Federal was a steel screw steamer of 1,516 tons built by William Doxford and Sons at Sunderland in 1890, 88 m (290 ft) long with a 40 ft beam, a typical British tramp of the period employed on the Australian coast in the coal trade. On 21 March 1901 she was carrying coal from Newcastle bound for Albany, Western Australia, when she met a severe south-west gale in eastern Bass Strait. She was never seen again; wreckage and bodies came ashore along the East Gippsland coast in the following weeks.

All aboard – variously recorded as 29 crew or 31 souls in total – were lost, making her one of the worst Victorian maritime disasters of the Federation year, and for more than a century the wreck's position was unknown. In 2012 recreational divers reported an unidentified sonar target far offshore, and in April 2019 the CSIRO research vessel Investigator, working the East Gippsland shelf with multibeam sonar, produced a 3D map of a wreck 34 km south of Cape Conran and 60 km south-west of Point Hicks in 115 m. It matched the Federal.

The imagery shows a ship lying on top of a six-metre-deep scour, broken up, with the stern smashed and the starboard hull plating beginning to fall into the scour. Heritage Victoria declared an 800 m radius protected zone; a permit is required to enter it and anchoring is prohibited. At 115 m in open Bass Strait, a three-hour passage from the nearest bar harbour, the Federal is beyond anything currently dived in Victoria and no dive on her has been reported.

Anyone planning an expedition would be pioneering; the realistic way to see the Federal is the CSIRO's sonar model.

Effectively inaccessible. The wreck lies 34 km south of Cape Conran in open Bass Strait; the nearest launch is the Marlo ramp at the mouth of the Snowy River (bar crossing) or the Lakes Entrance harbour 80 km to the west, either of which means a 2–3 hour open-sea passage in a large, well-found vessel. Drive Melbourne–Marlo via the Princes Highway and Orbost, about 5 hours.

Anchoring is prohibited within the 800 m protection zone and a Heritage Victoria permit is required to enter it. No dive has been publicly reported on the wreck; it was located by recreational divers' sonar reports in 2012 and confirmed by the CSIRO research vessel Investigator with multibeam sonar in April 2019.

Open Bass Strait 34 km offshore with no shelter: the East Gippsland shelf is exposed to swell from south-west through south-east and to the East Australian Current's southern eddies, which bring strong and unpredictable currents. Any expedition would need a multi-day high-pressure window with swell under 1 m and would still face 3–4 hours of decompression drifting in open water. The Scuba Doctor summarises Bass Strait conditions here as difficult, with exposed seas, poor visibility and strong currents.

In practice the depth places the wreck beyond current sport-technical practice in Victoria.

No dive plan – 115 m, protected zone, permit required, no recorded dives.

Not a practical dive: 115 m would require hypoxic trimix CCR with 3–4 hours of decompression in open Bass Strait, a support vessel and a Heritage Victoria permit. No recorded dives.

No operator and no known dives. The site was identified by sonar (recreational divers 2012, CSIRO RV Investigator 2019); it is a permit-only protected zone at 115 m and is listed here for completeness, not as a diveable site.