In the mid-1960s an abalone diver looking for seashells at Taylor Island, near Port
Lincoln found some unexpected types of shell – explosive ones from World War 2.
Neil Williams had uncovered 25 tonnes of fuses and bombs
The components were mainly artillery fuses which are the tips of projectiles which make
the projectiles explode.
So they’re mainly made of brass.
There were four different types of artillery fuses.
Navy divers recovered 18 tonnes of it.
Tom McNab was one of them.
Funny thing about old explosives, my understanding, is that it crystalises and can become more
sensitive than what it was when it was put in and it can go dud as well, but a lot of
that, it’s just part of the job.
You never thought about it, you just did it.
Tom photographed the mission.
Pictures of the divers, pictures of the people, pictures of the bombs and things like that
so, just generally what we picked up and how they look when they came up with all the growth
and seaweed and sponges and all sorts of the things hanging off them to give an idea of
what it looked like on the bottom.
Working at Taylors, you’d only get two days a month if you’re lucky, a day every two
weeks, when you’ve got no tide.
The tide roars through there, absolutely roars through.
So we had to lead up.
With that meaning we had double the amount of lead.
Lead boots with double the amount of lead.
We had out back weight pockets full of lead balls, 14 ounce lead balls, and then we had
our front weight pockets with as much weight as we could get in to work in the tide
We started out with just buckets and that, for the bits and pieces, then we found that
was crazy.
We were going to take too long so we ended up using a wicker basket and a winch, the
main winch on the HMAS Banks.
We lowered the divers down and they’d fill up the basket and we’d hoist it up and they
had communications which we got off the Royal Navy in Singapore.
Why they were there was a mystery.
No one’s ever owned up to taking the items, the shipment, out there and dumping where
it was dumped.
No one’s ever owned up to that but I’ve been able to put the dots together.
Back in 1946 after World War 2 there was a huge surplus of ammunition lying around in
storage depots just north of Peterborough, a little place called Terowie and at Gladstone
where they had a railway transport changeover system.
There was a lot of other sorts of obsolete ammunition which was transported down to Port
Germein jetty and was loaded onto a ship using handcarts and then that ship went out into
the middle of the gulf and it was supposed to be heading out to the continental shelf
for this obsolete ammunition to be dumped.
But the military personnel that were on board overseeing the disposal of these items were
horridly seasick so they decided to pull up in a certain little spot in the Passage here
off of Port Lincoln and it just so happened that it was near Taylors Island, and the decided
to unload it all there on the bottom of the ocean.
The rusted one is what’s left of a three-inch mortar bomb that was salvaged from that area.
It’s been exploded through explosives ordnance demolition people and it’s basically just
what’s left of the casing.
They also had the brass fuses in them and that’s one that’s been sectioned so you
can see inside what it looks like.
This item here is a PIAT, so this is a Projector Infantry Anti-Tank Projectile.
That’s the bomb from the PIATs.
Abalone divers collected some of them.
The story got out and suddenly there were quite a few abalone divers who were going
down there salvaging come of this stuff.
Once some of the basic fuses were removed they started coming across some of the three-inch
mortars and realising that there might have been some danger in it, a couple of the boys
took a couple of these things over to Taylor’s Island and decided to give them a bit of a
go and sure enough they found out that there was quite a bit of explosive content in it
and they went off with quite a big bang.
The navy dropped most of it into deeper water There were tonnes of these things brought
up by the Ab divers.
Now where they went to before they went off to scrap metal places, they could well have
filtered out into the community.
There might be one or two lying around in sheds somewhere.
So who knows how many are out there?
Some are now part of his collection
The divers were commended and two of them later moved to Port Lincoln.