Canberra Community Hospital

Royal Canberra Hospital was the first hospital in Canberra, the capital of Australia. It opened in 1914 (a year after the planned city was opened) on the Acton Peninsula, as the Canberra Community Hospital. It grew to become the major hospital in Canberra before being closed in 1991 and later demolished in 1997.

In 1912, Dr. W. Perrin Norris, Commonwealth Director of Quarantine and medical adviser to the Commonwealth, recommended that a Government hospital be built on a 10-acre (4.0 ha) site at Acton which had been reserved for this purpose, with separate facilities for isolation. This was in immediate response to cases of diphtheria amongst construction workers requiring lengthy isolation and hospitalisation, as well as measles and chicken pox. At this time there were few other public buildings in Canberra. The interim hospital site was Balmain Crescent in the precincts of the future Australian National University.

The building, refurbished in the late 1920s, still stands at the intersection of Mills Road leading to the John Curtin School of Medical Research. It is used by the Research School of Earth Sciences, ANU and a plaque on the front lawn, unveiled in 1978, by the then Minister of Health Mr Ralph Hunt, identifies it as the site of the first public hospital in Canberra.

The Acton Peninsula site originally reserved for the formal Canberra Hospital extended from Canberra House (in 1938 the residence of the British High Commissioner) to the Molonglo River (Lennox Crossing). Dr. J. Frederick Watson of Gungahlin gave evidence to the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works considering construction of the new brick hospital on Acton peninsula. He stated that in determining the size of the hospital, the possibility of a medical school within the proposed university (adjacent to the new hospital) should be borne in mind.

Two nurses who worked at Canberra Community Hospital on Acton in the 1930s were killed while serving in WWII. Sister Mona Tait, who had been a theatre sister in Canberra, was aboard the Vyner Brooke when it was sunk by the Japanese military and was subsequently amongst those nurses machine-gunned at Radji Beach (see Banka Island massacre). Sister May Hayman at the outbreak of war was working in the hospital at Gona in New Guinea and while fleeing with Allied soldiers was ambushed by a Japanese patrol and bayoneted.

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