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An account of the true story which inspired the film Paradise Road

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 Singpaore. 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 amid deprivation and the harshest of conditions. The women's ingenious and entertaining attempts to make their lot more tolerable, and their comradeship as they suffered so much anguish, display their incredible endurance and strength in the face of adversity.

About the Author

Betty Jeffrey was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia in 1987.