The first news of Australia's worst peacetime naval disaster came by way of a two-line message from the aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne on a training exercise off Jervis Bay in 1964. "Unclassified," it read. "Have been in collision with Voyager in position 120 Point Perpendicular 19."
At first it was not apparent on that February 10 - even to those who sent the signal to the mainland - that the Melbourne had cut the smaller destroyer in half amid the calm seas.
Those trapped inside sank to the ocean floor with the ship a few hours later. More than 80 lost their lives that night. By 12.18am mainland centres, including Canberra, Nowra and Jervis Bay, got another message. It was shorter than earlier requests for help, but it was final: "Voyager has sunk."
Four years ago Laurent Villoing - a Frenchman by birth, chef by profession and collector by passion - came across the now yellowed signals sent from the Melbourne. They were on eBay.
"Just absolutely amazing," Villoing says. "Just hardly any way to describe it. You could just feel the despair through those messages."
Villoing presented these signals as part of a Naval Historical Society of Australia display of postcards, covers and stamps for History Week, which ends tomorrow.
"Over time I have accumulated also quite a large selection of books," Villoing says. And there have been appreciative awards, too, from collectors groups and societies.
It is already dark when Villoing, 44, recounts the story of the signals from his Paris International Cooking School in Stanmore. The hum of Parramatta Road traffic wafts into the kitchen, which is filled with things that are scrubbed, duplicated, ordered. He is teaching a class in less than an hour, so he cleans and prepares as he talks - his speech rising and falling, jolting and oh-so-French.
About midday on February 11, 1964, the navy hauled up one particular body. "There was a signal saying, 'We have picked up what appears to be the body of the captain Voyager,"' he says.
"They had a body count, and how many people they had saved, and people had perished and so on and so on. There were more than 120 signals that came in the folder in the original navy bag."
Villoing says he outbid four others to pay almost $1000 for what is one of the original sets of signals sent between Melbourne and the mainland on the night of the disaster and the days afterwards. Serendipitously, perhaps, the seller - an antiques dealer who bought them from a deceased estate in Jervis Bay - lived across Parramatta Road.
"This is something that you would probably never, ever, ever see anywhere," Villoing says. "It is one of those types of things. You wouldn't believe how much you have ending up on eBay that you would otherwise not have had a clue on. So this would have gone up to private auction and I would never have heard of it."
Villoing has been a collector, mainly of stamps and philatelic covers, since his childhood in landlocked Orleans, south of Paris.
"Over time I had different passions," he says. "My previous passion before the navy was Pope John Paul II … I have one of the most complete displays on him in Australia - I've got more than 5000 items."
Villoing's interest in Australia's naval history emerged from his own story. As an 18-year-old and fresh out of his chef's training, he was assigned to the French aircraft carrier Clemenceau for national service. Marching with French seamen on Anzac Day led to an introduction to the Naval Historical Society, which broadened his interest beyond French carriers.
"I really enjoyed it," he says of his year serving three meals a day to a crew of 3000. "The unfortunate thing is that the ship … was deployed to a war zone. In Lebanon … [it was] very hard, very scary sometimes. There was a few times where we thought we were attacked …
"Looking back many years later I thought it might have been nice to do an extra two or three years in the navy, but unfortunately I did not; I decided to go back to civilian life."
He came to Sydney in 1993. Sydney had won the right to host the 2000 Olympics and needed people for its hospitality industry. Such was his resolve to settle here, he carried in his hand luggage a large memento recovered from the London restaurant where he worked, salvaged hours before a wrecking ball ripped through it. The wooden sign for La Peniche - the riverboat - is at his Stanmore restaurant of the same name, hanging near a brass bell commemorating the decommissioning of the Melbourne in 1982.
"Sydney is the best place I have been to," he says. "The only thing I miss in France is the old buildings, you know?" It is the "old" which Sydney ripped out, tossed away and replaced with "brand new and brassy and sparkling and metal" that he is driven to preserve.
He leads me through to the office, at the back of the kitchen. It is jam-packed with folders, papers, postcards, school information and a computer. He points to a row of folders. "This is the collection on the [aircraft] carriers." He also produces postcards featuring Australia's naval fleet, selling them over the internet, catering to a niche in the market. Several postcards on the wall are of a young Tom Cruise. "Well, it's carrier-related," says Villoing. "It was the movie Top Gun ."
Villoing's eye is on the clock and his cooking class is almost upon us. He quickly changes from shorts and a jumper into kitchen whites and chef's hat, and is sitting in the restaurant as the first car pulls up outside.
He does not have any plans for his collection beyond monthly displays for the history society.
"[I'll] keep collecting, I suppose," he says. "That's what collectors do until they go away; they collect and collect and collect. If I wanted to I could collect anything from ship hat to every other memorabilia I see coming over, but I try to be selective in the fact that I am limited in space."
The stamp collector and postcard seller does not think it ironic that his key tool is the internet.
"Six, seven years ago before I joined the internet my collection was much smaller than what it is now. Over the last seven years I've probably collected as much as I've been collecting the 20 years before that."