Wreck appears after 66 years

The first images of a torpedoed wartime hospital ship have seen the light of day.

BRISBANE - Shipwreck hunters have overcome technical difficulties to spend an extra five hours filming the Centaur wreck, including prized footage of the bell with the ship's name on it.

A submarine robot named Remora 3 descended more than 2000m to take the first underwater footage of the Australian hospital ship on Sunday, then returned to the wreck to take more photos yesterday.

The Centaur was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine off Queensland during World War II in 1943. Only 64 of the 332 people on board survived.

Shipwreck hunter David Mearns found sonar footage of the Centaur wreck on December 20 last year, 48km east of the southern tip of Moreton Island at a depth of 2059m.

Yesterday, Mearns and his crew of 33 on board the Seahorse Spirit began taking a second lot of haunting pictures of the wreck during a mission that lasted about nine hours.

The footage included the ship's bell and a well-documented escape hatch that survivor Martin Pash climbed through moments before the ship sank.

"We found the bell with the name on it. You can't get any better than that," Mearns said.

"The visibility has been better and the video footage has improved," he added. "The pilots are getting really comfortable around the wreck and that allows them to take really good, high-quality footage."

The crew also got a closer look at where the ship was hit by the torpedo, and offered a preliminary conclusion that it was hit on the port side just forward of the bridge.

The mission was blessed with a half-knot current yesterday, something Mearns described as "incredibly rare".

It was for this reason, he said, that he decided to delay the laying of the memorial plaque until today.

Queensland's Acting Premier, Paul Lucas, called for Japan to apologise for the "barbaric" attack after images showed that a bright red cross on the bow was still evident 67 years later. The ship also carried other Red Cross markings.

All footage will be shot more than one metre away as the ship remains protected under the Historic Shipwrecks Act 1976.

- AAP