Shopping in Singapore, looking down from the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, taking in the massive ancient temples in Cambodia’s Angkor Wat, and Borobudur in Java: tropical Southeast Asia is hardly short of things to do for tourists or places to go.
Some of the region’s best attractions are not on land. Diving is another reason Southeast Asia is popular with tourists, and East Timor and Raja Ampat in Indonesia, Thailand’s Similan Islands and Sipadan near Sabah, Malaysian Borneo are among the world’s best-regarded locations.
There are also plenty of diveable shipwrecks littered throughout these areas.
Recognising the potential heritage value of such wrecks, Indonesia’s government in 2018 established a conservation zone around the Perth, an Australian warship that was sunk in the Battle of the Sunda Strait during World War II and now lies around 40 metres (130ft) underwater.
In a recent article for History Today magazine, the University of Sydney’s Natali Pearson said the region’s sunken ships “are easily overlooked in the legacy landscape of the Second World War”, particularly when compared with wrecks from the period in European waters.