Australian nurse pows: Gender, war and captivity

Abstract

In World War II, thirty‐eight members of the Australian Army Nursing Service were taken prisoner by the Japanese Imperial Forces. This article focuses on nurse prisoners of war as women whose wartime experiences confounded symbolic understandings about appropriate gender roles in wartime. It also examines the nurses’ position as white women held captive by racial others outside the nation's borders. These tensions over gender, race and nation in wartime captivity are explored in three main sites: print media representations of the nurses’ release, POW nurses’ subjectivity and commemorative activity. POW nurses’ own testimony and activism undermined media representations of feminine vulnerability, but paradoxically reified rather than challenged the centrality of Anzac mythology in narratives of Australians at war.