Coming home

On Sunday as we set out from Melbourne Tullamarine to fly home to England the village musicians, singers and dancers were performing in the Municipal Theatre of Corfu,  Dr Spyros Savvani - centre right in the picture - president of the Korakiana Philharmonia spoke of the treasure of Ionian heritage - especially its music.

Πραγματοποιήθηκε απόψε (Κυριακή 5-12-2010) με επιτυχία στο Δημοτικό Θέατρο Κέρκυρας η «Επτανησιακή Γιορτή» με διοργανώτρια τη Φιλαρμονική Κορακιάνας, Στη σημασία της εκδήλωσης για την εκπαίδευση των Ατόμων με Αναπηρίες του Συλλόγου «Μέλισσα» αναφέρθηκε η Πρόεδρος του Συλλόγου κα Ηρώ Μπούα, ενώ ο Πρόεδρος της Φιλαρμονικής Σπύρος Σαββανής προλόγισε την εκδήλωση αναφερόμενος στον πλούτο της επτανησιακής πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς και στην ανάγκη ανάδειξης και ενίσχυσής της.

Around the same time, though its earlier in Australia we were on the top floor of a hotel on the edge of Melbourne Airport gathering our things and thoughts for the long journey home. We'd been long enough away, and I was now so accustomed to all that went with taking being in one place for granted that I could feel that ache in my stomach that goes with departures - dire adieu est mourir un peux - or as Chandler put it 'the bastards (the French) have a phrase for everything'. Yes...well. Over half a century later I'm affected by the sadness of a boy returning to boarding school. Even when, as here, I'm going home, looking forwarding to being back in England and seeing Amy and Richard and the dog Oscar and the garden and my allotment and Birmingham's German Market, and seeing friends, and Christmas coming, and then going up to the Highlands and then to beloved Greece only weeks after the New Year...I still recognise that ache of parting from the company and place we've shared for the last six weeks.

Holiday Inn, Melbourne: 'Murrumbidgee floods at Wagga Wagga'

Annie and John went out of their way to give us a great final sunday in Melbourne, starting the evening before with a supper on the Saturday, when just back from Tasmania, we ate together at the University Cafe on Lygon Street  before driving out to stay at a hotel convenient for the airport - five minutes from international departures - then from Sunday morning a good five hours in Queen Victoria Markets in the city centre. These are something special by way of markets containing, apart from many bargains, myriad superbly organised food counters from which people can pick and choose food to take home or take away to eat and drink there and then at tables and chairs in the market itself. Things to eat and drink from many nations were eagerly sold and bought - British, Polish, Chinese, Japanese, German, Korean, Greek, Italian, Turkish, Jewish, Syrian and Moroccan and ... you name it. Acres, in long lively covered avenues, of clothes, shoes, pot plants, a diversity of crafted artifacts. flags, paintings, posters, prints, souvenirs at bargain prices, jewellery - especially opals - stones, fossils, didgeridoos, boomerangs, dolls, teddies, soft fabric sharks, furry echidnia, plump wombats, musical roos and chiming koalas, crocs, platypus and singing birds and even a few real canaries and budgies, china ornaments, kitchenware, foot and head massage - there and then - music, films, computer and other electronics and abundant Christmas decorations...and so on and so on. A friendly sun cleared away the morning fog and the reminders of the days' of rain and mist we've seen in Australia and New Zealand. It was warm, dry and fresh. Blue sky. The Sunday morning markets bustling with energy on the edges of the tall glistening towers of the city.
We drove on to the beach at St.Kilda's where the breeze ruffled the peaty waters blowing spray towards the crowded beaches lined with tall palms. Sail boats healed across the small waves. Kite surfers and jetskiers sped back and forth well back from the shore, showing off to each other whirling and bouncing in zig-zags around the end of St Kilda's Pier. We strolled with other weekenders, some fishing from the pier, to the Kiosk, where we bought ice cream and watched the sea and the people.
***
And so late on Sunday our wide bodied plane sets off on a shallow climb westward across the great continent on its way to the northern hemisphere. We have 7000 miles to Dubai then another 3500 to Birmingham, eleven hours time difference so that although we leave Australia late Sunday night, we're in Birmingham by monday noon.

Melbourne-Dubai-Birmingham. 11500 miles in 20 hours

I'd far prefer to spend 32-40 days on a ship to make this journey (or take the Trans-Siberia Railway for at least some of the way with ferries from the railhead at Vladivostock) - but the cost even one way is around £4000.
So here we fly a mile higher than mount Everest - 6 miles up - rumbling through the empty night sky, sat in cushioned chairs, reading, watching films - earphones plugged into arm-rests, listening to music, eating and drinking from drop tables. As the long leg of our journey continues cabin lights are dimmed but for a few personal pools of overhead light controlled by individual passengers or from the small screens on the back of every seat.

In economy two aisles running the length of the plane separate about 340 seats in cross-rows of ten - three, four, three - occupied by a reclining congregation of tranquil passengers from many nations, of many ethnicities and ages, solitary and paired, men and women, new born humans blissfully unconscious, mother and baby, sometimes a father too, draped with blankets as in a nativity.

We fly over Broome on the north west of Australia; on to the Indian Ocean, then slowly - so ridiculous given an airspeed averaging 600 miles an hour - we travel parallel with the long islands of Indonesia, Java then Sumatra - crossing the equator again - across the empty space of the Indian Ocean, until near Sri Lanka we cross a major sea lane. Perhaps a watch gazing at the night sky, sees a small light moving across the sky, wondering for a moment if we're a plane or a satellite.  At last we leave the sea crossing southern India until somewhere on its west coast we are above the Arabian Sea heading for the Arabian peninsular and our stop, for a couple of hours, at Dubai. Then away again on another plane towards Europe, crossing Saudi Arabia, Iraq - passing over Baghdad and Mosul - until we are over Turkey, heading in morning light over the Black Sea near Trabzon, where they say, especially the persecuted Turkish writer Ömer Asan (his banned book: Ασάν, Ομέρ, Ο Πολιτισμός του Πόντου, Θεσσαλονίκη: Kyriakidis Brothers, 1998) there are people still speaking ancient Greek,

Where there they still speak ancient Greek

back to land over Constanta - where I've been long ago - on the shore of Rumania, Hungary, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and into Germany, where I spy Linz - where  from 1914 Adolf Eichmann spent his childhood. Over Nürnberg, Frankfurt, Bonn, Düsseldorf, then the clouded North Sea to England - Norwich, Ely and there's Coventry on the screen. We descend under the sun into a crisp frosty snow glistened Birmingham. Our Amy's taken time off to drive us home from the  airport. She stays chatting as we sit around in our kitchen. I do some washing up. We begin tidying after leaving the house in the hands of our beloved Richard for six weeks. Oscar's bouncing, collected from his carer's John and Jo. Our fishponds are frozen. I boil water to make holes in the ice. The birds need more nuts.

We hadn't read about the shark attacks at Sharm Al Sheik while in New Zealand. Amy and Guy were enjoying a late honeymoon by the Red Sea, snorkelling close to where a tourist was killed a fortnight after they'd come home. One of the experts brought in by anxious authorities described the problem as being not one shark - as in Jaws - but several different species; "not an unpredictable series of attacks by a rogue shark, like a deranged shooter, but rational attempts by predators to find food."
* * *
Good news about Greek human rights activists acquitted on Monday after being sued in Athens, after they'd criticised a Greek Supreme Court ruling on the acceptability of a deeply anti-semitic publication by Kostas Plevris, who left the right wing party LAOS to join an even further right party, now formally disbanded called Patriotic Alliance. This was the Appeals Court ruling that led to the criticism by members of the Greek Antinazi Initiative, (in Greek) and their subsequent prosecution for 'dissemination of false news':

In December 2007, Plevris was initially found guilty of inciting racial hatred by a Greek court based on excerpts and quotations in his book "The Jews: The Whole Truth". He appealed the court ruling and on the 27th of March 2009 the court of appeals completely overturned the ruling of incitement with 4-1 votes (my italics). Plevris was vindicated by the court, which accepted that his book did not lead to "incitement to racial hatred and violence against the Jews" by the 5-member court.

** **

At New Street Station on my way to London

Wikileaks is so far remaining on the internet by virtue of mass-mirroring on the 'I am Spartacus' principle. There's so little I know; so much that will be defined in retrospect. Am I watching a complicated re-working of democracy and the principle of free speech? Danica - friend and social web theorist in Belgrade - wrote me:

I am trying to focus on dissertation and I am big procrastinator and I feel guilty for not writing as days are short, time passes by and I don't see anything written but spending time online, reading the news, different opinions, and I may say I am confused with Julian, and I don't know is it good or bad that all documents are out there. Yes, we need transparent society and democracy but to reveal everything even if that would harm innocent ones?

The furore over intelligence published on the web by the Australian Julian Assange seems a test of the extent to which the world wide web can evade the control of governments - a cat and mouse game that has visceral appeal among the governed, not least because there are moments when it becomes unclear who's cat and who's mouse. Assange proclaims a levelling agenda, one approved by friends and allies in cyberspace. He's an inventive exploiter of the internet as a home for activities outside rulership or enforced authority; rich when I consider how it's given life to such mighty unanarchic entities as Google, Microsoft, Skype, eBay, Amazon, Yahoo and Apple and my much used Wikipedia, along with the proliferation of open source content management systems that have allowed, among other things, the spread of a million million blogs, and I haven't got to webporn. In addition we're seeing counter moves against entities like PayPal, Visa and Mastercard who've been subject to attempts at distributed denial of service - DDOS - following their refusals to process donations to Wikileaks. Some cat, some mouse! "Cyberwars", "Cyberstrife", "Cloudwars!" It isn't new but this seems especially prominent - raising old, and previously hypothetical, questions about the governance of cyberspace (see Governmentality - a chapter I wrote for a book on this in 1997).
I'm surprised no-one has used the internet to vex governments on such a scale before. Is that the result of a still recently wired world with far more people across the world able to join in a skirmish using technologies not available to Daniel Ellsberg decades ago, or even, more recently, Katherine Gun (who I've had the honour of meeting)?
Assange developed software to help human rights activists in authoritarian regimes to encrypt data so that their communications could not be intercepted. The documents released over the past year on Wikileaks had not been encrypted, even though his targets - the US, UK, China and Russia among others - are entirely capable of making their intelligence indecipherable. Why, if the released material is so sensitive, was it not encrypted? I glance at the possibility this is some sort of Operation Mincemeat aimed by US intelligence at Russia, China, Pakistan and Iran with collateral damage from revelations about our war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan - government-backed torture, the murder of civilians, corporate corruption - sacrificed as camouflage to Wikileaks - with Assange a victim or a collaborator, or somewhere in between. Then I think how unwise to get sucked into 'voodoo history'. On the other hand Wikileaks extends opportunities for disinformation, with new opportunities to invent and feed falsified leaks into cyberspace - Wikifakes. What is also intriguing is the way the mainstream press is playing the game, with the Guardian having received Wikileaks information passing it on to a foreign newspaper, the New York Times (and possibly others unnamed), with a view to sidestepping a UK gagging order.
The allegations against Assange in Sweden seem eccentric. A prosecutor there seeks not an arrest but a request for Assange to make himself available for questioning about alleged incidents that fall - ambiguously - between sexual assault - but not rape - and molestation; charges dismissed this August by one Swedish prosecutor, but taken up by another in another city, serving as a pretext for an arrest that could not be made for leaking secret intelligence, as Capone was indicted, tried and imprisoned, not for his violence as a gangster but for tax evasion. Meanwhile public figures who ought to know better call for Assange to be dealt with in a way that only enhances his standing as folk-hero (as the Telegraph points out).
Rebecca MacKinnon is a fellow at the New America Foundation, co-founder of the international bloggers' network Global Voices Online - to which I subscribe - and a founding member of the Global Network Initiative. In an essay special to CNN last week she wrote:

There are many ...who have made their views clear over the past week that WikiLeaks' 'cablegate' website should not be considered constitutionally protected speech. Others, however, believe equally strongly that now that the material is out, news media and website owners have the right to publish the material. What is troubling and dangerous is that in the internet age, public discourse increasingly depends on digital spaces created, owned and operated by private companies (my italics). The result is that one politician has more power than ever to shut down controversial speech unilaterally with one phone call....After suffering aggressive cyber attacks last weekend, Assange removed his 'cablegate' site from servers in Sweden and purchased a new home for it on Amazon's web hosting service. On Tuesday, Amazon talked on the phone with the office of Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's committee on homeland security. Shortly thereafter, Amazon booted WikiLeaks.

Back to the future ~ 14/12/10: Why Michael Moore, with others, donated money to pay Assange's bail as set by Westminster Magistrates Court.
23/12/10: The fate of Bradley Manning who gave information to Wikileaks
** ** **
Delightful news from the Ano Korakiana website. Two young architects have offered their help with possible work on the Agricultural Co-op Association building - Αγροτικού Συνεταιρισμού - which we also know as the 'olive oil factory' on the lower road of the village, where we last enjoyed the evening party organised for Carnival 2010 in the village. It was originally built around 1900 and needs renovation and adaptation to new uses by the community. There's a picture on the website showing Celia Metallinos and her friend Lucia Ventura outside the building with Nikos Savvani, President of the Association. It'll be so so good if their voluntary efforts with the support of other villagers lead to a good result.

** ** **
Meanwhile in the Highlands it's a lot colder than in the English Midlands...

Mum with an icicle from the roof  (photo: Margi Fleming)

Melbourne

John's old friend Jeff Floyd lent me his fine bicycle which I collected this morning from a floor high over central Melbourne, heading south along the Yarra to the shore at St Kilda, still far from the swells of real ocean but sandy and blue and built-up, just kilometers from the vertiginous architecture of this great city. The great interior and the vast uninhabited ocean shores remain remote, but for glimpses through a plane window and the genius of the indigenous genii who’s art seen this afternoon, when I cycled back to the city, has imparted something of what I’ve yet to learn; something which D.H.Lawrence in his genius seem to miss - 'this speechless country'. No longer and I don't mean just the Mabo Case or Paul Keating's Redfern Address, or Kevin Rudd's magnificent speech on 13 February 2008, or the Aboriginal Tent Embassy which I saw when John cycled me around central Canberra, but an epic - known and yet to be known - that will flow into future understanding of Australia and the world.

The recovery of Terra Nullius

I've been gazing entranced at the work of H.J.Wedge, Samantha Hobson, Julie Dowling, Gordon Hoskey, Treahna Hamme and, respect to Geoffrey Bardon, at the great mural Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming by Tim Leura Tjapaltjarri and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri.

But why turn my experience of a few weeks in Australia into painting by numbers? What might be fun would be to see how my judgements shift; what changes these swift weeks have made in my character.

There's the sense of understanding more about the negotiated space between politics and management, through the thinking of John Martin, now friend and colleague, studying the relationship in Australia; from John’s and Annie’s film – especially – of the conversation between the Mayor and CEO of Marion. This demonstrated the way a role-determined tension between political aspiration and managerially stewarded limits - legal, technical, financial - is resolved – over and over, by unique individuals who get better and better at it.

That demonstration of the personal workings of government also shone a light on the position and role of professionals in that mix whose grammar we’re striving to make more intelligible. Here there’s a professional who cares so much about the difference between almonds and jacarandas as part of the landscape of a street - a place - fretting about root-falls on understreet services – invisible to most. We’re still parsing this conversation. John’s used it on his own with one set of managers and councillors. I will use it in England – an exploration of how managers broker the relationship between the professionals and the politicians in government – made real In animated conversation between leaders - politicians and managers - at the apex, negotiating overlapping spheres of activity and interest.

As my train on Monday morning hurried south to Melbourne, through Castlemain, Malmesbury, Kyneton, Macedon, I drank up the landscape washed by a weekend of steady rain, still insufficient to fill the creeks and lakes so thirsty is the land itself, our speed at moments blending iron bark, grass, corrugated iron, yellow red stone, and clouds that reach beyond horizons I've glimpsed over a wing.

From my comfortable and inexpensive seat on the train I see stretches of the road on which I’ve been driven several times to Melbourne Airport to catch airplanes to the edges of the continent – Perth, Darwin (via Alice Springs), Brisbane, Canberra, Sydney, Adelaide and Launceston. We calculated, John and I, that by the time I’m home I’ll have travelled 47000 kilometres, over 29000 miles. I asked an environmental campaigner about this at the conference at Bendigo on Energy Futures, after he’d shown us a clever clip of flight movements across the world. He had no imperative. He mentioned George Monbiot pondering the same. Could you give up friends made across the world through the benefits of flight? “He calls them love miles"

*** *** *** I sent Paul in Agios Ioannis some pieces from the blog that might interest him for the December Newsletter, having failed so far to put together thoughts on the reciprocity between Ionians and successive Lords High Commissioners during the Protectorate - the theme of my chat this February at the Durrell School. 'Paul, would any of these do?':

Some of the most beautiful in Northern Greece - Koliopoulos on 'plundered loyalties' in Macedonia

Yearning Burning Earning and again - the commodification of Greek land, the 2009 fires in Athens and the Hellenic Cadastre

The missing commentary - The Parthenon Marbles

"Which side then has committed more crimes - right or left?" - ο Eμφύλιος.

Bad building on Corfu

Long ago in Aegina - Yannis Moralis and my Greek stepmother, Maria Roussen

Shades of grey. Corfu in winter

The curse of bottled water

Consumerism - upon which most of us depend...

* * * *

Greece and Melbourne mingle in my current reading - Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded - an excellent introduction to the city - East, North, South and West - for the average tourist with guidance on places to visit. I'm jesting. This is a Melbourne Sorrows of Young Werthe written in 1995, made into the film Head on, driven by the manic confusions of voluntary transportation to Australia, Greek parents with peasant roots who require land to feel secure, who 'migrated to escape the chaos of history' who 'know fundamentally, property is war' that:

Possession of land, of more and more land, is the means by which an uneducated, diasporic community enables itself to rise in the New World and kick their brothers and sisters in the face, in the balls, in the cunt. p.143

This Australian sturm und drang is unremittingly ugly - sexual and substance self-harm dancing to music that hurts and endless arguments of the kind that makes troubled youth so bloody irritating to the forgetful old - who've got their own problems. Wimpishly, I felt like hiding the book's well-lit pages from neighbours on the plane lest they think I'm reading porn, albeit funded by the Australian Council for the Arts. Ari, Tsiolkas' loaded antihero, loathes cars and suburbs and a lot of other things including the 'weakness' of his Greek parents. He was already 30 when Loaded was published. The book's unconsoling vigour brought to mind E.M.Forster in Passage to India, which I mined for A-Level 40 years ago:

Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it, and the books and talks that would describe it as interesting are obliged to exaggerate, in the hope of justifying their own existence. Inside its cocoon of work or social obligation, the human spirit slumbers for the most part, registering the distinction between pleasure and pain, but not nearly as alert as we pretend. There are periods in the most thrilling day during which nothing happens, and though we continue to exclaim, “I do enjoy myself,, or , “I am horrified,” we are insincere.

As an Englishman with mainly Scots roots, linked through my dad to a Greek stepmother and half Greek family set of sisters and half-bro, and parents who divorced in 1949, brought up by my mother and stepfather now living in inner-city Birmingham and the most congenially beautiful village in Corfu and re-visiting Australia, Tsiolkas' rich writing speaks of a misery in being young that I only half recall if at all, being largely distracted from self-harm by the ocean and all the possibilities of a life privileged by the imagination and talent of those closest to me, and located by English private boarding schools from the age of six - an indoctrination so robust I didn't start to peel it away until I was into my 30s, largely impervious until then that a peel even existed, and wasn't something that I could being to write about until I was well into my 50s, when I'd assembled some experience. I'll read more of Tsiolkas, as also Tim Winton, and thank the Brisbane bookshop owner who pitched me at just two consummate artists to be going on with, narrating the history of Australia as surely as its great physical explorers, matching the new cartography of its emerging indigenous artists.

[Back to the future 17 December 09: A finely written diatribe by the Sydney columnist Elizabeth Farralley, against suburbs and MacMansions and Australia's love affair with ugliness - see the comments too]

*A very different take on the Greek diaspora, comes from Stavros, author of My Greek Odyssey:

* * *

The image that will remain in my head is the Tjapaltjarris' night sky inside Napperby Death Spirit Dreaming and Lorenzo's words in The Merchant of Venice

Look how the floor of heaven Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold: There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st But in his motion like an angel sings, Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins; Such harmony is in immortal souls; But whilst this muddy vesture of decay Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

It reminded me of Richard's picture last year when he stayed with us in Ano Korakiana.

and...

HR 5171 (back to the future March 2014)

Refining the learning

Mayor Felicity-Ann Lewis, Prof John Martin and CEO Mark Searle

We've summarised it - the essence of our one day seminars:

- Learning: Mapping, ‘responsible gossip’, reading/carrying, Chatham House rule

- Negotiating: Constructing trust, overlapping spaces, leadership at the apex

- Governing: Films, critical incidents, conversations across boundaries, political-management leadership, governance

Some things we can teach; but integrity is a choice. Some things we know, some we know we don't know, and when it comes to a specific, and newly captured, political-management conversation, we're working together to understand what we're seeing. This is where the seminars are best for being Socratic in style. We join in pondering "what's going on?"

Marion City Council's conversation has been fascinating - a nine year working relationship between Mayor Felicity-Ann Lewis and CEO Mark Searle. John and I have edited - from the longer film he and Annie made in September - an eleven minute sample of separate clips within their conversation and then - drawing on later parts of the same conversation - two five minute exchanges in which Felicity and Mark negotiate their response to specific incidents - "events, dear boy, events!"

Mud-mapping - where we work on rough maps - jotting names, issues and events has enriched appreciation of a council's political context. I like this way of surveying a political landscape.

Waiting at Launceston, Tasmania

We've seen this work well in Darwin. It worked well in Launceston, and, a day later, in Melbourne. I'm used to doing this with more kit - geographically accurate maps and photos of members - but where we've been working with a range of individuals, perhaps pairs or trios, from different councils, where assembling all that kit would be tricky at short notice, the sketchier approach works really well - adding to ways of understanding and communicating the characteristics of a political environment.

We'd like to see politicians as adept at mapping the managerial characteristics of the council to which they've been elected, as many public managers seem to be at mapping their political environment. So far there's only one place I've been able to see this happen - in Peterborough City Council last year during a political-management project with Charlie Adan, where officers shared their perceptions with members and members theirs with officers - a conversation which led to a novel exercise in refining those mutual perceptions of one another - adding in a bit of jargon for fun, like 'scope creep'.

* * * Meanwhile in dear Greece I've just seen this story by Malcolm Brabant reporting the discovery of remains in the sunken bow portion of HMS Volage, one of the ships that struck an Albanian laid mine during the Corfu Channel Incident in 1946 - something Frank Carrick told me about last year. In September Frank and I, guided by George Psailas, visited the graves, in the British Cemetery in Corfu, of those whose bodies were recovered immediately after the event.

This is the AP story dated 2 November 09. The most comprehensive account seems to come from James P. Delgado of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, posted to Wikipedia on 23 Oct 09:

In July 2007, the RPM Nautical Foundation, a U.S. and Malta-based not-for-profit organization, began a comprehensive, ongoing archaeological survey of the coast of Albania in cooperation with the Albanian Institute of Archaeology (AIA) and the Institute of Nautical Archaeology (INA). The inaugural season, conducted from the R/V Hercules, involved a multibeam sonar survey with remotely operated vehicle (ROV) assessment of targets to the 120 m contour. The area surveyed was from the border with Greece, through the Corfu Channel (but not into Greek waters) and to the Bay of Saranda, 21 kilometer from the border. A total of 125 anomalies were encountered, and 67 were assessed with the ROV during the 2007 season. The majority of anomalies were found to be geological mud and mud/sand formations created as silt from the mouth of the Butrint River to the south is transported by current in a N-S direction. Fifteen shipwrecks were identified, fourteen of which were classified as “modern” and one of which was an ancient wreck of ca. 300-275 BCE. One of the fourteen other targets, briefly examined in 2007, was later (2009) determined to be the bow of HMS Volage.

During the 2009 field season the sonar target in this area was re-examined by James P. Delgado of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, Jeffrey Royal of the RPM Nautical Foundation, ROV specialist Kim Wilson, and George Robb, Jr., President and founder of the RPM Nautical Foundation, who immediately assessed the potential of the 2007 “wreck” as the possible bow of Volage in response to Delgado’s question of whether the surveys of 2007-2009 had encountered any traces of the Corfu Channel Incident. After consultation with Dr. Adrian Anastasi as the AIA and Albanian government representative, it was decided to non-intrusively reassess the site on 28 June 2009. An hour-long ROV dive was made to the site on that afternoon.

The site is located in the area of the mining of HMS Volage. The seabed is a loose mud and silt. The sonar anomaly delineated by multibeam in 2007 and reconfirmed in 2009 is approximately 15 by 10 meters in area and has a height of 1.5 meters above the current level of the seabed. Active siltation and burial of the vessel remains at the site is visible. Some localized scouring and uncovering of cultural material is also possible. The majority of the remains visible were a section of a steel ship’s hull, with explosion damage consistent with an implosion, exposed steel frames, electrical wiring, and a series of diagnostic artefacts. While identification of the site would have been better aided by the recovery of one or more diagnostic artefacts, because of the possibility of the site being the bow of HMS Volage and hence a war grave, no disturbance was planned and nothing was disturbed or removed from the site. The British and Albanian governments were notified of the find and provided with video and still images of the site after the survey.