Jon Sullivan (Longman, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the torpedoing and sinking during World War II of the Australian Hospital Ship Centaur, with a terrible loss of life. At 4.10 am on 14 May 1943, Centaur was struck by a single torpedo fired by an enemy submarine. The location of the torpedo strike could not have been more calamitous. Within seconds, diesel oil bunkers had vaporised and exploded and the Centaur was doomed. She sank within three minutes—the time taken, as one commentator pointed out, to boil an egg. Two hundred and sixty people lost their lives in horrible circumstances: doctors, nurses, medical staff, civilian Red Cross representatives, field ambulance and attached personnel, and merchant marines—all of them noncombatants; all of them supposedly protected by the conventions rendering hospital ships immune from attack. Sixty-four survivors—including one nurse, Sister Ellen Savage—then endured 34 hours adrift on rafts and makeshift flotation before they were discovered and rescued and the loss of the Centaur became known to authorities.

We may never know the reasons for the attack on the Centaur. She was properly marked; her status had been acknowledged by the Axis powers; she was steaming north to Port Moresby fully lit, as was required. There was of course a great deal of speculation—reprisal for the machine-gun attacks by American forces on Japanese who had survived their ship sinking; rumours at the time that the Centaur was carrying arms and munitions in breach of the convention; an overzealous submarine commander ignoring the immunity of hospital ships; the existence of an order to Japanese submarine fleet commanders implicitly including hospital ships as fair targets; or a simple failure to properly identify the ship before firing the torpedo. Whatever the reason, the families of those whose lives were lost are owed the same considerations given to the families of those gallant men who died aboard HMAS Sydney.

When giving the Anzac Day address at Toorbul in my electorate this year, I called for the government to undertake to locate the Centaura task I noted would be easier than the search for the Sydney. Today I repeat that call. I know that the 2nd/3rd AHS Centaur Association Inc. has written to the Prime Minister, as I have done. I will shortly meet with Heritage Minister Garrett, whose department makes the initial assessment and recommendation to cabinet on these matters, in order to progress an official application for a search to be undertaken. It is time this chapter in our wartime history is brought to a proper conclusion.