Georgina Banks joins ABC’s Compass to reveal the story of 21 nurses killed in WWII
- 4 days ago
- 2 min read
Ethinvest client Georgina Banks and her daughters travelled to Bangka, Indonesia with ABC’s Compass to uncover what happened to her great aunt, one of the 21 Australian World War II nurses murdered by Japanese soldiers in 1942.
Banks travelled to the island to learn more about her great-aunt, Army nurse Dorothy “Bud” Elmes, who was among the women killed on Radji Beach after surviving the sinking of the Vyner Brooke, considered one of the worst atrocities against Australians during the war.
Her search began as a personal effort to understand Bud’s final days but grew into a wider examination of what official accounts omitted about the nurses’ experiences before their deaths.
Working with historians, military experts and relatives of the victims, Banks challenged the official wartime narrative and pressed for fuller recognition of evidence that the women were sexually assaulted by Japanese troops before they were killed.
The Compass story follows Banks and other descendants as they return to the beach, cast flowers into the sea and honour the nurses not only as victims of the war, but as courageous women whose experiences were long constrained by the perception that the reality of the violence they endured would be too difficult for their families.
Through her determination to “turn over every stone,” Banks has helped bring a difficult chapter of Australian military history into public view and ensure that Bud and her fellow nurses are remembered with greater understanding and dignity.
“It's easy to forget that she [Bud Elmes] served and she nursed on that beach because we mainly talk about the end of her life as opposed to what she did," Georgina’s daughter Freddie said on Compass. “When you suppress a truth or kind of censor a truth, it just exacerbates the pain and spreads it across the generations.”
You can watch the full Compass story via ABC iview.
