A battle and an odyssey from Cocos remembered Victory at sea: German raider Emden "beached and done for" following her defeat at the Cocos Islands by HMAS Sydney on November 9,1914. Photo: Australian War Memorial The Cocos and Keeling Islands float at the far edge of Australia's imagination, way out in the Indian Ocean, halfway to Sri Lanka. It seems a place you'd want to escape to, rather than from. But 100 years ago, amid blood, a band of trapped German seafarers stole away from these islands into an adventure that remains barely conceivable. Apart, these days, from the occasional headline when an asylum seeker boat turns up - and under Scott Morrison's steely watch, there hasn't been one for a while now - the existence of the atoll of 600 inhabitants, about 150 of whom count themselves as white, with another 450 of Malay heritage, hardly registers. Tennis court undamaged: The wireless operator who sent the SOS call that brought HMAS Sydney to the area, standing next to the wireless mast destroyed by the German raiding party. Photo: Argus Collection, Fairfax Photographic It was precisely because of the dreamy isolation of the place that it was first settled by a randy English chap named Alexander Hare who turned up in 1814 with a harem of 40 Malay women, intent on a life of utopian pleasure. That turned to mush when a Scottish sea captain, John Clunies-Ross, who'd already claimed the place as his own, sailed in a couple of years later and sooled his sailors on to the interloper Hare, forcing him to skedaddle. Clunies-Ross and his family set to turning Cocos into their feudal kingdom and the sailors set to turning the harem into theirs, and a few decades later, Queen Victoria gave the place to the Clunies-Ross clan. A German sailor from the Emden establishes a machine gun position on the Cocos Islands. And so it went until the 1970s, when the Australian Government forced the Clunies-Ross family to sell the islands to the Commonwealth for more than $6 million. You might imagine that would be enough excitement for a speck in a giant ocean. Not so, and it won't be again in a few days time. On November 9, there will be much to-do on Cocos and the Keelings, with the Australian Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, and travellers from across the world descending to commemorate the centenary of Australia's first sea battle of the First World War. The light cruiser HMAS Sydney won the Battle of Cocos on November 9, 1914, all but destroying the German raider SMS Emden, which was left on the beach of one of the islands to rot. Few enough Australians know much but the sketchiest details of the battle, and fewer still know of the near-unbelievable story of what followed. Much of Australia was enraptured at the time in the romance of its soldiers sailing away to defend the Empire. The first troop convoy to Egypt had left Albany, Western Australia, just nine days before. The SMS Emden had been playing merry hell with allied shipping. In two months, without losing a seaman, it had captured or sunk 25 merchant ships, bombarded Madras, blown up warships at Penang and was loose in the Indian Ocean, causing high anxiety concerning the Australian and New Zealand convoy. And then the Emden turned up at Cocos: its mission to destroy a wireless station and the communications cable linking the British Empire with Perth. A party of 53 Germans, led by Emden ' s first officer, Hellmuth von Mücke, landed on Direction Island and set about smashing the wireless gear and cutting the cables. The locals implored von Mücke to avoid damaging the island's tennis court when his men were lopping the wireless mast. A gentleman warrior, he ensured the mast fell away from the court. But a signal had gone out and the HMAS Sydney steamed across the horizon. The Sydney and the Emden went at each other, guns blazing. By the end of the day, Emden was crippled and beached on North Keeling Island: 130 of its sailors were dead and 69 wounded, four of whom died later. The Sydney lost four sailors, with 16 wounded. The Emden's landing party was still ashore, undetected. In the night, while the surgeon and medics of HMAS Sydney tended the dreadful injuries of Emden's wounded, von Mücke and his men purloined a Clunies-Ross schooner, the graceful Ayesha, and sailed off for Padang, on Sumatra's west coast. It was the start of a six-month odyssey. They scuttled the Ayesha near Padang, hitched a ride on a German freighter to Yemen and spent months trying to wangle an on-pass deal with Turkish officials. When it fell through, von Mücke and his men took to the Red Sea on dhows, one of which sank. They began trekking with camels along the Red Sea coast towards Jeddah. They were promptly attacked by about 300 bedouins. With just two machine guns, a few rifles and handguns, they crouched behind dead camels and held off the attack for three days. Von Mücke lost only three of his men before being rescued by the Emir of Mecca, whom the Germans distrusted. Once again the German party sneaked away at night by boat, this time sailing from Jeddah to northern Saudi Arabia, and then marched inland to clamber aboard a train to an oasis. Finally, they caught a train all the way to Constantinople (Istanbul), and on to Germany, to great acclaim. On October 9, descendants of Australians aboard the Sydney, German descendants of the Emden's crew and Cocos Islanders will gather to remember, and a lifebuoy from the long-gone Ayesha will be returned. And two memorials to old enemies - paying equal tribute to Australian and German sailors - will be revealed. And so time, tide and the world move on - even at the edge of our imagination.