WWII and Wartime Wrecks You Can Dive in Victoria

The Second World War reached Australian waters in three ways: German raiders and mines off the south-east coast in 1940 and 1941, the Japanese air raids on Darwin from February 1942, and Japanese submarines along the east coast in 1942 and 1943. Each left wrecks. The mines took the City of Rayville and the Cambridge off Victoria; the Darwin raids sank eight ships in the harbour in a morning; the submarines torpedoed freighters from Cairns to Gabo Island and put a midget submarine into Sydney Harbour.

This list is ordered by the year the wreck was lost among wrecks from 1939 to 1945, which is why the pre-war-loss Belbowrie at Maroubra opens it; from there it runs through the 1940 minings, the 1942 raids and the late-war reef strandings.

Nowhere else in Australia has a cluster of Second World War wrecks that a recreational diver can visit in a weekend. The Meigs, Mauna Loa, Zealandia, British Motorist and Peary all lie in 18 to 30 m within the harbour, dived on the neap-tide slack when the current stops and the visibility rises to 5 to 10 m. Darwin's operators run them from April to October; the Peary is a US war grave and is dived under permit conditions. The wrecks are protected under the Underwater Cultural Heritage Act, as is everything else on this list older than 75 years.

Some of the most important wartime wrecks are closed. The M24 midget submarine off Sydney's northern beaches and the Japanese submarine I-124 off Darwin are protected war graves inside no-entry zones. HMAS Sydney and HSK Kormoran lie in 2,500 m off Shark Bay. AHS Centaur is in 2,000 m off Moreton Island. They appear in the directory for their history, marked as no-dive sites, and the I-124 has a virtual-reality tour produced by the Northern Territory government.