Voyager Memorial Park

Plenty of people walk through this park without reading anything in it, because it looks like what it also is: a wide piece of grass on the water in the middle of town, with the sea pool at one end and the bay in front of it.

It is a war memorial, and the thing it remembers happened just out there.

On the night of 10 February 1964, the destroyer HMAS Voyager was on exercises off Point Perpendicular, at the mouth of Jervis Bay, when she turned across the bow of the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. The Melbourne cut her in two. Eighty-two men died. It remains the worst peacetime disaster in the history of the Australian navy, and it happened within sight of this lawn.

The park was dedicated in 1972. A black granite wall was added in 2015, and the Court of Remembrance, the low curved wall you can see from the road, was dedicated in February 2019. It carries the names of the 82, alongside a separate wall of remembrance for Australians lost in conflict more broadly.

Go and read it. It takes ten minutes, it costs nothing, and it changes the view. Jervis Bay is sold almost entirely on how pretty it is, and this is the one place in Huskisson that tells you something else about the water you have been swimming in all weekend.

The sea pool sits in the same park, though it is a summer pool and closes over the cooler months. Check the Shoalhaven Swim Sport Fitness website for what is open before you pack the towels.