'My grandmother never mentioned her sister’s name. Then I received a surprising invitation.'

The following is an edited extract from Back to Bangka by Georgina Banks, published by Penguin. 

It was November 2016 and I was ignorant of the iconic history buried in my family. 

Out of the blue, I had received an invitation to the seventy-fifth memorial service for my grandmother’s little sister ‘Bud’ Elmes. 

The service was to be held on the actual beach, on Bangka Island, Indonesia, where she and 21 unarmed Australian army nurses had been massacred in WWII by Japanese soldiers. Vivian Bullwinkel was the only survivor. 

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I accepted, mainly out of curiosity, but something else too that I did not understand. Little did I know the depths to which I would go to speak up on her behalf. How I would grapple with partial truths and allegations of censored war crimes.

I learnt in to the photo on the screen and took a closer look. Bud was handsome, chestnut hair pulled back in a bun. Her eyebrows arched up, as if to challenge, are you up for it? 

I wanted to reach back in time, through the computer, like a portal, say, ‘Hello, Bud.’ 

The shot registered as familiar. Had I seen it before at my grandmother’s home? It shocked me, though, when I realised, I had never heard my grandmother mention her sister Bud’s name. Not once.

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Not long before my trip, my aunt Sally came over and gave me Bud’s letters. Previously housed in a rattan box, they were now filed in a cardboard folder with white stickers lining its spine to cover up the previous contents. Sally seemed relieved as she handed me this most precious of gifts. 

'I’ll look after them,' I promised, wondering what I was accepting. Was this a passing of the baton?

‘She was a real character,’ Sally said, ‘used all these kooky nicknames.’

Later that night I retrieved the letters and laid them on the dining room table. Alert with anticipation, I rubbed the tips of my fingers to make sure they were dry. 

The yellowing pages revealed a country girl from Cheshunt, Victoria with a sassy sense of humour. ‘Dear Old Nifty’, the first one started – Bud didn’t disappoint. By the time I read the telegram to Bud’s parents from the Red Cross it was one in the morning. ‘It is with deepest regret that we heard your daughter Nurse G. Elmes, is now officially believed to have been killed on or after the 11th of February 1942.’

It was enough to stop your heart from beating.

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I attended the 75th memorial service, stood on the sand where Bud and the nurses were killed, and laid a wreath of chrysanthemums in the sea wet with the tears of generations of my family. 

Family business was done now: memorialising and retracing. 

The trip to the beach. 

But, on returning home I was faced with allegations of darker truths in the media; of sexual and violent crimes, and that they had been airbrushed from history. 

Had Bud and these courageous women’s full experience been erased? I searched desperately for answers. 

In a few weeks’ time the Vivian Bullwinkel statue will be unveiled at the Australian War Memorial. The rippling surface at the base of the statue has silver discs inlaid to reflect the nurses killed, in a poetic tribute.

As part of the yearly commemorations on Bangka Island, we have enshrined ‘the Walk for Humanity’ as an act of positive defiance, to say that brutality won’t have the last word on Radji Beach. 

But justice for Bud and the nurses requires telling their full story, not just the sanitised version. 

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Part historical detective story, part re-enactment that straddles both past and present, Back to Bangka by Georgina Banks is a deeply moving intergenerational family story that throws a spotlight on women in wartime – in their vulnerability and profound strength.

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