By Anne Davies
New York turned on a spectacularly clear day to welcome Australian warships HMAS Ballarat and HMAS Sydney as they sailed past the Statue of Liberty into the Hudson as part of centenary celebrations of the visit of the US Navy's 1908 Great White Fleet visit.
One-hundred-and-one years ago, sixteen US battleships, painted white to demonstrate their peaceful intentions, known as the Great White Fleet, made a tour of the world as a demonstration of US naval might - a visit that began the deeening of the relationship between Australia and the US.
The Australian ships are midway through a six-month deployment, a kind of diplomatic mission that involves visits and exercises in India, Europe, Canada and the US.
The voyage of a lifetime for many young sailors has even had a brush with pirates.
The Ballarat and Sydney received a call for help from an oil tanker while in the Gulf of Aden and were forced to intervene to stop two skiffs of Somali pirates from boarding the vessel.
"I think we stopped one and possibly two ships from being highjacked," said the Sydney's captain, Peter Leavy, adding that the ships remained to patrol the waters for five days.
But the visit to New York is the most significant.
Last year, the USS McCain, named after the former presidential candidate, John McCain's grandfather, and the USS Shoup visited Australian shores, a visible symbol of the way in which Australia's alliance with America has grown and strengthened.
On Sunday, Theodore Roosevelt IV, who is managing director of Barclays in New York, and the great grandson of Alfred Deakin, Tom Harley, the chairman of the Australian Heritage Commission, were choppered out to Australian ships to take part in their historic moment in New York.
It was Prime Minister Deakin who invited President Theodore Roosevelt to send the Great White Fleet to Australia in 1908, as part of his campaign to build support for an Australian navy.
"I guess it's a feeling of enormous warmth. I have been privileged to go to Australia once in my life but Australia has been an incredibly loyal ally to the United States," Mr Roosevelt said.
"She has provided us with a lot of wisdom and insight into what's happening in Asia, and this is one way of commemorating this important relationship."
Mr Harley said the New York visit honoured the start of a "very important relationship".
"It's a relationship born in peace and forged in war, but is far deeper than a just a defence alliance," he said.
"The visit of the Great White Fleet was cooked up by Alfred Deakin, sending a message through behind the British government's back, to President Roosevelt asking him to visit," Mr Harley said
"The British were not at all amused by his impertinence in going behind them given that they had carriage of Australian foreign policy.
He wanted to build the case for an Australian navy and he thought the best way to do that was to have a massive demonstration of naval power :the peaceful aspects as well as the military aspects."
A quarter of Australias population met US naval personnel when they came to Sydney, Melbourne and Albany 101 years ago, Mr Harley said.
Australians fell in love with US sailors on that visit, and have since hosted many visits by the American fleet during war and peacetime.