Sea Control - Sea Control 538 - Sunken Warships and Diplomatic Timebombs with Dr. Natali Pearson

Episode Date: July 20, 2024

Links1. The Australasian Journal of Maritime Archaeology.

Hey folks, it's Jared. Dr. Natalie Pearson makes her first appearance with us today to discuss all the complications surrounding sunken warships. This episode was edited and produced by Jim Jarby. Here at SimSec, we aim to further international maritime security through an exchange of ideas and the rigor of critical thought and writing. If you haven't already, please check out SimSec.org for new articles on the most important maritime topics. If you'd like to contribute to the discussion, check out the Write for SimSec tab to learn how you can submit articles for publication. And now, Kimbersman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security.

Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Dr. Natalie Pearson. We're going to be discussing her paper, Diplomatic Time Bombs, Southeast Asia's Sunken Warships. So, Natalie, welcome. Could you start by telling us a little bit more about your background? Hi, Jared. thank you so much for having me on the podcast. I'm a senior lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia and I work at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre which is one of the university's

multi-disciplinary initiatives so I work with scholars from all different disciplines at this centre but I'm also affiliated with the discipline of archaeology so my research is on heritage studies. I'm not a maritime archaeologist, I'm firmly within heritage studies and my background is in history and Indonesian. Along the way, I've picked up a few degrees in strategic studies and museum and heritage studies, as well as working for a while at the Australian Department of Defence, as well as AUSTRAC, the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre, which is Australia's anti-money laundering and counter-terrorism financing regulator. In hindsight, I guess all these different experiences and interests come together really well in the research that I'm

doing at the moment. So I think, you know, my experience in government, as well as across different disciplines, if you think of my research interests, like a Venn diagram of Southeast Asia and the ocean and like material culture, my research is somewhere in the intersection there. Yeah. Well, thank you again for joining us. As a reminder to the listeners, all opinions expressed are our own and not representative of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. So we'll start with the weighty question. Can you explain the concept of heritage diplomacy? Yeah, so this is a concept that I myself am grappling with, to be perfectly honest with you. And that's because there are two different ways of thinking

about heritage diplomacy. These are terms that we hear pretty often these days, heritage and diplomacy widely used. And so to put them together and try to pin down a specific meaning is quite elusive and quite difficult. So the way I'm thinking about it is that there are two different ways of conceptualising heritage diplomacy. The first is as a domain of practice. And in this sense, heritage diplomacy is commonly conflated with soft power or cultural diplomacy, terms with which we might be more familiar. And this is a pretty accurate reading, right? So this is diplomacy as an arm of government policy. And it's most commonly seen in the form of multilateral preservation aid. So in those big campaigns of the 1970s to save Borobudur or save

Venice, it's where states seek to secure influence through the export of their own social and cultural goods. And you often see it emerging in certain conditions, like in the aftermath of conflict or post-disasters such as destructive earthquakes or floods. So that's the first way of thinking about heritage diplomacy. That for me is quite accessible. Then there's heritage diplomacy as a conceptual framework or an analytical tool. And this is where it gets harder. It's much more slippery to pin this down. As I said, heritage and diplomacy are used a lot, used widely today. So coming up with a definition that is sufficiently precise is very difficult. And in a sense, it's one of the things I'm trying to do with my new project on sunken warships, which we'll get to.

And I'm really interested in getting a better sense of what heritage diplomacy means as a conceptual framework for understanding heritage in the context of international relationships, but not just international relationships, also how the local fits into that. So I'm thinking about shipwreck communities, veterans and descendants of warships, but also the coastal communities in whose wrecks these waters lie, and how developments between these veterans groups and coastal communities inflect the relationships at the national and the global level. We know that when it comes to heritage, there are certain claims being made to territory, to stories, to the past and to the future. And these aren't just an add-on, but for me, they're a really essential part of the bigger geopolitical debates going on around the world. So that's where I'm trying to position heritage diplomacy. And I'm not the only scholar working on heritage diplomacy by any means, but it is a concept that's very engaging for me in the sense of the work that I'm seeking to do in Southeast Asia. And, you know, maybe I can talk a little bit about the project itself now, Jared, would that be okay?

Yeah, if you want to explain to us how you got interested in this concept and then talk about the project that you have ongoing, that'd be tremendous. I'm particularly interested in the potential of heritage diplomacy as a tool in understanding how heritage is organized, not just by nation states, they are a really important part of it, but also by other actors, including those communities that coalesce around the ship outbreaks and thinking about the ways that they accumulate and power. So if we think about these ideas in the context of Southeast Asia, this is particularly maritime Southeast Asia, this is somewhere that has borne witness to a whole range of issues that speak to some of the bigger

geopolitical debates taking place across the region and globally. So these include things like disputes over territory, contested claims being made on marine space, issues relating to access like to oil and gas natural resources in the seabed to fishing rights of course and simply to territory so southeast asia located as it is adjacent to the south china sea is also witnessing these great power rivalries taking place you know a place where tensions between the great powers are playing out most often in the sea and in the maritime domain and for me the sunken warships issue which is the focus of my project brings in a whole range of flag and coastal states so the flag states we're thinking about shipwrecks from world war ii they're estimated to be about 2000

in southeast asia warships and also merchant ships and the flag states include the us uk netherlands australia of course japan and then coastal states like the philippines malaysia singapore indonesia Timor-Leste and China, of course. And there's many different ways of thinking about these political contestations that have emerged around the sunken warships. But as a heritage scholar, my interest is in the claims that are being made around the shipwrecks and their potential as vectors for both conflict and cooperation in Southeast Asia. Which vessels did you choose for your case study and why? So I've chosen six shipwrecks, six warships. And as I said, there's about 2000 in Southeast Asia. So I had my work cut out for me narrowing down the six that I

wanted to look at. I have to be honest, part of the reason I chose the RECs and the coastal states I did is because I have language facility in Indonesian. So I've chosen coastal states where I can use my Indonesian. So they are Indonesia, of course, Malaysia and Timor-Leste. If we start with Indonesia, the country, the first country I knew I wanted to work in, done a lot of work on HMA's Perth, which is an Australian warship that sank in Bunton Bay in late February, early March 1942, in particular around the illicit salvaging that has taken place of Perth in the last 10 to 20 years. You know, they estimate that there's less than 40% of the vessel remaining now. It's been salvaged for its scrap metal. I was very interested to see what's

taking place on USS Houston and how it's being managed differently. If it's in a better state of preservation than HMAS Perth and what might be the reasons for that better state of preservation. So the first shipwreck I've chosen is USS Houston. For me, it is eternally tied to HMAS Perth, though, so I've managed to sort of slip HMAS Perth in on the side with that one. And the other shipwreck in Indonesia is also an American one. It's the USAT Liberty.

This is an interesting wreck to me because there were no casualties. No one died on Liberty. It was a transport ship and it was more or less abandoned during World War II on the east coast of Bali. And then about 20 years later, Mount Agung erupted. And Mount Agung is a very significant spiritual volcano in Bali. And when Agung erupted, it was so violent that it pushed Yusat Liberty into the water.

And it's now Indonesia's most popular dive and tourist site for shipwreck tourism. And because of its connection to Sacred Agung, the community is really invested in USAT Liberty in a way that they might not have been had the wreck not been affected by the eruption. So there's actually community management of that particular shipwreck. So it's a very different situation from Houston. You know, no human remains on that ship. The community is very heavily involved in its protection and preservation. So they're two very interesting and different shipwrecks, both American wrecks, those ones.

Then if we move to Malaysia, the other coastal state I'm working in, the two wrecks there are both British wrecks. They're from Royal Navy, HMS Repulse and HMS Prince of Wales. The reason Repulse and Prince of Wales were particularly interesting to me is because of the illicit salvage that they have endured over the past few decades and because the Royal Navy recognised, I think it was sometime in the 90s, that these wrecks were vulnerable to salvage it's very difficult to protect shipwrecks out of sight out of mind you know

and they're often far from the coast it's difficult to monitor them the royal navy recognized as far back as the 90s that they these wrecks were vulnerable and that there wasn't the capacity whether you know from from the uk or from malaysia to protect them and they sent royal navy divers down to recover the bell because it's like a touchstone object so it's quite uncommon to interfere in a sunken warship in this way but it was also quite a strategic move on their part because as anticipated these wrecks have been salvaged and the bell that's been recovered is one of the last remaining sort of connections to the wreck and to the men who served on her and then the final country that I'm working in is Timor-Leste, East Timor and there are two

Australian ships there that I'm interested in. HMA's Voyager is on the south coast on a black beach called Nibitano. And Voyager was abandoned by the Australians. The captain had to make a terrible decision. He was disembarking troops and, you know, dropping off reinforcements for the commandos who were fighting on the island of Timor in World War II. And he had to make this terrible decision where if he turned on his engine, the propellers were going to churn up the small boat beside him and kill the men who were disembarking. If he didn't turn on his propellers and engage the engine, Voyager was going to wash up on the beach and be caught on the tide. So he chose the latter option and Voyager paid the cost. They had to abandon that vessel. You know, the sun

was coming up, the Japanese were flying overhead, they'd been spotted, so they had to abandon the vessel and that means that no Australians died on the wreck but it has sat on that beach on the south coast of East Timor, Timor-Leste for almost 80 years and it was intact when they abandoned it and now there's almost nothing remaining. So again it's been salvaged and it's also been heavily corroded. It's right in the wash zone on the beach. The final one I'm working on is HMAS Armidale. This is a pretty tragic story with HMAS Armidale. It was lost somewhere between Timor-Leste and Australia. A plane did spot some of the survivors of the wrecking in a Kali raft, and they were unable to rescue them. It was the last photo of those survivors ever seen. And the wreck of

Armidale has never been found. That wreck I've chosen because of the relationship between oil and gas development, natural resource development, and heritage. And often when those two things come together, there is conflict. You've spoken about this a little bit already, but I'll see if there's anything else that you want to add? What difficulties do you encounter with maritime sites that you don't necessarily find on land? I always find it really hard to talk about the difference between land and sea because it's not definitive, actually, and because there are always exceptions to the rule. But generally speaking, there are these sensitivities associated with working on underwater cultural heritage or sunken shipwrecks or, you know, cultural objects in the

ocean that you don't find on land. And to be honest, these become even more complicated when the object in question is a state vessel. And on that note, I've been talking about warships, but there are 10 times as many aircraft in Southeast Asian waters as there are shipwrecks. So let's not forget those state craft as well. But some of the sensitivities include the vague legal status of the shipwrecks there is this concept of sovereign immunity in international law where for example an australian shipwreck in indonesian waters indonesian territorial waters is like an australian embassy and people from indonesia cannot just visit the australian embassy without permission right so indonesians cannot just visit hmas perth without permission and by the same

token australians cannot just visit their shipwreck without indonesian permission because it's in Indonesian territory. Then there's the issue of the potentially polluting wrecks. So, so many of these wrecks, when they went down, had oil on board and unexploded ordnance. So, there are big efforts underway in the Pacific by organisations like the Major Projects Foundation to determine responsibility for who cleans up these shipwrecks once they start leaking oil, and many of them are in a very fragile condition. So, there's great work being done in the Pacific, but not so much being done in Southeast Asia. So I'm really interested to explore those issues.

And the leaking oil in particular can cause significant damage to local fishing stock, to local reefs, and to community livelihoods, these coastal communities who make their living from fishing. For the 80-year-old wreck in those waters to start leaking oil is absolutely devastating for their livelihood and their income. And the question remains, you know, whose responsibility is it to clean up the mess and should they be doing it proactively. The other issue is the presence of human remains.

Some of the wrecks I've chosen do not have human remains on them and some most certainly do or they did until they were industrially salvaged for scrap metal. And the question of human remains underwater on a warship is a complicated one because survivors and descendants, you know, veterans communities often describe them as official war graves and unfortunately they're not, right? If we're thinking about allied wrecks, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission describes

an official war grave as something that has a tombstone, and they don't have tombstones. And there are a couple of other reasons why they can't be considered official war graves in the same sense that, you know, the war graves at Fromelles are considered an official war grave. So they have different status in a way, and the presence of human remains and the desecration of those human remains through salvage has been absolutely devastating for survivors and descendants so at the same time they're not being protected properly then there's a question of who are these warships archaeologically and historically significant for so these warships

the allied warships that i'm working on were advocating allied interests and to be frank colonial interests in the region in maritime southeast asia in world war ii so what expectation can those flag states have around the coastal states willingness to protect them particularly without proactive support, collaboration, building capacity in the legal sector, all that sort of thing. If allied states are not doing that proactively, who is responsible for telling these stories and why would the coastal states be interested in protecting them? The other interesting sort of sensitivity is the marine ecosystems that develop around

the wreck and their ability to support fish populations to be a source of protein for coastal communities and the tensions arising around the potential for tourism so there is a lot of interest in world war ii in southeast asian waters but that can become a very complicated issue because coastal communities might benefit from people visiting the wrecks doing dive tourism spending money locally but how do survivor and descendant communities feel about what is the war grave for their family member being visited as a tourism site so there are a lot of sensitivities associated with the warships and for me that's what makes them so interesting because i don't think there's a clear-cut answer to any of these questions why do you refer to the vessels as

diplomatic time bombs and i'll caveat that with things like you just gave us like six different possible examples of that they have the potential to really inflect diplomatic relationships and between states but also for me essential to the project is the relationships between these communities around the shipwreck that i've been talking about the veterans communities and coastal communities and there is a sense of danger associated with the wrecks they are precarious they are home to unexploded ordnance people can suffer injuries if they bring and i've certainly heard stories and seen photos of people bringing shells to the surface that they found in their dives and i'm interested in the question of who bears the cost you know moral

ecological financial when something goes wrong and it's just a matter of time before something does go wrong the wrecks are very old they're corroded they're being destroyed by illicit salvage and it's going to cause problems in bilateral relationships i mean there have already been a number of dutch shipwrecks removed in their entirety from the seabed in the java sea and the question was you know why had the netherlands not worked proactively with indonesia earlier to protect and preserve the wrecks if that's what they wanted for the wrecks? Why did it have to wait? Why did the diplomatic talks and the track one and two dialogue have to wait until the discovery that the wrecks had been removed? So I guess I'm trying to get a bit

of momentum around more proactive engagement around these wrecks. What collective efforts are underway to protect these sites? Or are there any efforts? There are some protective efforts underway to protect these sites. I mentioned HMAS Perth earlier. It sank in 19... It was destroyed in 1942 and it wasn't until 2018 that Indonesia enacted

a marine protection zone around HMAS Perth. Now that zone sought to protect the fish and the marine ecosystems and cultural heritage was caught up in that protection. So the wreck has been protected as a resistance

and that was a clever way for Indonesia to do it, to bring in some form of protection around the wreck. But to be honest, the efforts to enact appropriate legislation around these shipwrecks, not just in Indonesia but in Malaysia and Timor and, of course, elsewhere like the Philippines, it has been slow, the introduction of appropriate legislation.

There's also the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage, a convention established to protect shipwrecks and other forms of cultural heritage. But in our region, it's quite unique actually. only one country in Southeast Asia has signed this 2001 convention, that's Cambodia. And in fact, none of the flag states that I'm working on have signed the convention either. So Australia, UK and the US are also not signatories to the 2001 convention. So there is potential there to work more closely together and to get sort of regional momentum around signing and ratifying that 2001

convention these are the the sort of legal frameworks around which the wrecks can be protected and preserved but ultimately what it comes down to is strong establishing strong collaboration between regional partners proactively because by the time a wreck is located or found to be salvaged it's too late the mechanisms to bring in you know a marine protection zone for HMAS Perth I mean it took a very long time for that to be brought in they're still working on that with USS Houston. It hasn't been introduced around USS Houston yet for various reasons. So we really need to be thinking about these issues early and needs to take place on a case-by-case as it represents. They're all quite different. Well, unfortunately, that's all that we have

time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Dr. Natalie Pearson. Natalie, where can we find you online and what are you working on next? Thank you for having me, Jared. You can find me on Twitter and my handle is S-E-A underscore G-R-E-E-N-Y Sea Greenie. I've also received funding from the Australia ASEAN Council to do work on shared heritage through maritime collections in a number of ASEAN countries. So I'm really

looking forward to that and to getting stuck into the Sunken Warships project as well. Thank you again for joining us. To the listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you. We'll be right back.