Queen of Nations was a wooden-hulled, three-masted clipper that was built in Scotland in 1861 and wrecked on the coast of New South Wales in 1881.

She spent her entire two-decade career with George Thompson, Junior's Aberdeen White Star Line.

The wreck of Queen of Nations lies in shallow water just off the beach at Corrimal, New South Wales.

[4] On 21 August 1879 in the North Atlantic Queen of Nations rescued Captain Lewis Gerhardt Goldsmith and his ailing young wife from their 18.5-foot (5.6 m) lifeboat, Uncle Sam, in which they had been trying to sail around the World.

Queen of Nations approached the New South Wales coast on dead reckoning, as no sights had been possible the day before.

In the hours before dawn on Tuesday 31 May 1881, and despite clear visibility, Captain Bache mistook a slag heap fire at a coal mine on Mount Keira for the lighthouse on the south head of Port Jackson.

[10] This led him to turn Queen of Nations landward prematurely, running her aground on Corrimal beach opposite the mouth of Towradgi Creek (then called "Towridge"), just north of Wollongong.

Late in the afternoon they agreed to join a boat that had put out from the shore carrying a local magistrate and two police officers.

A salvage team threw the barrels of cement overboard on the southern side of the wreck to try to form a breakwater.

Several members of the crew gave evidence, and all stated that Bache was drunk throughout much of the voyage from England, including when the ship ran ashore.

Another master mariner, Joseph Amora, told the inquiry that he knew of two other ships whose navigators made the same mistake as Bache.

But the inquiry found Bache wholly responsible for the loss of the ship, much of its cargo, and a crewman's life, and suspended his Master's certificate for 12 months.

This attracted looters, who used hammers, knives, and dredge hoses to remove natural concretions from the wreck and open its wooden cargo crates.

Because of the heritage value of the Queen of Nations, this process was completed relatively quickly, and the order was published in the Commonwealth of Australia Gazette on 7 February 1992.

[11] The looting of the wreck and shortcomings in the 1976 Act led heritage interests to lobby state and Commonwealth legislatures.