More than 20 years after her death, Broken Hill nurse Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel is set to become the first woman honoured with a statue at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.
Sister Bullwinkel was a nurse who served during World War II before returning home and becoming the nursing director at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital.
The sculpture was commissioned by the memorial council and is set to be built and installed next year.
Australian War Memorial director Matthew Anderson said he was "thrilled" to hear decades after Mrs Bullwinkel's death that she was widely known in Far West NSW and would now receive national recognition.
"Our aim … is to make sure [that for] the million visitors a year that we get through the memorial, Vivian Bullwinkel becomes a household name for them too," he said.
"It's a remarkable story of service [and] ultimately of sacrifice for the 21 other nurses."
Sole survivor of a massacre
Sister Bullwinkel was born in Kapunda, South Australia in 1915 and moved to Broken Hill after her father took a job in the mines.
At the outbreak of World War II, Sister Bullwinkel enlisted in the Australian Army Nurse Service and was posted to the Pacific Theatre.
In February 1942, she and hundreds of others attempted to escape the Japanese advance through Indonesia.
However, the ship she was aboard, the Vyner Brooke, was sunk by an enemy aircraft.
Some of the survivors swam to shore at Radji beach.
About 60 Australian and British soldiers were immediately killed by the Japanese Imperial Army, before 22 nurses were forced into the water and machine-gunned.
Sister Bullwinkel miraculously survived despite being shot in the hip, by feigning death to trick her would-be killers.
Among those killed in the Banka Island massacre was fellow Broken Hill nurse Matron Irene Drummond.
Speaking to the Age newspaper in 1945, Sister Bullwinkel said the atrocity was like something out of a movie.
"As we were thigh deep in the surf they opened murderous fire, mowing us down like a scene I saw in a film as a child," she said.
"Women around me shrieked, stiffened and sank."
She then spent the next 12 days hiding from the Japanese, before being captured and put into a prisoner of war camp.
The lone survivor spent the next three years in captivity, returning home to Australia at the end of the war.
Sister Bullwinkel retired from the army in 1947 as a Lieutenant Colonel.
She was named a Member of the Order of the British Empire in 1973 and and an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993.
Sister Bullwinkel died aged 84 in Perth in July, 2000.
First woman to be honoured
Mr Anderson said the veteran would be the first woman to be commemorated with a statue on the memorial grounds.
"It's pretty elite company really, when you think we only have three other statues: one is for Simpson and his donkey, another is for Sir John Monash and the other is for Weary Dunlop," he said.
"She is going to get the recognition she so richly deserves."
Mr Anderson said wartime nurses should be held alongside soldiers when it came to honouring their service to their country.
'A privilege' to help raise funds
Adjunct Professor Kylie Ward, chief executive of the Australian College of Nursing, was the driving force in fundraising for the cost of producing and installing the new sculpture, something she described as "a privilege".
"This is really important to me … it's a bit of legacy for the profession," she told ABC Radio Canberra.
Ms Ward said the lack of acknowledgement of women's roles and stories meant Australians were missing out on remembering and learning from huge swathes of history.
The statue will feature a series of stainless steel discs to represent each of the nurses killed in combat 80 years ago.
