Caught reading the racy bestseller Peyton Place, he was told to read and write a report on Betty Jeffrey's White Coolies (1954). It was a published diary by one of the Australian army nurses who survived imprisonment by the Japanese in Sumatra after the fall of Singapore during World War II.

"I couldn't get it out of my head," Misto, who became a lawyer and writer, said.

But many in officialdom apparently could. After the war, another survivor, Vivien Bulwinkle, who had survived a massacre and who, like many of her fellow nurses, had suffered terribly, was forced to limit her testimony at a war crimes tribunal by authorities embarrassed by their failure to evacuate people from Singapore. The nurses' service and suffering were dismissed by successive Australian governments focused on forging and maintaing trade relations with Japan. The nurses received a pittance in compensation and no pensions and were not permitted to march on Anzac Day. Most of them died as forgotten victims of the war, suffering from PTSD and the physical aftereffects of their privations.

Misto's interest was reawakened in 1994 when he read a short news item about a survivor. He made contact with the woman and from there talked to others.

The result was The Shoe-Horn Sonata, written to help the lobbying efforts to get a memorial for Australian nurses on Anzac Parade. It was first produced at Sydney's Ensemble Theatre in 1995, the 50^th anniversary of the end of World War II, and has continued to have productions mounted.

Misto won the National Play competition and donated his $20,000 prize money to a fund for the Army Nurses Memorial on Anzac Parade.

The Shoe-Horn Sonata been been used as an HSC text and is being mounted in Canberra by Lexi Sekuless Productions.

It is fiction but draws on the true stories of the women as reported in White Coolies and Misto's interviews.

One of the civilians Misto interviewed, Pamela de Neuman, was tortured in Belalau and her mother died there. There were burials just twice a week and de Neuman had to sit with her mother's body and fight off hungry rats.

"Everything I put in the play I learned from the survivors," Misto said.

He left some particularly harrowing stories out as being too much for audiences to bear.

In the play, Sheila (played by Zsuzsi Soboslay) and Bridie (Andrea Close) were two of the women who survived the horrific experience. Soboslay said the character Sheila was 15 when captured, a few years younger than Bridie, one of the nurses.

Fifty years later, they are reunited to take part in a television documentary, which brings a lot of terrible memories to the surface that they discuss on camera and between themselves - including one particular incident that led to a long-time rift.

Soboloslay said she had not known much about the real stories behind the play and was "aghast - really I think it's a terrible history".

She felt traumatised just working on it - her father, who died when she was 11, was also a prisoner of war and never talked about his experiences.

Soboloslay pointed out that while countries like Japan have been criticised for not acknowledging the dark parts of their wartime history, in this case the British and Australian governments were also at fault for their long-time treatment of the nurses.

Jeffrey and Bullwinkel raised funds for a memorial to nurses who had died in Sumatra. The Nurses Memorial Centre, a living memorial to Australian nurses who died in all wars, opened in Melbourne in 1950.

The Australian War Memorial website contains information on the nurses and what befell them and in 1999 unveiled the Australian Service Nurses National Memorial commemorating all Australian nurses who died and suffered in wars since 1899.

Last year, on August 2, the memorial unveiled a sculpture of Lieutenant Colonel Vivian Bullwinkel in its grounds. It's the first sculpture of an individual nurse or woman to be installed there and the closest thing to a memorial for the nurses whose stories are told in The Shoe-Horn Sonata.

None of the nurses from the fall of Singapore lived to see it.

The Shoe-Horn Sonata is on at the Mill Theatre at Dairy Road until April 27. See: milltheatreatdairyroad.com.