The Search for HMAS Sydney

An Australian Story

Ted Graham, Bob King, Bob Trotter, Kim Kirsner

• Publisher: University of New South Wales Press
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781742246918
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

In November 1941, the HMAS Sydney, the pride of Australia's wartime fleet, and its crew of 645 disappeared without a trace off the Western Australian coast. All that was known was Sydney had come under fire from the German raider HSK Kormoran, which also sank. After numerous unsuccessful searches from the mid-1970s onwards, the Finding Sydney Foundation was set up and, in March 2008, one of Australia's greatest maritime mysteries was solved when both wrecks were finally discovered. The Search for HMAS Sydney pieces together the incredible story of Sydney, its crew, and the families left behind. It details the innovative and powerful research procedures implemented by the Finding Sydney Foundation to locate the wrecks of Sydney and Kormoran, their discovery, and the detailed forensic analyses and commemorations that followed.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. I Just Wanted to Know Where My Dad Is'
• 2. An Australian Navy Evolves
• 3. Birth of the Finding Sydney Foundation
• 4. Realisation of Government Support
• 5. Commitment, Persistence and Science Bring Success
• 6. Oceanography and Independent Peer Review
• 7. How Cognitive Science put the FSF within ‘Spitting Distance’ of the Kormoran Wreck
• 8. The search for the Unknown Sailor
• 9. The British Light Cruiser of the 1930s
• 10. Scientific Analysis of the Destruction of Sydney
• 11. A human Factors Analysis of the Loss of Sydney
• 12. The Rest is Silence … a Moving Memorial to Sydney’s Lost Souls
• 13 Commemorating Sydney’s Lost
• Acknowledgements
• Appendix 1
• Appendix 2
• Appendix 3
• Notes
• Index