The Rabaul Nurses 1945
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Australian  Nurses

Captured in New Guinea

Three separate groups of Australian "women who wore the cape of red" comprise The Rabaul Nurses of New Guinea, captured by the Japanese on the 23rd January 1942.

Following are the nurses listed in alphabetical order and grouped according to their service.

Namanula Hospital
Namanula Hill Rabaul

Traditionally, nurses are known by nicknames, which stem mostly from surnames as you can see from the above: Bowie, Maisie, Mac, Whytie etc.. There are of course exceptions. Jean McLellan, Administration nurse from Namanula Hospital, was very small of stature and was named accordingly, Liklik — Pidgin for little! Pidgin English (as it was known) could not be stamped out when authorities in New Guinea attempted to do so. Instead, as Pidgin, it has become an established language retaining its mix of English and German words and is now the lingua franca of New Guinea — a necessity in a country where 700 dialects are spoken!

With the exception of Mary Goss, all the nurses were single. Mary was married to Tom Goss, a plantation owner and a member of the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles (as were many of his civilian compatriots). Mary had been on the staff at Namanula Hospital before her marriage and subsequently was employed on a casual basis. Mary's husband, Tom, was in company with fellow plantation owners, Vic Pratt, Frank Smith and Albert Smith, as well as C J Thompson from Carpenters Ltd. and Jack Marshall from the Rabaul Administration; this party held out in the jungle at Raniolo Plantation for six months following the Japanese invasion. Two weeks after their surrender, at the end of July, this group of six was executed by the Japanese. There is very limited information of this execution which is known to have taken place. Mary was not to know of her husband's fate until the war was over; the fate of all who perished after the fall of Rabaul was not known until the war was over.

Two more civilians complete this captive group of nineteen women, known collectively as The Rabaul Nurses.

Map of the Territory of New Guinea

Rabaul is seen at the northern tip of the island of New Britain.

One of the civilians interned with the nurses was Mrs Kathleen Bignell (known always as Mrs. Bignell throughout their captivity). During her imprisonment years Mrs Bignell was classified as a Red Cross worker — she had been undertaking this voluntary work before her capture. She was a strong woman of singular determination; a plantation owner who would not leave her home, in December 1941, following the order of compulsory evacuation of all women and children. She had been known as the Heroine of Rabaul in 1937 and subsequently became a recipient of the British Empire Medal. This was for her gallant work during the devastating fallout, in May of that year, from the eruption of Matupi Crater and the unprecedented eruption of an island, Vulcan Island, which gave birth to a new volcano, Vulcan. Rabaul is surrounded by volcanoes and stands precariously on the edge of a crater of an ancient volcano where rumblings and eruptions are frequent happenings!

Mrs Bignell was at least twenty years older than the other nurses. In 1914, as Kathleen Freeman she married Charles Bignell and made her home on his plantation in the Solomon Islands. They had two daughters and one son. Mrs Bignell's daughters were in Australia when the Japanese invaded and her son, Ted, who had enlisted in the New Guinea Volunteer Rifles, was captured by the Japanese. Sadly her daughter Jean, who was expecting her first child at that time, was to lose not only her husband Dudley Roberts (one of the Administration's school-teachers) but also her brother; both men are believed to have been on board the Japanese prison ship Montevideo Maru.

Among her many talents, Mrs Bignell was a writer of beautiful poetry; some inspiring works on her imprisonment years — written in Japan — can be read in Yield Not to the Wind, Mrs Bignell's life story written by her other daughter, Margaret Clarence. This book has interesting chapters on Rabaul, the saga of its fall to the Japanese and the nurses' imprisonment in Japan.

Quoted from Mrs Bignell's poem, The Battle of the Hibachi, in Yield Not to the Wind are some lines about an incident which happened in Japan when the guard they called Basher more than voiced his anger after discovering how the nurses had struggled to keep warm around the cook's fire on a chilly winter's night.

This most frightening experience for "Mac" is depicted in a drawing in Not Now Tomorrow. Mac is Joyce McGahan, Bowie's lifelong friend pictured (standing) with Bowie on the cover of the book.

The second civilian woman to complete the group was Mrs Etta Jones, a gracious American school-teacher who joined the nurses in Japan. Mrs Jones was also a lot older than The Rabaul Nurses, whose ages ranged from 25 to 35. Mrs Jones was taken prisoner and transported from the Aleutian Islands after the execution of her husband, an American meteorologist — another of war's cruel tragedies resulting from the invasion of those islands by the Japanese.

The Rabaul Nurses Manila September 1945
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Pictured, free at last, is a happy group of Rabaul Nurses recuperating in Manila; Bowie is second from the left (waving), standing with her friends from Namanula Hospital, Grace Kruger, Joyce McGahan and Jean McLellan. Grace Kruger, like Mrs Bignell, was also a writer of poetry. As did all the nurses Grace stealthily kept a diary, but with one exception; the exception being that Grace's entire diary was cleverly written in prose.