"Diving into the Past" - The Wreck of the Birchgrove Park

This is a three-projector audio-visual presentation using photographs taken on slide film between (roughly) 1985 and 1988. It documents the wreck of the Birchgrove Park, a collier that sank off Sydney's Avalon Beach to a depth of 51 metres in 1956, with the loss of many of the crews' lives. Ideally, the slides would be rescanned and the whole production re-programmed digitally, but this video was taken with a camera aimed at a projection screen with all three projectors whirling away.
Please note that divers are discouraged from taking things off wrecks - for ownership and also heritage preservation reasons. This presentation needs to be understood in the context of the time period we were diving wrecks, where education and awareness of such protocols was just developing.
The presentation is important for a couple of reasons:
1/ It represents a documentation of the state of the wreck and its disintegration in a certain time period, and
2/ Interviews with two of the survivors are included, with their spoken accounts of the sinking recorded. Both men have since passed.
The wreck could actually be a challenging dive for the time, due to its depth and location just south of Broken Bay with the tidal outflow of the Hawkesbury River making visibility often poor. We were also using open-circuit scuba gear breathing compressed air. These days, with the use of rebreathers and specially-mixed gases, we are diving to much greater depths.

[@ClassicSuper8]

Thanks Mark, for posting this very valuable example of Australian Wreck Diving history which will no doubt be of great value to wreck divers and historians alike. I recall attending the premiere of "Diving into the Past" in Sydney when it was greeted with acclaim by the local dive fraternity and survivors at the time. All in the days before dive computers and nitrox mixes, when the formidable challenges of deep wreck diving made this accomplishment all the more special.

[@AussieSpencerSaunder]

Thank you Jim. That’s a lovely comment given that you were my mentor in deep diving and underwater photography and inspired me to engross myself in diving adventures.

[@cliftonwillis9372]

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