Sisters Behind the Wire: Reappraising Australian Military Nursing and Internment in the Pacific during World War II

Abstract

During the Second World War, approximately 3,500 Australian military nurses served in combat regions throughout the world. The vast majority were enlisted in the Australian Army Nursing Service (AANS), but after the Japanese advance and the fall of Hong Kong (December 1941) and Singapore (February 1942), a significant number of these nurses spent three-and-a-half years as POWs in Indonesia, Hong Kong, Japan and the Philippines. To date, considerable research has been undertaken on POW experiences in Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand and Japan, albeit primarily focused on the testimonies of men and civilian women. This body of research utilises various methodologies, from Yuki Tanaka and Kei Ushimura's efforts to reconcile Japanese war crimes with the corruption of the Bushido ethic and sexual violence in contemporary Japanese society, to Christina Twomey's work on the imprisonment and repatriation of Dutch, Dutch–Eurasian and Australian civilian women and children. In the past fifteen years, historians have become aware of the need to recognise the multiplicity of these experiences, rather than continuing to focus on individual community, camp or regional case studies. Nurses are by no means absent from the discussion, although the majority of notable works on this subject focus on Hong Kong or the Philippines and adopt a descriptive and somewhat anecdotal approach. At the same time, scant critical attention has been paid to the internment of nurses in Indonesia despite a wealth of material kept in the Australian War Memorial (AWM) and National Archives of Australia (NAA).