Vivian Bullwinkel's Dress

In the Australian War Memorial, an innocuous grey dress hangs in one of the display cabinets. It belonged to Vivian Bullwinkel, who was known as the sole survivor of the Bangka Island massacre on 16 February 1942. On that day, on an island off the coast of Sumatra, Bullwinkel was one of a group of nurses ordered by a Japanese battalion to form a line along the beach and walk towards the sea.

The dress is suspended in space and time. Its emptiness allows us to imagine the uniform filled out by the bodies of other nurses who were not able to tell their story. The wall label beside it directs readers to the small hole above the waist-band on the left-hand side. This is where the bullet intended to kill Staff Nurse Bullwinkel made a clean exit from her body. The dress is at once an emblem of sacrifice and evidence that what Vivian Bullwinkel said about the Bangka Island massacre is true.

But is it? Bullwinkel always denied that she or the other nurses who had been killed had also been subjected to sexual violence. Vivian Bullwinkel's Dress takes another look at the evidence of the massacre and other threatening incidents, to understand why women born a century ago were more inclined to say 'not me', rather than 'me too'.