Blog posts
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.
Australian army nurses prisoners of Japanese forces in the Dutch East Indies
In An Attractive Naivety, Armistice Darcy 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.
The Darcy family tree for An Attractive Naivety
An Attractive Naivety covers three generations of the Darcy family over a fifty year period. The following is a family tree to aid the reader of the novel.
