"The Indian Ocean has seen quite a bit of us or else it is the other way round but so long as we are on top is all that we worry about. At the moment, we are waiting for an enemy ship to show up." HMAS Sydney sailor Ernest David Rolley, 21.
By Carmelo Amalfi
A LETTER posted by a HMAS Sydney steward before disappearing off WA on November 19, 1941, offers a poignant reminder of why the ship's discovery was worth the 66-year effort to find the World War Two wreck.
Stuffed inside a teapot until its discovery a few years ago, the handwritten letter by Ernest David Rolley, 21, is a rare snapshot, not into where to possibly find the wreck, but that moment when the Queensland-born sailor found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
A casualty of Australia's worst naval disaster. One of 645 sailors who never came home.
Ernest joined HMAS Sydney only after his ship, the coastal defender Cerberus, sailed while he was attending his mum's funeral on March 12, 1941.
He would not have been on Sydney.
But by Easter of 1941, the third of four sons from Herberton in Far North Queensland who worked in Brisbane as a hotel and "picture theatre" worker was sailing west on escort duties that would bring him face to face with the German raider Kormoran, whose wreckage was found about 12 nautical miles from Sydney's remains.
The steward thanks Nancy Francis, president of the Returned Soldiers, Sailors and Airman’s Imperial League (now Returned and Services League) for her postal note or money order he received, "the last time in harbour".
Miss Francis' grand-daughter Ros Fielding inherited the letter in the teapot after her father died several years ago.
"It was all wrapped up and put into a box, which I almost threw out," she said from her home near Townsville. "We used a lot of teapots then."
Having served in the Army, the former radio operator and Australian spy said she realised the correspondence could be important, and passed it on to friend Mary Hilbig, a volunteer at North Queensland Military Aviation Museum who contacted the WA Maritime Museum in Fremantle.
Rolley's brother Stan, who lives near Brisbane, said his older brother by nine years was posted to HMAS Sydney on April 7, 1941: "He had been on Cerberus since September 1940. When my mum died, he returned to Herberton for the funeral, and missed Cerberus, which had sailed."
Stan said he couldn't believe it when his older brother's letter turned up in Ros' teapot: "It had been around for more than 60 years. "Luckily, Nancy Francis' family did not throw it out."
Wes Olsen, WA author of Bitter Victory: the Death of HMAS Sydney, said Rolley's letter provided a personal chronology leading up to the tragic loss of HMAS Sydney.
"The letter is an important reminder that HMAS Sydney's sailors, who lost their lives protecting Australia, had hopes and dreams," Mr Olsen said.
"Rolley talks about mundane things, the weather and his long time at sea."
HMAS Sydney left Sydney on April 11, 1941. By Easter Sunday on April 13, the ship was, as Rolley writes, at sea and headed for Fremantle via the Great Australian Bight.
Admiral Ragnar Colvin, Chief of Australian Navy Staff, also was on board, bound for an American-British-Dutch defence meeting in Singapore.
"Rolley notes a change in temperature," Mr Olsen explains. "From the bitter cold which probably refers to the passage through the Bight and the heat of the tropics in Singapore."
Rolley says one week it is bitter cold and miserable and the next, "it is just the opposite, we can't get cool". HMAS Sydney arrived in Singapore on April 19, where it stayed for three days before reaching Fremantle on April 27 for maintenance and training work.
Mr Olsen said this would have been the best opportunity for Rolley to post his letter to Miss Francis and the Women's Auxiliary in Queensland.
Rolley also says that the Indian Ocean, "has seen quite a bit of us or else it is the other way around but so long as we are on top is all that we worry about".
Asked which enemy ship Rolley refers to, Mr Olsen said it was not Kormoran. Both Sydney and Kormoran were believed to have sunk each other about 120km west of the Gascoyne coast, off Shark Bay.
By the time the Sydney sailed into the Bight towards Fremantle port, Kormoran was rounding the Cape of Good Hope having sunk seven ships and captured one in the Atlantic before running into Sydney.
Mr Olsen said HMAS Sydney was after the German battleship Admiral Scheer which entered the Indian Ocean in February 1941.
HMAS Sydney Captain John Collins, who was replaced by Captain Joseph Burnett on May 17, wanted to sink the Scheer with the combined might of HMAS Australia and HMAS Hobart.
He said the only raider naval authorities were aware of at that stage was the deadly auxiliary cruiser Atlantis, which left Australia for the Pacific in August until it finally met its match against HMS Devonshire off Ascension Island in the Atlantic on November 22, two days after HMAS Sydney sank off WA.
"There was no other threat except Scheer and enemy merchant raiders," he said. "Sydney was here protecting Australia's shipping routes."
WA Maritime Museum archaeologist Mike McCarthy said Rolley's letter was one of many written by members of Sydney's crew.
"It is one of the most interesting accounts confirming HMAS Sydney's state of readiness," he said.
"The letter is extremely important, carrying references both to the desire to remain afloat being all that was important to this young sailor and to their waiting to sink an elusive enemy ship."
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