MANY decades ago, I heard a strange true tale about a scuba diver who had decorated his whole garage wall with shipwreck coins.
But back in the 1950s and well into the 1970s there was no law against scavenging on wrecks. The coins were reported souvenirs from years of combing the seabed beneath the towering rockface of Sydney's South Head. He must have been an experienced skindiver as here, on a turbulent day, the oceans roars and monster waves crash savagely onto rocks.
The area is very near The Gap. Today it's a place of extraordinary beauty, menace and a reminder also of a maritime catastrophe which claimed 121 lives.
For beneath these cliffs back on this day 165 years ago, on August 20, 1857, the mighty ship Dunbar, reported to be the safest, fastest and most luxurious clipper in the golden age of sail abruptly met her end.
After a successful 81-day voyage out from Britain to Australia, the grand vessel struck gale-force winds, lashing rain and poor visibility approaching the entrance of Sydney Harbour.
The sailing vessel was tantalisingly close to its destination when disaster struck. In the bad weather, the ship's captain assumed his ship was entering the heads and Port Jackson. Instead, the ship was on a collision course with sheer 60-metre seacliffs. The crew tried to steer clear at the last moment, but the immense power of the onshore swell and wind thwarted the manoeuvre and the vessel smashed broadside onto dangerous rocks.
What happens next is recounted in Larry Writer's hauntingly sad and intensely researched book simply titled The Shipwreck.
Smashed to pieces, the vessel broke apart, killing all its passengers and crew, save one. That sole survivor was a burly Irishman called James Johnson who forged a strong link later on to Newcastle.
Johnson survived on a rock shelf, alone, wet, miserable and terrified for 36 hours before he was rescued. Meanwhile, everyone around him in the water had perished. The sea was full of drowned and battered bodies and floating ship debris. Sharks mauled the corpses.
It was the worst shipping disaster in Australian colonial history. Bodies, or parts of them, swept by the tides washed up around Sydney beaches for days. People wept uncontrollably. The residents of Sydney, then comprising just 57,000 people realised they were totally reliant on the sea and all of its capricious moods. The colony, after such a great loss, felt truly isolated and vulnerable.
In author Writer's words "(the disaster) united Sydneysiders in grief and adversity, just as Gallipoli, the Great Depression (of the 1930s) and the Covid-19 pandemic would in years to come".
In the end, serious lessons were learned from the major shipping disaster.
These finally resulted in changes to navigation and maritime safety, including building a new lighthouse - the red, candy-striped Hornby Lighthouse- on the actual northern tip of Sydney's South Head.
For when the Dunbar fatally struck the rocks, the crew of the doomed ship at the last moment saw the beam of the Macquarie Light pierce the clouds above, but the beacon was almost two kilometres south of the harbour entrance.
Writer's book also puts the gripping tale in context with the present. He reports that removing relics from the Dunbar was only banned when the site was granted provisional protection under the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976.
Before then divers descended to remove (sometimes with gelignite) items as diverse as anchors, cannons, coins, candlesticks, cutlery, lamps, ceramic plates and cups, pocket watches, pewter tankards, buttons and even dentures. One gold brooch was found in which a shark's tooth was lodged.
One Sydney diver alone reportedly retrieved more than 5000 objects from the wreck site.
Meanwhile, what happened to the "bear of a man", ship survivor James Johnson? Besides his harrowing ordeal awaiting rescue, Johnson then had the grim task helping identify the recovered bodies in Sydney's 'Death House' (the morgue).
Johnson briefly became a celebrity, but never again went overseas. He died in 1915 and is buried in Sandgate Cemetery. Yet, he did once continue to watch over the sea.
Johnson became assistant lighthouse keeper at Nobby's Head, here in Newcastle. And he was on duty when an extraordinary irony dragged him back into the limelight.
In July 1866, the iron paddle wheeler Cawarra was smashed off course by waves and wrecked on the Oyster Bank at Newcastle Harbour entrance.
Sixty passengers and crew died. A deck hand called Frederick Hedges was the only survivor. A small rescue lifeboat reached the drowning Hedges amid big waves. His rescuer was none other than James Johnson, himself the sole survivor of the wreck of the Dunbar nine years before.
THE OTHER SURVIVOR
IT'S not often that a book about World War 2, after all this time, can have a new, stark tale to tell stopping you dead in your tracks. Novelist Tom Gilling's latest work called The Witness is one such book, but it's non-fiction.
Older Australians will have heard of the Sandakan POW camp and the infamous 260km death march through Borneo jungle which followed.
Of more than 2400 Allied prisoners of war in Sandakan in early 1945, only six survived. If the prisoners hadn't already died of starvation, sickness or overwork after three years of imprisonment, the others were then either shot by bayoneted by sadistic Japanese guards.
In the aftermath, Australian war crimes trials were conducted into the atrocities. The Sandakan camp commandant and some of his soldiers were then sent to the gallows.
Much of the critical prosecution evidence against them was provided by one Aussie, Warrant Officer Bill Sticpewich. And yet, he wasn't a hero to his fellow surviving Aussie prisoners.
Instead, Sticpewich was accused of being a traitor, a collaborator, a "white Jap" who obtained extra rations by helping their hated Japanese captors.
A dark, disturbing and revealing yarn, Tom Gilling's book deserves to be read.
