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. 

The Remarkable Mrs Reiby

Mary Haydock was arrested for stealing a horse in August 1791. Fourteen months later she was aboard the convict ship, Royal Admiral, on her way to Sydney Cove. In 1794, Mary married seaman, Thomas Reiby, and they moved to the Hawkesbury where they been given land to farm. 

They started a cargo business transporting goods on the Hawkesbury River between Sydney and the new settlement where they now lived. Mary became involved in operating the family business as well as looking after their growing family of seven children, especially when her husband travelled overseas for more cargo.

When Thomas Reibey died in 1811, Mary was in control of a successful business which she operated from the heart of Sydney. She was more than able to compete with the other traders in the colony and became a wealthy businesswoman and landowner.

As well as telling Mary's story in The Remarkable Mrs Reibey, Grantlee Kieza provides vivid descriptions of life in the colony of New South Wales at the time both in Sydney and at the Hawkesbury, politics, trade, Rum Corps, other merchants and living as a former convict in the settlement. When some of her family settle in Van Diemen's Land descriptions are also provided of life in that colony. One of Mary's neighbours in Sydney was Simeon Lord whose name appears quite often in the book.

Mary Reibey has been remembered with her image appearing on the Australian $20 note.

 

The book has detailed endnotes and a bibliography.