JOHN ROBERTSON
Sole Survivor – Bangka Island Massacre
Acrylic on board
61 x 45cm
Sole Survivor – Bangka Island Massacre – 1942 Vivian Bullwinkel AO, MBE, ARRE, ED (1915 – 2000) Australian army nursing sister and prisoner of war. Years of Service: 1941-1947 With the fall of Singapore imminent (14th February 1942), 65 Australian Army nurses along with patients and women and children embarked on the cargo ship SS Vyner Brooke. The number of people on board was estimated to be greater than 300. The Japanese spotted the ship in the Bangka Strait, it was subsequently attacked and sunk. Approximately 150 survivors eventually made it ashore on nearby Bangka Island after spending between eight and 65 hours in the water.
With no capability of receiving support from the local civil population the survivors sent a deputation to the occupying Japanese, with the aim of surrendering. Soon after, A delegation of Japanese soldiers arrived at Radii Beach shot and bayoneted all the males and gathered the existing 22 nurses together and forced them to wade into the sea, where they machine-gunned them from behind. “The girls fell one after the other.” All but one perished. Sister Bullwinkel, badly wounded in the diaphragm, feigned death by laying on the beach for several hours till it cleared of soldiers and then attended a badly wounded British soldier from another massacre.
They hid in the jungle for several days, during which time Bullwinkel tended his wounds. However, starvation eventually prompted their surrender to the Japanese. Neither mentioned the massacre for fear of death. The soldier died soon after their capture. Bullwinkel (secretly nursed her own injury) was interned with other nurses in a POW camp and endured a further three years of hardship and brutality by her captors before her release enabled her to tell her harrowing story.
Later Life Bullwinkel retired from the army in 1947 and became Director of Nursing at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital. Also, in1947 she gave evidence of the massacre at a war crimes trial in Tokyo. She devoted herself to the nursing profession and to honouring those killed on Bangka Island, raising funds for a nurses’ memorial and serving on numerous committees, including a period as a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, and later president of the Australian College of Nursing. Vivian passed away on the 3rd of July 2000, aged 84, in Perth, Western Australia.
