While sweeping the prewar Australian Navy online archives personnel recollections section, I came across a jackpot on RAN cruiser colors, a modeler's dream. The memoir described in detail the A.P. 507C so well described by Sovereign Hobbies research. No surpriser here, the blue-gray of the Med Fleet. The surprise was a modeler's dream and nightmare all at once. The narrator claimed the crew was basically in charge of the painted appearance of the cruisers. This was an RAN tradition. All the Aussie sailors liked Med Blue-Gray. On one of the RAN cruisers, which was due for a repaint, the crew decided a tad more blue would improve the appearance of vanilla A.P. 507C, and this was done. The author then, with undisguised mirth, noted that the next RAN cruiser to receive fresh paint opted for a tad more blue until the later jobs had moved away from A.P. 507C into an RAN color quite unlike the A.P. 507C of their RN brethren. The color was an RAN blue by 1939.

Of course, by this time, I was utterly delighted to have found this story in the RAN archives, no less, and I was arming my iPad to pdf the doc so I could get over to Steel Navy to inform the Commonwealth. This was, unfortunately, one of of those days when about six crises arrived simultaneously, and I was forced to derail my orderly preservation of the memoir. The tragic upshot is that I lost my place, and the brief account of the inception of RAN blue disappeared into the haze. No problem, how hard is it to find something you had found less than a few hours earlier. Very hard. It is now about three years.

I guarantee it is there. I am not some kind of sadistic modeling anarchist desirous of incepting a notorious plague of "Spencer's true blue 1939 RAN cruisers." It's not a canard. Maybe with five or six hardy researchers raking the files, the loss can be repaired. I am as reluctant as you to go very blue. I do not remember the names of the cruisers in their consecutive order of painting. The finder will be a Commonwealth hero. Go for it.