The Australian Women's Register

Vivian Bullwinkel grew up in Broken Hill, New South Wales, and Adelaide, South Australia. Her father had migrated to Australia from Essex in 1912 and worked as a jackaroo on a station near Broken Hill before he married and took on a clerical post with Broken Hill South Pty Ltd. Vivian’s grandfather was William John Shegog, a member of the South Australian Police Force. At the age of nine, she moved to Adelaide to live with her grandparents but returned to attend Broken Hill High School when she was thirteen. In 1934 she began nursing and midwife training at the Broken Hill and District Hospital. From February 1939 she was working at the Kia-Ora Hospital in Hamilton, Victoria, but moved to Melbourne to enlist at the outbreak of war and worked for a time at the Jessie MacPherson Hospital.

In May 1941, Bullwinkel volunteered for the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS) and sailed for Singapore, assigned to the 2/13th Australian General Hospital. In February 1942, she boarded the SS Vyner Brooke with 65 other nurses to flee Singapore following an invasion by Japanese troops, but the ship was sunk by Japanese aircraft two days later. A large number of passengers, including 22 nurses, made it ashore to Radji Beach on Banka Island and decided to surrender to the Japanese. They were joined the following day by about 100 British soldiers. Upon being discovered by Japanese soldiers, however, the men were killed and the nurses ordered to wade into the sea where they were machine-gunned from behind. Bullwinkel was struck by a bullet but feigned death until her persecutors had left. The sole survivor of the massacre, she hid for twelve days before surrendering and spent a further three and a half years in captivity.

Bullwinkel served in Japan in 1946 and 1947 before resigning from the Army as Captain, but she rejoined the Citizen Military Forces in 1955 and served until 1970, when she retired as Lieutenant Colonel. Post-war, Bullwinkel spent 16 years as Matron of Melbourne’s Fairfield Hospital and continued as Director of Nursing there until 1977. In that year, she married Colonel F.W. Statham and moved to Perth. She was a member of the Council of the Australian War Memorial, and president of the Australian College of Nursing. In 1992, she returned to Banka Island to unveil a shrine to the nurses who died there.

Vivian Bullwinkel was appointed to the Order of Australia (AO) on 26 January 1993, appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) on 1 January 1973 and awarded the Royal Red Cross Medal on 6 March 1947 for service to the veteran and ex-prisoner of war communities, to nursing, to the Red Cross Society and to the community. She was also the winner of the Florence Nightingale Medal.

Photographs, newspaper articles and memorabilia relating to Vivian Bullwinkel were exhibited at the RSL in Argent Street, Broken Hill, in 2000 and the foyer of the Broken Hill Health Service has been named in her honour.