It was lunchtime on a Sunday and the beach was teeming with life. There were people fishing while children played tag, running around the rusty hulks that litter this foreshore. Under the shade of the trees, families were eating and talking. The main topic of conversation that day, as our Indonesian guide told us later, was what had brought two Westerners to a remote island off the coast of Sumatra, seldom visited by tourists.
We were there, my friend Sarah and I, to research a play we are developing, after reading Ian W Shore’s book about a group of remarkable Australian women. In 2010 we met in Canberra, travelling from Sydney and Melbourne so that we could research the story further in the archives of the Australian War Memorial. We felt enormously privileged to able to read the notes, cards and letters home written by a group of lively expat women, who had left their homes so willingly to serve their country.
On the February 12 1942, 65 Australian nurses left Singapore on SS Vyner Brooke. Out of the 47 ships that fled during those last chaotic days before the Fall of Singapore, only five made it to safety. The rest, including the Vyner Brooke, were bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft. 12 of the nurses were lost at sea while the remaining 53 swam or clung to life rafts. They washed up on various parts of Bangka Island, which by mid-February had been taken over by the Japanese.
What struck us as we approached the old lighthouse near Muntok, which had guided those shipwrecked survivors, was that that the place as described all those years ago was eerily similar to the way it is today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/ex...-Indonesian-island-haunted-by-a-massacre.html
We were there, my friend Sarah and I, to research a play we are developing, after reading Ian W Shore’s book about a group of remarkable Australian women. In 2010 we met in Canberra, travelling from Sydney and Melbourne so that we could research the story further in the archives of the Australian War Memorial. We felt enormously privileged to able to read the notes, cards and letters home written by a group of lively expat women, who had left their homes so willingly to serve their country.
On the February 12 1942, 65 Australian nurses left Singapore on SS Vyner Brooke. Out of the 47 ships that fled during those last chaotic days before the Fall of Singapore, only five made it to safety. The rest, including the Vyner Brooke, were bombed and sunk by Japanese aircraft. 12 of the nurses were lost at sea while the remaining 53 swam or clung to life rafts. They washed up on various parts of Bangka Island, which by mid-February had been taken over by the Japanese.
What struck us as we approached the old lighthouse near Muntok, which had guided those shipwrecked survivors, was that that the place as described all those years ago was eerily similar to the way it is today.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/ex...-Indonesian-island-haunted-by-a-massacre.html