Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

– Shakespeare, The Tempest.

NOTHING demonstrates the seachange that has swept over the 645 men who served aboard the HMAS Sydney more clearly than the ongoing national obsession with discovering the final resting place of the ship and her crew.

Public interest in the mystery has been driven by three significant factors.

The first is that the loss of the Sydney remains the worst tragedy in the history of the Royal Australian Navy.

The second is that the ship – a world class medium cruiser and a significant naval asset to the allied powers in WW2 – fell victim to a vastly inferior foe in the shape of the Emden, essentially an armed merchant man.

The third is that war time secrecy about the loss of the vessel – the news was supressed for the better part of two weeks – lent itself to all kinds of speculation and conspiracy theories.

One of the most popular theories down the years has been that the Sydney had been sunk by a Japanese submarine acting in concert with the German raider.

This was a highly controversial suggestion given the Japanese did not enter the war – even then without making a formal declaration – until the attack on Pearl Harbor just over a fortnight later.

One suspects that as soon as good photographic imaging is available the experts will be checking to see if the fatal damage was caused by the Kormoran’s guns or a torpedo.

Either way, the weekend discovery of the wreckage of both the Kormoran and the Sydney brings the curtain down on one of the most tragic moments in our naval history, and, most importantly, the descendants – who include widows and children – of the crew now know where their loved ones finally came to rest.