page_title: History of nursing
section_title: Australia
hierarchical_section_title: History of nursing / Modern / World War II / Australia
caption_attribution_description: English: Second World War poster featuring the sinking of the Australian hospital ship Centaur in May 1943.
context_page_description: The word "nurse" originally came from the Latin word "nutrire", meaning to suckle, referring to a wet-nurse; only in the late 16th century did it attain its modern meaning of a person who cares for the infirm.
  From the earliest times most cultures produced a stream of nurses dedicated to service on religious principles. Both Christendom and the Muslim World generated a stream of dedicated nurses from their earliest days. In Europe before the foundation of modern nursing, Catholic nuns and the military often provided nursing-like services. It took until the 19th century for nursing to become a secular profession.
context_section_description: In 1942, sixty five front line nurses from the General Hospital Division in British Singapore were ordered aboard the Vyner Brook and Empire Star for evacuation, rather than caring for wounded. The ships were strafed with machine gun fire by Japanese planes. Sisters Vera Torney and Margaret Anderson were awarded medals when they could find nothing else on the crowded deck and covered their patients with their own bodies. A version of this action was honoured in the film Paradise Road. The Vyner Brook was bombed and sank quickly in shallow water of the Sumatra Strait and all but twenty-one were lost at sea, presumed drowned. The remaining nurses swam ashore at Mentok, Sumatra. The twenty-one nurses and some British and Australian troops were marched into the sea and killed with machine gun fire in the Banka Island massacre. Sister Vivian Bullwinkel was the only survivor. She became Australia's premier nursing war hero when she nursed wounded British soldiers in the jungle for three weeks, despite her own flesh wound. She survived on the charity provided by Indonesian locals, but eventually hunger and the privations of hiding in mangrove swamp forced her to surrender. She remained imprisoned for the remainder of the war.
  At around the same time, another group of twelve nurses stationed at the Rabaul mission in New Guinea were captured along with missionaries by invading Japanese troops and interred at their camp for two years. They cared for a number of British, Australian and American wounded. Toward the end of the war, they were transferred to a concentration camp in Kyoto and imprisoned under freezing conditions and forced into hard labour.
caption: Centaur poster
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