‘We’d like the two periscopes’: the mission to save a piece of Australia’s first submarine

The AE1 was found 103 years after it sank in the first world war. Now a team hopes to salvage part of the disintegrating wreck to be preserved in a museum

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The wreck of Australia’s first submarine is disintegrating, sparking a new mission to salvage a relic from it for the Australian War Memorial.

HMAS AE1 disappeared with 35 crew on board while on a mission near the Duke of York Islands in Papua New Guinea in September 1914, less than two months after the outbreak of the first world war.