"I would like to see the ship found in my lifetime. This would help in the healing process. It would be a great comfort to all the relatives of HMAS Sydney."
Marie Elizabeth Bell, 86

By Carmelo Amalfi
"BETTY" Bell married Frederick Harold Schoch, a 24 year old engineer on HMAS Sydney, in 1941, just weeks before the newlyweds were parted forever by war and death at sea off WA.
The young couple spent a couple of nights together, in love, in Bunbury just a few weeks before the World War Two warship sailed to her doom at the hands of the German raider HSK Kormoran on November 19.
It was Harold's first trip.
"We were in love," she said a few years ago during the short drive from her home to Monument Hill overlooking the port of Fremantle.
Betty's father was a top architect who won the competition for the best design for the Monument Hill war memorial that today serves as a sacred meeting place for the families and friends of Australia's lost service men and women.
The old memorial overlooking the port from where thousands left to fight in foreign wars includes a commemorative plaque to Sydney, where hundreds of people from around WA meet each November to remember the loss of the 645 sailors, including Harold.
Asked to comment on the search for Sydney, Betty, who passed away last year, said finding the ship was the first step in laying the dead to rest and helping those left behind to move on. It would mean peace for all relatives of the lost Sydney men.
She said the actual position of the ship should be marked as a war grave, which she would like to visit before she died - to lay a rose for Harold.
Betty said in the months before her death that finding HMAS Sydney would bring Australians closer to understanding what happened when the light cruiser and Kormoran crossed paths off WA nearly 67 years ago.
"We have no option but to look," Betty said after learning of renewed efforts to look for the shipwreck off the coast of Shark Bay. "If it can't be located this time, perhaps people in the future will try.
"We owe it to those boys to do what we can."
*At the start of a Federal Government-funded search for HMAS Sydney and its wartime nemesis HSK Kormoran, Murdoch University honours student Carmelo Amalfi explores the historical and contemporary challenges facing media coverage of WA shipwrecks and, more importantly, the discovery of human remains, treasure and other cultural materials.
Amalfi, who teaches journalism at Curtin University of Technology, is an award-winning science writer with a passion for WA maritime and military history and has been involved in the discovery and media coverage of shipwrecks such as British explorer William Dampier's Roebuck (1699) and French explorer Louis de Freycinet's L'Uranie (1821).
For many years, he reported extensively on the loss of and contemporary search for HMAS Sydney for WA's daily paper, The West Australian, which he left in 2005.
Last year, his report on the discovery last year of a handgun thrown into the water by a German survivor in the days after the Sydney battle appeared in The Australian newspaper and online.
He is a freelance writer for and contributor to a number of leading print and online news organisations including Perth's The Sunday Times and The Australian newspapers, Cosmos Magazine, AAP and ScienceNetworkWA.
His reports on the Sydney search will be shared by universities, media groups and, more importantly, the wider public in WA and around Australia.

Copyright 2008




SEARCH FOR SYDNEY UNDERWAY OFF WA

By Carmelo Amalfi
SHIPWRECK searchers have arrived at the site of one of Australia's most enduring wartime mysteries - the final resting place of HMAS Sydney and its 645 sailors.
British-based shipwreck searcher David Mearns is leading a Federal Government-funded search off the Western Australian coast where the light cruiser and its entire crew disappeared on November 19, 1941.
Contracted to The Finding Sydney Foundation based in Perth, the American-born discoverer of more than 45 wrecks, including the German warship Bismark, hopes to find Australia's World War Two wreck by locating the German raider that sank with Sydney.
HMAS Sydney was the largest vessel of any country (6830 tons) to be lost with no survivors. Its sinking represents the greatest ever loss of life in an Australian warship.
HSK Kormoran, which sank with Sydney, is believed to be in about 2.5km of water.
According to German accounts of the 1941 sea battle, the well-armed raider was scuttled by Kormoran captain Theodor Detmers, whose crew reportedly blasted Sydney into submission by destroying its bridge and open upper decks.
Of the 397 Kormoran crew, 317 survived the action and were rescued at sea or land.
Sydney sailed away in a southerly direction, disabled and on fire, the Kormoran survivors later told Australian interrogators. It could be resting in waters up to 4km deep and possibly within up to 35km to 50km of the Kormoran wreck site.
To search for such ships at such depths requires advanced subsea technologies and navigational skills. Now focused on an area 120 nautical miles southwest of Carnarvon, the searchers are sailing back in time to pinpoint where both ships sank in the 1941 battle off WA.
The search would begin with a bird's eye view of the site, gradually zooming in on the wrecks over an area of ocean covering 1500 square nautical miles.
It took 45 days to find Titanic in 1985. Today, searchers can cover the same area in two days. The search box for the British frigate HMS Hood was 620 square nautical miles. It took Mr Mearns about three hours to find the wreck and 39 hours to relocate the Bismarck.
Finding Sydney was like pinpointing a row of 10 houses in a search area from Wanneroo to Mandurah and inland to York.
The wreckage, once identified on the seafloor, will provide important clues researchers will use to determine what happened to the ships after the exchange of fire at sea.
Searchers will scour the seabed for big metallic objects and lunar-like craters they created when they hit the bottom at high speed.
The Foundation has awarded the sonar search contract to Seattle-based company Williamson and Associates Inc, which has found an Israeli submarine in the Mediterranean and a US submarine which sank in 1942 off Alaska.
The vessel and survey positioning contract was awarded to DOF Subsea Australia Pty Ltd, whose survey vessel SV Geosounder arrived in Geraldton from Singapore on February 26.
Securing a vessel was challenging as schedules had to be matched with the weather window of opportunity to conduct the search and mobilisation of the side scan sonar equipment from Seattle.
Leading the team of geophysicists and marine sonar experts on the SV Geosounder is Williamson operations manager Art Wright.
The company's low frequency, deep towed side scan sonar search system will cover a defined area of approximately 1800 square nautical miles, about 120 nautical miles from Steep Point in water depths of between 2300m and 4200m.
Mr Mearns said phase one of the search was similar to mowing the lawn, "albeit a very large lawn”.
“We will be systematically towing a sonar 'fish' along a grid of overlapping track lines that covers the seabed in areas where we believe the wrecks sank," he explains on the company's website at www.findingsydney.com.
"Given the large size of the search area we will be using sonar that can cover this area at an extraordinarily fast rate. Once any contact of a potential wreck is made, we will then make a series of higher resolution narrow swathe passes to confirm the dimensions and characteristics of any target, with any debris field being mapped.”
Project manager Patrick Flynn said the search company was glad to have come this far in the road to solving the mystery behind where Sydney sank.
He said that the 70m-long survey vessel with ROV (remotely operated vehicle) capacity had undergone an extensive refit.
Having worked previously in Australia waters, the vessel with a crew of about 30 people also accommodates the "back deck operations" in which Williamson's deep tow side scan sonar technology was deployed.
"That also includes 10,000m of cable, or Perth to Fremantle," he said.
Mr Mearns, who holds the Guinness World Record for the deepest shipwreck ever discovered - a German blockade runner sunk during WWII at a depth 5762m - will work back to back in shifts, sailing SV Geosounder in a grid pattern over the target area.
Australian Minister for Defence Science and Personnel Warren Snowdon - whose electorate takes in Christmas Island where the Unknown Sailor believed to be from Sydney washed up on the beach in 1942 - said the 2008 search was a turning point in solving the war mystery.
"If we can establish where Kormoran is, maybe we can find Sydney," he said from his Alice Springs office on the eve of the long-awaited search off WA. "It may not end the controversy surrounding Sydney's sinking, but it will mean closure to a lot of people."
The federal member for the Northern Territory describes himself as a history buff, describing HMAS Sydney as a great Australian warship whose young crew sacrificed their lives to ensure the future and freedoms of a country at war.
"It will be a great day when the Sydney is found," he said. "The ship and her crew form a significant part of Australia's history and maritime heritage."
WA Maritime Musuem archaeologist Mike McCarthy, who has provided expertise to solving the Sydney mystery for the past 25 years, said the discovery of one or both wrecks would attract protection under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976.
"This allows restriction zones to be established around the wrecks," he said.
The zones could measure up to half a square kilometre in size and require visitors to apply for permits to enter them.

Copyright 2008