The
Island of Rats, that is Rottnest Island, lies just off the Western Australian
coastline opposite Perth and Fremantle.
This island has featured on two separate occasions in massive wide area
searches in the Indian Ocean.
The first occasion was after the
firefight in the Indian Ocean off the Australian coastline between the two navy
vessels, the Australian HMAS Sydney and the German HSK Kormoran, on November
19, 1941. That was 76 years ago this
weekend.
The two warring ships tragically
destroyed each other in a fierce battle lasting just one hour. Both ships were sunk, with a heavy loss of
life. Aboard the Kormoran were 400 crew,
300 of whom survived and were taken prisoner along the Australian
coastline. Aboard the Sydney however
were 650 men, none of whom survived, making it Australia’s deadliest wartime disaster. The Australian naval authorities became aware
of the deadly naval battle only when survivors of the German raider Kormoran
arrived in lifeboats on the Western Australian coastline.
The first search over the ocean was
carried out informally and unofficially by a Fairey Battle airplane on November
23 (1941), four days after this tragic wartime engagement. The Fairey Battle was a light single engined
bomber from England, and in this initial search flight over the Indian Ocean,
the plane used Rottnest Island as its reference point. During the two following days, a flight of 6
Hudson Bombers flew a fan shaped search pattern, again referenced on Rottnest
Island, though no ship debris nor survivor lifeboats were found.
It was not until 2008 that the
wreckage of both the German Kormoran and the Australian Sydney were located by
the Finding Sydney Foundation which was using sophisticated underwater
technical equipment. The scattered
wreckage of both ships was found 12 miles apart in ocean waters 1½ miles deep, 128 miles west of Shark
Bay in Western Australia in March 2008.
The second major aircraft search in
which Rottnest Island featured again began in March 2014, when the Malaysian
airliner MAS370 went missing over the Indian Ocean. This passenger plane with more than 200
passengers and crew began a regular scheduled flight from Kuala Lumpur in
Malaysia to Beijing in China.
After one hour in flight, the plane turned
around and flew back across the Malay Peninsula and then out over the Indian
Ocean. When the fuel was exhausted, the
plane fell into the ocean.
Several different search patterns
were implemented, with some based on Rottnest Island as a reference point. Though some debris has washed up on distant
shores, the wreckage of the sunken plane itself has not been rediscovered. This search and recovery effort developed
into the largest, most extensive and
most expensive aviation search in the history of the world.
The Island of Rats, Rottnest Island, is 7 miles long and 3
miles wide, and it lies 11 miles due west of Fremantle on coastal Western Australia. On the map, it looks like a scrawny ancient
monster.
This island was known to the
Aborigines as Wadjemap who did inhabit it at times in the ancient eras, though
not since European discovery. The first
European discoverers were Dutch explorers (1610), and the first to land on the
island was Willem de Vlamingh who went ashore on December 16, 1629; he spent 6
days on this small and rather featureless island.
It was Vlamingh who named the island
Rotte Nest in the Dutch language, which later became Rottnest. Vlemingh discovered the rare Australian
animal the Quokka which is best described as a miniature variety of
Kangaroo. He thought that it was a large
type of rat.
The first European settlers were
William Clarke and Robert Thomson together with their families, in 1831. The island has since been used as a prison
for Aboriginal criminals, a reform school for boys, an internment camp for
Germans and Austrians during World War 1, and an internment camp for Italians
during World War 2. These days the island
has a resident population of about 100, and it is a tourist destination for ½ million visitors each year.
Southwest of Rottnest Island is a
ship graveyard, 7 miles in diameter, and the first ship was deliberately sunk
there in 1910. Since then, 47
historically significant ships have been sunk at that location, in addition to
a whole host of American lendlease vehicles and aircraft towards the end of
World War 2.
The first wireless experiments in
Western Australia took place during the year 1899. A spark transmitter was installed in the
Royal Yacht Club in Perth and a small police launch carried a coherer receiver
on the Swan River and on Swan River Lake.
Right towards the end of that same
year (1899), the police launch ventured out from the Swan River in an attempt
to establish wireless communication with Rottnest island. The simple electrical signal was lost soon
after the launch entered open waters.
Just six years later (1905), the
Postmaster General, the Honorable Austin Chapman, made an official statement in
which he indicated that the Australian government was giving consideration to
installing a wireless station on Rottnest island. Three years later though (1908), the federal
government stated that the Western Australian wireless station would be
installed on the mainland, not Rottnest.
Ultimately, the wireless station, with the projected callsigns POF and
later POP, was installed at Applecross as VIP in 1912.
However, a communication station was
installed on Rottnest around 1933 and it was on the air under the callsign VKN
on 1620 kHz, just immediately above the standard mediumwave band. Four years later (1937), the navy announced
that they would install a communication station on Rottnest, and during World
War 2, the army did so too, in conjunction with a radar station.
This army station was installed on
the bottom floor of the 3 storied Rottnest Fortress. It was this station, under Naval Commander
Victor Ramage, that declared that they had heard no wireless signals from the
two ships Kormoran and Sydney during their firefight 450 miles to the north.
