Prime Minister John Curtin died 80 years ago on 5 July 1945 in an upstairs bedroom at the Lodge. He’d been taken up to the bedroom by stretcher on 22 May after leaving a small private hospital in Canberra. He never came back down those stairs. He died in his sleep at 4am with a nurse named Marjorie Sirl by his side. His wife Elsie was in an adjoining room, unable to sleep.

Or was she? The newspaper accounts of the time seem to have all used the same press release (I haven’t been able to find it in the archives though) which stated Elsie was also by his side when he died. But Elsie wrote a short memoir of Curtin as a series of articles published in Perth’s Daily News in 1950 and she states that the nurse came to her room to tell her he was dead. I trust her own account, five years after the event, over the reporting at the time which would not have come directly from her or Sirl. It’s a small detail but it dramatically changes the picture of Curtin’s last moment.

I’ve been writing my account of Curtin’s last months and death in my biography. Not because I’ve nearly finished – far from it – but I was working on an exhibition on this theme at work and so it seemed a good time to immerse myself in this period at home in my research.