It's always the detail which moves the emotions - like seeing a watch that stopped the exact moment a sailor hit the water after his ship was torpedoed.
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Exactly 80 years ago, on May 14, 1943, a torpedo from a Japanese submarine sunk the Australian hospital ship Centaur, causing 272 deaths. Only 64 of those on board survived, spending 35 hours in life-rafts in an ocean where sharks and enemy submarines sought prey.
The Australian War Memorial is making much of this 80th anniversary with a series of exhibits.
But perhaps the most moving one is a simple wristwatch where the face is marked with the time the hands stopped: 4.10am.
The memorial has several watches belonging to those on the ship. Because of the rudimentary technology of watches at the time, the hands of the watches stopped when the service people wearing them went under water.
The sinking only 80km from Brisbane was a big event in the Australian experience of war because it was so close to home soil.
On top of that, the atrocities in the Japanese prisoner of war camps weren't known about at that time, so the sinking of a hospital ship revealed the brutal nature of the enemy. The Japanese had been told it was a hospital ship and red crosses were prominent on it - but still the Japanese commander fired the torpedo.
Accordingly, the sinking galvanised Australians, Australian War Memorial director Matt Anderson said. It was a kind of wake-up moment.
"The ship was well-lit at night. It had been registered as a hospital ship with the Red Cross. And they (the casualties) were non-combatants," he said.
"It revealed to Australians the brutality and the uncompromising nature of the the enemy we were facing."
Even though the Centaur was a hospital ship, there were no patients aboard. It was carrying 332 crew and medical staff, including 12 nurses, 11 of whom died.
In the aftermath, the slogan "Avenge the nurses" was used on posters (which are also on display at the memorial).
The only nurse to survive was Sister Ellen Savage, who then became a national hero at a time Australia desperately needed one.
The legend (which may well have been the unvarnished truth) was she concealed her injuries and helped the other survivors on the life raft.
"She had a fractured jaw. You wouldn't think there was anything wrong with her but she suffered very badly. She had broken ribs," another survivor, Seaman Martin Pash, recalled.
Her portrait is among the exhibits in the section on the sinking at the war memorial, along with a wristwatch from a sailor, lights on life jackets and other items from the sinking and its aftermath.
The memorial has several watches but some of them are mildly radioactive because that was the way of making them luminous at that time. The radioactive watches are not on public display.
"The watches have stopped at the time their wearers went into the water. Their radium paint means that they are radioactive and must be handled and displayed with great care," curator Dianne Rutherford said.
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The sinking of the Centaur was a terrible event.
The bridge collapsed and the funnel crashed onto the deck. Everything was covered with burning oil and a fire quickly began to roar across the ship. Water rushed in through the gaping hole in the side. Many of those onboard not killed in the explosion or fire were trapped as the ship started to go down bow first, and then broke in two.
In three minutes, the Centaur was gone.