Vivian Bullwinkel: The Nurse Who Survived Bangka Island and Gave Evidence for Twenty One

Kate Wheeler
3 days ago
5 min read

Vivian Bullwinkel is remembered as the sole surviving nurse of the Bangka Island Massacre, one of the most harrowing events in Australian nursing history, and as a woman who spent the rest of her working life honouring the colleagues she lost. Her story is not an easy one, but it belongs firmly among the nurses who came before us in the perioperative and broader nursing profession across Australia and New Zealand.

Early life and training

Vivian Bullwinkel was born on 18 December 1915 in Kapunda, South Australia, to George and Eva Bullwinkel. She attended Broken Hill High School, where she served as School Captain in 1933, before training as a nurse and midwife in Broken Hill, New South Wales. She began her nursing career in Hamilton, Victoria, before moving to the Jessie McPherson Hospital in Melbourne.

In 1941, wanting to serve during the Second World War, Bullwinkel first volunteered with the Royal Australian Air Force but was rejected on medical grounds. She was accepted instead into the Australian Army Nursing Service, and in September 1941, at the age of twenty six, she sailed for Singapore as a staff nurse with the newly formed 2/13th Australian General Hospital.

Singapore and the sinking of the Vyner Brooke

Bullwinkel served in Singapore through the Japanese advance down the Malay Peninsula. As Singapore approached collapse in February 1942, she was evacuated along with sixty four other Australian Army nursing sisters aboard the small coastal steamer SS Vyner Brooke on 12 February, only three days before the city fell. Two days later, on 14 February, while heading for Sumatra through the Bangka Strait, the ship was sunk by Japanese bombers.

Bullwinkel made it ashore at Radji Beach on Bangka Island, in what is now Indonesia, along with twenty one other nurses and a larger group of men, women and children from the sinking. The group, joined the following day by others including around twenty British soldiers, decided to surrender to the Japanese rather than attempt to evade capture on the island.

The massacre at Radji Beach

On 16 February 1942, a Japanese patrol arrived at the beach. The men in the group were taken away and killed. The Japanese soldiers then ordered the twenty two remaining nursing sisters, Bullwinkel among them, to walk into the sea, before opening fire on them from behind with a machine gun. Bullwinkel was struck by a single bullet that passed through her body without hitting any major organ. She fell into the water and feigned death until the Japanese soldiers had gone.

She survived alone in the jungle for around two weeks, caring for a badly wounded British soldier, Private Cecil Kingsley of the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, before eventually giving herself up. Kingsley died shortly afterwards from his injuries. Bullwinkel then rejoined thirty one other Australian nurses who had also made it ashore and survived. Of the sixty five nurses who had left Singapore on the Vyner Brooke, only twenty four, including Bullwinkel, would eventually return to Australia. She kept the fact that she had witnessed and survived a massacre secret from her captors throughout her captivity, aware that the truth would almost certainly have led to her death.

Three and a half years as a prisoner of war

Bullwinkel spent the next three and a half years in Japanese internment camps on Bangka Island and in Sumatra, alongside fellow nurses including Betty Jeffrey, Wilma Oram and Margaret Dryburgh. Conditions in the camps were harsh, and eight of the surviving nurses died in captivity from malnutrition and treatable disease, several of them in the final months before liberation. Among Bullwinkel's surviving papers, later donated to the Australian War Memorial, is a postcard she was permitted to send home in March 1943, in which she wrote to her mother simply that her roving spirit had been somewhat checked.

After the war

Following liberation, Bullwinkel gave evidence before the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal in December 1946, where she was described as a model witness. She chose not to remain in Japan with the British Commonwealth Occupation Force and instead returned to Australia as a civilian nurse, working at Heidelberg Military Hospital and later serving as a lieutenant colonel in the Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps Training Unit from 1955 to 1970. She went on to become Director of Nursing at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Victoria, a position she held until her retirement in 1977.

While at Fairfield, Bullwinkel organised and led a nursing team that travelled to evacuate Vietnamese orphans as part of Operation Babylift in April 1975, and personally oversaw their convalescent care ahead of adoption by Australian families. She also worked to establish nursing scholarships enabling Malaysian nurses to complete their training in Australia, and served on numerous committees connected to nursing and returned services.

Bullwinkel was appointed the first woman trustee of the Australian War Memorial, serving from 1964 to 1969. In 1992 she returned to Bangka Island with her husband, Colonel Francis Statham, whom she had married in 1977, to select the site for a memorial to the nurses who had died there, and in 1993 she attended the dedication of that memorial. In October 1999 she travelled to Canberra for the dedication of the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial.

Recognition

Vivian Bullwinkel was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire and later an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993, and was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal in 1947 along with the Associate of the Royal Red Cross. She died of a heart attack in Perth on 3 July 2000, at the age of eighty four. In 2022, she became the first Australian woman in defence service to be honoured with a dedicated statue at the Australian War Memorial, and in 2024 the Australian Electoral Commission proposed naming a new Western Australian federal electorate, Bullwinkel, in her honour.

Why her story still matters in perioperative nursing

Bullwinkel's career after the war was not defined by the trauma of Bangka Island alone. She spent more than three decades in nursing leadership, education and humanitarian work, including a period leading a hospital's response to a genuine international crisis in Operation Babylift. Her insistence on properly honouring the nurses who died with her, through the memorials she helped establish, is a reminder of how seriously the profession's own history deserves to be treated.

For more from this series, see our pieces on Ellen Dougherty, the world's first registered nurse, and Lucy Osburn's work establishing trained nursing in New South Wales. You can also read about the perioperative skills that strengthen a career today, and view current theatre nursing jobs in Australia.