The terrifying sublimity of shipwrecks has pervaded the imagery of literature for millennia; from Old Testament psalms through the landlocked fantasies of Emily Dickinson or the monumental modernism of Will Self. In 1946, the Second World War Dutch submarine HNLMS K XI was decommissioned and sent off to Australia, to a place colloquially known as ‘Rottnest ship graveyard’, where it was intentionally sunk and left lost on the vast expanse of the sea floor.
Until January 2025, when a team of divers from the Australian company WreckSploration noticed something strange when they were investigating the Rottnest coast. Andrew Oakley, the team’s lead diver, said: ‘An unusual cigar-shaped image of reef came up on the unit – unusual enough just to have a quick ‘reef’ dive to empty the tanks so we could get back to the ramp’. After investigating, Andrew, along with other team members David Jackson and Patrick Morrison, found they had discovered the long-thought lost submarine.
In collaboration with the Western Australian Museum, the divers took 6,000 photos of the wreck and, combining that with archival data, were able to create a 3D photogrammetric model that proved their discovery was in fact HNLMS K XI.
The discovery of HNLMS K XI represents a significant moment in modern understanding of Dutch nautical and military history. Martijn Manders, a spokesman for the Dutch Cultural Heritage Agency, who contributed to the funding of the project, said: ‘It is the best result we could have hoped for. The discovery of the submarine not only shows the ties between the Netherlands and Australia but also how close we are when it comes to the management of our marine cultural heritage’.
HNLMS K XI was launched in 1924, and its initial operation was to monitor the waters around Indonesia, which was then still a Dutch colony before the country gained independence in 1949. The submarine’s most notable moment came during World War Two: it saved the lives of thirteen crew members of the Royal Australian Navy’s minesweeping and convoy escort sloop HMAS Yarra (II). In March 1942 the HMAS Yarra was struck by a Japanese warship and sunk, killing 138 of the 151 crew members. The thirteen men who were rescued by the HNLMS K XI had miraculously survived for five days in rough seas.
Several decades after the submarine was intentionally sunk, diving teams and cultural heritage sites began investigating the Rottnest area for interesting and potentially historically valuable shipwrecks, including HNLMS K XI. However, finding the Dutch submarine proved difficult until the WreckSploration discovery, because it had moved several kilometres from where historical records suggested it was. ‘She sank in a place where she actually should not have, which is why she was lost,’ says Martijn Manders. ‘It turns out to be on the edge of the ship graveyard and that’s a stroke of luck, because most wrecks are at greater depths, but you can reach this one as a sports diver.’
Manders is enthusiastically advising people to go visit the wreck, describing it as a ‘fantastic place that you can go look inside. It is very large, 67 meters long and about 6 meters wide. We actually hope that many people will go and have a look. There is a long cigar that is slowly being overgrown by corals!’
The wreck will be maintained by the Western Australian Museum and is protected under the Commonwealth’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act 2018. This protection means that divers are able to visit the site but are not allowed to damage, disturb or remove any part of the submarine. The museum states that ‘HNLMS K XI is a protected shipwreck site, holding significant historical value as a record of WW2 co-operation between Allied forces from Australia and the Netherlands’.
Written by James Turrell