The Ex HMAS
Pioneer was commissioned as a Pelorus Class Light Cruiser by the Royal Navy and built at Chatham in the UK in 1900. After working in home waters, she was sent to the Mediterranean Station in November 1900 where she served for 4 years before returning home and being placed in Reserve. She was recommissioned for service on the Australia Station in 1905, where she was used as a drill ship by the Australian Commonwealth Government and Imperial Government as part of the Australia Squadron. She remained in the Royal Navy until 1912, when she was transferred to the RAN as a gift from the Admiralty, wherupon she became
HMAS Pioneer. After a refit in 1913, by 1914 she had been commissioned as a training vessel for the Naval Reserve. With the outbreak of WWI, the light cruiser operated off the coast of WA, where she captured two German vessels off Rottnest Island. After breaking down during a convoy escort in 1914, she retruned to Fremantle, which was fortuitous as it is likely that she would have encountered the German Cruiser
Emden as she had been detailed to divert to Cocus Islands during this trip. The vessel served a stint on the German East African Coast in 1915, where she took place in a blockade at Zanzibar and an attack to neutralise the German cruiser
Konigsberg. The vessel remained in Africa until she retruned to Australia in November 1916, where she was subsequently used as an accommodation ship at Garden Island. In 1923, the vessel was taken to Cockatoo Island for disposal, where she was stripped to a bare hull. She was purchased by H.P. Stacey at Sydney for scrap and the stripped hull was subsequently scuttled off Sydney on 18 February 1931 (RAN 2014).
This site of the scuttled wreck was discovered by Scott Allen, Max Gleeson, Damien Siviero, Geoff Cook and Dave Wood on 23 March 2014. Congratulations to the finders!
The site lies approximately 4.4km east of Kimberley St, Vaucluse. The site's position was identified by researcher and diver Scott Willan who reinterpreted multi-beam data provided by the CSIRO research vessel RV Southern Surveyor (which was collected in 2010).
More details of the discovery methods are available at NSW Wreck Info Online website:
http://nswwrecks.info/Information/ss2010_t03Target1.pdf
The wreck lies in 67m of water, with the stern to the north west and bow to the south east, with elevated structure standing from between 2-6m off the seabed.
Based on measurements taken on the site, the finders have speculated that the wreck is either the ex HMAS Pioneer .
More images of the site are available at Damien Siviero Photography and Huw Porter Photography
