John Foster served for 30 years in the Australian Navy and spent his retirement searching for
answers to one of this nation's great maritime mysteries - the fate of the submarine AE1, which
disappeared near Rabaul in 1914.
John Douglas Foster was born in Sydney on November 25, 1935, the only child of Harold and
Winifred Foster. He was sent to Newington College and encouraged by his parents to become a
lawyer.
Instead, at 16, Foster joined the navy as a cadet midshipman and trained for two years in HMAS
Cerberus near Melbourne. He did further training on Australian naval ships and Royal Navy bases in
England, becoming a specialist in torpedo and anti-submarine warfare, known as a TAS officer. In
the late 1950s, he met and married Deirdre Knowles
In 1961 Foster was posted to England, where he took up his first two commands, the coastal
minesweepers HMS Repton and HMS Shoulton. After three years, the family moved back to Australia
and Foster took up his third command, HMAS Hawk.
Foster and Hawk saw active service in Borneo in 1965 when Australia joined Britain in defending
Malaysian sovereign territory. The RAN sent in the 16th Minesweeping Squadron as patrol boats to
intercept and fire on insurgents.
Tropical diseases were an additional risk. At one point, one of Hawk's sailors, ravaged by illness, got
hold of a machinegun and fired on his crew. Fortunately, he was stopped without severe injury but
Foster carried a metal fragment from the day in his hand for the rest of his life.
In 1966, Foster was promoted to lieutenant commander and posted to the destroyer escort HMAS
Yarra. During the Vietnam War, Yarra accompanied the aircraft carrier HMAS Sydney on several
voyages to Vung Tau. Foster used his TAS and diving expertise searching for mines.
In 1968, Foster, now a commander, was posted as anti-submarine warfare officer to the Australian
embassy in Washington, DC. His sharp sense of humour and ability to whip out a guitar at the right
moment left a lasting impression on many American dignitaries.
The family moved to Canberra in 1971 when Foster was posted to Navy Office. Relief from the
paperwork came with his fourth command, on the destroyer escort HMAS Parramatta. He also spent
1976 and 1977 in Papua New Guinea in the defence advisory group established to hand over
facilities to the newly independent PNG government.
In PNG, Foster learnt of the loss of Australia's first submarine, AE1, which, with her sister ship, AE2,
was commissioned in 1913. The submarines arrived at Port Jackson from Portsmouth in 1914 and
were refitted at Cockatoo Island. Britain declared war on Germany on August 4 and two days later the
British government asked the Australian governor-general, Lord Denman, to seize all German
possessions in the Pacific. AE1, with a crew of 35, formed part of an expeditionary squadron of 18
ships that went in search of Admiral von Spee's squadron (which by then, as it turned out, was in
Samoa).
On September 14, the squadron attacked the German forces near Rabaul. AE1 was last seen at
3.20pm and it was Australia's first naval loss in warfare.
In 1977, Foster married Elizabeth Arnold and they moved to Sydney. Foster's final posting was as the
executive officer on the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne. He then retired and moved to the Gold Coast.
He made a number of trips back to the Rabaul area and gathered a substantial amount of
information about its waters, currents, islets, reefs and native knowledge of wrecks in the area.
In 2003, with the Western Australian Maritime Museum and the ABC, Foster led an expedition to look
for AE1 and the ABC made a documentary about the search.
Foster then formed a group of mostly former military officers, under the banner ''PROJECT AE1''
(submarineae1.org.au), which continues to lobby for support in locating AE1 and finding out what
caused its loss. In 2006, Foster published a book about the search, AE1: Entombed but Not
Forgotten.
In April last year, with new information, Foster and some AE1 project team members made another,
privately funded, expedition to Rabaul, without success. Also last year, Foster was awarded an Order
of Australia Medal.
John Foster is survived by Deirdre and their children Susan, Michael and Kathleen, and Elizabeth and
her daughters Eloise and Analeigh.