Tree

Embroidery completed in Palembang, Sumatra, depicting a large eucalypt gum tree and surrounding landscape. A number of Australian nurses, including Pat Gunther, survived the sinking of the 'Vyner Brooke' and endured captivity at Palembang and Muntok. The women developed ways of surviving the harsh conditions, and ways of maintaining tenuous links with normality, however remote normality may have been. A silver jam spoon and pair of eyebrow tweezers came to signify the last vestiges of a civilised world. This embroidery was woven from threads pulled from clothing at the prisoner of war camp.