This story was first published in 2009.
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Even the threat of shark attack is not enough to deter diving detective Max Gleeson from uncovering the secrets of the past, WILLIAM VERITY discovers.
It's the moment that every seafarer fears more than any other, the stuff of fascination and of legend, the moment that many do not survive to tell the tale.
For Max Gleeson, that moment came in 2004 when - after more than 30 years of diving shipwrecks, researching, writing about them, photographing them and filming them - he found himself adrift in open water, helpless and scared.
He and a mate had anchored off Seal Rocks in northern NSW to visit the wreck of the Catterthun, a steamer that sank in 1895 on a trip from Port Kembla to Hong Kong. Included in her cargo were 10 boxes containing almost 9000 gold coins.
After reaching the bottom, Gleeson decided to abort the dive due to poor visibility, but lost the anchor-line in a fumble and had no choice but to surface, hoping the anchor was slipping along the sand and the boat was drifting in the same current as the diver.
"When I come to the surface, I am 100m from the boat and it is still anchored," Gleeson related. "I have no chance of getting back and my mate is not in the boat. Where is he? Is he dead? Has a shark got him?"
He remembers a conversation he had with a shipwreck survivor, how after 12 hours in the water, the albatrosses started attacking him. By the end of an hour, he is starting to talk to himself and two albatrosses are flying low over his head.
"The water is filthy and brown and I knew that water was known for sharks.
"Sitting with your head sticking out of the water, there is no more vulnerable feeling of helplessness. I hear this noise coming over my left shoulder and spin around, fully expecting to see a shark fin."
His panic is premature. The hissing is simply air escaping from the dump valve on his tank. After nearly three hours in the water, he was rescued by his mate in the boat and the coastguard helicopter,
"My story ended fine and it was only a small incident compared to what some of those men went through, but it gave me an insight," Gleeson said.
Then he adds: "I think about sharks every day. I am anti shark to tell the truth, if they napalmed the lot of them, that would be fine by me."
As soon as you enter Gleeson's living room in Caringbah, you know he may be a fitter by trade, but he is a diver by passion and by birth.
One wall of the room is dominated by shelves on which sit brass port holes (one with broken glass), a ship's lantern, watches, a set of brass binoculars, a clock, and a sign warning second class passengers not to pass this point.
They are relics of wrecks from the Illawarra and beyond, collected before the days when laws were passed prohibiting any disturbance of the sites.
Gleeson's grandfather served as a leading hand fireman under the captain - Arthur Rostron - who would later come to the aid of the most famous shipwreck of them all, the Titanic.
He grew up in a suburb named after a shipwreck, the Malabar, a 350-ft liner that foundered in dense fog on April 2, 1931 and whose carcass still sits close to shore on the southern Sydney shore.
Bream and blackfish congregate at the base of the engine and its huge pistons and conrods, which can still be seen from the surface when conditions are clear. A spare steel propeller lies nearby.
But it's another ship that Gleeson wants to talk about, a collier that used to ply its trade between Sandon Point and Sydney in the early 20th century, providing the link between Coalcliff Colliery and the hungry steamers that needed refuelling in Sydney Harbour.
The SS Undola was purpose-built in Scotland and delivered to Coalcliff Collieries Ltd in early 1910 but would often touch the bottom when loading coal from the Coalcliff jetty, so began working out of jetties at Bellambi, Bulli and the harbours at Wollongong and Port Kembla. In 1916 alone, she made 108 voyages to the Illawarra and three voyages to Newcastle.
Yet disaster struck - and a mystery was born - when the Undola foundered in the face of a furious southerly buster and rising seas off the Royal National Park, while attempting to return to Sydney with a full cargo of coal from Bellambi.
All 11 crew perished.
It was the first of three coal ships to sink between December 1918 and May 1919 - the SS Myola sank travelling south from Newcastle on April 2, the SS Tuggerah sank after departing Bulli on May 17 - and together, they sparked a Royal Commission into collier safety.
The commission suggested that the Undola may have struck a German mine but came to no firm conclusion about the cause of the sinking.
In a DVD filmed over three years and launched by Gleeson last month, he visits the wreck site and disproves the mine theory, citing the fact that the hull appears relatively intact.
However, he details a new theory - that the steering chains broke, leaving the collier helpless in heavy seas, and provides underwater footage of the wreck that points in the same direction. The rudder, he notes, is locked hard at starboard.
"A break in the chain would have left the rudder banging like a barn door, possibly causing her to broach and roll onto her beam's end and founder," Gleeson said.
Positive proof of a mystery now 90 years old, however, would be impossible without disturbing the wreck to check the pointer in the ship's wheelhouse.
"Since this is now buried, and the law prevents us from disturbing the wreck, the mystery will have to remain unsolved," Gleeson concluded.
For many years, Gleeson has made a name for himself taking underwater stills of wrecks and the colourful marine life that inhabit them.
Then he started writing about them, publishing four books in 20 years, the last three of them telling the stories behind wrecks, many of them off the Illawarra and South Coast.
Then in 2004, he stopped waiting for somebody else to start making documentaries and spent $18,000 on an underwater video camera to do it himself.
New technology now enables divers to go twice as deep, as far as 180m below the surface, so recent years have yielded some exciting finds.
Shortly after buying the camera, Gleeson was the first recorded diver to visit the site of the SS Bega, a tramp steamer with berths for 32 gentlemen and 16 ladies, that was part of the Illawarra Steam Navigation Company.
The fleet was the only practicable form of communication and transport for both goods and passengers along the South Coast, before the railway was built to Nowra in the late 19th century.
The ship foundered off Tathra on her way from Merimbula to Sydney on April 5, 1908. Her cargo included cheese, butter, gold sovereigns, pigs for the Sydney market and livestock for the Royal Easter Show.
After a tip-off from fishermen, Gleeson dived the wreck with the hope of being the first person in nearly a century to see the ship.
"The water was very dark but clear. I hit the bottom and tried to figure out where I was," he said. "Then I set off to try and identify the ship, crawling along the hull and looking for any piece of china that would be embossed with Illawarra Steamship Company.
"The first thing I found was a beautiful old teapot but with no writing. Then I saw this plate way ahead of me and there it was on the company emblem.
"Just to prove it was the Bega, I swam over the stern and saw the twin propellers. I had written about the Bega in my books but it was not found. To be one of the first divers to be down there was extraordinary."
The ship will be the subject of his next documentary because the call of the ocean remains as strong as ever.
"No-one will ever know the amount of effort that goes into something like this, because eight times out of 10 you drag the camera down and you don't even switch it on because the camera is too dirty.
"Any time when you get a clear dive, it's a fantastic feeling. You come down the line and see the wreck lying on the bottom, it's just a phenomenal thing."
The Queen of Nations
One of the finest of the many wrecks that litter the NSW coast lies just a few metres out from Corrimal Beach.
The Queen of Nations was a square-rigged clipper, a fine example of the famous White Star Line whose ships pioneered the Kangaroo route - between London and Sydney.
Under the ruinous captaincy of a drunk, Captain Samuel Bache, and a drunken first mate, the ship foundered in the pre-dawn hours of May 31, 1881, and only a few kilometres south of their final destination. It may be no surprise that the ship's cargo included 7000 gallons of cognac.
Capt Bache mistook a slag heap fire on Mount Keira off Wollongong for the light on Port Jackson's south head. Believing he was entering Sydney Harbour, he turned the ship toward shore and literally drove through the surf onto Corrimal Beach, just north of Wollongong.
The crew prepared to abandon ship, but were confronted by the first mate brandishing a firearm. He would have shot them too, except that he had forgotten to load the weapon first.
The story is one of the favourites for Tim Smith, co-ordinator of the NSW Maritime Archaeology Program and the man responsible for the 1800 wrecks off the state's coast, 27 of them off Wollongong.
"There are remarkable stories that are locked up in these heritage sites," Smith said. "Often, they are out of sight and out of mind and their legacy is forgotten. Only when the sites are rediscovered are the stories relived."
The golden age of shipwrecks - if such a term can be used - is from about 1860 to 1945. Modern navigation techniques means wrecks are now an event of the past.
The Illawarra is rich in wrecks because of the volume of traffic along the coast and the number of coal mines and jetties.
Smith has seen the virtually untouched remains of the Queen of Nations, after freak weather conditions laid it bare for a few days in 1991.
"It's part of the detective work that we do," Smith said. "You get a glimpse for a few days and then it's gone again for years."
MAP: All shipwrecks in the Illawarra region
Caption:
Four photos: Divers explore shipwrecks off the coast of Port Kembla (ABOVE) and Bellambi reef. Pictures: MAX GLEESON Max Gleeson is one of Australia's most experienced wreck divers and authorities on NSW shipwrecks. He recently launched a DVD which examines the fate of the SS Undola, the first of three coal ships to sink off the South Coast between December 1918 and May 1919. Picture: LISA McMAHON