The chance discovery of a sunken ship lying off Wollongong for 120 years has led to an appeal for any relatives of the 32 lost crew to come forward. 

The SS Nemesis was carrying coal between Newcastle and Melbourne when it ran into a huge storm and sank in July 1904.

Bodies and parts of the ship washed ashore at Cronulla Beach in the following days, but a search for the 73-metre-long vessel failed to locate the hull — until now. 

"The Nemesis was an iron vessel, and the greater part of the deck woodwork has already been cast up on the beach in an almost unrecognisable mass of splintered timber," the Sydney Morning Herald reported on July 15, 1904.

The lost crew aged 18 to 56 came from Australia, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Norway, and British Guinea.

NSW Heritage Minister Penny Sharpe has urged families who lost loved ones on the ship to come forward.

"Up till now, they didn't know what happened to them," she said.

"We don't know where all of the families are and so, for me, today is really a call-out to say please get in contact with either my office or Heritage NSW." 

Unexpected discovery

The wreck was discovered 26 kilometres off the Wollongong coast when a company searching for sunken shipping containers came across it by accident, Ed Korber from Brisbane-based Subsea Professional Marine Services said.

"We were on a different project and we had deployed our sight scan equipment looking for other objects," Mr Korber said.

"And one of our technicians on the computer watching the data coming through called me up at 1 o'clock in the morning saying: 'Hey listen, I think I've got something quite interesting here.'

"We could see the bow, we could see the stern was missing, so just studying that footage and having the experience and expertise in this field I knew we were onto something quite significant."

A look into the past

The director of assessments at Heritage NSW, Tim Smith, said it was a unique opportunity to help uncover more information about our maritime history.

"Most of our shipwrecks are timber sailing vessels that are fairly broken up when they hit the coast," he said.

"The offshore steamships like Nemesis tend to survive more intact in deeper water on sand and they present just an amazing time capsule of past events in 19th century trade and, in this case, a wreck that just tipped over into the 20th century.

"And for the families who can connect their family histories to an event like this, it gives them a focus and we are really hoping people will have memorabilia, photographs of the men, and the single woman who were on this ship."