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there were about 19 151 records brought up by a search for ‘navy’; 19 692 for ‘air force’ and almost 400 000 for ‘army’, the last figure reflecting the number and method of storage of individual service records. A similar broad catalogue searchat the Australian War Memorial returned 12 987 ‘navy’ records, 41 908 ‘army’ records and 22 558 ‘air force’ records: numbers that are broadly consistent with the sizes of each service referred to earlier. Similar proportional search results are returned from sources such as Wikipedia (5587 from ‘Australian naval history’, 8281 ‘Australian air force history’, and 11 330 ‘Australian army history’). 8
    The situation is not all bad news. Since the late 1980s, Australian naval history has received greater sustained attention than at any other stage in its existence. Starting with the work of some eminent naval historians, the Navy has put an increasing effort into the research and publication of its history. In large part this has been achieved through the work of authors such as Tom Frame, James Goldrick, David Stevens, Ian Pfennigwerth and others who have been associated with the Navy’s historical studies. The appointment of Dr John Reeve as the Osborne Fellow in Naval History at the University of New South Wales campus at the Australian Defence Force Academy, supported by the Navy, has reinforced this work. This is an appropriate level of support by the Navy, because no other organisation has the level of motivation or the depth of institutional knowledge to be able to promote this field of study. Yet the Navy also needs to assimilate the idea that to fight and win at sea requires an intimate understanding of all the facets that create naval capability. Not everything of importance occurs on the water, and those things that do occur at sea need careful patient explanation to the public. These are considerations that the Navy has over its long history generally failed to grasp and they contribute directly to the current state of naval history.
    Despite this greater recent attention by the Navy and an undoubted increase in the number and quality of publications on Australian naval history, there remains an undercurrent ofdisquiet amongst naval historians. Often this is expressed as a wish for greater attention to navy history, yet quantity is not really the issue. Our concern arises because those events that are traditionally taken as defining moments in naval affairs often attract a generally negative tone: they become stories of loss without understanding why. The contrast with army history is stark. At Gallipoli, the Australian army took part in a long, drawn out defeat; but it is remembered positively as the exemplification of so many positive attributes of Australia and Australians. When the World War II losses of Sydney , Perth or Canberra are remembered, the tone is much different.
    So what is to be done? More resources for the study of naval history alone are not enough, although they would not hurt. Nor will greater attention from the broader public be garnered simply by decrying its lack. The single most important factor is for naval historians to describe the history of the Royal Australian Navy in a way that acknowledges the gap between subject and audience – and to appreciate that the subject must first be brought to the audience, not vice versa.
    Having described some of the problems and difficulties of naval history, the remainder of this chapter will show how those problems might be remedied. 9 This will be done through a re-examination of the truly remarkable operations of HMAS Murchison on the Han River during the Korean War, including an account of what action within the ship was required to undertake these operations. HMAS Murchison was a ‘Modified Bay’ class frigate, built in Australia at the Evans, Deakin and Company dockyard in Brisbane. A product of the demand