In this Year of the Nurse and the Midwife, The Lamp will celebrate nurses and midwives who created their own history. In this issue we look at the life of Vivien Bullwinkel.
On 12 February 1942 an Australian nurse, Vivian Bullwinkel, was caring for injured soldiers on a beach on Bangka Island off the Sumatran coast. When they were discovered by Japanese soldiers, the Japanese separated the men and women and ordered Vivian, along with 21 other nurses, to wade into the ocean until they were waist deep in water.
Vivian described the Japanese opening fire: “They just swept up and down the line, and the girls fell.”
A bullet hit Bullwinkel above her left hip, and when she fell into the sea she feigned death and allowed the current to bring her back to shore. She was the only nurse to survive. The story of what has become known as the Bangka Island massacre is told in Ian Shaw’s On Radji Beach.
Bullwinkel hid on the Island for 12 days, caring for an English private who had evaded capture, and helped by villagers who provided food. Realising there was little hope of rescue, the pair surrendered to the Japanese army and were taken to a POW camp.
When she returned to Australia, Bullwinkel became a leader in the nursing profession. In the 1970s she was a council member and later president of the College of Nursing, helping to usher in the change from hospital-based nurse training to university-based qualifications.
As a member of the Nurses Wages Board, she worked to improve pay and working conditions for all nurses in Victoria. Now the ACN is raising funds for a sculpture to be erected in the grounds of the Australian War Memorial to honour her life.
Bullwinkel was born in Kapunda in 1915, a small town in South Australia on the Light River near the Barossa Valley, and she devoted her life to serving her country and her profession. She trained as a nurse and midwife at the Broken Hill and District Hospital, and she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service when World War II broke out.
“I just felt that if my friends were prepared to go and fight for my country, then they deserved the best care we could give them,” she told a 2007 documentary Vivian Bullwinkel: An Australian Heroine.
One of the last out of Singapore
She was working at the Australian General Hospital in Singapore in December 1941. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour was quickly followed by the Japanese army’s invasion of Malaya. By January, Bullwinkel’s medical unit was forced to evacuate.
Bullwinkel joined 65 nurses and 265 men, women and children on the last ship to leave Singapore, the SS Vyner Brooke, originally designed to carry just 12 passengers.
Two days later, Japanese aircraft sank the ship and survivors made it ashore at Radji Beach. Bullwinkel was later reunited with some of the nurses on board the SS Vyner Brooke in the POW camp, but only 24 of the 65 nurses would return home. Twenty-one died on Banka Island, eight died in POW camps, and the rest drowned.
Vivian continued to serve with the army in Japan until 1947, and she re-joined the Citizen Military Forces in 1955 until 1970, retiring as a Lieutenant-Colonel.
She worked as the matron and later as director of nursing at Melbourne’s Fairfield Hospital until 1977, when she married and moved to Perth. Fifty years after the massacre, Bullwinkel returned to Bangka Island with surviving nurses and unveiled a memorial on the beach to the nurses who had died there.
In recognition of her leadership in the profession and philanthropic work, Bullwinkel was awarded the Florence Nightingale and Royal Red Cross Medals, and she was also appointed to the Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) and to the Order of Australia (AO).
Trevor Capps, the director of philanthropy at the ACN, said the Australian War Memorial (AMW) has agreed in principle to locating a commemorative sculpture in the AWM grounds.
“We are looking to raise half a million dollars. We are currently about a quarter of the way there and the War Memorial is in the process of approaching artists at this moment.”
Find out more
To donate to the campaign for a commemorative sculpture visit acn.edu.au/bullwinkelproject or contact ACN Director of Philanthropy Trevor Capps at trevor.capps@acn.edu.au.