Word of the day

Fling-brand – one who takes pleasure in breeding dissent and argument, purely for the sake of it.

Sowell says

When people are confronted with a choice between hating themselves for their stagnation or hating others for their progress, they seldom hate themselves.

— Thomas Sowell Quotes (@ThomasSowell) May 10, 2024

Woman of the day

Betty Jeffrey is the woman of the day:

Woman of the Day Australian Army nursing sister Betty Jeffrey born OTD 1908 in Hobart, captured by the Japanese as a prisoner of war in 1942 after they sank a ship crammed with women and children evacuees from Singapore.

This is not an easy read.

A former secretary, Betty took up nursing when she was 29 and graduated in 1940. She immediately joined the army and arrived in Singapore in February 1941 with the 2/10th Australian General Hospital unit. Twelve months later, days after Singapore fell, she was one of 65 Australian Army nursing sisters evacuated on the Vyner Brooke. They didn’t want to leave.

“Our refusal was useless. We were ordered to leave and had to walk out on those superb fellows. All needed attention…I have never felt worse about anything. This was the work we had gone overseas to do.”

The Viner Brooke was a cargo ship with capacity for 47 crew and 12 passengers. One of the last evacuee ships leaving Singapore, 181 passengers – mostly women and children – were crammed aboard.

It was bombed near Banka Island. Twelve Australian nurses died, 53 scrambled ashore, 21 were murdered on the beach; the remaining 32, including Betty who spent three days in the water, were captured.

The nurses were held as POWs at various camps on Sumatra for nearly four years along with British and Dutch women teachers and missionaries. Conditions were appalling: bug-infested rice (one tablespoon of boiled rice each per day), rotten vegetables, plus a tiny pannikin of foetid water as the daily diet yet they were made to walk for hours to fetch clean water for the guards’ sweet potato crops.

Most of the nurses had only the clothes they stood up in. No shoes; they’d taken those off before diving off the Viner Brooke. For punishment, they were made to stand for long periods in the blistering sun. At great personal risk, Betty kept a secret diary and she recorded it all. She took her life in her hands – the Japanese confiscated and destroyed all records such as birth or marriage certificates, lists of names, anything written.

They even removed the hands from the women’s watches so they couldn’t tell the time. The only reliable indicator of time passing was the rigid, monotonous camp regime with its calls of Tenkō (転向, literally changing direction, meaning coerced ideological conversion), used as a roll call requiring the women to bow in obeisance to the Japanese emperor.

Betty’s diary was written in two exercise books she managed to steal from the Japanese. She hid it for weeks and months at a time, sewn into her pillowcase. She also drew sketches of camp life: carrying water, chopping wood.

She nursed women as best she could with no resources – those Red Cross parcels containing food and medical supplies were withheld from the POWs – and dug their graves when they died. Eight of her nursing colleagues were among those who didn’t survive. She fought off animals trying to dig up the remains and reburied her friends. She defied her captors, stealing from them and mocking them when forced to bow at Tenkō.

“We are…praying for our freedom. If this doesn’t happen soon, we shall be a mess for the rest of our lives.”

When Betty was moved to Palembang, another POW camp in Sumatra, she drew a sketch of waving hands and barbed wire. From House Two, they could see their male relatives in the men’s camp. On Christmas Day 1942, the women sang “Oh come, all ye faithful” for the men and waved hankies and hats till they heard a faint “thank you”.

Two days later, the men sang the same song to the women. Everyone cried.

They were liberated late in 1945 by a rescue mission headed by a South African major. Betty weighed four stone and four pounds (30 kilos) and had severe tuberculosis. She was in hospital for two years.

After release, she learnt that mail and Red Cross parcels had been withheld and locally supplied fresh food had been left to rot in the sun and rain. It took years before she could view her captors with any equanimity.

“You forget nothing, not a thing, from years like those.”

Betty and another Banka Island survivor, Lt Col Vivian Bullwinkel, raised £78k for a memorial to the Australian nurses who died during WW2 and opened the Nurses Memorial Centre in Melbourne in 1949. Betty’s diary and sketches were the basis of her memoir White Coolies published in 1954 and dramatised in the 1997 film Paradise Road.

Correct order & council order

There’s the correct order for doing road works then there’s the council order of works:

• Paint lines
• Tar seal
• Dig up road to lay pipes

That is supposed to be a joke but in Wellington it’s an expensive mistake:

An accidentally released memo has revealed at least $5.2 million of “must do” pipework lies beneath $55m worth of new Thorndon Quay bus lanes and cycleways – which could be ripped up if regular leaks persist.

For business owners, who had a new water leak on Tuesday and have seen dramatic pipe failures erupt drinking water on to the street, it is a further blow as they endure months of disruption while a $54.8m bus and cycleway gets put down the stretch. . .

Comical incompetence as Wellington Council might have to dig up brand new $55 million bus lanes and cycleways

A memo accidentally released by Wellington City Council shows at least $5.2 million of pipes needing urgent repair have just been covered up by $55 million of brand new…

— New Zealand Taxpayers' Union (@TaxpayersUnion) May 14, 2024