The pathos of Nurse Savage

By Rhonda Dredge

Pathos is defined as pity shared between friends. It can be used in an artistic sense to make tragedies less horrifying by focusing on small details or moments in a story.

An exhibition mounted at the Shrine of Remembrance in July was prompted by footage of a 60-year-old nurse’s shoe on the ocean floor.

The eerie footage of the shoe and a torpedoed hospital ship appeared on the news in 2009.

Melbourne artist Dean Bowen was watching, and he began doing charcoal drawings, not of the underwater remains, but of the incident that led to the sinking.

The result is an exhibition Dean Bowen’s Imagining Centaur, including drawings and an animation, that demonstrates the power of a story to sweep up all those who come in touch with it.

The star of Bowen’s telling of the tragic sinking of the Centaur in 1943 by the Japanese is Sister Savage, the sole surviving nurse from the ship who had just a seawater salve to administer to those left floating in the ocean beside her.

The Shrine commonly commemorates battles with historical exhibits of uniforms, photographs and testaments but this exhibition is different.

It is a survivor story, but one that does not need a “graphic material” warning because even though there were deaths and war crimes this is not a simulation but a re-imagining.

Curator Neil Sharkey has respected the materiality of the work by floating the drawings on the wall and keeping the didactic boards to a minimum, allowing Bowen’s lovely charcoal sensibility to filter through like a trace of something that might be remembered somewhere.

Sharkey conceded that facts were important. “This is not an art gallery,” he said, and there are photographs of the Centaur and the nurse but these exhibits recede beside the little piece of ocean off the coast of Queensland where the action took place.

Did Sister Savage actually ever see the enemy submarine? Probably not, so she might have imagined it to be like the strange, tuber shape Bowen has depicted with a periscope shooting up like a sensitive snout.

The ocean was filled with bodies after the torpedo hit and Sister Savage would have been happy to see a couple of sailors clinging onto a piece of timber. Sharks were circling and the day was long while they waited to be rescued.

The Centaur sank to the bottom of the ocean and it wasn’t until 2009 that a team was sent to find it somewhere near Moreton Bay.

That was just the beginning for the story is still unfolding to those close to it. For Sharkey, the fact that the captain of the submarine was never charged is puzzling for it was clear that the Centaur was a hospital ship with large red crosses along its length.

“He was a war criminal,” Sharkey said.

But histories like this can easily be forgotten. For Sue Burgess, director of public programs for the Shrine, the story might prompt people to find out more about the incident.

There is an animation on the Shrine website based on Bowen’s drawings and Burgess said that seeing the work from the perspective of Sister Savage was particularly moving now that medicos “are front of mind.”

When Sister Savage was confronted by all that death and suffering after the explosion, “her nurse’s training kicked in”, Burgess said, and she reassured those who were floating in the ocean even though she was badly injured herself.

Dean Bowen’s Imagining Centaur, Shrine of Remembrance, from August •

For more information: shrine.org.au/exhibition-dean-bowens-imagining-centaur