Local film buff Dallas Stowe, reports he attended a screening of Die Manner der Emden, aka Odyssey of Heroes, earlier this month and was surprised to see a front page purportedly from The Canberra Times flashed across the screen.

It carried an article on the sinking of the German ship by HMAS Sydney off the Cocos and Keeling Islands on November 9, 1914. The close up of the masthead carried the legend ''founded in 1850''.

''Odyssey of Heroes pays tribute to the extraordinary respect and admiration the Emden's crew were given even by their enemies, including The Canberra Times, as 'gentleman soldiers','' the publicity blurb claims.

Given Canberra itself is only just celebrating its centenary this would have been quite a feat. Your local paper is actually significantly younger than that, celebrating 87 years of continuous publication this year having been established in 1926, just one year before the Parliament relocated from Melbourne.

''Members of the audience reacted to the scene with some hilarity,'' Dallas reported.

Odyssey, a ripping yarn that traces the journey made by members of the Emden's shore party from the middle of the Indian Ocean back to Germany after their ship was grounded, was screened in Canberra as part of the Audi Festival of German Films.

Screenings were also held in Sydney and Melbourne. Made in 2012 under the direction Berengar Pfahl, the film focuses on an aspect of the Emden saga that is not at all well known in this country.

Indeed, when Gang-Gang was attending school in the late dark ages, the only references to the German raider in the curriculum were to its utility as gunnery target for the crew of HMAS Sydney on that fateful day in November, 1914.

The photograph of the light cruiser, her funnels shot away by Australian cannonfire and surviving crew members gathered on the stern awaiting rescue, after she was run aground by her captain, is an Australian icon.

There is, however, much more to the story than that. Before her ill-fated encounter with the Sydney, the Emden had landed a party of about 50 men under the command of Lieutenant Hellmuth von Mucke on Direction Island in the Cocos and Keeling group. Their mission was to destroy the Eastern Telegraph Company's wireless station.

The Emden was forced to abandon the shore party when it was engaged by HMAS Sydney and subsequently run aground on North Keeling Island after being struck by more than 100 shells. She gave a good account of herself, despite being outgunned by her larger and speedier opponent, knocking out one of Sydney's guns and destroying her range finder.

The resourceful Lieutenant von Mucke had no intention of spending the rest of the war as a prisoner. He and his men commandeered a schooner, the Ayesha, and sailed to Sumatra, from where they made their way back to Germany.

Odyssey is an apparently partly romanticised account of that epic 13,000km journey that saw them reach Constantinople on May 5, 1915 - less than a fortnight after the Anzacs landed at Anzac Cove.

While Australia, rightly, claims the sinking of the Emden as our young navy's first major victory, the Germans regarded her crew as heroes. Between August 4, and November 9, 1914, her crew apprehended more than 30 Allied vessels. On October 28, 1914, she sailed into the British port of Penang in Malaysia where she sunk a Russian cruiser, the Zhemchug, and the French destroyer, the Mousquet.