Sydney find may finally solve mystery

It was also one of the most mysterious, though several of the mysteries may well be unravelled this month.
That everyone in the ship was lost - a huge assembly of Australians - was part of the shock.
When the migrant ship Cataraqui was wrecked off King Island in 1845, while on the final days of her long voyage from the British Isles to Melbourne, 399 people were drowned.
But a few sailors and one immigrant survived to tell the story of what is still the worst peacetime disaster in our history.
When services were held in the two Melbourne cathedrals late in 1941 in memory of those who were lost in Sydney, the grief was increased by the fact there were no bodies to bury.
Reporters wrote of the sounds of sobbing coming from women seated in the packed cathedrals.

It was early in the third year of Australia's participation in World War II, and compared to the previous world war the monthly list of casualties was low.
In the course of the intense fighting in North Africa, Syria, Greece and Crete, Australia so far had lost a little more than 3000 soldiers.
In contrast, here on the one afternoon, close to the peaceful coast of West Australia, more than 600 sailors had died.
At the same time thousands of Australian airmen were flying in raids over Europe or the sealanes near Britain, but their death toll in that most hazardous zone of war did not yet equal those lost at sea on the afternoon of November 19, 1941.
HMAS Sydney was Australia's favourite warship, and that increased the sensation, the bewilderment, when her sinking was announced on the front pages of Australian newspapers.
A year earlier, she had destroyed the fine Italian cruiser Bartolomeo Colleoni in the Mediterranean.
And now here she was, in what appeared to be the safety of her home waters, dramatically sunk by a smaller enemy ship.
How did it happen?
Why did the powerful Australian ship, capable of outgunning her opponent from a secure position, allow herself to sail within the range of the German's feebler guns and other armaments?
After all, the Kormoran was really an armed cargo ship, masquerading under a Dutch flag and name. If a ship was to be sunk on that afternoon, she was likely to be the victim.
Less than three weeks later, it so happened that Japan entered the war with its synchronised raids on Pearl Harbour, Manila, and the Malay Peninsula.
At once a rumour galloped the length and breadth of Australia, insisting that a Japanese submarine must have appeared out of the blue and torpedoed Sydney.
It was even rumoured that the Japanese machinegunned the survivors.
These unlikely rumours were replaced by others. Surely the radio operators in Sydney must have sent out a few early messages explaining what was happening?
Perhaps the Curtin Labor government, which had just taken office in Canberra, was hiding from the press some of the vital facts about the tragedy.
So far as is known, the government did not apply censorship.
Admittedly, when Darwin was first bombed by the Japanese on February 19, 1942 - exactly three months after Sydney was sunk - it did.
But there was no such concealing of the terrible death toll that occurred late that afternoon not too far from Geraldton.
It was commonly rumoured that radio messages sent out from the Kormoran, before she went down at around midnight, might supply some of the missing answers.
But no vital messages were intercepted by Australia and its allies.
In any case, the airwaves along which the messages ran that afternoon were a congested babble of many languages and codes, from which any particular message was not easily plucked.
So the mystery remains.
Yesterday a heavy weight was lifted from the shoulders of relatives, friends and former shipmates of the officers and men who went down with their ship in 1941.
For many, the anxiety and unease will possibly return. They wonder what an examination of the wreckage will reveal in the weeks ahead.
Prof Geoffrey Blainey, is Australia's foremost historian and a patron of The Finding Sydney Foundation, which located the ship.

Source:News.com.au March 18, 2008 09:15am