Unknown sailor from HMAS Sydney II finally identified as Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark thanks to modern DNA technology

Stoker Collins would have been in the engine room of the mighty cruiser HMAS Sydney II when the German raider Kormoran dropped the camouflage from her guns and opened fire on the Australian ship at the nautical equivalent of point blank range.

Working deep in the bowels of the cruiser, Stoker Collins, whom my mother recalls as a big, happy man who loved to sing, never stood a chance.

Nor did the rest of his 645 fellow crewmen.

My Uncle Bill had joined the Navy to escape a father who had been gassed in the trenches during his frontline service in World War I and would drink heavily, then explode into deep, dark and abusive rages.

The four Collins siblings - Bill, Jack, Arthur and Edith - had knitted closely to protect each other, and shared a deep love and affection.

The family's anguish and sorrow at losing their brother in November 1941 joined that of an entire nation.

The sinking of HMAS Sydney II, in an intense sea battle described as "ferocious and brutal", traumatised and demoralised the country.

Only one crewman escaped that fateful battle, his body washed ashore in a life raft at Christmas Island.

Only now, 80 long years later, has that sailor been positively identified through the diligent and painstaking efforts of many people, civilians and service people alike, over 15 years and harnessing the very latest Y-chromosome DNA testing technology available at the Australian federal police forensics laboratory at Majura.

He was 21-year-old Able Seaman Thomas Welsby Clark.

His body was badly decomposed after three months at sea. He had suffered shrapnel wounds to his head from the conflict and when found, the bottom half of his legs were curled up, a legacy of paddling the raft, probably for days, until he perished, lost and alone.

The body was buried on Christmas Island in what is known in the services as a battlefield burial. A plinth exists on the island where the raft and his body were found. In 2006, his remains were exhumed, and he was finally laid to rest at a memorial for HMAS Sydney II at Geraldton, in WA, but still then an unknown sailor.

Until now.

Rarely, if ever, do words of our politicians ever generate an emotional response.

But at the Australian War Memorial on Friday when the Minister for Defence Personnel Andrew Gee spoke about how the pain of loss "echoes through the generations", they were more than just empty words.

Looking at the torn and bullet-riddled Carley life float displayed at the War Memorial - one of just a few scant items recovered from that awful, fateful day so many years ago - and thinking about how all those brave sailors, my great uncle Bill among them, had fought and died until the cold, dark waters of the Indian Ocean rushed in and claimed them, that emotion, unbidden, wells up.

Lest we forget.

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