The 645 men who never came home

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In 2013, on Bubblews, I wrote about a memorial to the World War II cruiser HMAS Sydney. The memorial is in Geraldton, in Western Australia's Mid-West region and some 263 miles north of Perth. Most of this discussion is taken from that post. We called in to see the memorial again on our recent trip north of Perth. The Sydney was engaged in a battle with the German ship HSK Kormoran and went down with the loss of 645 crew and military personnel. Seventy lives were lost on the Kormoran. The details of the tragedy were the source of many rumours as it was to be decades before the wrecks of both ships were found in 2008. They were 22 km apart. The Sydney lay on the bottom of the ocean almost 2.5 kms below the surface. In 1998, a temporary memorial to the dead was opened. As the Last Post was played at the ceremony, a flock of seagulls swooped over the crowd and flew out to sea. There were plenty of seagulls in the coastal town but such a display had not been seen before. This one incident had a huge impact on the crowd and eventually led to the Sanctuary or 'dome of the souls' being created. There are five elements to the permanent memorial. The Sanctuary is one. It shows 645 stainless steel seagulls welded into a dome and supported by seven pillars. Another is a stele which commemorates the size and shape of the prow of the Sydney. A Wall of Remembrance lists the names of those killed. As there is no rank in death, the names are simply listed alphabetically with their professions following their name. This makes fascinating reading. The fourth element, 'The Waiting Woman' is a bronze statue of a woman facing the sea, clutching her hat and waiting in vain for the return of her husband. When I wrote in 2013, the Pond of Remembrance was still under construction. It is now complete and six hundred and forty-four seagulls are etched into the base of a granite well with another two-metre high seagull emerging from the water and pointing to the resting place of HMAS Sydney. The memorial is very moving. My uncle was in the Navy during the War and was due to join the Sydney in Perth. However his train from the Eastern States ran late and he was not on board on that fateful day.