I wonder if I would have had the fortitude ........ On 23 October 1945, the hospital ship Manunda arrived in Fremantle. On the wharf were hundreds of waving and cheering people including Matron-in-Chief Annie Sage of the AANS. As the ship docked, people came on board carrying flowers and fruit. They had come to welcome home 24 Australian army nurses, women who had just spent three and a half years in Japanese captivity on the island of Sumatra and who, in February 1942, had survived the sinking of the Vyner Brooke. The nurses were taken to recuperate in the Military Hospital at Hollywood in Perth. There they received more flowers than they had ever seen: ‘they came from every garden in Perth and kept on coming’. The matron at the hospital, Sister Eileen Joubert, had appealed over the local radio for flowers to brighten the wards for the nurses: The response was overwhelming. The large forecourt of the military hospital was covered in blooms, some of them brought hundreds of kilometres, others carried locally in wheelbarrows. Behind the Wire
And then there is this brave lady ....... Vivian Bullwinkel ......... 18.12.1915 - 3.7.2000 Angell Productions - Vivian Bullwinkel-Statham And let us not forget the one civilian woman (un-named) who chose to remain with her husband, was present when he was butchered nearby and who walked bravely into the water with the nurses .........
