Lieutenant Vivian Bullwinkel
Vivian Bullwinkel, WWII heroine, Lieutenant Colonel, nurse, and prisoner of war, is the first woman to be honoured by a statue at the Australian War Memorial.
Vivian Bullwinkel trained as a nurse in Broken Hill and was nursing in Hamilton, Victoria in 1939 when war was declared. She applied to serve in the Air Force but was rejected because she had flat feet. Vivian completed her military training in May 1941 and joined the Australian Armed Services, landing in Singapore on the 5th of September 1941.
When Singapore was invaded by the Japanese army in January 1942, Bullwinkel was evacuated by sea along with 180 other nurses, women, and children. Their boat was bombed and sunk by the Japanese off Bangka Island in Indonesia. Bullwinkel and twenty-one other allied nurses, some of them at sea for days, made it to Radji Beach. Realising that they couldn’t otherwise survive, they surrendered to the Japanese who occupied the island.
After witnessing the bayonetting of 100 British soldiers, also prisoners of the Japanese, the nurses were raped (a crime that Bullwinkel was later told by the Australian government not to include in her war crimes statement) then ordered to walk into the sea. They were machine-gunned from behind.
Vivian Bullwinkel was shot in the abdomen but survived by feigning death. She was the only survivor of what is now known as the Bangka Island Massacre. She made it to shore and hid in the jungle for over a week, wounded yet nursing an injured soldier, before realising that she must again surrender to the Japanese army to have any chance of staying alive. She was imprisoned in a women’s camp for three and a half years in appalling conditions until the end of the war.
These years of service were filled with countless stories of Australian nurses' quiet heroism and acts of compassion during the war, including the improvisation of care for seriously ill and dying prisoners, doing what they could with the resources available to ease their pain, and when the time came, burying the deceased.
In October 1946 Vivian Bullwinkel testified at the War Crimes Tribunal in Tokyo.
Vivian Bullwinkel was a Lieutenant Colonel when she retired from military service in 1970, though remained Director of Nursing at Melbourne’s Fairfield Hospital until 1977. By the time of her death in 2000, she had been awarded the Order of Australia, Member of the Order of the British Empire, Royal Red Cross Medal, and Florence Nightingale medal.
Audio transcript available.