Findng the HMAS Sydney is a Discovery for all the Ages
March 17th 2008 22:07
Yesterday I also had a conversation with a colleague about the merits of revisiting the HMAS Sydney mystery, where, rather obviously, his argument came down to funding. He wanted to know who was funding the expedition, if it was costing the tax payer, and, utterly naively, if it was draining money away from a children’s hospital somewhere. Like that’s a real choice.
I could justifiably concentrate this article on the value of this discovery to the families of the dead and the sense of closure they must now be feeling; God knows they must have dreamt of this day for so long. It’s most certainly, as the Prime Minister put it, ‘an historic day’, which brings me to my point… the bigger picture.
It never ceases to amaze me that people still don’t understand the value of historical discovery. We humans are by nature a race of explorers. We need to conquer, not armies and people necessarily, but our own curiosity. Without historical exploration of the Roman Empire, the French Revolution, dinosaurs, World War I, Evolution, the Italian Renaissance, et cetera (the list could seriously go on for several pages), as a species, we would live in a world of missed opportunities.
We have travelled through all the lands and then continued over the vast oceans. We took to the sky but didn’t stop there and our curiosity has now taken us to the moon and far beyond.
Yes, we’re only talking about one World War Two Cruise Liner, but who knows what secrets we can unveil? We have a responsibility to the generations that follow us, to provide answers and solutions to the most terrifying questions. Without exploration and detailed knowledge of how we have arrived where we are today, we are surely doomed to make the same mistakes over and over.
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Comment by Cibbuano
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Unfortunately, government money doesn't work like that, does it? It'd be nice for the government to just arbitrarily reassign money to worthy causes, but it just can't happen.
Anyway, history is an important part of any society... for a country as young as Australia, a little discovery like this probably does a world of good..