White Coolies Audiobook By Betty Jeffrey cover art

White Coolies

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White Coolies

By: Betty Jeffrey
Narrated by: Beverley Dunn
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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.

©1954 Betty Jeffrey. Betty Jeffrey asserts her moral right to be identified as theauthor of this Work. First published by HarperCollinsPublishers in. This audio version produced by arrangement with HarperCollinsPublishers Australia Pty Ltd. (P)1997 Bolinda Publishing Military

Editorial reviews

A harrowing but ultimately inspiring account of Australian Army nurses attacked and imprisoned by the Japanese during World War II. In her dignified and matter-of-fact-voice, Australian actress Beverley Dunn reads a secret diary kept by one of the nurses, Betty Jeffrey, written while imprisoned in the Sumatran jungle. Jeffrey's account of tortures, starvation, murder, and humiliation is hard to hear, although it’s brightened by the courage and perseverance of these brave women, and their determination to find humor and even joy in the bleakest of times.
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I liked the truth exhibited by the women in such horrible situations, their perseverance in such circumstances.

the cruelty of the Japanese

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Uninteresting and boring. Could not get through it.

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