Blog posts on Australian history by David Gormley-O'Brien

The 'Black Armada' - Australian boycott of Dutch ships in 1945

David Gormley-…
Australia’s relationship with Indonesia was transformed during the Second World War. Before 1942, most Australians knew little about the Netherlands East Indies or the realities of Dutch colonial rule. The arrival of thousands of Indonesians in Australia during the war, combined with labour disputes, union activism and growing support for Indonesian independence, brought Australians into direct contact with colonialism and revolution on their doorstep.

Sources for Japanese breakout from Cowra Prisoner of War Camp

David Gormley-…
At 1.50 am on 5 August 1944, almost a thousand Japanese prisoners-of-war interned at No. 12 Prisoner of War Camp, Cowra, NSW, staged a mass breakout. 22 Garrison Battalion was assign as the camp guard. Armed with improvised weapons including baseball bats and sharpened mess knives the Japanese stormed the prison barb-wire fences.

The Bridge jumpers

David Gormley-…
The opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge at the height of the Great Depression in March 1932 was a festive occasion for the young nation. Celebrations were short-lived when the bridge became a popular spot for suicide jumpers. It took nearly two years and almost 50 deaths for the reluctant Government to erect a safety barrier on the bridge's footways.

Vivian Bullwinkel

David Gormley-…
Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole survivor of the massacre of 21 nurses on Bangka Island in World War II. She spent the following three and a half years in Japanese internment camps in Sumatra. She appears in An Attractive Naivety, and in reading her diaries, notebooks, and her testimony at the Tokyo War Crimes Trials in December 1946, I was struck by her extraordinary courage and leadership. Her story is told in my historical novel, An Attractive Naivety.

Australia's first war crime trials

David Gormley-…
Between November 1945 and February 1946, on the island of Morotai, Australia convened some of the first war crimes trials in the Pacific. These tribunals prosecuted Japanese officers and soldiers accused of atrocities against Australian prisoners of war, confronting unique legal and logistical challenges.

Internment of Australian army nurses

David Gormley-…

In An Attractive Naivety, Armistice Darcy, a character inspired by Australian nurse, Betty Jeffrey, is one of 65 Australian army nurses evacuated from Singapore on 12 February 1942, just before its fall, on the SS Vyner Brooke. The following day, Friday the 13th, the ship was attacked by six Japanese bombers and sunk. Of those who made it to shore, 21 were savagely raped and murdered by Japanese soldiers on Radji Beach, Bangka Island. One, Sr Vivian Bullwinkel, miraculously survived the massacre, having been shot through her side, and would live to testify against the perpetrators at the Tokyo trials after the war. Bullwinkel and the other surviving nurses were interned in a small village at Muntok and later transported to jungle POW camps on the island of Sumatra where they endured three and a half years of starvation, disease, ill-treatment and neglect at the hands of their Japanese captors.

The Darcy/Davis family tree

David Gormley-…
An Attractive Naivety and it companion novel, Ashes and Sakura, cover three generations of the Darcy family over a fifty year period. The following is a family tree to aid the reader.