Sydney Found!

Don't think they thought it had sunk that close to Australia. Wasn't it believed to be a victim of a U boat?

There is a story here in NZ about a U Boat that surfaced off the coast of the North Island and the crew rowing ashore, milking a cow in a paddock, then rowing back with a bucket of fresh milk, never to be seen again.

There is a story here in NZ about a U Boat that surfaced off the coast of the North Island and the crew rowing ashore, milking a cow in a paddock, then rowing back with a bucket of fresh milk, never to be seen again.

[...]
As the war went on, Detmers was moved to the German POW camp at Dhurringile in rural Victoria. Some time in 1944, Detmers, as camp leader and in line with his duty, hatched an escape plan by excavating a 120m long tunnel out of the camp, which began under a false floor in a music room.

On the night of January 10, 1945, Detmers and 19 others escaped into the countryside. He was on the run for eight days before being arrested in Shepparton. When he was searched, authorities found a small, coded notebook. It was immediately seized and sent for decryption and analysis.

What the authorities did not know was that Detmers had left behind a small brown German-English dictionary at the camp, in which he had used a pencil to put faint dots under letters on each page, giving the same details of the Kormoran's co-ordinates and log details as were in his seized notebook.

The war ended and Detmers was repatriated in 1947. He returned to Germany, debilitated by a stroke down his left side. His dictionary was his most prized possession.

But in 1990, Brisbane author Barbara Poniewierski, on a research trip to Germany, uncovered the existence of Detmers's dictionary while attending a reunion of Kormoran survivors.

Detmers had apparently bequeathed the dictionary to his sister's son and, when Poniewierski got a phone call from famed shipwreck hunter David Mearns seeking confirmation that the dictionary existed, she gave him the name of Detmers's relatives in Hamburg.

When Mearns got his hands on the dictionary, he engaged former Royal Navy captain and linguist Peter Hore to crack the code. It wasn't hard. It was just a matter of, quite literally, joining the dots. They spelled out a few words a page, detailing the battle, the co-ordinates, and all the log details of arguably Australia's most famous naval encounter. It confirmed Detmers's original notes seized from him at Shepparton more than 60 years earlier.

Mearns has said he used Detmers's dictionary as "factual ground zero". And he knew if the dictionary could lead him to the Kormoran, it would also reveal to him the final resting place of HMAS Sydney.

"Captain Detmers's versions were nearly always identical, so I concluded he was always telling the truth," Mearns told journalist Carmelo Amalfi. "No other shipwreck hunter has had so many vital clues about the Sydney's resting place."

Australian authorities had been told by the Germans where to look for the Kormoran from day one. Their inexplicable lack of action over passing decades only fuelled never-ending conspiracy theories involving governments, politicians and the navy.

[...]

2.5 km under water off the west Aust coast.

I want aware it was lost but a Damn fine place for sin city.l