Before James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster Titanic, the Hollywood Titanic of 1953, the 1958 British film A night to remember, and the 1997 Broadway musical Titanic, there was the Nazi German film Titanic. A Tobis production begun in 1942, this production nearly sank as decisively as the doomed ocean liner. The film's director, Herbert Selpin, infuriated with the slow second-unit shooting in the port of Gdynia, was overheard making remarks damning the...

Four hundred asylum seekers were pitched into the sea when their people-smuggling boat from Indonesia sank on its way to Australia in 2001. Three hundred and fifty three people drowned. Only seven survivors made it to Australia. Amal Basry was one of those survivors, spending 22 hours in the ocean hanging on to a floating corpse, convinced that her son was dead and she was the only person left alive. Acclaimed documentary maker Steve Thomas records...

On 1 December 1942, a US bomber called Little Eva was returning to base after a bombing raid over New Guinea. The plane hit a tropical storm and crashed at Moonlight Creek in the southeast corner of the Gulf of Carpentaria, in Australia's far north. The events that followed were recorded both in the journal of an American survivor and in a spectacular corroboree created by the Yanyuwa people who searched for Little Eva and her crew. Aeroplane Dance...