For three and a half years, Sister Viv was a prisoner of war in a series of brutal Japanese camps where she helped other inmates survive the horror. When peace was restored, she went on to become a giant of Australian nursing, and was a key drive of Operation Babylife, the mass rescue of young orphans during the Vietnam War.
Growing up in Broken Hill, New south Wales, Vivian started work at a local hospital and joined the Australian Army Nursing Service in World War II. When the Japanese attacked Singapore in 1942, she and sixty-four other nurses were ordered to evacuate, but soon their ship was bombed by enemy aircraft. Some of the women drowned, but Viv made it to Radji Beach on Bangka Island, off Sumatra, with twenty-one of her nursing colleagues. There, Japanese soldiers forced the women to wade back into the sea, and as Vivian felt a bullet slam into her back, she fell face down into the water then waited to die as the soldiers bayonetted survivors. Somehow Vivian lived, and this is her story
