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White Coolies

by Betty Jeffrey

Narrator Beverley Dunn

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Length 7 hours 53 minutes

Language English

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Summary
About the author
About the narrator

It is October 1942. From the doorway of this small three-roomed cottage, which houses thirty-two of us, we look out beyond to a steaming jungle in Sumatra. In 1942 a group of sixty-five Australian Army nursing sisters was evacuated from Malaya a few days before the fall of Singapore. Two days later their ship was bombed and sunk by the Japanese. Of the fifty-three survivors who scrambled ashore, twenty-one were murdered and the remaining thirty-two taken prisoner. White Coolies is the engrossing record kept by one of the sisters, Betty Jeffrey, during the more than three gruelling years of imprisonment that followed. It is an amazing story of survival and deprivation and the harshest of conditions.

Children's History Art Nonfiction

Betty Jeffrey (1908–2000) trained as a nurse at the Alfred Hospital in Melbourne from 1937 to 1939. In September 1941 she joined the Australian Army Nursing Service and was posted to the 2/10th Australian General Hospital, then in Malacca, Malaya. Evacuated to Singapore, Betty's group of nurses were captured by the Japanese and began life as prisoners of war. Throughout her captivity, Betty kept a diary hidden from the Japanese, which became the book White Coolies. After 1947 Betty campaigned to raise funds to establish a nurses' memorial centre in Melbourne, and became the centre's first administrator in 1949. Betty Jeffrey was awarded the Order of Australia for services to ex-servicemen and women in 1987.

Beverley Dunn is one of Australia's most distinguished actresses. Her acclaimed work in theatre, television, radio and film has taken her all over Australia and overseas. Among her many television credits are two years in The Flying Doctors, and she also toured Australia for hit stage productions of Hotel Sorrento and A Happy and Holy Occasion, which won her a Green Room Award in 1993. She was also the narrator of White Eye by Blanche d'Alpuget, the 1994 TDK Australian Audio Book of the Year, and White Coolies by Betty Jeffrey, which was shortlisted at the Audie awards and won the Golden Ears award.