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This working life
The heroic feats of Australian war nurse Sister Vivian Bullwinkel are being honoured with the establishment of a palliative care professorship in her name, writes Christine Giles.
Australia's World War Two heroine Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was not meant to survive the horrors of war.
Her life should have ended - as it did for many of her Australian Army Nursing Service colleagues - with the bombing and the sinking of the ship on which she was evacuated from Singapore in 1942, or with the Japanese gunfire that killed other nurses who struggled to shore with Sister Bullwinkel and left her wounded and feigning death in shallow waters off Banka Island, now part of Indonesia.
But by surviving against all odds and enduring more than three years of failing health as a prisoner of war tending the needs of fellow prisoners, she understood better than most the medical and emotional plight of the sick and dying.
It is now a year since the nation mourned the...