian.

After volunteering to serve in the Australian Military Forces (AMF) on 21 November 1940, Vima was called up for fulltime duty with the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS). On 7 July 1941 she was posted to the 110th Australian General Hospital (AGH), located in the Perth suburb of Hollywood, before being transferred a week later to the camp hospital at Northam Military Camp, 80 kilometres northeast of Perth. A week after that she moved to Faversham Convalescent Hospital in York, 100 kilometres due east of Perth, before returning to Northam.

On 14 August Vima ceased fulltime duty with the AMF and was attached the following day to the 2/13th AGH of the Second Australian Imperial Force (2nd AIF). She was going overseas. The 2/13th AGH had recently been raised in Melbourne following a request from Colonel Alfred Plumley Derham, Assistant Director of Medical Services for the 8th Division in Malaya, who had asked for additional medical personnel for Malaya in view of likely Japanese aggression (Arthurson, p. 3). The 2/13th AGH would join the 2/10th AGH, which had arrived in Singapore in February with elements of the 8th Division and was based in Malacca on the west coast of the Malay peninsula. Since Vima would not ship out until 9 September, she returned to the 110th AGH.

On 6 September, three days before their departure, Vima and her new Western Australian 2/13th AGH colleagues – Sara Baldwin-Wiseman, Eloise Bales, Alma Beard, lole Harper, Minnie Hodgson and Gertrude McManus – were guests of honour at a morning tea arranged by the Sportsmen's Organising Council for Patriotic Funds and held at the Hotel Adelphi. Lieutenant-Governor Sir James Mitchell presented each nurse with an initialled rug to mark their impending embarkation. Five other AANS nurses, Frances Aldoun, Betty Brooking, Evelyn Hardwick, Beanie Keamy and Gwen Martin, were present at the tea – at least one of whom, Betty Brooking, was set to embark on the same day on the Queen Mary for the Middle East. Present also was Matron M. D. Edis, Principal Matron (Western Command), who thanked the Sportsmen’s Council for arranging the function.

On 9 September, Vima, Eloise, Sara, Alma, Iole, Minnie and Gertrude duly boarded the Australian hospital ship Wanganella and departed Fremantle. They joined 42 other 2/13th AGH nurses, who had embarked in Sydney and Melbourne, all as uncertain of their destination as their Western Australian colleagues. It was only after leaving Fremantle that they and the other 2/13th personnel were told by the unit’s registrar, Major Arthur Robinson Home, that they were bound for Malaya. The announcement was met with disappointment, since it was felt that in Malaya the unit would not be in the thick of it (Manners, p. 16). They could not have been more wrong.

After crossing the equator the previous day, on 15 September the Wanganella berthed at Victoria Dock on Singapore Island. Upon disembarking, Vima and 38 of her new colleagues were met by Colonel Wilfrid Kent-Hughes, Assistant Adjutant and Quartermaster General of the 2nd AIF 8th Division. Col. Kent-Hughes had organised buses to transport them the 11 kilometres to their billets in St. Patrick’s School in Katong (Arthurson, p. 95). The remaining 10 nurses, much to their disappointment, were detached to the 2/10th AGH and entrained for Malacca.

When Vima and the others arrived at St. Patrick’s School in sweltering heat late in the day, they found a neat and tidy Catholic boys’ school, requisitioned for the war. Occupying 15 acres of land on Singapore Island’s southern coastline, the school consisted of three large buildings, two of which were brick, and many smaller outbuildings. The grounds were resplendent with beautiful hibiscus, many-coloured bouvardia, and heady frangipani and gardenia. The nurses were allocated pleasant quarters with wide balconies but, as Corporal Lex Arthurson tells us, “sleep was difficult the first night under a mosquito net on a charpoy in very humid heat. Perspiration just poured out from us and frequent showering was necessary” (Arthurson, p. 9; Angel, p. 43). Arthurson is of course referring to the non-commissioned officers’ quarters, but conditions were likely to have been as humid in the nurses’ rooms.

St. Patrick’s School was meant to be a temporary base for the 2/13th AGH while the unit awaited the preparation of a site in a working psychiatric hospital in Tampoi, located 10 kilometres from the town of Johore Bahru in the south of the Malay peninsula. However, the 2/13th would not end up moving there for another 10 weeks, and in the meantime, there was not much for the nurses to do. Vima’s colleague Jessie Simons observed as much when she wrote that “we were amazed to find that there was no urgent need for us. Our main job for a while was relieving other nurses on duty at the main army hospital, the 2/10th A. G. H. established at Malacca” (Simons, p. 2).

This was nevertheless an important means of facilitating the transfer of tropical-nursing knowledge from the experienced 2/10th staff to their newly arrived 2/13th colleagues, and most or all of the 2/13th nurses ended up spending time in Malacca. When they returned to their own unit, the 2/13th AGH nurses in turn were able to instruct their nursing orderlies and stretcher bearers (Arthurson, p. 95). Some of the 2/13th nurses were also detached to the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), which had recently established a small hospital at the Tampoi site ahead of the 2/13th’s relocation there.

There were in the meantime plenty of enjoyable diversions for the nurses. “In Singapore,” wrote Jessie Simons, “life was even more pleasant and remote from war for those first months … The local people were the most hospitable and many lovely homes were opened to us” (Simons, p. 3). According to Arthurson, the nurses were “entertained like royalty” due to the “scarcity of unmarried ladies among the island’s population of 9,000 Europeans, and also because of their charm” (Arthurson, p. 95). They were taken on sightseeing tours and invited to dinners, dances and tennis. But the most popular spot in Singapore for the nurses was the Swimming Club, where each was made an honorary member (Arthurson, p. 95). For Jessie Simons, it was “out of this world!” (Simons, p. 3).

There were learning opportunities too. Visits were arranged to the British Military Hospital (also known as Alexandra Hospital) to learn about malaria; to Tan Tock Seng Hospital, where clinics were conducted by Prof. Gordon Arthur Ransome and by a certain Dr. Wallace on Friday afternoons; and to Singapore General Hospital to see beri-beri and typhoid patients (Arthurson, p. 95). The nurses also spent time lecturing their unit’s orderlies each day (Angell, p. 41).

From 20 October to 12 November Vima herself was detached to the 2/10th AGH. In Malacca she found a modern civic hospital on a hill, with quarters as comfortable as those at St. Patrick’s, and plenty of work to keep her busy. With thousands of garrisoned Australian 8th Division soldiers to care for, the hospital was treating dozens of cases of various tropical maladies each day. There was still plenty of time for leisure though, and in their time off, the nurses were entertained by the town’s British expats in much the same way as they were in Singapore.

On 23 November, 11 days after Vima’s return to St. Patrick’s School, the psychiatric hospital in Tampoi was finally ready for the 2/13th AGH to move into. The rambling, single-story complex of concrete buildings had been leased from the Sultan of Johore on the proviso that the psychiatric patients could remain on site in a separate building. One hundred tons of equipment had been transported across the causeway linking Singapore Island with the peninsula between 21 and 23 November, and the nurses and ward staff of the unit had worked tirelessly for days to make the wards suitable for casualty patients. The 2/4th CCS had relocated to a site at Kluang, 100 kilometres north of Johore Bahru (Arthurson, p. 15).

Jessie Simons was not impressed by the hospital. “We were reputed to be the best-equipped hospital ever sent overseas,” she wrote. “I can only say that I am sorry for the others” (Simons, p. 4). Set in extensive grounds, and surrounded by jungle, the hospital was at least peaceful. In a letter home, Vima’s colleague Mona Wilton notes the hospital’s peace and quiet, far “from the noise and smells of Singapore. The only noises we have are the wind in the trees and the jungle birds singing to us” (quoted in Angell, p. 43).

The peace and quiet was shattered in the early morning of 8 December, when at around 4.30 am the nurses and other staff of the 2/13th AGH were awakened from their sleep by the drone of aircraft flying overhead, followed by explosions. Singapore was being bombed. Jessie Simons records the dramatic events in her book. “Before dawn,” she writes, “Japanese planes droned high overhead towards Singapore, completely ignoring the searchlights which quickly had them located. The tracer bullets streamed upwards … harmlessly” (Simons, p. 4). Arthurson too paints a vivid picture. “Suddenly the bubble burst when [we] were awakened at 0430 hours … by the sound of shells being fired at aeroplanes, in formation, silvery looking in the full moon heading south towards Singapore … Then the sound of bombs hitting earth – most likely Singapore’s strategic positions, airfields and oil installations” (Arthurson, p. 16).

Three hours earlier, at Kota Bahru on the northern coast of Malaya, Japanese troops had launched an amphibious assault. Three days later, two more Japanese forces entered Malaya from Thailand.

It was a full-scale invasion.

On 12 December the 2/13th AGH received a secret memo ordering the hospital to expand from 600 to 1,200 beds. In the days that followed, hospital staff worked around the clock to prepare new wards. Iron bars were removed from windows, mosquito nets erected, and heavy equipment shifted. Operating theatres were fitted out, resuscitation and surgical wards equipped, and all sorts of materials sorted and put in place. The efforts of staff were frequently interrupted by air raid sirens, whereupon the patients, many of whom were malaria cases, had to be helped into slit trenches or at least under their beds wearing tin helmets (Manners, p. 33). By 15 December two new wards had been set up and the number of available beds had grown to 643. On the same day ten more 2/13th AGH nurses returned from detachment to the 2/10th AGH (Arthurson, p. 16).

Despite news of British and Indian withdrawals in northern Malaya in the face of overwhelming Japanese force, the mood in Tampoi remained upbeat (Manners, p. 35). Christmas decorations were put up on 20 December and soon Christmas Day arrived.

The cooks of the 2/13th AGH provided a splendid Christmas menu. Church services were held. Lieutenant General Henry Gordon Bennett, commanding officer of the AIF in Malaya, sent Christmas wishes. The unit even received a visit from the Sultan of Johore. Two days later a lively party was organised by the nurses. Half of the unit’s personnel attended in the afternoon and half in the evening. Food, alcohol and cigarettes were provided, and everyone had a most enjoyable time (Arthurson, p. 17).

On New Year’s Day 1942, 20 nurses from the 2/10th AGH arrived at Tampoi on detachment, an alarming development that heralded the impending evacuation of the Malacca-based unit southwards. Nonetheless, on the same day Mona Wilton and her friend Wilma Orma were still able somewhat blithely to “go into the city we know so well [where] we spent all our money, had lunch with my Major [and] shopped again” (quoted in Angell, p. 48). Six days later, 76 patients were transferred to Tampoi from Malacca, and shortly after that, around 110 staff of the 2/10th, including 16 more nurses, were attached to the 2/13th (Arthurson, p. 17–8). By mid-January the 2/10th AGH had completed its relocation, to Oldham Hall on Singapore Island.

Meanwhile, Japanese troops were continuing to press southwards through the Malay peninsula and soon reached the line across the north of Johore state that General Bennett had been instructed to hold. Here, at the same time as the 2/10th AGH was moving into Oldham Hall, Australian soldiers were engaging Japanese forces in combat for the first time, near Gemas.

The Australian resistance did little to slow Japanese progress but resulted in many Australian casualties. They were funnelled through the 2/4th CCS, now located in Mengkibol rubber plantation near Kluang, to the 2/13th AGH. Referring to the evening of 16 January, Arthurson writes, “the war hit us right between the eyes. Men, on stretchers with tickets pinned to them showing the most urgent injuries, were delivered in rapid succession from transports of all types … The admission room quickly established identity, rank, injury of the admitted. Stretcher bearers ran the battle casualty to either ward or theatre. Matron [Irene] Drummond had her staff fine-tuned and expert attention was provided at all times” (Arthurson, p. 18–9).

As the Japanese army moved ever further southwards, the 2/13th AGH itself was compelled to return to Singapore Island and ended up back to St. Patrick’s School in Katong. On 24 January more than 100 detached staff returned to the 2/10th AGH at Oldham Hall, including 42 nurses, and by the end of the following day, convoys of 20–30 trucks, at times avoiding Japanese bombers, had moved the entire 2/13th back over the causeway. Three days later, the number of patients, mainly battle casualties, had risen to nearly 700, and more wards needed to be found and opened (Arthurson, p. 20).

The Japanese advance was unstoppable. On 31 January the last Commonwealth troops retreated across Johore Strait to Singapore Island and blew up the causeway. Upon reaching the strait soon after, Japanese forces launched heavy artillery and air bombardments of the island, and Singapore began to burn. “From the hospital,” writes Arthurson, “a grandstand view was available to see the burning of Keppel Harbour and the docks. Then the oil installations on nearby islands were blown up. The fires burnt night and day for weeks. At night the red glow extended over the island making black-outs nearly superfluous” (Arthurson, p. 21).

On 8 February, Japanese assault troops mounted an amphibious crossing of Johore Strait and soon established a bridgehead on Singapore, despite strong opposition from Australian troops. Casualties were heavy, and convoys of ambulances arrived at St. Patrick’s carrying hundreds of wounded soldiers, mainly with gunshot and shrapnel wounds. The surgeons and nurses of the 2/13th carried out 65 operations in 24 hours, and no one sought rest or sleep. The hospital was by now so overcrowded with wounded combatants that outbuildings and even tents were used as wards. Casualties lay closely packed on mattresses on floors or even outside on the lawns. From outside the school came the constant noise of artillery fire (Arthurson, pp. 21, 98).

As reports of Japanese atrocities in Hong Kong two months earlier filtered through to 8th Division headquarters, General Bennett had been urged in January to order the evacuation of the 130 AANS nurses in Singapore. He had refused, arguing that such a move would be detrimental to morale. Now, on 9 February, with the Japanese so close to each AGH, he finally agreed.

The nurses most decidedly did not agree, however, and would not volunteer when requested. In the end Vima and her colleagues had to be ordered to leave by Matron Olive Paschke of the 2/10th AGH, senior matron in Malaya – but not after some argument first with Matron Drummond of the 2/13th AGH, who took a far more sympathetic view of the nurses’ stance. Many nurses wept openly as they went about their work on these final days in Singapore. On 10 February, six nurses embarked on the makeshift hospital ship Wah Sui, and the following day 59 more left Singapore aboard the Empire Star. All 65 eventually made it home safely. On Thursday 12 February, the remaining 65 nurses departed aboard the Vyner Brooke, among whom were 27 from the 2/13th AGH, including Vima. According to Arthurson, this day of final departure was the saddest day in the history of the 2/13th AGH (Arthurson, p. 98).

After a mad rush through the devastated city to Keppel Harbour, the 65 AANS nurses were ferried out to the Vyner Brooke, lying at anchor some way out in the harbour. They boarded the small coastal steamer, a one-time pleasure craft of the colonial ruler Charles Vyner Brooke, to find it packed to the gills with anywhere between 200 and 300 people. The ship, equipped with six lifeboats, three on either side, as well as stacks of rafts and scores of lifebelts, slid out of Keppel Harbour in the gathering darkness of Thursday evening and proceeded south for Jakarta. When they looked back at the waterfront, the nurses saw a city ablaze. “It was a never-to-be-forgotten scene,” writes Betty Jeffrey of the 2/13th AGH. “Huge fires were burning along the whole front of Singapore and the black smoke billowed higher and higher far behind the town” (Jeffrey, p. 4).

During the night Captain Richard Borton guided the Vyner Brooke slowly through the many islands that lined the passage between Singapore and Batavia (Jakarta), the ship’s destination. During the next day, Friday 13 February, the ship’s stop-start progress through the islands continued.

In the morning Matrons Paschke and Drummond addressed their nurses in the ship’s saloon. They set out a plan they had devised earlier in conjunction with their senior nurses, according to which the nurses would be arranged into ‘district nursing teams’, with each team assigned an area of responsibility within the ship. Each nurse was to help maintain discipline and morale within her area. Should the ship come under attack, they were to attend to the wounded, and should the ship begin to sink, they were to evacuate the passengers and the wounded first, then themselves. Some of the nurses, including Vima, Iole Harper, Vivian Bullwinkel and Beth Cuthbertson, were tasked with searching the ship to ensure that all passengers had been accounted for. Finally, those nurses who could swim should make for life rafts deployed by the ship’s crew; for those who couldn’t, a place in a lifeboat would be sought (Manners, pp. 65–6; Shaw, pp. 130–3, 157).

Saturday 14 February dawned bright and clear. The Vyner Brooke lay at anchor in the lee of an island. The nurses gathered once again in the ship’s saloon and were addressed by Matron Paschke. She underlined the gravity of their situation, stating that it was likely the ship would be attacked. Among other things, she explained that if the ship’s siren sounded short blasts, meaning imminent attack, the nurses were to move to their assigned areas of responsibility, don their lifebelts and helmets, see to the passengers’ safety, then take cover. A continuous blast meant abandon ship, in which case the nurses were to proceed to the lifeboats and help passengers to board (Shaw, pp. 140–1).

Not long after the meeting, at around 11.00 am and seemingly out of the blue, the Vyner Brooke was strafed by a single Japanese aircraft. (Jessie Simons places this attack on the previous afternoon.) No one was injured, but the three starboard lifeboats were holed. Captain Borton anticipated that the pilot would radio the ship’s position to base, so began a run through open water towards a group of islands in the distance. By 1.30 pm the Vyner Brooke was once again lying at anchor in the lee of an island and an eerie calm had settled over the ship (Shaw, pp. 141–2).

Just before 2.00 pm, the Vyner Brooke’s spotter picked out another plane, which circled the ship and flew off again. Captain Borton guessed – correctly – that bombers would soon arrive and sounded the ship’s siren. “We were awakened,” writes Betty Jeffrey, “from the first decent sleep we had had for at least a week. Aircraft overhead … We had to don lifebelts, tin hats etc., go down one deck and lie on the floor of the lounge [and] wait” (Jeffrey, p. 5). The captain commenced evasive manoeuvres and began to zig-zag through open water towards a large island on the horizon. He was determined not to present an easy target. Sure enough, Japanese dive-bombers soon appeared on the horizon, flying in formation, and closing fast (Shaw, pp. 147–8).

At first the Japanese crews missed the ship. They wheeled their planes around and prepared for another run. Down they came again, and this time made no mistake, as three bombs found their target. Jessie Simons records that “the ship lifted and rocked with the vast roar of a bomb exploding amidships.” Another “went squarely down the tunnel and exploded in the engine room.” Then, as the passengers swarmed up to the open air, “another stick of bombs threshed the sea to foam, and one dealt the dying ship a last fatal blow” (Simons, pp. 13–4).

The nurses put into action the plan they had worked out with Matrons Paschke and Drummond. Working from their areas of responsibility, some assisted injured passengers while others directed women and children and the elderly into lifeboats. Vima, together with Iole, Vivian and Beth, helped to check all public areas, passageways, bathrooms and cabins for remaining passengers (Shaw, p. 157). Shortly afterwards, as the time came to leave the stricken vessel, Vima accompanied Jessie Simons and Iole Harper down to the lower deck from the upper the more easily to enter the water. Upon reaching the lower deck, however, Jessie found that “the floor was covered with ugly-looking broken glass and … I raced back to get my shoes. When I returned, my friends had taken warning from the listing ship and were nowhere to be seen” (Simons, p. 14).

Iole Harper ended up around a raft with Betty Jeffrey and a number of other nurses. We do not know what happened to Vima. Perhaps the last person to see Vima alive was Ada ‘Mickey’ Syer of the 2/10th AGH, who had a fleeting encounter with her as darkness was gathering on Saturday night. Ada was drifting with the current when she saw the silhouette of a head bobbing in the water and heard a voice singing. Ada called out “Who’s that?” In response a voice called back “Bates!” Ada looked around, but could no longer see the head, and when she called out again there was no answer. Vima was never seen again.

On 16 July 1942 Vima was officially reported ‘missing’ for the first time in the Australian press. In June 1944 this designation was changed to ‘missing believed killed on or after 11 February 1942’, and the first death notices in Vima’s honour appeared on 12 June. Over the next four days, 14 tributes were printed in The West Australian, attesting to the high regard in which Vima was held by her family and friends:

“Dearly loved and only daughter of Mr and Mrs A. E. Bates, of 190 Douglas Avenue, South Perth; dear sister of Ken (New Zealand Forces). Our Darling Daughter.”

“Dearly loved friend of Lorna Williams (Cottesloe).”

“Dearly loved niece of Mrs and Mr J Davey, loved cousin of late Edwin, Baden (Singapore), Aubrey, Mabel, Albert (AIF), Ian (Germany), John (AlF). Loved by all.”

“A tribute to the memory of Vima, former trainee of Fremantle Hospital, believed killed near Sumatra, February 11, 1942. Inserted by Fremantle Hospital Ex-Trainees' Association.”

“Much-loved friend of Else Evan.”

“One of God's angels. Dearly loved friend of Mr and Mrs Hearle and family (North Perth).”

“A wonderful daughter, nurse and friend, loved by all. Inserted by Mr and Mrs W. Truran and family (South Fremantle).”

“In fond remembrance of Vima (Lieut. AANS), believed killed near Sumatra, about February 11, 1942; cousin of Crom and Kathleen Wilson (Spearwood).”

“Fremantle Church of Christ pays loving tribute to the affection and faithfulness unto death of our late Member, Lieutenant (Sister) Louvima Bates, AANS.”

“A tribute to the memory of Vima (Sister Bates). A true friend to all. Mr and Mrs Deal, Mal, Glad and Ted (Marita Road, Nedlands).”

“Dearly loved friend of Barbara Logan (Armadale).”

“Much-loved friend of Mr and Mrs David Howell (Coogee) and Ken (AIF, missing, Singapore).”

“Loved niece of Mr and Mrs L. Cull and fond cousin of Eric and Ethel, Ella, Ida, Bona, Marjorie and Gwen.”

“A dear friend of the late Ron Doggett, also Mrs V. Doggett, of South Fremantle. Another flower for heaven.”

Another flower for heaven.

In memoriam Vima. Lest we forget.

Sources
Angell, B. (2003), A Woman's War: The Exceptional Life of Wilma Oram Young AM, New Holland Publishers.

Arthurson, L., ‘The Story of the 13th Australian General Hospital, 8th Division AIF, Malaya’, as reproduced by Winstanley, P. on the website Prisoners of War of the Japanese 1942–1945.

Australian War Memorial, ‘WX11105 Ada Corbitt 'Mickey' Syer as a Captain, Australian Army Nursing Service and NX59288 Leslie William Joseph Bond as a Private, all 2/20 Battalion, both prisoners of the Japanese, 1941-1945, interviewed by Don Wall’.

Jeffrey, B. (1954), White Coolies, Angus & Robertson Publishers.

Manners, N. G. (1999), Bullwinkel, Hesperian Press.

National Archives of Australia, ‘Bates, Louvinia [sic] Mary Isabella’.

Royal Collection Trust, ‘Photograph of the Princess of Wales, later Queen Alexandra, attending the Devonshire House Ball, attended by Louvima Knollys, 2 Jul 1897’.

Shaw, I. W. (2010), On Radji Beach, Pan Macmillan Australia.

Simons, J. E. (1956), While History Passed, William Heinemann Ltd.

Trove, Kalgoorlie Miner (7 Oct 1938, p. 3), ‘A Lady’s Letter’.

Trove, Kalgoorlie Miner (16 Jul 1942, p. 2), ‘Army Casualties’.

Trove, Kalgoorlie Miner (28 Apr 1950, p. 2), ‘Nurses' Hostel Opened’.

Trove, Sunday Times (Perth, 5 Feb 1939, p. 15), ‘The Jottings of a Lady about Town’.

Trove, The Daily News (Perth, 6 Sep 1941, p. 7), ‘AIF Nurses Get Due Praise’.

Trove, The West Australian (Perth, 12 Jun 1944, p. 1), ‘Family Notices’.

Trove, The West Australian (Perth, 13 Jun 1944, p. 1), ‘Family Notices’.

Trove, The West Australian (Perth, 14 Jun 1944, p. 1), ‘Family Notices’.

Trove, The West Australian (Perth, 15 Jun 1944, p. 1), ‘Family Notices’.

Victoria Government Gazette (3 May 1940), 'Supplementary Register of Midwives for the Year Ending 31 December 1939'.

Caroline Mary Ennis - VFX38751
Caroline Mary Ennis	Rank Lieutenant Service Number VFX38751 Unit 2/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Lost at Sea - Presumed Drowned Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 14 February 1942 Age 28

Caroline Mary Ennis was born on 13 August 1913 in Swan Hill, Victoria, daughter of Hugh Martin Ennis and Mary Josephine Ennis (née Carter) of Moyhu, Victoria. Known as ‘Carrie’ to her family, she was the eldest of four children (or possibly three; sources differ). The family moved shortly afterwards to Charters Towers in Queensland, where her father died in 1922, after which the family returned to Victoria.

An early nursing photo of Caroline. Courtesy Northeast Health Wangaratta

Caroline trained to be a nurse at Beechworth Hospital and passed her Nurses Board exam in either March or April 1936. In 1940 she worked at Wangaratta Hospital with Dorothy Elmes, later killed on Radji Beach in the Bangka Island Massacre.

On 20 August 1940, while living in Cheshunt, Victoria, Caroline enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service. On 11 January 1941, she was attached to the 2/10th Australian General Hospital (AGH) and assigned the rank of Staff Nurse. On 4 February 1941, Caroline embarked from Sydney with the 2/10th AGH aboard the Queen Mary, bound for Malaya.

Arriving in Singapore on 18 February, Caroline was detached for duty between the 2/10th AGH, the 2/9th Field Ambulance and the 2/4th Casualty Clearing Station (CCS), treating the ill and wounded across the peninsula. She was working at the 2/4th CCS when the Imperial Japanese Army invaded Malaya.

In late January 1942, in the face of the swift southward progress of Japanese forces, the 2/4th CCS was forced to withdraw to Singapore, where Caroline, now promoted to the rank of Sister Group 1, joined the 2/13th AGH, the only Australian hospital left on mainland Malaya.

On 12 February, along with 64 other Australian nurses and many civilians, Caroline was evacuated from Singapore aboard the SS Vyner Brooke. On Saturday 14 February the Vyner Brooke entered Bangka Strait, which runs between Sumatra and Bangka Island, en route to Batavia (Jakarta). Not long after 2.00 pm the ship was bombed and strafed repeatedly by Japanese aircraft and sank within 30 minutes.

As the bombs exploded, the nurses prepared for evacuation, treating the wounded as best they could, before abandoning ship with the rest. Some were helped into lifeboats, others clung to rafts. Those who could swim made for nearby Bangka Island.

Caroline managed to find a place on a raft with seven other nurses, Mary Clarke, Millie Dorsch, Iole Harper, Betty Jeffrey, Gladys McDonald, Olive Paschke and Merle Trenerry. The raft drifted away from the wreckage, caught in the currents. Aboard the raft Caroline assumed responsibility for two small children, a boy Betty had plucked out of the sea and a girl who took to calling Caroline “Auntie.”

They drifted all Saturday night. Betty Jeffrey and Iole Harper had volunteered to lighten the raft by swimming alongside it, but on Sunday morning they became separated from it. Betty and Iole, who would eventually make it ashore, “watched the raft grow smaller, with Mary Clarke and Gladys McDonald sitting on either side of Olive Paschke, and Millie Dorsch and Merle Trenerry in the water alongside hanging onto the trailing ropes. And there, back-to-back with her matron, sat Caroline Ennis, cradling the two small children in her lap. The raft and its occupants were never seen again” (Shaw, p.187). Caroline was 28 years old.

Of the 65 nurses aboard the Vyner Brooke, 12 were lost at sea and 32 survived the sinking, making it to Bangka Island only to be interned as prisoners of war. Twenty-four eventually returned to Australia. The remaining 22 nurses survived the sinking and came ashore at Radji Beach, Bangka Island. All but Vivian Bullwinkel perished in the Bangka Island Massacre.

In March 1943 Caroline was promoted posthumously to the rank of Lieutenant.

At the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Caroline is commemorated on the Roll of Honour among some 40,000 others from the Second World War. In Cheshunt, a tree planted in 1959 in memory of Caroline stands next to one planted in memory of Dorothy Elmes. In front of each is a plaque. Another memorial plaque is mounted at Wangaratta Hospital. It reads:

In memory of
Lieut. Dorothy Gwenda Elmes
And
Lieut. Caroline Mary Ennis
Australian Army Nursing Service
Who paid the supreme sacrifice overseas for King and Country
1939–45

"Lest We Forget"

Sources

Australian War Memorial, 'The Last Post Ceremony commemorating the service of (VFX38751) Sister Caroline Mary Ennis, 10th Australian General Hospital, Australian Army Nursing Service, Second World War' (8 May 2028).

Australian War Memorial, 'The Sinking of the Vyner Brooke'.

Malayan Volunteers Group, 'SS Vyner Brooke Passenger List' (June 2017).

National Register of War Memorials, 'Sister Dorothy Elmes & Sister Caroline Ennis Memorial'.

Northeast Health Wangaratta, 'Nurses from WWII'.

Shaw, I W (2010), On Radji Beach, Pan Macmillan Australia.

WikiTree, 'Australian Nurses of the Vyner Brooke'.

Olive Dorothy Paschke - VFX38812
Matron Olive Paschke	Rank Matron Service Number VFX38812 Unit 2/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Lost at Sea - Presumed Drowned Place of Death Bangka Island, Indonesia Date of Death 14 February 1942 Age 36

Matron Olive Paschke MBE, Herald & Weekly Times Limited portrait collection, State Library of Victoria

Matron Olive Paschke was one of 65 Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) nurses and over 250 civilian men, women and children evacuated on the SS Vyner Brooke from Singapore on Thursday 12 February 1942, three days before its fall to the Imperial Japanese Army. On Saturday 14 February, the Vyner Brooke was bombed by Japanese aircraft near Bangka Island and sank within 30 minutes.

Of the 65 AANS nurses aboard, 12 were killed in the bombing or lost at sea. After leaving the sinking ship, Matron Paschke, along with Sisters Clarke, Trenerry, McDonald, Dorsch and Ennis, was washed out to sea on a life raft and never seen again.

Fifty-three nurses were washed ashore on Bangka Island, of whom 31 were interned by Japanese troops and taken to the town of Muntok. The remaining 22 nurses, together with civilians and injured Allied soldiers, had arrived in a lifeboat on Radji Beach, where they joined other survivors of the sinking.

On Monday 16 February 1942, after most of the civilian women and children had earlier walked into Muntok, the AANS nurses and the remaining civilians and Allied soldiers were killed, by Japanese soldiers, despite their efforts to surrender. The Allied soldiers were bayoneted, and the nurses were ordered to march into the sea and were shot. Only Sister Vivian Bullwinkel and a lone British soldier survived the massacre. The soldier later died, but Vivian joined the other 31 AANS nurses in internment.

Vivian Bullwinkel - VFX61330
	Rank Lieutenant Colonel Service Number VFX61330 Unit 2/13th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Natural Causes Place of Death - Date of Death 3 July 2000 Age 84

18/12/1915 – 3/7/2000

Sole Survivor of a Massacre

After a bullet from a Japanese machine gun tore through her body, Australian nurse Vivian Bullwinkel floated face down in the sea and feigned death. She was the sole survivor of the 1942 Bangka Island Massacre, in which 22 nurses were forced to wade into the ocean at gunpoint and then shot in the back.

Early Years

Vivian was born on 18 December 1915 at Kapunda, South Australia. After her family moved to Broken Hill, in New South Wales, Vivian attended Broken Hill High School and was named school captain in 1933. After completing school, Vivian trained as a nurse at Broken Hill Hospital and then continued her career in Victoria. She volunteered for service in 1941, joining the Australian Army Nursing Service.

“I felt if my friends were willing to go and fight for their country, then they deserved the best care we could give them,” she said in a later interview.

War Service

Assigned to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital, Vivian set sail for Singapore on the AHS Wanganella. After a few weeks with the 2/10th AGH, Vivian rejoined the 2/13th in Johore Baharu, where she remained until Japanese troops began to work their way down the Malayan peninsula, at which time the 2/13th was evacuated to the relative safety of Singapore. As it became likely that Singapore too would fall into Japanese hands, the nurses were ordered to leave. Vivian was in the last group of 65 Australian nurses to leave Singapore bound for Australia on the SS Vyner Brooke.

Evacuation from Singapore

The Vyner Brooke was a small ship designed to carry only 12 passengers; however, when it left Singapore 265 passengers were aboard. The Vyner Brooke travelled along, hugging the coast of the islands. On 14 February 1942 Japanese aircraft bombed the ship. It began to sink. The nurses assisted passengers to evacuate. Over the next three days, some would drown, some would drift ashore on life rafts and others would make it to shore in various locations on Bangka Island. Vivian joined the group on Radji Beach. There were men, women and children on the beach. The nurses cared for the sick and injured and remained with them. A decision was made to give themselves up, so a group of men walked into Muntok to do just that.

Bangka Island

The Massacre

When the men returned with Japanese soldiers they could not have know what would happen next. All the men were ordered around a bluff where they were bayoneted and shot. The Japanese soldiers returned and ordered the nurses to walk into the water whereupon they were machine-gunned. As they marched into the sea, Irene Drummond called to her sisters “Chin up girls, I am proud of you. I love you all.” All of them fell, but one would not die. Vivian Bullwinkel would survive the massacre. She recalled that being shot was like being kicked by a mule and that she thought that being shot meant that you were dead. Floating in the water amidst the bodies of her friends she discovered that she was still alive. She feigned death until the Japanese had left the beach, then dragged herself up the beach, tended the gunshot wound as best she could, then took shelter in the jungle near a stream, where she fell asleep. Vivian was woken by a voice. It was Private Cecil Gordon Kinsley, a severely injured British soldier.

Twelve Days in the Jungle

Vivian found a water canteen, filled it with water from the stream for Private Kinsley. She dressed his wounds with what she could find. Finally she decided to seek help from the nearby villagers. The men of the village declined to assist her for fear of recrimination. The women of the village were more helpful and left her food on more than one occasion. Several days passed and they both decided to give themselves up to the Japanese. Private Kinsley requested one more day of freedom. When asked why, he told Vivian that it was his birthday and he wanted to spend the day in freedom. She agreed to his wishes. Vivian and Private Kinsley spent 12 days in the jungle.

Surrender

Vivian used the water canteen, slung over her shoulder to hide the bloodstained bullet hole in her uniform. They were walking towards Muntok, they were met by a car carrying a Japanese Naval officer, who drove them into Muntok where Vivian was reunited with 31 of her fellow nurses. Private Kinsley would die from his wounds a few days later.

Prisoner of War

Initially Vivian and the nurses were held in the Coolie Lines near the prison in Muntok. They then travelled to Palembang under horrendous conditions. After eighteen months in Irenelaan they would be sent by boat again back to Camp Menjelang in Muntok. The nurses lived under awful conditions. They had little food to eat and coupled with Beri-Beri, malaria, TB and Bangka fever, four more nurses would die in Muntok. The nurses were then sent back to Sumatra to Loebok Lingau to a camp called Belalau. A boat journey followed by a long train journey. Four more nurses would succumb to disease during their time in this camp.

Liberation

On the 16th of September 1945 the nurses would be liberated. On hearing this news, Matron Annie Sage and Sister Jean Floyd flew to Lahat, to greet the surviving Australian nurses, at the camp that was hidden in the jungle. Matron Annie Sage had lipsticks for all of the girls as she expected to find 65 nurses. Instead she was confronted with 24 painfully thin and unwell nurses. 24 women whose suffering had been unimaginable.

Return to Singapore and Home

The nurses returned to Singapore where they were treated for illnesses, and given time to recuperate from their malnutrition.

Having put on some weight, they were ready to be seen by the Australian public. They left Singapore on the 5th October 1945 on the AHS Manunda.

On their arrival back in Australia, they were greeted by many well-wishers offering fruit and bouquets. They still had so much to recover from though.

Group portrait of AANS nurses with Colonel Annie M Sage, Matron-in-Chief of the AANS, on board the AHS Manunda on its arrival in Fremantle

Home Again

Vivian and the other prisoner of war nurses were at home at last. What would the next chapter of their lives be like?

For Vivian it was letters and visits to the family of the murdered girls on Bangka Island. This was an amazing testimony to the woman that she was.

She was discharged from the Army in 1947, and was awarded the Royal Red Cross (2nd Class). She took some time to recover from the ordeal through which she had been as a prisoner of war. Vivian then commenced work at the Repatriation Hospital in Melbourne for a time.

In 1947, Vivian travelled to Tokyo for the War Crimes Tribunal and stated her recollections of the massacre and subsequent treatment by the Japanese in the prisoner-of-war camps.

Vivian Bullwinkel giving evidence at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in December 1946

Conception of the Nurses Memorial Centre

Betty Jeffrey and Vivian Bullwinkel travelled around the state of Victoria talking about their experiences as POWs and how they were fundraising to support the establishment of a nurses’ memorial centre in memory of their fallen comrades. They didn’t want just a stone edifice to memorialise their fallen friends: they wanted a living memorial that would offer nurses a place to meet and a place that would support continuing education. They had thought about this concept when they were prisoners in Sumatra. On the 19th of February 1950 the establishment of the War Nurses Memorial Centre would become a reality.

Civilian Life

Vivian was appointed Matron of Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in 1959. She was involved with many nursing related ventures that included the positions of President of the College of Nursing Australia and member of Council for the Australian War Memorial. She was an instrumental player in Operation Babylift where Vietnamese orphans we brought to Australia in 1975 by Australian nurses who cared for them in flight.

Vivian at Fairfield Hospital

In September 1977 she married Colonel Francis (Frank) Statham and moved to Perth. She remained in touch with all of the ex-POW friends.

She continued to be an active voice for veterans throughout her life. Here she is marching with fellow AANS POWs Betty Jeffrey and Beryl Woodbridge in the 1955 Anzac Day parade in Melbourne.

Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel (front left), Lieutenant Betty Jeffrey (front centre) and Lieutenant Beryl Woodbridge (front right) marching on Anzac Day in 1955

Vivian was awarded both the Order of Australia and the MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) for her bravery.

Honours

Over the years Vivian received many awards. In 1947 she was awarded an ARRC (Associate of the Royal Red Cross), in 1973 an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) and in 1993 an AO (Officer of the Order of Australia). She was also awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal and an Efficiency Decoration.

In 1993 she, along with seven of the other POW nurses, would travel back to Bangka Island, Indonesia to unveil the memorial to the nurses who had died there during the war and to those who had been prisoners of war.

Vivian died on the 3rd of July 2000 aged 84 years. Her service to Australia and to the nurses who died and were prisoners of war during World War II and to the nursing profession will never be forgotten.

This portrait in the Australian War Memorial depicts her wearing her grey nurse’s uniform, red cape and sister’s veil. Among her medals, she is wearing the Florence Nightingale Medal, the world’s highest honour available to nurses.

'Matron Vivian Bullwinkel' by Shirley Bourne (1962). This portrait of Vivian was a finalist in the 1962 Archibald Prize for portraiture. It hangs at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra

On the 75th anniversary of the tragedy in February 2017, a commemorative coin bearing an image of the SS Vyner Brooke was struck by the Royal Australian Mint.

At that time, the director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, paid tribute to this outstanding heroine by saying this: “From a generation that produced so many remarkable Australians, Vivian Bullwinkel was a giant among them.”

Commemorative coin marking the 75th anniversary of the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke

In February 2023, the drill hall at Broken Hill High School was named in Vivian's honour. The Vivian Bullwinkel Drill Hall is emblazoned with the year of Vivian's captaincy of the school, 1933, and with a picture of Vivian in her AANS uniform.

The Vivian Bullwinkel Drill Hall at Broken Hill High School. Photo courtesy Barrier Truth, 21 Feb 2023

Agnes Betty Jeffrey - VX53059
	Rank Lieutenant Service Number VX53059 Unit 2nd/10th Australian General Hospital Cause of Death Natural Causes Place of Death - Date of Death 13 September 2000 Age 92

15/5/1908 – 13/10/2000

Sisters Jenny Greer (left) and Betty Jeffrey recovering in a Dutch hospital in 1945 from the malnutrition they suffered while prisoners of war in Sumatra. Throughout this ordeal, Sister Betty Jeffrey kept a secret diary, later published as White coolies (1954). In her diary Jeffrey recorded the physical and mental battle for survival, the unrelenting obsession with food, the death of friends, and the fading of hope.

Biography

By Emily Malone, July 2020

Agnes Betty Jeffrey was born in Hobart, Tasmania on 14th May 1908. Second youngest in a family of six, she preferred to be known as Betty, not liking the name Agnes. Whilst growing up her family moved often, as her father was an accountant at the General Post Office frequently transferred interstate to set up new accounting methods. Her family finally came to live in East Malvern, Victoria where Betty stayed for the rest of her life, close to some of her siblings.

Betty attended Warwick Girls College in East Malvern and gained her Intermediate and Leaving Certificates. At school she excelled at playing tennis and was good at swimming and athletics. Upon leaving school she worked as a Sports Mistress at a Girls School and as a typist for a firm of accountants.

At the age of 29 Betty began nursing training at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne. She had always wanted to begin a career in nursing, but had not been impressed with hospitals interstate and so had put off training for many years, with her mind set on training at the Alfred Hospital. Betty graduated with her General Nursing Certificate in 1939. In 1940, at the Royal Women's Hospital, Betty received her Midwifery Certificate. Aged 33 she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service, excited by the opportunity to travel and aid the war effort. She was posted to Darley Military Camp, Victoria with five other nurses to set up a Camp Hospital.

In 1941, Betty was posted to Malacca, in Malaya to join the 2/10th Australian General Hospital. At this stage there wasn't any war in the Pacific, so it seemed to be a safe place for the nurses. Being fit and healthy and with no responsibilities at home, going overseas and representing her country was exciting and something Betty wanted to do. In May, she left Melbourne for Malacca aboard the ship Zealandia. After the nurses had been in Malacca for several months the war in the Pacific commenced and their hospital was now heavily involved. In early January 1942 the hospital evacuated to Singapore and the 2/10^th Australian Hospital converted a school into a hospital where the nurses worked tirelessly to care for the sick and wounded under constant danger and air raids.

On 13 February 1942 the order was given for the nurses to evacuate Singapore as the Japanese forces closed in. None of the nurses wanted to abandon there patients and initially they refused to leave. Carrying only a few possessions, Betty and her 64 nursing colleagues were taken by a fleet of ambulances to St. Andrew’s Cathedral. They waited while there was an air raid and when it was over they were taken to the wharf to board the small steamer ship Vyner Brooke.

The Vyner Brooke, with just four cabins and built to carry only 12 passengers plus its crew, left Singapore under the cover of darkness with a few hundred civilians and soldiers on board. After dodging bombing attacks from Japanese planes and ‘hiding’ in the Bangka Strait, on 14 February 1942 the Vyner Brooke was attacked from the air. One bomb hit the bridge and another went straight down the funnel. The planes machined gunned the deck and the lifeboats. Many lifeboats filled with water and sank. The ship took on water very quickly and sunk approximately 10 miles (16kms) from Bangka Island, Sumatra.

Betty, a strong swimmer, slid down a rope over the side of the ship just as it was going down and was burned from the rope along her hands, skinning her fingers. In the water, Betty clung to a raft containing Matron Paschke, head of her Unit, who was a non-swimmer. After hours, the raft drifted very close to a pier but was carried out by a storm. Betty realised that the load was too heavy so she and another nurse, Iole Harper, and two men hopped out of the raft to swim beside it. Suddenly the raft was caught in a current, which missed Betty and those swimming beside it, and carried it out to sea. Betty and Iole never saw Matron or those sisters again. Of the sixty-five nurses on board the Vyner Brooke twelve were drowned.

Betty and Iole swam together in the sea and mangrove swamps for three days. After the first 28 hours they realised that they didn't know each other's name, so they stopped, formally introduced themselves and then continued swimming. Finally they were found, exhausted and delirious, by a Malay fisherman who took them to his village to feed and care for them, explaining they were on Bangka Island, now in Japanese hands, and were advised to give themselves up.

For the next three and a half years Betty and 31 other Australian Army Nursing Sisters were held captive as prisoners of war in and around Sumatra. Fellow captives, including nuns, missionaries and Dutch and English civilian women and children, endured appalling conditions in the prison camps. Water for drinking came from one tap, which could only drip. Bath water trickled into a large trough called a tong, which the women stood beside and splashed tiny amounts of water over themselves. They were fed rice twice a day, which was from the market floor and had teeth, hair, stones, bugs and dirt in it. They were sometimes given a little sugar or salt with their rice and perhaps a piece of vegetable the size of a 5 cent coin or a tiny pink splinter which they were told was pork. They went to bed hungry.

Many of the nurses had only the clothes on their backs – and no shoes, having removed them before diving off the Vyner Brooke. Their treatment by prison guards was often cruel. Some nurses had to walk for hours to collect clean water for the guards’ crops of sweet potatoes, while they themselves were forced to drink water that was often putrid and contaminated. Red Cross parcels carrying food and medical supplies were also kept from the prisoners.

In camp, Betty wanted to keep her mind active. She was worried that when she returned home she would forget all the things that happened to her. In a 1983 interview when asked about her diary, Betty recalled: “I didn’t want my brain to rust. I wanted to remember how to read, write and spell but there was nothing to write on or write with. I found a pencil on a rubbish heap and I thought, well I’m getting started, but no paper. On my way to a working party, outside the camp, near the guard house I saw a little exercise booklet and thought that’s exactly what I want. I hope it is still there when I come in and it was. I grabbed it and no one saw. After that I kept it as my diary. I knew I had to keep it hidden”.

Betty hid the diary under the bench on which she slept in the hut. She rolled it in rags and hid it in a bottle amongst rats and spiders, a place where she thought her captors definitely wouldn't look. Had the Japanese soldiers found the diary Betty would have been executed and the diary been burnt. Other nurses knew about the diary because Betty needed someone to keep watch for the Japanese guards while she was writing in it.

To cope with the atrocious circumstances the nurses found themselves in, Betty and her friends attempted to establish a routine. Each woman was designated as a cook, a cleaner, or a gardener. In August 1942 a ‘shop’ was allowed into camp once a week. It was a cart belonging to a local man, containing fruit, sugar and a tiny amount of butter, tea, coffee beans and sandshoes. The shop was only good if you had money, so the nurses set to work. The Dutch women in camp had money, but the nurses had been shipwrecked and lost everything. Betty very quickly became the camp ‘hairdresser’, cutting people’s hair with a pair of nail scissors.

When morale was particularly low in the camp Norah Chambers who attended the Royal Academy in London and was classically trained and Dutch Missionary Margaret Drybrugh formed the Vocal Orchestra. These incredibly talented women wrote music to classical symphonies from memory on scraps of paper. Betty would watch and listen to the orchestra practice. She would hum the tunes to herself. Norah asked if she could read music and Betty responded that she could and so Betty was made a fist alto in the vocal orchestra. The concerts transported the captives to another place where they were not hungry and being held prisoner.

During her time in camp, Margaret Dryburgh composed the Captive's Hymn which was sung in camp each Sunday at Church services held. This song is still sung at many commemorative services today.

To keep up morale, the nurses celebrated their birthdays and gave one other presents, using whatever they could find in the camp or make. Christmas was also an important time in camp and the prisoners made cards and gifts for one another, using any type of paper they could get their hands on. Many of the gifts Betty received were sketches.

On 15^th August 1945, the Second World War ended. The women being held captive in the prison camp were not told of this until 24^th August. During their first few days of freedom the men from the men’s camp were allowed to mix with the women’s camp and see their wives and children. More food became available and the women were given lipstick, clothes, materials and shoes. The Australian Red Cross supplies that had been sent to the camp were made available and medical supplies, letters from the internee’s families, writing paper and materials that had been withheld in a store room were now passed around the camp.

Only 24 Australian Army nurses were released from the final prison camp when the war finally ended and the nurses were rescued. Betty weighed just 32 kilograms. The nurses were flown to Singapore and were hospitalised immediately. They were desperate to get home.

On 5^th October 1945, 24 nurses left Singapore on the hospital ship Manunda. Betty was very sick on the way home and wasn’t able to celebrate properly.

On 24^th October 1945 Betty arrived home in Melbourne. She spent one night at home with her family, catching up on news. She was so unwell and after celebrating her arrival home, she was admitted to the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital where she remained for two years, suffering tropical diseases and tuberculosis.

In 1947 Betty was discharged from hospital. Together with Vivian Bullwinkel she fulfilled a promise made in captivity, to honour their colleagues who had died and create a memorial so they would not be forgotten. They travelled around Victoria, speaking at towns to raise funds in order to establish a Nurses Memorial Centre in Melbourne. Betty and Vivian, together with the support of Wilma Oram raised 78,000 pounds. An overall amount of 120,000 pounds was finally raised so the Nurses Memorial Centre could become a reality. This Centre was to be not just a place to remember the passing of the fallen nurses, but a place to meet, gather and continue the ongoing professional development of nurses through education.

On 14 May 1949 (Betty’s birthday) the Nurses Memorial Centre was opened and Betty was asked to be its first administrator. Betty lived at the Centre and enjoyed her position despite the very long hours which were often 9am – 10.30pm. Betty also established the Betty Jeffrey Auxiliary to raise additional funds for the Nurses Memorial Centre to enable the purchase of equipment.

In May 1950 Betty took a leave of absence from the Nurses Memorial Centre to travel to England with Vivian Bullwinkel. In May 1951 they were presented to King George VI and Queen Elizabeth in the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace. They were trained to curtsy correctly. They were also received by Her Majesty Queen Mary at her home, Marlborough House. Betty said this was an unforgettable and wonderful experience. Queen Mary wanted to know all about the Nurses Memorial Centre as she had sent an autographed photograph of herself there.

In 1954 Betty became unwell again and was in and out of Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital often for 9 – 11 weeks at a time. She was advised by the medical team to retire from the Nurses Memorial Centre. This was very difficult for her as she loved her job.

In May 1954 Betty’s book White Coolies was published after a suggestion her diary kept during her time as a prisoner should be made into a book. The book was originally called Diary of White Coolie but the publishers thought the name too long. Betty agreed to publish her experiences as she wanted to explain to her family what it had been like being a prisoner of war.

In 1955 an adaptation of White Coolies was recorded for radio and was broadcast across Australia.

In the early 1960s Betty was a golf caddy to Victorian champion, Burtta Cheney; an old friend. They were both members at Huntingdale Golf Club. It helped Betty to become fit once again. During this time she also worked on the ex-Prisoner of War (POW) and Nurses Memorial Centre committees.

During the 1970s and 1980s Betty was a frequent guest speaker on ex-service personnel and prisoner of war subjects. She continued to attend ANZAC Day and commemoration services. She was also invited to open many memorials and was Patron and Member of the ex-POW and Relatives association and a committee member for many years. White Coolies kept her busy during this period, she wrote dozens of articles about the book and answered hundreds of letters regarding being a prisoner or war.

In 1979 Betty travelled back to Sumatra for the making of the BBC Documentary “Women in Captivity” by producer Lavinia Warner, who is also the author of Women beyond the Wire. Dame Margot Turner and Betty were flown to Palembang Sumatra to be filmed for the documentary. This was what she called her ‘journey backwards’. Going back to Sumatra after 34 years.

In 1987 Betty was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for her services to ex-servicemen and women.

During 1996, Betty became an advisor to Bruce Beresford, director of the film Paradise Road which was largely based on White Coolies. The film was released in 1997.

Early in 2000, the latest edition of White Coolies was re-printed. This was its nineteenth edition. In June 2000, Betty was awarded with a Life Membership of the Returned Services League, presented to her by President, Bruce Ruxton and Major General Peter Cosgrove.

Betty passed away, aged 92, on 13 September 2000. Her life was remembered at a family funeral, and a moving memorial service arranged by the Returned Nurses Association.

Regarded with great fondness by her friends, Betty Jeffrey's dignified manner and sense of humour has been recalled by many who knew her during the war. The camaraderie amongst the nurses together with her wit, imagination, ability to embellish a story and fabulous sense of humour all contributed to Betty surviving three and a half harrowing years as a Prisoner of War, and this can be seen in her dairies, the poems she wrote and the sketches she drew while in captivity. Her sense of humour, conscientious, caring, innovative and generous spirit remained with her throughout her years, as did her strong friendships with the returned nurses. It was her wish to keep the memory of the nurses who did not return alive, and so now this task is passed onto us. Lest we forget.