The Yongala was barely eight years old and well loved. Built in 1903 at the Armstrong Whitworth yard on the Tyne for the Adelaide Steamship Company, she was a handsome vessel with electric lighting throughout and accommodation for 240 passengers. She had pioneered Australia's longest interstate route, a 2,700-nautical-mile run linking Fremantle to the eastern ports. Her name came from the South Australian town of Yongala, a word from the Ngadjuri people meaning broad water. On her final voyage she carried first- and second-class passengers up the Queensland coast, along with cargo, a Lincoln Red bull, and a racehorse named Moonshine. A harbour inspection had pronounced her in excellent trim.

When the Yongala failed to arrive at Townsville, hope held on for a while. Perhaps she had simply taken shelter, as prudent ships did. By 26 March she was listed as missing, and the Premier of Queensland sent seven vessels to search. Then the sea began to give back its evidence. Wreckage washed ashore along the coast between Hinchinbrook Island and Bowen. The body of the racehorse Moonshine was found at Gordon Creek. Of the men, women and children, there was nothing. The government offered a thousand-pound reward for anyone who could find the ship. The reward went unclaimed and was eventually withdrawn. For their families, there was no wreck to mourn over and no graves to visit, only an empty stretch of the Coral Sea.

The Yongala kept her secret for nearly half a century. Then, in 1958, the wreck was located on the sea floor off Cape Bowling Green. A fisherman recovered a safe from one of the cabins; inside was only black sludge, but part of a serial number survived, 9825W. Years later, the safe's English makers matched that number to the one they had supplied in 1903 for the cabin of the Yongala's purser. The mystery was finally closed. The ship lay on her starboard side in about thirty metres of water, more than a hundred metres of hull resting intact on open sand, her dead still within her. By Australian and international heritage law she is now strictly protected, and divers are forbidden from entering the hull, out of respect for those who never left it.

There is a strange grace to what the Yongala has become. Rising alone from a flat sandy seabed, the wreck is the only hard structure for miles, and over a century the ocean has claimed it utterly. Soft and hard corals encrust the hull. Giant groupers and Maori wrasse patrol the decks; sea snakes, turtles, eagle rays and schooling trevally swirl through the superstructure, while bull sharks cruise the blue beyond the bow. More than ten thousand divers come each year to one of the most celebrated wreck dives on Earth. They descend in silence, the way one enters a memorial. The Yongala is a grave that has filled with life, a place where loss and abundance share the same dark water, and the 122 are never quite forgotten.