The only sailor whose body was found after the sinking of HMAS Sydney during World War II was finally identified last year after a new program linking unidentified human remains with long-term missing persons took on his case,did some further testing on samples of his remains,and found a descendent who matched.
The National DNA Program for Unidentified and Missing Persons was launched in 2020 with the goal of linking some of the hundreds of unidentified human remains with long-term missing persons. Initially allocated funding from proceeds of crime seizures for 2.5 years,the AFP on Thursday announced it will now be extended until the end of 2023.
Giving a name to the former “unknown soldier” has been one of the highlights of the program’s first two years,but Associate Professor Jodie Ward says there’s a lot more work to do,with hundreds of unknown persons whose body parts have been found across Australia – as well as forensics gaps in long-term missing persons cases that she’s endeavouring to fill in by gathering data like dental records and reference DNA samples from family members.
So far,55 sets of remains have been examined under the program,with 36 submitted for specialist DNA testing. Five have been matched with missing persons. But the most recent national case audit reported 750 sets of unidentified human remains.
Ward advocated for a program of this kind for nearly a decade after she first learned of the “hundreds” of human remains sitting unidentified in forensic and mortuary facilities around the country,which had been subjected to “a variety of tests in some cases and no testing at all in others” – largely due to the different forensic capabilities of different states and territories.
She saw the need for a centralised national facility with the sole focus of examining these human remains,and providing a suite of forensic tools that could be used to solve them.
Ward hopes the 12-month extension will give the team a chance to clear some more of the backlog of very old cases,and ensure that the system is in top shape for identifying future discoveries of human remains.