1912. She returned to Portsmouth the following December and was assigned again to the Home Fleet. She made a number of port visits to France and Russia before the war began. Australia set sail for Australia almost immediately after she was commissioned in June 1913 to assume her duties as the first flagship of the Royal Australian Navy. Pursuit of Goeben and Breslau Indefatigable, accompanied by , under the command of Admiral Sir Archibald Berkeley Milne, encountered the German battlecruiser Goeben and the light cruiser Breslau on the morning of 4 August 1914 headed east after a cursory bombardment of the French Algerian port of Philippeville, but Britain and Germany were not yet at war so Milne turned to shadow the Germans as they headed back to Messina to recoal. All three battlecruisers had problems with their boilers, but Goeben and Breslau were able to break contact and reached Messina by the morning of the 5th. By this time war had been declared, after the German invasion of Belgium, but an Admiralty order to respect Italian neutrality and stay outside a six-mile (10 km) limit from the Italian coast precluded entrance into the passage of the Strait of Messina where they could observe the port directly. Milne therefore stationed and Indefatigable at the northern exit of the Straits of Messina, still expecting the Germans to break out to the west where they could attack French troop transports; he stationed the light cruiser at the southern exit and sent Indomitable to recoal at Bizerte, where she was better positioned to react to a German sortie into the Western Mediterranean. The Germans sortied from Messina on 6 August and headed east, towards Constantinople, trailed by Gloucester. Milne, still expecting Rear Admiral Wilhelm Souchon to turn west, kept the battlecruisers at Malta until shortly after midnight on 8 August, when he set sail for Cape Matapan, where Goeben had been spotted eight hours earlier, at a leisurely . At 14:30 he received an incorrect signal from the Admiralty stating that Britain was at war with Austria — war would not be declared until 12 August and the order was countermanded four hours later, but Milne followed his standing orders to guard the Adriatic against an Austrian breakout attempt, rather than seek Goeben. Finally on 9 August Milne was given clear orders to "chase Goeben which had passed Cape Matapan on the 7th steering