The hospital ship

During WWII in 1943, the hospital ship, Centaur was returning from Sydney to New Guinea when she was torpedoed by the Japanese off Cape Moreton, just to the North of the Tweed.

The ship sank in minutes and there was no time to launch life-boats. 258 lives were lost including Army doctors and nurses, personnel of Field Ambulance and Merchant Navy crews. There were only 64 survivors. After 36 hrs in the shark-infested waters the survivors were rescued by an American ship us USS Mugford.

The Centaur had been appropriately lit and marked to indicate that it was a hospital ship and its sinking was regarded as an atrocity. The Australian Government delivered an official protest to Japan over the incident. The Japanese did not acknowledge responsibility for the incident for many years and the War Crimes Tribunal could not identify the responsible submarine.

Local boy Leslie (Joe) Moss was one of the lives lost in the tragedy. Joe was a corporal and a hospital attendant aboard the ship and described as “the soul of kindness to every sick solider he attended”.

After many years of searching, the wreck of the Centaur was finally located on 20 December 2009, at a depth of over 2000 metres. The wreck will now be protected by the Australian government’s Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976, and will become a memorial to the lives that were lost. You can read more about the wreck of the Centaur on the Australasian Underwater Cultural Heritage Database.

Model of the Centaur

This model of the Centaur was built by Bill Spencer in 2003, well before the wreck was discovered in 2009.

Centaur model. Donated by Bill Spencer. TRM Collection TH2003.321.1