The Extraordinary Nursing Career of Vivian Bullwinkel

Vivian Bullwinkel was, without a doubt, one of the most influential Australian nurses of the 20th century. She was a true carer, a born leader, and a passionate believer in the importance of advancing nursing education in Australia. Vivian Bullwinkel's nursing career was highly successful and productive and her extraordinary dedication to her profession and her boundless energy led her to fill her spare time with countless extracurricular nursing commitments. Her contribution to Australian nursing is incalculable. Even if she were not famous for her wartime experiences, she would still be remembered as one of the nursing profession's luminaries.

After completing her training, she moved to the small country town of Hamilton in Victoria and worked as a Staff Nurse at the Kiaora Private Hospital. She then moved to Melbourne and worked at Guildford Private Hospital and then in the Jessie McPherson wing of the Queen Victoria Hospital.

War broke out in Europe in 1939 and Vivian felt it was important that the people who were prepared to go and die for their country should get the best nursing care possible. She knew that her training had been very good and believed she could help. Vivian enlisted in 1940 and in early 1941 she was sent to Puckapunyal Army base in Victoria for basic training. She had high hopes of being deployed to the Middle East where she knew that nurses were desperately needed. So when she learnt that she was being sent to Singapore she was disappointed. The Pacific war had not yet started and she felt she would be of more use elsewhere.

The voyage to Singapore was a busy one. The nurses spent most of their their time on board ship attending lectures on the types of tropical diseases they were likely to encounter in Malaya.

When Vivian arrived in Singapore with the 2/13th Australian General Hospital in September of 1941, she found she was needed there after all. Several battalions of Australian troops were stationed in the region and a malaria epidemic was taking place. The 2/13th were stationed at St Patrick's Boys School which had been commandeered by the army and converted into a hospital.

Soon after she arrived, Vivian was detached to join the 2/10th AGH in Malacca further up the Malay peninsula. They were there to service the medical needs the infantry units stationed nearby. Malaria, skin disease and broken bones were the main ailments. Part of Vivian's role was to learn as much as she could about tropical diseases and blood bank processes so she could pass on her knowledge to the 2/13th AGH when she rejoined them.

When Vivian rejoined the 2/13th AGH in Singapore, she found her workload increased and there was the additional strain of constant air raid drills. The 2/13th was then moved to a new makeshift hospital in Johore Baru, across the causeway from Singapore, and Vivian was appointed the Sister in Charge of a malarial ward. The wards had no running water or electricity and the nurses' living quarters were a row of tents. The nurses spent a month working 16 hour days while they got the hospital into shape.

When the Japanese attacked Malaya on 8 December 1941, Vivian found herself thrown into war nursing. A never ending stream wounded soldiers came through the hospital and the operating theatre ran day and night. The nurses worked under constant aerial bombardment for two months. They were ordered to wear steel helmets at all times. During the frequent air raids, the nurses were to help their patients get to the air raid slits outside or, if they were too ill to be moved, they were to put the patients under their beds. Only then would the nurses themselves take cover.

On the 25th of January the 2/13th AGH moved back to Singapore as the Japanese approached the island. Vivian was worked to near exhaustion during this time. The hospital overflowed and nearby buildings and chapels were converted into makeshift wards. A bomb crashed through the roof of the hospital and exploded in a ward but miraculously no-one was hurt.

When Vivian was evacuated from Singapore she still considered herself a nurse with responsibilities. On board the Vyner Brooke the nurses organised an evacuation plan in case of attack. If the ship went down, they would get the wounded to the lifeboats first and then help the rest of the passengers to abandon ship. There were not enough life boats for everyone so, once the civilians had gone, the nurses would leap into the sea and rely on their life belts to keep them afloat (as Vivian and several of her colleagues could not swim). This plan was put into action when their ship was sunk two days later.

After the massacre on Radji beach Vivian nursed the only other survivor - Private Kinsley, a severely wounded British soldier. When his ship had been sunk, part of his arm had been sliced off exposing the bone and he had multiple bayonet wounds inflicted by the Japanese. The early signs of infection were already present and Vivian knew he required extensive surgery if he was to live. As they hid in the jungle for 12 long days she did her best to care for him. Lacking even the most basic field dressing kit, Vivian bathed his wounds using water from a nearby stream and made dressings out of coconut fibres. She found some life belts on the beach which she used as pillows to make him comfortable. It was not until she had finished with Kinsley's initial care that she dressed the bullet wound in her own side.

Faced with starvation, Vivian decide that they had no choice but to surrender to the Japanese. They were taken to join the other nurses at the POW camp in Muntok where Private Kinsley died several days later.

After she had been reunited with her friends, Vivian kept nursing. The nurses formed district nursing teams and went around the camp visiting the sick and doing what they could for them - despite an almost complete lack of medicines. When they were not nursing they kept themselves busy organising the camp and working at solving the camp's considerable sanitation problems before they caused serious disease.

A hospital was created out of one of the huts which was run by Dutch nuns. The nuns were assisted by the Australian nurses who looked after the hospital patients while continuing their district nursing rounds. To treat the dysentery that was rife in the camp, the nurses pounded the embers of the fire into a charcoal which they gave to their patients and they boiled the bark of a tree to treat beri beri. The nurses knew these local remedies had little effect but they felt it was important to give their patients the feeling that something was being done.

Their meager rations grew scarcer as the war progressed. The nurses would often share their own small portions of food with their patients. If they could not save their patients, they made sure that no woman died on her own and would guard the corpses from rats until they could be buried. Eventually, malnutrition and illness began to exact a toll and during the final months of the war large numbers of the women in the camp died. Among them were eight of Vivian's fellow nursing sisters.

After the war had ended and the nurses had been liberated, Vivian returned to Australia and recuperated for several months. In early 1946 she resumed her nursing career and was given a post as a Sister in Charge at the Heidelberg Military Hospital (1,200 beds). Her patients were returned servicemen who were suffering from war injuries and illnesses. During her time there she worked in the tuberculosis ward and was a particular favourite with the soldiers.

In the late 1940s, she became heavily involved with the fund raising effort to create a living memorial for the nurses who had died in the war. Vivian and Betty Jeffrey, a fellow nurse POW, toured around Victoria in Betty's little car visiting the country hospitals and making speeches. Eventually the nurses raised enough money to buy a property on St Kilda Road in Melbourne. It became The Nurses Memorial Centre and was (and still is) a resource for the nursing profession. Vivian would remain involved in the Centre for the rest of her life and served as the Centre's Vice-President from 1969-1978

In May 1947, Vivian was awarded the Florence Nightingale Medal for distinguished service in time of war. Other awards she would be given throughout her life were the Order of Australia, an MBE, and she was made an Associate of the Royal Red Cross.

In 1949, Vivian resigned from the army and continued her career as a civilian nurse. She retained her position at the hospital which had now become the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital and was transferred to the hospital's blood bank.

In 1950, she traveled to England with Betty Jeffrey. They were able to obtain positions at St Mary's Hospital in Paddington. Vivian later was employed as a sister-receptionist at the Department of Immigration at Australia House. They spent two years working in England but the highlight of their trip was being invited to tea with the Queen Mother who was eager to hear about their war experiences.

On returning to Australia, in 1953 she resumed her position at the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital and in 1955 she became the Assistant Matron. At the same time she was offered the position of Lieutenant-Colonel in the Citizen Military Forces. She accepted and became the Commanding Officer of 3 Royal Australian Army Nursing Corps, Southern Command. In 1959, Vivian completed a Diploma in Nursing Administration and was appointed Matron of Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital in Melbourne. She was to remain there for the rest of her career.

Fairfield was Australia's only dedicated infectious diseases hospital and during her time there Vivian dealt with scarlet fever, diphtheria, the polio and Murray River encephalitis epidemics and countless other infectious diseases.

Under Vivian's leadership, Fairfield became a teaching hospital for Monash and Melbourne universities. She was a firm believer in the importance of quality and ongoing nursing education and encouraged her staff to undertake tertiary studies.

The development of the nursing profession was very important to Vivian. She became heavily involved in nursing politics and was a major player in the fight to have nursing education moved to the tertiary sector. Vivian used her high profile in Australia to help fight the antiquated public conception of nurses.

Vivian used Fairfield as an example for increasing the educational standards of nurses. In 1964 she established the Nurse's Aide School at Fairfield which was recognised and accredited by the Victorian Nursing Federation. Graduates could then go on and do a post-basic course followed by a fever course. Once they had these qualifications, the nursing aides were the equivalent of a second-year general nursing student and were invaluable in making up staff numbers on the wards (during the critical nursing shortage that existed at the time). The success of the school silenced many of Vivian's critics.

In 1973-1974, Vivian served as the President of the Royal College of Nursing Australia. She would later become the Vice President of the Victorian State Committee of the RCNA.

Her other extracurricular nursing activities included a 1964-69 stint as Deputy Commandant and Nursing Advisor to the Australian Red Cross; she was a member of the Executive Committee of the Association of Directors of Nursing (VIC); and the was the Nurses Representative on the Nurses Wages Board (VIC).

One evening in April 1975, Vivian was ordered to assemble a team to fly to Saigon the next day to evacuate 100 Vietnamese war orphans. She was determined to lead the team herself as she felt that she had experience that could be of some value.

Two weeks later they finally to flew to Saigon. When they landed, the city was surrounded by the North Vietnamese and was just days from capitulation. They found the 80 orphans they were to evacuate packed into cardboard boxes. The orphans, ranging in age from babies to toddlers, were in a pitiable condition and were suffering from malnourishment and were suffering from intestinal infection, salmonella, shigella, intestinal parasitic infection, pediculi skin infection, boils, abscesses, scabies and a variety of rashes. They placed the most severely dehydrated children on I.V. fluids and flew them back to Australia aboard a QANTAS plane that had been hastily converted into makeshift hospital. They kept the sick and traumatised children at Fairfield for several months and during that time the nurses became very attached to them. When the children left to join their new adoptive families, Vivian kept in contact with many of them over the years.

After she retired and had married and moved to Perth, Vivian remained busy and active. She became involved with the Army Wives Association, Returned Sisters, Military Museum, Red Cross, Royal Humane Society, State War Memorial, and the Naval, Military and Airforces Club of WA. From 1980 to 1995 she served as the Chairperson for the Women's Auxiliary Group of the Hollywood Repatriation Hospital in Perth.