Built in Britain, the HMAS Perth was taken over by the Australian navy at Portsmouth in 1939, on the eve of World War II. Her officers and crew spent their first Christmas at Jamaica, on their way home. They marched in their white uniforms through the streets of Sydney for the first time in March 1940, and later their light cruiser escorted many troop ships across the Great Australian Bight and Indian Ocean.

Two tall funnels, rather handsome, puffed out smoke from the fuel that drove her four Parsons steam turbines. Capable in a crisis of travelling at thirty-two knots or a speed of sixty kilometres an hour, she makes most of the huge cruise ships of today look slow. She fought first in the Mediterranean Sea. Often a target for Italian and German bombs, she lost thirteen of her crew while assisting in the evacuation of troops from the island of Crete in 1941. In the following year, in a battle near Java, another 353 of her crew were lost. ‘There is no comparable event,’ writes Carlton, ‘in the history of the RAN.’

This is a story of ordinary and extraordinary men. Here is Hec Waller, who was captain during her final voyage. Son of a storekeeper from Benalla – that short corridor of country along the Hume Highway probably produced more war heroes than any other small region of Australia – Waller did not seem likely to become a notable captain. In his first command, he was given low marks for seamanship. Moreover, his health was poor in his last months at sea.

We also meet Ray Parkin, who, before becoming an outstanding novelist and naval historian, was a petty officer in the Perth (he described its ultimate fate in Out of the Smoke [1960]). Described by Carlton as ‘one of the most extraordinary men ever to wear the uniform of the RAN’, he had first marvelled at the sea when aged only six. Standing on a Victorian beach one summer holiday, with the water ‘lapping around my ankles’, he looked on ‘the widest sea I could imagine’. A hundred other seamen appear in the book: city and country boys, married or single, reared in Salvationist or Bible-empty homes. They included many who carried only a pack of cards for their daytime reading, while others owned tiny libraries of serious books.

And who could overlook the ship’s cat? Named Redlead, she was actually grey and white. When the ship was ready to sail from Sydney for the last time, she was smuggled aboard by Able Seaman Bob Collins and eventually accepted by the captain as a crew member.

The Battle of the Sunda Strait – an attempt to hold back the might of the advancing Japanese ships and aircraft in 1942 – is the centrepiece of the book. British Singapore had fallen a fortnight previously; Dutch Java was soon to fall. In the open sea, the big USS Houston and other Allied vessels were hopelessly outgunned. Perth was hit by three Japanese torpedoes. ‘Men were tossed around like dolls, and those on deck were drenched by a rushing wall of seawater.’ Wounded Australian sailors were carried to the sick bay, where doctors tried to cope with arms and legs ‘blown away’ and skin burned ‘beyond recognition’.

The ship was abandoned in the first minutes of Sunday, 1 March 1942. Those in the water watched her begin to sink. As the bow slowly dived, a propeller could be seen still turning in mid air. For an instant a Japanese searchlight flashed on the red and white and blue of the ensign still flying from the tilting mainmast (it was precisely 12.25 a.m.) Redlead was at first safe as Bob Collins, jumping overboard, carried her in his arms, but in the darkness and confusion he eventually lost his grip, and Redlead was last seen ‘floating away’.

Captain Waller, to the very end, remained on the bridge. Mike Carlton endorses the view of many of the Perth’s crew that the captain should have been awarded the Victoria Cross for his valour. He regrets that ‘bureaucracy and imperial muddle stood in the way’. In all, ninety-seven Australians so far have received the VC, but not one was a member of the Royal Australian Navy.

News of the extent of the disaster was slow to reach Australia. It was some three months later that relatives learned that survivors were definitely alive. Rohan Rivett, a young journalist who was captured by the Japanese in Singapore, was later ordered by the Japanese to write a letter, which was eventually read over the radio in Jakarta. He had cleverly inserted news of the Perth’s three hundred or so survivors, and in Australia the broadcast was officially monitored, and the welcome news passed on.

Of those who were in the ship when she was torpedoed, less than one in three survived the combination of the sinking and the Japanese prison camps. Even after the end of the war in August 1945 and the safe homecoming of the survivors, it was hoped that a few others, still missing, might be found somewhere in the war zone. Mrs Jack Lewis of Sydney, who had long been saving up for a family house, thought that her husband might somehow return to live in it: ‘I realised then that Jack was not coming back. I thought he might come back, but he didn’t.’

Many of the arresting pages in the book are based on such interviews. It is wonderful what the tape recorder has made possible, not least the tone of voice and the conversational quirks that add vividness. On the other hand, the recorded interview has its traps, and from time to time all authors are caught by them. Occasionally, persons interviewed are talking emphatically about events which they vividly remember, but in fact part of their knowledge has come from hearsay, folklore or a misunderstanding. Perhaps a few errors in the chapters have arisen in this way. There is also folklore in the political background emphatically depicted here: too much folklore in praising Curtin and the trade unions in the late 1930s, or in lamenting perfidious England and blindly loyal Australia. The contradictory evidence seems to be forgotten. But all in all, it is an exciting story.