This Website presents Not Now Tomorrow, Alice M Bowman's true story of The Rabaul Nurses, prisoners of the Second World War following the Japanese invasion of New Guinea in January 1942. Also presented is insight into the disastrous fall of Rabaul and the appalling aftermath of the sinking of the Japanese prison ship Montevideo Maru enroute to Japan.
Tomorrow
The story of this small group of seventeen civilian and army nurses and a New Guinea plantation owner is related by Alice M Bowman, their colleague from the Australian Government Hospital in Rabaul, New Guinea.
AWM Neg. 19146
The nurses were captured and imprisoned with those who could not escape: the greater part of the Australian Battalion and its support units, men of the Royal Australian Navy, Royal Australian Airforce and New Guinea Volunteer Rifles together with the civilian men of Rabaul. The small Australian garrison was overwhelmed by a vastly outnumbered invasion force and their impossible task was valiantly faced in defence of Australia's centre of Administration in New Guinea. The questionable fate of the many unsung heroes of this campaign, who were doomed to die in the hold of a prison ship in July 1942, still haunts the lives of those left to grieve.
On another, unmarked prison ship, the Naruto Maru, the Rabaul Nurses from New Guinea were safely transported to Japan. They were the only Australian nurses to be sent to Japan and held in isolation on the remote Japanese homeland for the duration of the war. Their little known story is told, intimately, for the first time in Not Now Tomorrow.
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Created by Claire Déglon Marriott August 2006
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