Blog posts by David Gormley-O'Brien

Vivian Bullwinkel was the sole survivor of the massacre of 21 nurses on Bangka Island in World War II. She spent the following 3 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.

Paper given at the Fighting to the finish: Australia in 1945 - Strategy, Victory and Legacy Conference, Melbourne  11 October 2025  Military History and Heritage Victoria based on a topic from my historical novel, Ashes and Sakura

The Diggers' Darling: Australian Owen Submachine Gun

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.

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.

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.

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.