Bangka Island anniversary: Families come together to mark 75 years since nurses killed
Updated
What would Kathleen Neuss have been thinking when she looked out across the ocean from Indonesia's Bangka Island?
As she walked into the water at Radji beach, could the woman from country Inverell in New South Wales hear her heart beating loudly? Or was she calm?
Was she contemplating her life as it was in those short 30 years or was she struck by an unbelievable fear, as we can only imagine she would have been?
As she looked across the horizon, or perhaps to the women standing next to her, she surely longed to be home. Did she cry or was she stoic?
As the machine gun fired out from behind her, did she hear it? Or was she dead before the sound could reach her?
"Kath" Neuss went to war as a nurse in 1941. On February 4 of that year she sailed from Sydney on the Queen Mary to Singapore.
For a young woman who had been trained at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney, it was an exhilarating time but also nerve-racking. It was war after all.
Almost exactly a year later, on the 16th of February 1942, she was killed.
"They were machine-gunned to death; those who weren't immediately killed the Japanese came back and bayoneted," Michael Noyce, Kathleen's nephew told the ABC.
Four days before her death Ms Neuss was among the 65 nurses evacuated during the fall of Singapore on-board the SS Vyner Brooke, which then sank after being bombed by the Japanese.
She was among 22 nurses who drifted at sea and made it ashore on Indonesia's Bangka Island.
Days later they were forced to wade into the ocean by Japanese soldiers and sprayed with bullets from behind.
"No-one knew anything, basically nothing was confirmed until 1945 when the nurses were finally found three weeks after the war finished," Mr Noyce said.
The better known "Bully", or Vivian Bullwinkel, was the only nurse among the group to survive. She died in Perth in 2000.
Victims remembered 75 years later
Some 75 years on Ms Neuss and the other Australian nurses will be remembered on the little-known, 300-metre Radji beach, on Bangka Island near Sumatra, and for the first time a plaque will be erected there.
More than 100 relatives, officials and nurses will attend the ceremony on Thursday.
"It had a devastating effect on our family, not me personally because I was just young then, but on my uncles and aunts," Mr Noyce said.
"It basically killed my grandparents, they both died quite young at 51, 52 years old. Our story is typical of all the families that suffered like this."
For the Bangka Island locals they have their own war stories to tell. Their own hurt and pain.
For now though on a far-away beach they have agreed to care for a plaque for the Australian nurses who died for their country.
"For years and years they tell us fishermen wouldn't fish there again because they said the waters were haunted," Mr Noyce said.
"So this is very, very important to bring closure to a lot of people 75 years later."
Topics: world-war-2, unrest-conflict-and-war, sumatra, australia
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