HMAS Sydney memorial, the Abrolhos Islands and the mid-west WA coast where the Batavia wrecked in 1629
Geraldton lies 420 km north of Perth on the Indian Ocean coast — the capital of WA's Mid West region, a lobster-fishing and grain-farming hub with an exceptional warm climate (the most sunshine hours of any major Australian city). The HMAS Sydney II Memorial, where all 645 crew were lost in 1941, is the most visited war memorial in Western Australia. Sixty kilometres offshore, the Houtman Abrolhos Islands — a 122-island coral archipelago and UNESCO heritage nominee — hold the wreck of the 1629 Dutch East India Company ship Batavia and marine biodiversity found nowhere else on earth.
The Yamatji peoples inhabited this coast for tens of thousands of years before the Dutch East India Company's Batavia ran onto the Abrolhos reef in June 1629; within months survivors murdered 125 of their own number in the bloodiest mutiny in maritime history, a story that didn't reach a worldwide audience until the wreck's rediscovery in 1963. British settlement at Geraldton began in 1850 and the city grew steadily as a grain and lobster centre, but it was the HMAS Sydney's loss in November 1941 — all hands, cause unknown for 67 years until the wreck's 2008 discovery — that left the deepest…