Historical information

The article details the war time recollections of Vivian Bullwinkel, sole survivor of the Japanese massacre of Australian nurses in 1942.
The Australian Army nurses, with 200 civilians, were aboard the SS Vyner Brook when the Japanese bombed and sank the ship. After ten hours, twenty four nurses survived to make it ashore on Banka Island. The Japanese took them prisoner and then proceeded to shoot them all, after first bayoneting forty Bristish prisoners. Vivian was shot in the side and pretended she was dead. Vivian credits her initial survival to the duty she felt to a fellow survivor of the massacre, a British man. They then had to make the decision that giving themselves up to the Japanese was their best chance of survival. After threes years as a POW Vivian had lost alot of weight and seen many die, but she had continued to care for those that were her patients.
More than 50 years later Vivian is to return to Banka Island as and honoured guest of Indonesia, to chose the site of of a memorial to her dead comrades.
Vivian avoids talking in detail about her POW experiences but she does have strong views on selling Australian land to Japanese investors. The Japanese government had recently apologised for the atrocities they committed, but Vivian believes the apology was not specific enough.

Physical description

Second page of a magazine clipping consisting of three columns of text under a large colour photo of an older man and woman leaning into each other, page two of two