The "graveyard"
I suppose of the whole story of this process started
following settlement in Western Australia
what was happening is, that ships were coming
in the port, some of were being wrecked, some of them were
not capable of carrying on their journeys of voyages
and they were being abandoned on the beaches
and this actually, I suspect,
caused a rather, sort of,
didn't look terribly good to the settlers to settle with
abandoned wrecks laying all over the place
and eventually the government decided that
it had to managed properly as governments tend to want to
do, and so they designated an area
well they initially designated a
place down in Cockburn Sound
to get rid of ships, but this started to become another problem
and so they said, the best bet is we're going to
get them to be dumped in what they called the "deep-water graveyard"
which is about 10-15 kilometres
south-west from the west end of Rottnest
in about a 100 metres of water
So, there is over various period of time ships that were
being used in the harbour, a ship would come in
it would not be fit to carry on
it's voyage, because it was
in such bad condition, it would be say, damaged in a storm or something like this
generally those ships then became lighters, or they became
hulks, and they stored
coal, or supplies for the ships, water, that sort of thing
and they were tied up in the harbour ervice the ships that weer coming in
and then eventually, they became so
hopelessly rotten
that they became a danger to the port and that
point they were taken out and sunk
in the deep water graveyard.
And we've got public records of about
50 or 60 ships from
around 1900 to the 1950s
that were sunk in the graveyard.
And then what happened is Mike McCarthy
started, we started to get reports from
fisherman who were working
fishing out in this area, and shipwrecks are big
fish aggregation areas, fish tend to collect around them and if you
go over the top of wreck site with an echo-sounder you'll see big
column of fish, basicially, so fish love them
and so they started to report sites
and they were way too deep for us to deal with
but we started to
gather this sort of information together
and then about, ten years ago
a local film company
Propero Productions, they were doing the
"Shipwreck Detectives" and one of the
projects, they came to us and said
what sort of project would you like to
do that you're not normally funded to do by the government?
And one of them was the deep water graveyard
unfortunately, that program never came, went to air
six other programs did, but
the story wasn't good enough
but it's fascinating, it has been fascinating, because
they commissioned a local
aerial survey company to
run an aerial magnotomic survey over a section of the deep water graveyard
and came up with six or seven very large magnetic anomalies
so we then knew the precise position
of five or six big iron wrecks
iron wrecks sunk in the graveyard
Fortunately at that time there was a
a group of technical divers, these sort of
people who dive on gas mixtures
and they were looking for things to do
you could go dive to a 100 metres and have a look at the
few sea anemones at the bottom, but it's pretty boring stuff, so they were really excited by this idea
we gave them positions of the sites and they dived on them
they reported there were wrecks there
they got very fuzzy photographs
in the beginning, because they were just learning how to do things
and it really became
really interesting, and
I've been working with them in Turkey
in 2001
and we'd been using a
two-man submarine to go in and
look for wreck sites
and it was a really, sort of, it's a one atmosphere thing, so it's
comfortable, there's a big plastic style bubble
and I was in the Swan River
sailing my boat, and I looked across at the
Pier 21 and there was boat with a
one these submarines on the back of it, and I said
Gosh! This is..
Who's that?! So,
we did some investigation and found the guy who owned it
and he was also looking for things to do, because
you can go down in a submarine to a 100 metres
of water and look around at a very boring
bottom, and we gave him the positions of some of the wreck
sites and he started to dive on them
and we started to get high-definition
video footage of the sites
and we've now identified probably
about 16 sites
well, we've located 16 sites
identified about five of them
we've actually got names for them
and virtually every day
not every day, but once a month or so, new information has come in
about this whole area, so it's
it's very interesting
I dived in the submarine one time, when we were in 70 metres of water
and you could see the surface
we were down for two hours I think it was
and of course the technical divers can only
dive for about 15 minutes then they have to spend about
three hours decompressing
in 10 metres of water, so it's
a wonderful tool
I think gradually as time goes on
we're going to learn a lot more about
the graveyard and the ships
that have been sunk there
