Australia’s Historic Shipwreck Heritage

More than 6,500 historic shipwrecks surround Australia’s vast coastline. Each has its own unique story to tell and they form an invaluable, limited and irreplaceable part of Australia’s heritage. These shipwrecks provide us with the means of documenting and understanding important aspects of our maritime history. As a continent isolated from the rest of the world by water, Australia owes much of its early cultural development to transport by sea.

Australia’s rich maritime history can be traced back at least 60,000 years to the arrival of the Aboriginal people. Later the Macassans, from what is now part of Indonesia, came to fish Australia’s northern waters. In the 17th century, the Dutch, Spanish, English and French began to explore and chart the coast, having braved extraordinary distances in small sailing ships and without accurate maps or modern navigation aids.

The earliest recorded Australian shipwreck is the English vessel Trial, which was lost in 1622 on the Northwest Coast of Western Australia. Other wrecks followed in the 17th and 18th centuries, when Dutch East India Company ships foundered on the rocky coast of Western Australia including the Batavia, Zuytdorp and Vergulde Draeck.

After Captain James Cook’s voyage in 1770, during which his ship HMB Endeavour was almost wrecked on the Great Barrier Reef, Australia’s coastline became the focus for hundreds of ships from the northern hemisphere. Many European and American sailing vessels which ventured into Australia’s often treacherous waters never returned. As trade developed between Australia ports, locally build ships also became victims of shipwreck.

Many Australian shipwrecks are part of our shared heritage with other countries or important for their historical associations with events in international history. For instance, HMS Pandora wrecked in 1791 off Cape York Peninsular represents a chapter in the famous Bounty mutiny. HMS Sirius lost at Norfolk Island in 1790 was flagship of the first fleet which arrived in 1788.

One of Australia's darkest moments in WWII was the sinking of hospital ship Centaur (picture right) where 268 medical personnel and civilians were lost at sea. The ship was attacked and sunk by a Japanese submarine off the coast of Queensland, Australia, on 14 May 1943. In 2009, the Australian federal and state government funded a $4 million project to locate her. She was found late 2009.

Other shipwrecks were the casualties of war such as the Japanese submarine I-124 in the Northern Territory; the Japanese midget submarine M24 which took part in an attack on Sydney Harbour in 1942 or the German cruiser SMS Emden at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands, sunk by the first HMAS Sydney which was protecting the ANZAC convoy on its way to Gallipoli. There are also many merchant vessels which were sunk in Australian waters during wartime conflicts.

In 1976 Australia became one of the first countries to nationally protect it’s shipwreck heritage when it introduced the Commonwealth Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976. This legislation protects all historic shipwrecks and their associated relics that are at least 75 years old. Other more recent shipwrecks can be declared as historic such as the famous World War II shipwrecks HMAS Sydney II and the German raider HSK Kormoran that were protected in 2008. The Historic Shipwrecks Act helps protect and conserve Australia’s shipwrecks and their associated relics to ensure they can be enjoyed and studied now and by future generations.

For more information on the Government's Historic Shipwrecks Program visit the website

Home page picture: Halls of Halladale aground in 1908 with no loss of life near Peterborough on Victoria's Shipwreck Coast.