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Welcome to Nihil Alienum: books and blogs by David Gormley-O'Brien

An Attractive Naivety

Sister 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 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.

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.