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One Saturday afternoon in 1917, as an American mail ship steamed in through Sydney Heads, it took evasive action to avoid hitting a floating mine.
Unscathed from its close encounter, the ship raised the alarm when it docked.
There were no minesweepers in Australia at the time, so a naval cutter was sent out to investigate.
Eventually the explosive was located, floating in the ocean off Sydney’s northern beaches. The crew of the cutter, with much care and a great deal of mirth, disabled and retrieved the ‘mine’.
It was not a mine after all! How did the object get there? We have to go back a few hours, to around 3pm that same afternoon.
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At Lyne Park, near Sydney’s picturesque Rose Bay, a game of football was taking place between teams from the Navy and Drummoyne.
Some time during the match, one of the players took an almighty swipe at the ball – perhaps a shot on goal, presumably by a defender – which sailed well over the goalposts all the way into Rose Bay.
The players could only shrug and give up the ball as lost.
The ball floated out of Rose Bay on the tide all the way to the harbour entrance where it ‘attacked’ the steamer coming in through the heads. Of course, footballs didn’t come in white or fluro colours in those days, they were tanned leather, which turned dark brown when wet, so in the water they could resemble anything really – even a German floating mine.
Eventually the ball floated up the coast all the way to Narrabeen, where it was picked up by said sailors.
The newspaper report I based this story on mentions, “at the time the Wolf was off the coast and she was blamed”. So what of this Wolf?
The book The Wolf, by Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen, describes the 451-day cruise of the German raider, SMS Wolf. Sailing from Kiel in late 1916, it sunk more than 30 ships in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, some in Australian waters.
The Wolf also laid mines off the coasts of South Africa, New Zealand and Victoria. A freighter, the Cumberland, struck one of these mines just a few kilometres off the Victorian coast in July 1917.
So it turns out that the Americans’ concerns may not have been completely baseless.
Is this salty nautical tale a true story? Admittedly it was reported in a Sydney newspaper some ten years after the events occurred. And it wouldn’t surprise if those footballers from the navy and Drummoyne teams might have had a few ales after the game.
Who knows, perhaps the story grew a few barnacles in the retelling. But sometimes a good story is like good wine – it gets better with age.
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