HOMECOMING:HMAS SYDNEY [II]'s triumphant return to her name port, Feb. 10, 1941 - F.J. Halmarick, SMH.

6634. We have had several wonderful fullship images of the cruiser HMAS SYDNEY [II]'s triumpant return from her Mediterranean victories to her name port in February 1941, including one that we think is simply the best image of SYDNEY [II] ion existence [see links below].

 

Entry 43:

www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/3810255013/

 

Entry 2000:

 

www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/4654794115/

 

And Entry 5078, one of the best photos of HMAS SYDNEY [II] in existence :

 

www.flickr.com/photos/41311545@N05/6360212241/

 

The cruiser had in fact arrived in Port Jackson just before midnight the night before, Sunday Feb. 9, and moored in Watson's Bay - just inside South Head - in preparation for her ceremonial progress down the Harbour to a huge civic reception awaitng her at Circular Quay. Huge crowds lined the foreshore, and among those to greet her were the Governor General, Lord Gowrie, Vic, the former WWI Prime Minister and Minister for the navy in a national unity government, William Morris Hughes, and many military leaders. In the photograph here we see SYDNEY's Captain John Augustus Collins [CBE] responding after a plague commemorating SYDNEY [II]'s destruction of the Italian cruiser BARTOLOMEO COLLEONI at the Battle of Cape Spada has been unveiled on 'Y' turret by Sydney's Lord Mayor, Ald Stanley Crick [standing mid-left].

 

We're not sure when the plaque was made ready, but it was presumably installed overnight, there were other presentations to follow [see next image], before a formal march by the ship's company through the city to the Town Hall, where yet more speeches awaited. [NOTE: each member of SYDNEY's company were given a medallian which was of the same design, front and back, as this plaque].

 

These celebrations, of course, took place just nine months before SYDNEY's dreadful loss with all hands in her encounter with the German raider SMS KORMORAN in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia on 19, 1941.

 

It was we showed the poignant image of SYDNEY crewmen coming home in February at Entry TK just down this page, uploaded on Anzac Day, 2013, that long-time Melbourne Contributor Kimberley Dunstan who has suggested we should expand the random images we have shown of SYDNEY'S return into some more consolidated sequence of scenes from the day.

 

There are images available for that from number of sources: the Australian National Maritime Museum [ANMM]'s Photostream here on Flickr alone has a set of 24 from its Sam Hood Studios Collection, and there are others shown by the State Library of Victoria [La Trobe Library]'s Argus Collection of Newspaper Photographs, the Sydney Morning Herald's oliune photo site, the RAN's Seapower Centre, and in various books, including the late VADM Sir John Collins's memoirs, 'As a Luck Would Have It' [Angus and Robertson Ltrd, Sydney 1965] and David L. Mearns 'The Search For The SYDNEY [Harper Collins, Sydney 2009].

 

Photo: F.J. Halmarick, the Sydney Morning Herald.

 

 

Done