Virtual
War Memorial
Australia

Rene trained in Melbourne as a nurse, and was at the Caulfield Military Hospital when she volunteered for overseas service in August 1940. In February 1942 she was one of a group of nurses evacuated aboard the "Vyner Brooke" as Singapore burned.

The Japanese bombed the ship, which sank. Twelve nurses drowned and another 21 who reached the shore of Banka Island were massacred by the Japanese. Rene was one of the 32 nurses who survived. She and the others were held as prisoners of war at Muntok, Sumatra under atrocious conditions, and it was not until March 1943 that her family knew she had survived. Conditions slowly worsened, and Rene became ill and died at Sumatra on 20 February 1945 [RE:  (AWM) Roll of Honour]. She was 36 years of age.

In August 1945 newspapers reported the rescue of the soldiers, but that the nurses could not be found. Her family was not advised of her death until September 1945. Rene now rests in the Jakarta War Cemetery. She died not knowing that her brothers, Douglas and Ken, had been killed within ten days of each other during heavy fighting in North Africa almost two years before.

This plaque is in the Maffra Library, beside one to Louie Riggall, who died on service as a VAD in France in 1918.

These notes have been extracted from "Rene died on Banka Island: Irene Ada Singleton (1908-1945)" by Ann Synan in Gippsland Heritage Journal #27 (2003).