Bullwinkel thought she was going to die.

The 26-year-old Australian army nurse had escaped the fall of Singapore in February 1942, and had survived the sinking of the SS Vyner Brooke, clinging to a life raft before making it ashore at Radji Beach on Banka Island.

There, 22 Australian nurses and a British civilian woman were forced to wade into the ocean and shot by Japanese soldiers. Bullwinkel was the only survivor.

“The Japanese took out tommy-guns, set up a machine-gun, and ordered us into the sea,” Bullwinkel told reporters after the war.

“There was no mistaking their vicious intentions ... We all knew we were going to die...

“When we were thigh deep in the surf they opened up a murderous fire, mowing us down like a scene I saw in a film as a child.

“The women around me shrieked, stiffened, and sank. I was hit here, in the left side, under the ribs, falling unconscious in the water.

“I can’t swim a stroke, I can’t even float, but somehow I felt my body being washed about in the waves.

“I lay still, partly because something told me I would be killed if I moved, and partly because I did not care anyway.”

Wearing the uniform in which she was shot, Bullwinkel told reporters, “I am sorry I am hazy in parts about all this. I have tried so hard all this time to drive these scenes from my mind.”

When one correspondent began to apologise for asking her to recall the horrors she had experienced during the Second World War, she replied, “No. This story is one that must be told everywhere.”

Bullwinkel spent three and a half years as a prisoner of war in and around Sumatra. She went on to testify at the war crimes tribunal in Tokyo, and dedicated the rest of her life to ensuring the nurses killed at Banka Island were not forgotten.

More than 80 years after the Banka Island massacre, Bullwinkel has been immortalised in a bronze sculpture by Brisbane artist Dr Charles Robb at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra.

Her nephew, John Bullwinkel, was one of three generations of the Bullwinkel family at the dedication ceremony.

“It’s a great honour,” he said. “She wasn’t one to hog the limelight ... She was humble. She was compassionate. And she was very self-effacing. She was always trying to help people ... and she was very loyal, and very loyal to her colleagues, in particular.”

Bullwinkel’s sculpture now stands in the grounds of the Memorial, opposite a sculpture of her friend, wartime surgeon and fellow prisoner of war, Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop.

On the base are 22 stainless steel discs, representing the victims of the Banka Island massacre. They are arranged on the base of the sculpture as a reflection of the stars that would have been visible in the night sky on 16 February 1942.

For her nephew John, it’s particularly poignant.

“We’re very proud that she’s being remembered, together with the other girls who died on the beach,” he said. “I think she would have appreciated that. For her, it was always to do with her comradeship, loyalty, and compassion, and not wanting them to be forgotten.”