ON RADJI BEACH BY IAN W. SHAW, MACMILLAN AUSTRALIA, $34.99.
Social historian Ian Shaw plunges into the jungle of one of Australia’s most heroic acts of women’s wartime service. When two units of city and country nurses boarded the Queen Mary in 1941 to tend soldiers serving in Malaya, duties included treating insect bites and attending parties.
By Christmas Eve, Japanese had taken the island and the nurses tossed coins and “lost” if their fate was to board a ship for safer waters, leaving wounded soldiers behind. Twenty-two of the nurses were shipwrecked at Radji Beach, where Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was the only one to survive. She was reunited with her fellow nurses at Banka Island internment camp and moved to a camp in Sumatra, in March 1942, where many died. When rescued in 1945, the remaining 24 nurses weighed around 30kg each. Back in Australia, army psychologists thought it best to pretend the POW experience never happened and survivors suffered for the rest of their lives
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