The "Dominion Monarch" was launched on 27 July 1938 and was a Shaw Savill liner displacing 36,000 tonnes, the largest vessel regularly employed on the Britain-New Zealand run. She could accommodate 517 first-class passengers and large volumes of cargo. Four diesel engines gave her a maxium speed of 21 knots and a cruising speed of 19 knots.

Commissioned as a troop ship in August 1940, by 1945 she had travelled 560,000 kilometres and carried nearly 90,000 service personnel. She was being refitted at Singapore in 1941 when the Japanese invaded, and escaped capture only through efforts of her engineering staff. She was broken up in Japan in 1962. (Taken from Scars in the Heart exhibition, Auckland War Memorial Museum) AWMM