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The sinking of the AHS Centaur off the south Queensland coast on 14 May 1943 shocked Australians profoundly and prompted an outpouring of outrage, grief and mourning. The loss of 11 Australian Army Nursing Centre (AANS) nurses became an immediate focus of attention, and in late May 1943 a fund was established in their memory in Melbourne. The fund’s object was to raise £5,000 to enable a trained nurse to take a two-year Diploma of Administration at the Royal College of Nursing in London. At this time, no postgraduate nursing courses were available in Australia. By August 1956 the fund, which had become known as the Centaur War Nurses Memorial Trust, had raised close to £18,000 and had sent eight Centaur Scholars to London.

Among the driving forces behind the fund were Edith Hughes-Jones, matron and owner of Windermere Private Hospital in Prahran, Melbourne, and Colonel Annie Sage, matron-in-chief of the AANS. Ms Hughes-Jones and Colonel Sage would later be instrumental in establishing the War Nurses’ Memorial Centre (today known as the Australian Nurses Memorial Centre) in Melbourne, which opened on 14 May 1949 – the sixth anniversary of the Centaur’s sinking – as a ‘living memorial’ to all service nurses who died during the Second World War.

On the same date, Centaur House opened in Brisbane. A year earlier, in January 1948, the Welfare and Social Committee of the Australasian Trained Nurses’ Association (Queensland), with a similar vision to that of Ms Hughes-Jones and Colonel Sage in Melbourne, had launched an appeal to raise £65,000 to acquire a building to be used as a residential, recreational, educational and social centre for nurses. The building would be “a memorial to the brave women of the nursing service and particularly those who suffered the hardships of the two world wars” and would “take the form of a building to be a central meeting place for all associated with the nursing profession.”

By October 1948 £57,000 had been raised, and Exton House in Brisbane city was bought. It was renamed Centaur House, and just enough of the building was refurbished in time for an opening on 14 May 1949, since the previous year designated Centaur Day. Nell Savage, the only AANS nurse to survive the sinking of the Centaur, was the first to sign the visitors’ book.

Plans for similar ‘living memorials’ had also been initiated in Sydney and Perth, while in Adelaide the South Australian War Nurses’ Memorial Fund was aiming for a simple memorial.

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Sources

• Milligan, C. and Foley, J. (1993), Australian Hospital Ship Centaur: The Myth of Immunity, Nairana Publications.
• State Library of Queensland, John Oxley Library, ‘Centaur Memorial Fund for Nurses Records’ (Meyers, L. and Grehan, M., 24 Aug 2018).
• State Library of Queensland, John Oxley Library, ‘Centaur House, Queen St, Brisbane: A Memorial Edifice to Queensland’s Nurses in Two World Wars’ (Grehan, M., 14 May 2020).