Sister Viv

Most Australians will have heard of Sister Vivian Bullwinkle and the massacre of Australian nurses by a group of Japanese soldiers during the Second World War. In Sister Viv Grantlee Kieza provides a detailed, readable story about the sixty-five nurses who escaped from Singapore as the Japanese took the island only to have their ship bombed and sunk and then having to struggle to reach land and then be captured by Japanese soldiers.

Many of the nurses plus others who had been on the ship did not make it to the shore but one group of twenty-two nurses, including Viv, made it to Radji Beach on Banka Island near Sumatra. The nurses were separated from the other survivors, forced back into the water and shot. Viv was the only nurse in this group to survive. She was then a prisoner of war for more than three years.

Grantlee Kieza provides a detailed account of the mistreatment of nurses by the Japanese in the prisoner of war camps. At the first camp Viv was reunited with other nurses who had escaped Singapore and they remained as a group as they were moved from one location to another. In the various prison camps the prisoners lived in squalor and had little food. Disease was rife and many of the nurses died. Still those remaining worked as a team assisting each other and trying not to give up hope until eventually peace was declared and they could return home. 

After the war Viv continued to work as a nurse holding senior positions in major hospitals. She never forgot her colleagues who had died during the war and made sure that their story was told. There is now a statue of Viv at the Australian War Memorial and a memorial at Radji Beach in remembrance of the massacre and the twenty-one Australian nurses who were murdered at the site.