Blog posts by David Gormley-O'Brien

Crowds at southern side of Sydney Harbour Bridge on opening day
The Bridge jumpers
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.
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Vivian Bullwinkel at Tokyo War Crimes Trials
Vivian Bullwinkel
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.
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asdas
Australia's first war crime trials
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.
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Evelyn Owen with an Owen Gun
The Diggers' Darling
In Ashes and Sakura the Australian troops in Borneo and later in the occupation of Japan were sometimes depicted carrying Owen submachine guns. Not as famous as the British Sten gun or the American Tommy gun, the Australian Owen submachine gun was superior to both and the story of how it came into being is fascinating.
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Wool Arch - Federation 1901
Aboriginals in the Australian Constitution

Why were aboriginal natives not to be counted for constitutional purposes (section 127)?

Chapter 3 of An Attractive Naivety highlights the excitement in Sydney on New Year's Day, 1901, when people from all over New South Wales, and indeed from the other colonies and other parts of the world, came together to celebrate the birth of a new nation. It was a coming of age, where Australia would take up its place on the world stage. Its people would be both Australian and British.

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Group portrait of the nursing staff of 2/13 AGH c. 1941/2
Australian army nurses prisoners

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.

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The Darcy family tree
The Darcy/Davis family tree
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.
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