Jeremy Green: The Deep-Water Graveyard

The settlement of Western Australia meant that an increasing number of ships were sailing into port. Some of these ships were incapable of carrying on due to factors like age and storm damage, and so were being abandoned on pristine beaches. This caused unrest within the local community as it ‘didn’t look good’ to have wrecked ships lining the coast.

The Government acted on this unrest by designating a dumping area in Cockburn Sound but this caused further problems. It was then decided that the wrecks would instead be dumped in an area of 100m deep water, 10-15km south west of the west end of Rottnest Island.

Ships that weren’t fit to carry on were employed as hulks and stored coal or supplies to service other ships. Eventually, they became so rotten that they were deemed a danger to the port, at which point they were taken to the Graveyard.

Records exist of 50-60 ships from 1900s-50s that were sunk at the Graveyard. Dr. Michael McCarthy of the Western Australian Museum started to receive reports from fishermen that fish were aggregating around the site in great columns – needless to say a great spot for fishing. However, this indicated something existed on a deeper level, and the conclusion drawn was that this area was the location of the Deep-Water Graveyard.

The water certainly was deep: too deep, in fact, for maritime archaeologists to explore the area with the skills and tools that were available to them. Luckily, a decade ago, a local film company called Prospero Productions came to the Western Australian Museum and asked if there were any projects they would like to pursue that they wouldn’t usually get government funding for. The Deep-Water Graveyard was one of the possibilities mentioned.

A film was made about the Graveyard but, unfortunately, it never went to air: the story was not deemed ‘good enough.’ The story it told, though, was a fascinating one. Prospero Productions had commissioned a local aerial survey company to run an aerial magnetic survey over a section of the Graveyard, which revealed the location of 6 or 7 very large magnetic anomalies: iron wrecks. A further stroke of luck saw a group of technical divers looking for something ‘interesting’ to do, and so added their skills to the investigation. Their expertise provided archaeologists with confirmation that the iron wrecks existed there, and also with the first fuzzy photographs of the sunken skeletons.

Jeremy Green from the Western Australian Museum, says that, once again, the team had a lucky encounter. Jeremy had been working in Turkey in 2001, where he’d used a two-man submarine to look for wreck sites. The submarines were quite comfortable: ‘a big plexiglass bubble.’ At the time of the Graveyard investigation, Jeremy was sailing on the Swan River when he saw a boat moored at Pier 21 with one of the same submarines on the back of it. He tracked down the owner of the sub and found that they, like the technical divers, were also looking for something interesting to do.

The owner was given the coordinates of the wreck sites and, for the first time, high-definition video was recorded of the wrecks. This allowed the team to confirm the existence of 16 sites in the Deep-Water Graveyard, 5 of which they could identify from records. From that point on, for the rest of the site investigation, new information would come in about the area every month or so.

Jeremy went down in the submarine on one occasion: ‘70m of water and you could still see the surface.’ He spent two hours down there which, for him, highlighted the big advantage such a piece of technology has over other methods of deep water exploration. Technical divers, for example, can only spend around 15 minutes exploring a site before they have to return to the surface, where the must spend up to 3 hours decompressing in 10m of water.

Jeremy is confident that, as time goes on, more will be revealed about the Deep-Water Graveyard and the ships that were sunk there. There is, he is certain, much more to be revealed about Western Australia’s rich maritime history.