EVER wondered if there's more to the story?
Take the official career of our warship HMAS Psyche (pronounced sigh-kee), Britain's former HMS Psyche. Strangely, her remains now rest in mud on the bottom of Salamander Bay, not scuttled in some obscure, deep ocean graveyard.
Labelled our "forgotten cruiser", many say she is nothing special, but if you examine closely, this P-class vessel has an interesting, unknown past, including an encounter once with an inexplicable floating object.
Decommissioned in 1918, our ex-World War 1 light cruiser capsized off Corlette during a storm in December 1924 without taking part in any major Australian action. And yet, she is historic, being one of the first ships of the Royal Australian Navy (RAN).
Since July 2015, she's had a waterfront memorial in Roy Wood Reserve, just off Foreshore Drive, Corlette, marking the old warship's last resting place, which is about 200 metres offshore.
The 2169-tonne vessel was launched in England in 1898 as HMS Psyche, but in July 1915, after the outbreak of WW1, was transferred to RAN. It again saw service overseas and was sold for scrap in 1922 and stripped out to become a hulk.
Her hull was towed to Port Stephens to be used as a lighter, storing timber before it was transferred to larger vessels bound for Sydney.
After the vessel rolled over and sank at her mooring in 1924, the RAN found a new use for the submerged wreck. Between 1950 and 1973, navy clearance divers used her to practice underwater demolition.
Superficially, the former HMAS Psyche might not seem to deserve much attention - much of her patrol duty was uneventful. Tropical heat, disease and mind-numbing routine ship patrols in the Bay of Bengal even sparked one of the armed services first mutinies (by its stokers).
The 95-metre-long, steam-powered Psyche was one of Britain's nine-ship Pelorus - or 'P' class - protected cruisers. The warship operated in New Zealand and Indian waters and around Sumatra until 1916, then went to Hong Kong and patrolled Chinese waters before returning to Australia.
Authorities must have feared she might sink in any scrap with the enemy as they paid her off three times in four years, before recommissioning her into service twice. But what of the average seaman's experiences onboard? Was sea life very dull? Hardly.
"HMAS Psyche was obsolete even at the beginning of WW1," former seaman Dudley Ricketts reminisced in June 1978, giving a rare glimpse of life onboard the small cruiser.
And we have the Naval Historical Society of Australia to thank for recording his invaluable memories for posterity.
Ricketts, originally from HMAS Tingira, said his warship was armed with eight four-inch guns and could carry a crew of 220 men.
The Admiralty feared an uprising in India and Burma (now Myanmar), so HMAS Psyche was to haunt the coasts, stopping suspicious vessels and searching them.
"During our wanderings (around the Indian Ocean's Nicobar Islands) we experienced a number of adventures and saw some unusual sights," Ricketts reported.
One time, near a spot where an English ship had been sunk by a sea mine, the lookouts spied a mystery floating object.
"We saw something on the surface about a mile away, and we circled it slowly to examine it," Ricketts said.
"It looked to be about eight feet long and six wide and floated well out of the water - a dirty white colour with weeds and barnacles growing on it.
"We closed in and opened fire with rifles and could hear the bullets ricocheting away from it. We then fired at it with three pounder guns and the little shells burst on it but did no damage.
"So, we fired a four-inch gun at it and the second shell split it open. We lowered a boat and went to examine it. It turned out to be a huge turtle which appeared to be dead and kept afloat by the gases inside it.
"Once we sailed close to a terrific fight going on between a sperm whale and a huge squid. The whale was enormous and the squid had terribly long tentacles which it seemed to be trying to use to cover the whale's blow hole to suffocate it."
Another time, Ricketts remembered his ship anchored near an island at Port Blair in the Andaman Islands. The crew were assured there were no sharks in the bay as locals often swam across to the mainland. The crew then went swimming near the ship.
A shark line was rigged anyway on the ship's stern and within minutes caught a "14-footer" (shark).
"I have never seen men leave the water so quickly! It turned out the bay was full of sharks, but they were all so well fed with waste from a slaughter yard on one side of the bay that they were not interested in men," Ricketts recalled.
"Although it was a necessary job that HMAS Psyche carried out, it was also a pretty thankless one," he concluded, remembering when half the crew (or 111 men) were once off duty sick in 1916.
The plaque at the Psyche memorial rock honours the often ultimate sacrifice of navy men in wartime. The epitaph reads: "They have no grave but the cruel sea. No flowers lay at their head. A rusting hulk is their tombstone - Afast on the ocean bed."
