Hunt begins for crew members’ relatives after 120-year-old shipwreck mystery is solved

The rusting remains of the 73-metre long vessel were discovered by chance – BRAD DUNCAN/CSIRO

The hunt is on for British relatives of those killed in a major shipwreck, after a chance discovery enabled the 120-year-old mystery of the vessel’s demise to be solved.

All 32 crew members on board the SS Nemesis died after the 73-metre coal ship vanished without trace, in rough seas south of Sydney, Australia, in 1904.

Half of those on board the 1393-ton single screw steamer were from the UK, including the English captain, Alex Lusher, chief mate, T.A. Renaut, and second mate, W.D. Stein.

Carpenter J. Lochhead, from Glasgow, fireman T. Bourner, from London, chief cook J. Page, from Liverpool, and donkeyman C. Strachan, from Scotland, also went down with the ship.

“Around 40 children lost their parents in this wreck,” said New South Wales heritage minister Penny Sharpe.

“Up till now, they didn’t know what happened to them. We don’t know where all of the families are and so, for me, today is really a call-out to say please get in contact with either my office or Heritage NSW.”

An original drawing of the SS Nemesis – CSIRO

Discovering precisely what happened to the SS Nemesis had been described by some shipwreck researchers as the “Holy Grail”.

Built in Whitby in 1881, the ship ran deliveries along the west coast of Australia during the gold rushes, before becoming a coal carrier in around 1900.

She was last seen in distress, off Wollongong, NSW, on July 9, 1904. In the following weeks, the bodies of three crew members washed up on shore and were buried in an unmarked grave in Woronora Memorial Park.

Despite intense press attention and several dives over the years, the wreck remained lost until 2022, when remote sensing company Subsea Professional Marine Services stumbled across it, 160 metres below the surface, while looking for lost cargo containers.

A researcher looking at images of the wreck site captured by an underwater camera – HUGHBARKE/CSIRO

Underwater images of the rusting hulk, captured by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, have now finally revealed why the SS Nemesis likely sank: the engine appears to have been overwhelmed by waves, causing the ship to go down so quickly there was no time to deploy its lifeboats.

Tim Smith, director of assessments at Heritage NSW, said such shipwrecks offered “an amazing time capsule of past events in 19th century trade and, in this case, a wreck that just tipped over into the 20th century”.

He added: “For the families who can connect their family histories to an event like this, it gives them a focus and we are really hoping people will have memorabilia, photographs of the men, and the single woman who were on this ship.”

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